Note: This Wed. action is in lieu of NAG’s Friday morning action this week.
Memorial demonstration for US Airman Aaron Bushnell!
Wednesday, February 25, 10:30am - 12:30pm: Israeli Consulate, 456 Montgomery St. San Francisco, CA, between Sacramento and California.
(10 min. walk from Montgomery BART Station)
To honor US Airman Aaron Bushnell on the 2nd Anniversary of his self-immolation and death in protest of US complicity in genocide, Noisemakers Against Genocide (NAG)* will collaborate with Veterans for Peace (VFP), SF and Monterey chapters for this special event. Please spread the word and bring allies. We want a large turnout.
The Israeli consulate is NOT welcome in the Bay Area.
Please join us this coming WEDNESDAY!
US & Israel Out of Palestine! No US military bases in Palestine!”
*Noisemakers Against Genocide, an autonomous group of pro-Palestine activists, along with the Revolutionary Love Brigade street chalk artists, have been holding weekly vigils at the Israeli consulate for many months to oppose the ongoing US-Israeli led genocide in Gaza. Please bring drums, whistles, pots & pans, and other noisemaking objects, as well as keffiyehs, Palestinian flags, signs & banners. Justin Loza, President of the Monterey Chapter of Veterans For Peace, will do a public reading of Aaron Bushnell’s last words. Members of other organizations are encouraged to attend.
For more information on Aaron Bushnell's final act, please read this statement from the Veterans For Peace National Office:
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/pressroom/news/2024/02/26/veterans-peace-statement-about-aaron-bushnell-protesting-dea
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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) Dozens of U.S. Planes Are at Jordan Base, Satellite Images and Flight Data Show
At least 60 attack aircraft are parked at the base, which has become a key hub for U.S. military planning for possible strikes on Iran.
By Riley Mellen, Christoph Koettl and Eric Schmitt, Published Feb. 20, 2026, Updated Feb. 21, 2026
New satellite imagery and flight tracking data show a base in central Jordan has become a key hub for the U.S. military’s planning for possible strikes on Iran.
Imagery captured on Friday shows more than 60 attack aircraft parked at the base, known as Muwaffaq Salti, roughly tripling the number of jets that are normally there. And at least 68 cargo planes have landed at the base since Sunday, according to flight tracking data. More fighter jets could be parked under shelters.
The satellite images also show more modern aircraft, including F-35 stealth jets, compared to the aircraft normally seen there. Several drones and helicopters are also seen.
Soldiers also installed new air defenses to protect the base from incoming Iranian missiles.
Jordanian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the American planes and equipment are deployed there as part of a defense agreement with the United States.
The changes at the base in Jordan are part of a large U.S. military buildup across the region, which comes amid negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. On Friday, President Trump told reporters he was considering a limited military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.
The Jordanian officials said they hoped negotiations between the United States and Iran lead to an agreement that would prevent war in the region. Over the past month, officials from Jordan — as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — praised the talks and said they barred attacks on Iran from their soil.
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2) What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 21, 2026
Jesse Rieser for The New York Times
For the past month or so, I’ve been writing about the abysmal conditions in ICE detention centers. Last week, I argued that you could use the term “concentration camp” to describe the system the Trump administration is using to seize and detain immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Both to expand on that point and to bring in a broader perspective, I spoke to Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Pitzer also tackled this question of identification in a recent piece for her newsletter, “Degenerate Art.” As we spoke about her argument, we tried to place the White House’s relentless drive to expand immigration detention in a larger context.
Our conversation covers quite a bit of ground. If, in particular, you want to learn more about the United States’ 19th and 20th century imperial expansion, let me recommend two books, both by journalists. The first, by Spencer Ackerman, is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.” And the second, by Jonathan Katz, is “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.”
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hi, Andrea. First, could you introduce yourself?
My name is Andrea Pitzer, and I am a journalist as well as the author of a few books. I think probably the most important one in this moment is “One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps.”
You recently wrote an essay for your newsletter called “What Counts as a ‘Concentration Camp’?,” in relation to the use of the term to describe the ICE detention facilities. What prompted you to write this particular piece?
I think there is a lot of concern that I see from different communities, certainly from the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad, that when people start trying to compare the Holocaust to anything, they’re doing so out of antisemitism. It is a natural response to say, “Wait, wait, wait” — are you diminishing this historical event in some way? And my point is always: absolutely not.
If there is a plain of concentration camps over 130 years in the world on six continents, Auschwitz is this tower that kind of looms above all of them. So, it is critical that we keep that in mind because that shows us where it’s possible for humanity to go. My work has been about, “How did we get to that point and how do we keep from returning to it?”
Now, we are really directly replicating a bunch of that history. And I think it’s become more and more important that we use that term to just to really bring information and educate people about how closely we are following history.
So let’s talk about that history for a moment. When does the concentration camp emerge as a technique for how governments manage populations?
One thing that’s important to get out of the way up front is that without centuries of colonialism and imperial rule, particularly the British and the Spanish, a lot of it in the Americas, but also in Africa and Asia, you don’t get to modern concentration camps. Native American genocide also relates to similar kinds of displacement and detention. But the modern concentration camp, for the purposes of my book, starts in the 1890s. And it only becomes possible due to the invention, mass production and patenting of barbed wire and automatic weapons. So suddenly you can hold a lot of people with a very small guard force.
That starts with Spanish rule in Cuba in the 1890s, putting down insurrection and very quickly appears again in South Africa with the British during the Second Boer War, where they’re rounding up civilians. And that’s a critical thing to say about who is getting held in these kinds of camps. These are not prisoner of war camps. It’s the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of identities — political, religious, racial, ethnic. And almost always it is done to expand or entrench political power.
When do Americans enter this story?
Unfortunately, the United States does it very early in the history of these modern camps. We see it in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. Ironically, and this is something that’s been lost to history, but I go into in my book quite a bit, the reason that America backed that war against Spain in 1898 was because of the images of these earliest concentration camps that they had been presented with. Americans were horrified with what Spain was doing in Cuba and that provided a lot of impetus for the war.
We won that war very quickly. We took over the Philippines. I’m condensing a lot of history here, obviously. This is a very simple version of it. But after some question of whether we had promised the Philippines their independence, we did not give them their independence. And we wound up with an insurrection on our hands as an imperial power. And we immediately, after denouncing concentration camps as something that, for example, President William McKinley said would lead to nothing but “the wilderness and the grave,” the U.S., in fact, installed those camps in the Philippines to put down that rebellion. So it was a very quick turn.
This is a bit of a sidebar, but the Philippine war and the Philippine occupation, the Spanish-American War, are this kind of blank spot in popular memory, right? I bring this up because with the occupation of Iraq, the American experience in the Philippines was brought in to contextualize kind of some of what the United States is doing in the Middle East. These are not the first American experiences with this form of occupation. I think it’s useful to consider, right, how the American experience in the Philippines is again coming back to us in the use of concentration camps.
I do think there’s something really important to say about that, which is people never want to think that the camps they’re doing, that their country is doing, are like those other camps. That’s something I found across the board, across a whole 130 years. As soon as there was one system to compare to the next, as soon as they were comparing the Boer system to the Spanish system in Cuba, people said, no, our camps aren’t like that. These are actually bad people. But if you bake a cake with the same ingredients, you don’t have to have the same recipe exactly, right? You’re going to get something similar.
So in the period you’re talking about in the Middle East with U.S. actions, we see a pre-emptive war, right? It was not a necessary war. It was a war of choice. And you see waterboarding, right? Very specific tactics. You see this same kind of detention. You see torture. You know, Gitmo rose out of that same phenomenon as well. So you see this proto-concentration camp that is between domestic soil and foreign soil. It’s slowly being brought into the U.S.
I think there is this feeling of recognition, right? Oh, wait, we know what this constellation of things is. And it approaches a concentration camp society. We’ve been on this road for some time.
To fast forward to the present, and looking at the administration’s current detention policies, how much of this is truly unique to the Trump administration? How much of it is an outgrowth of American detention policies on the southern border?
It is, of course, both. And that’s an important thing that I’ve been trying to write a lot about. It’s in my book, but I’ve been emphasizing it even more with the second Trump administration because concentration camps are not just a thing that shows up like an alien ship and lands, right? It has to grow out of something in this society.
What are the things in U.S. society that will allow this kind of detention, this mass detention of civilians to take root? The answer is twofold, I would say. It is that we have an extremely carceral state in which local police departments have all of this equipment of war brought over from the very conflicts we were talking about. It is a weirdly militarized, highly violent society where we already lock people up. That’s one important piece of it.
The other important piece of it is that across U.S. history, what is the flashpoint in our society? In Germany, it was Jews that had been vilified for centuries, right? That’s the point where they could have this cultural wedge. What is it in the United States? It is who gets to actually be American. And I mean that in terms of citizenship, but I also mean it in some broader terms as well, right? So from the beginning, Native Americans are not considered Americans. Chattel slavery, we literally are litigating whether Africans brought to the U.S. for chattel slavery are going to count as human. And then with Japanese American internment, which I do frame as a concentration camp system during World War II, the majority of those people were actually U.S. citizens, right? But they were not allowed to actually be citizens in that moment. So who gets excluded that way?
These questions of who is a foreigner, who is an outsider, and who is a citizen have gone to the heart of our country from the beginning. And that’s why I think we see immigrants being focused on today. There’s a tremendous hatred movement that’s actively being pushed against trans people right now in the U.S., but it doesn’t have as long or deep a history in the U.S. culture and in the U.S. rhetoric of, you know, deliberate propaganda and polarization. And so the reason immigrants are the people being locked up right now is because of these deep historical fissures.
What Trump is doing that is new is he is externalizing that violence, right? That stuff that was kind of hidden before. Trump is seizing the tools that he’s been left. And he and his allies are working together to do the purging of people of color. The purging of anyone that’s deemed the outsider or the foreigner. It has been weaponized into this much, much more dangerous state. And with the number of detention beds in terms of expansions and the warehousing, the potential for this, we’re really looking at stuff on the scale of the concentration camp systems that most people have heard of. The earlier years, pre-death camp, it’s important to say, Nazi concentration camp system, we are very much mimicking that. And if they get all the beds that they have funding for, we’ll be starting to approach the Soviet gulag as well.
Can you tease out that distinction between the “concentration camp” and the “death camp?”
So Auschwitz and a handful of other death camps were expressly built as part of what was termed the “final solution.” And it was for the mass extermination of targeted populations, particularly Jewish communities and Jews that were rounded up and shipped there deliberately for extermination.
But before that, for almost a decade, the Nazis had opened and run their concentration camp system. And I don’t want to say, death camps were really bad and concentration camps weren’t. It was all terrible. But those camps were not deliberately aimed at mass extermination as quickly as possible to remove people from the planet. They were seen to re-educate people. They were to punish people. They were to hide people. The concentration camp tendency, as I define it, is this impulse politically to remove groups of people from society for various reasons.
When the Nazis took power, they were not necessarily imagining the death camps. They were not necessarily imagining Auschwitz. But it was after having these other camps in place for many years that you then see the doors open to worse possibilities.
Yes, you have this line in your recent piece that “Concentration camps are a process, one that can be interrupted at the beginning but less easily further along, and often only at dreadful cost.”
What I would say to people is that if a concentration camp is a process, how do you know if you’re in it? It is less immediately the instant conditions of detention, because sometimes detention can start out a little more neutral in terms of daily life and the kind of abuses that are there. But always, always, always concentration camps are an end run around the existing legal system. These people that are getting rounded up because whoever’s in power wants to do something that they can’t do using the letter of the law. And anytime you create or expand that kind of detention — and again, we already had some of that before Trump came to office, we’ve got to be clear about it — but when you expand that, when you lean into it, things always get worse in there because it does not have the same kind of oversight.
The very definition of what it is means a lot is going to happen in secret. A lot of it is not going to be accounted for. And we are looking at even more of this lack of accountability, this lack of transparency, with the warehouse-ification. The warehouse-ification will allow people to be more isolated. And I think that the conditions we’ve already been hearing of lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of medical access, lack of hygiene, sexual assaults, beatings, one homicide’s already been declared, other deaths, those are going to get exponentially worse.
I want to return to a point you made earlier because it is so critical, which is that the purpose of these facilities is to do things that you cannot do in the open. This perspective extends to other aspects of the government’s authority, like the use of masked agents, who are masked because they don’t want the legal and political accountability that comes with being identifiable.
Yeah, so it isn’t just that concentration camps are a process, it is that concentration camps are part of a larger thing that happens, right? They’re very visibly and violently getting people off the streets. That’s not hiding it. And the point isn’t that they hide it. The point is to instill terror on the society as a whole, right? To particularly terrorize one group and then to make the rest of the community that’s not currently targeted feel like “I better lay low because I don’t want to be on their radar.”
So the terror side of that on the streets is scaring people very visibly and very publicly. But the terror side of that in the camps is you don’t know what’s happening in there and you don’t want to go there, do you? And so it’s so you can have that secrecy and that public performance of violence both be part of what’s going on. They’re both part of a concentration camp society. And the goal is always to use one group as an example of what can happen to everybody. But first, you have to target that group that people will tolerate being harmed. And for far too long in the U.S., we have actively as an economy and as a country pulled in immigrants, right, while still punishing them.
The answer in the long run is going to have to be, if we’re going to undo the concentration camp society, it has to be that nobody gets that end-run treatment, that nobody gets that performative cruelty on the streets, or that illicit detention in which they are outside the protection of the law. And I think more people are seeing that now that it’s right in front of their faces. But with all the talk of small reforms, I really hope that we, and we do have a few politicians, but I hope we’ll have even more who keep their eye on the big picture, which is in the end, this is going to have to get undone. So you can call it abolish, you can call it dismantle, you can call it whatever, but our existing immigration system is a funnel to create a concentration camp society. We have to change that somehow.
This gets to what I wanted to end on, which is that it is easy for people to think, oh, we can elect, put the political opposition into office after the next midterm elections and impose some accountability. But in terms of actually reversing or dismantling what we’re experiencing — and taking away the tools altogether — it does seem like what ultimately is necessary is a fundamental re-envisioning of just what we want the relationship of immigration to be to the United States.
I think that it’s easy to say that, right? And it’s harder to do it. And one thing we haven’t talked much about here that I’ll just throw one word in that’s really critical is you don’t get to a concentration camp society without years and years of sustained, active propaganda. And so I think we’re going to have to really look at how propaganda functions in the U.S. and its role right now and what’s happening and how we can and how we can press back against that.
But in addition to that, the elections this November are, I think, critical. At the same time, I think we as people can’t wait for those elections to happen. And we can’t assume that they’re going to resolve everything because the natural tendency for anybody just psychologically is to want things to kind of feel normal. And so I think that that’s why we need some leadership staking big visions. And if they don’t do it, then we the people have to do it.
Forty-six percent of Americans were on the record in a recent poll saying they supported abolishing ICE. Like if you can’t seize the public momentum for the reaction to this, then we need better politicians who can, because I think there is a tremendous desire to see something different. And I think that it’s possible to do it. There’s real possibility to make these changes in a way that I will say I have not seen in the other countries that I have looked at around the globe across this time. Because there is still so much individual freedom to act, we have a lot of potential to make those changes. But assuming that we don’t have to actively do it would be a huge mistake.
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3) Arab Leaders Condemn Remarks by U.S. Ambassador to Israel
The ambassador, Mike Huckabee, seemed to endorse Israeli control of lands stretching from Egypt to Iraq. He said his comments were taken out of context.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 22, 2026
Remarks by Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, prompted a storm of condemnation from Arab leaders over the weekend after he suggested that it “would be fine” if Israel took lands stretching across the Middle East from Egypt to Iraq.
Mr. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and a staunch supporter of Israel, made the comments during a two-hour interview with the provocative right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, which aired on Friday.
The ambassador quickly went on to qualify the remarks, and the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem later said they had been taken out of context.
In his conversation with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Huckabee said he believed that God had given the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Mr. Carlson pressed him on exactly what land he was talking about and where its borders ended.
He questioned Mr. Huckabee about Genesis 15, the biblical chapter that promised the descendants of Abraham the lands from Egypt to the Euphrates River, in modern-day Iraq.
Asked if Israel had the right to that land, Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, replied, “It would be fine if they took it all,” spreading out his hands as if to encompass it.
“But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today,” Mr. Huckabee added. “They don’t want to take it over, they’re not asking to take it over,” he added.
Arab governments erupted in fury.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry called the remarks “irresponsible,” saying they “constitute a violation of international law, the Charter of the United Nations and established diplomatic norms.” It called on the U.S. State Department to “clarify its position.”
Jordan’s foreign ministry described Mr. Huckabee’s statements as “absurd and provocative.” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the secretary general of the League of Arab States, said they contradicted “logic and reason” as well as longstanding U.S. government positions, and that they “serve only to inflame sentiments and stir religious and national emotions.”
The Qatari foreign ministry said 14 Arab and Islamic countries, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, had condemned Mr. Huckabee’s suggestion “that it would be acceptable for Israel to exercise control over territories belonging to Arab states, including the occupied West Bank.”
In the wake of the uproar, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem said there had been no change in American policy.
“The narrative was based on an edited portion of a response,” it said in an emailed statement to The New York Times. “If one listens to the full context, Ambassador Huckabee clearly says that Israel has no desire to change their current boundaries,” the embassy added.
Mr. Huckabee has long supported Israel taking ownership of the occupied West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 2017, before he became ambassador, he said that Israel had “title deed” to Judea and Samaria, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names.
“There is no such thing as a West Bank,” Mr. Huckabee said at the time, adding, “There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
President Trump has said he opposes Israeli annexation of West Bank territory. Most of the world considers Israeli settlement in the territory to be a violation of international law.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2024 finding Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territory to be “unlawful.”
Mr. Huckabee has made clear that it is Mr. Trump who sets the policy on Israel, not the ambassador. He partially walked back his statement on the biblical vision of a greater Israel when Mr. Tucker sought clarification, but he remained vague about Israel’s borders.
Asked whether he was saying that Israel had a moral right to take over other countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Mr. Huckabee said, “No, I didn’t say that.” He said he was “not sure it would be” legitimate for Israel to claim those countries.
“Now if they end up getting attacked by all these places and they win that war, and they take that land, OK, that’s a whole other discussion,” he said.
Mr. Carlson has been sharply critical of Israel and has accused it, among other things, of dragging the United States into Middle Eastern wars.
During the podcast, Mr. Carlson suggested that Mr. Huckabee was more interested in representing and defending Israel than the United States.
Mr. Carlson pitched the interview on social media as exposing “the truth about America’s deeply unhealthy relationship with Israel.” He and Mr. Huckabee sparred more over the topic on social media this weekend.
Mr. Carlson posted a short clip from the interview, ending with Mr. Huckabee saying that it would be fine if Israel took all the land. In response, Mr. Huckabee reposted a longer, five-minute clip showing his full response to what he described as “Tucker’s ridiculous line of ‘interrogation.’”
In a longer post on Saturday, Mr. Huckabee described the podcast as “a very twisty and frankly confusing discussion about the meaning of Zionism.”
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4) Denmark Rejects Trump’s Plan to Send Hospital Boat to Greenland
Denmark’s defense minister said Greenland did not need health care assistance, a day after President Trump said he planned to send a “great hospital boat” to the island.
By Ali Watkins and Amelia Nierenberg, Feb. 22, 2026
President Trump’s announcement of his plan to send a “great hospital boat” to Greenland included a depiction of the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Mercy, seen here in California in 2020. Credit...Mario Tama/Getty Images
Denmark’s defense minister on Sunday rejected a plan by President Trump to send a “great hospital boat” to Greenland, the Arctic island and semiautonomous territory of Denmark that Mr. Trump has long sought to acquire.
The president said in a post on Truth Social on Saturday that the boat would “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” adding that it was “on the way!!!”
But Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, told Denmark’s public broadcaster, DR, that his government had not been made aware of the plan. He said that there was “no need for special health care efforts” in Greenland.
It was not clear why Mr. Trump planned to assist Greenland with its health care. Greenlanders have the right to health care that is free at the point of use, including prescription medications, according to the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark also appeared to respond to Mr. Trump’s announcement, though she did not mention Mr. Trump or the United States. “I’m happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to health care for everyone,” she wrote in a post on Instagram on Sunday. “The same approach exists in Greenland,” she said.
Mr. Trump’s announcement appeared to be another salvo in his continuing pressure campaign on Greenland, which he has openly coveted for years. Mr. Trump last month appeared to back down from escalating threats to seize Greenland for the United States, though negotiations over his administration’s demands continued this month, and tensions with European leaders over the issue remain.
In his social media post, Mr. Trump said he was working with Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana to send the hospital ship. Mr. Trump named Mr. Landry, a fierce Trump loyalist with little foreign policy experience, to act as an envoy to the island last year. Mr. Landry said in a post on X on Saturday that he was “proud” to work with the president on “this important issue!”
Mr. Trump also accompanied his post with an illustration of the U.S.N.S. Mercy, a Navy hospital ship. According to gCaptain, a blog widely read in the maritime industry, the ship had been undergoing maintenance in dry dock at the Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, Ala., since last year. The Navy’s other hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Comfort, was also moored in Mobile, the blog reported.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The office of Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen of Greenland referred a request for comment to the country’s health minister, Anna Wangenheim, who did not immediately respond.
Maya Tekeli contributed reporting from Copenhagen.
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5) Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today
By Ian Buruma, Feb. 22, 2026
Mr. Buruma is a professor at Bard College and the author of the forthcoming book “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945.”
Lewis Chamberlain
To live in Berlin under the Nazis during World War II must have been an extraordinary experience. To be deported to death camps, if one was one of the tens of thousands of Jews who were still alive and living in Berlin, was horrific. For non-Jews, living in a police state was frightening enough. Being bombed day and night in the last two years of the war was surely terrifying.
The terrorism of the Nazi state was often in plain view. If you lived in Grunewald, one of the wealthiest parts of Berlin, you could have seen Jews being marched to the railway station, from which freight trains packed with humans left for the ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe. Others would have seen neighbors dragged from their homes. In some cases, they could have heard the screams of prisoners in the forced labor camps that were spread all over the city.
And yet most people looked away, pretending to see nothing, and carried on with their lives. Why? As is so often the case under autocratic regimes, from Hitler’s Berlin to Mussolini’s Rome to Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, things go from bad to worse in stages. Today’s outrage is tomorrow’s normal. People adapt and get used to it.
My interest in what happened in Berlin during the war was sparked by my father’s letters from the Nazi capital between 1943 and the end of the war. A student in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he was deported to Germany as a forced laborer. His life was far from normal. But even as an unwilling foreign worker, he was able to observe the daily life of Germans, who often appeared to be oblivious to the horrors taking place around them.
In a letter to his sister during winter in 1944, when Berlin was being bombed day and night, he describes a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the audience and the musicians huddled in thick coats under a roof filled with holes from British and American bombshells.
Almost until the last stages of the war, when the Soviet Army conquered Berlin in a devastating battle that reduced the city to rubble, the cinemas were full, the dance revues were in full swing, the soccer competition went on, and people visited the zoo and sunbathed on the Wannsee opposite the infamous villa where the logistics of the Holocaust were worked out over glasses of brandy.
One reason for public docility in terrible circumstances is fear. In the last years of the war, a Berliner could be arrested and, often, executed for doubting the final German victory — for defeatism. But there is something more insidious, something not unfamiliar to many of us today: the hope that things will turn out all right soon, that the political outrages are temporary or at least that they can’t get worse. One way of dealing with bad times is to pretend that they are normal.
This is the problem when the destruction of moral norms and the rule of law is incremental. Germans should have known that politics would take a criminal turn as soon as Hitler and his brutal paladins grabbed total state power in August 1934. The racial laws of 1935 robbed Jews of their civil rights. But Jews made up less than 1 percent of the German population. So most people could live with the racial laws. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and grabbed a chunk of Czechoslovakia. OK. Perhaps that would satisfy the Führer’s imperial lust. He surely wouldn’t go any further.
By September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, it was clearly too late for normal life to resume. But even then, many Germans believed that Britain and France would not resist. Surely, the war would soon be over. Erich Alenfeld, a Jewish banker married to a Gentile wife, wrote a letter to Goering asking to serve in the invading army. After all, he was still a German patriot. He never received an answer.
And so life continued. People kept hoping that the next act of war and assault on decency would be the final one and the nightmare would finally end. Even in 1945, when terrifying Soviet artillery was within earshot and much of Berlin lay in ruins, there was still hope that wonder weapons — fearsome missiles that would destroy and demoralize London or machines that would pull Allied bombers from the skies like giant magnets — would turn things around.
The human capacity for hope is an essential quality. Without hope, there can be no improvement. But hope can also turn into delusion. The United States today is not Hitler’s Third Reich. We are nowhere near the disastrous circumstances of Berliners in 1945, 1939, 1935 or even 1934. But as humans, we are prey to similar kinds of self-deception.
When Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election in 2016, people should have sensed the danger. And yet at the time, respected intellectuals told me that everything would be fine: All he wanted was to play golf or make money. Anyway, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were worse, for they condoned or unleashed unnecessary wars. I was told by a well-known American historian that there was really nothing to worry about, for after all, Roosevelt once had authoritarian tendencies, too. Democracy would never be shattered, a law professor assured me, for “Americans love freedom too much.”
Since then, one red line after another has been crossed: Undocumented immigrants are called animals; civilian boats are blown out of the water; American citizens are gunned down in the streets and then accused of being domestic terrorists; universities, news organizations and law firms are being bullied and blackmailed; and refugees are deported to countries whose languages they probably don’t even speak. And that is aside from the blatant corruption of family and cronies.
All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.
But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.
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6) At the Olympics, I Saw the Difference Between Nationalism and Patriotism
By David Litt, Feb. 22, 2026
Mr. Litt was a speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
Millie von Platen
Before leaving for the airport to catch my flight to Milan, I bought one full-size American flag, four 8-by-12-inch flags and two backup smaller flags, just in case. Then — because of Minneapolis, because U.S. Olympic officials had to change the name of its athlete hangout from Ice House to Winter House, because of the Donroe Doctrine and because many Americans, including some Olympians, are struggling with what it means to represent and root for their country right now — I wondered how comfortable I should be about waving them.
Maybe I could try turning the Stars and Stripes upside down, the way Martha-Ann Alito did shortly after Joe Biden had been elected president? Did I need to invent some kind of semaphore to convey support for Team U.S.A. combined with opposition to annexing Greenland or Canada?
I needn’t have worried. Even though we were in the stands to watch a zero-sum competition among nations, I can’t imagine a stronger rebuke of nationalism than the one that was delivered by fans at this year’s Winter Games.
I don’t mean to suggest that sports will bring the world together. And certainly not the Olympics. The 2018 Pyeongchang Games brought North and South Korea no closer to reconciliation. The 2022 Beijing Games very likely delayed Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by less than one week.
Instead, whenever my wife and I entered Olympic venues, we witnessed unfussy, entirely organic displays of the difference between patriotism and nationalism: thousands of people, all cheering loudly for their countries while recognizing others’ right to cheer equally loudly for theirs.
The spirit inside the venues was one the TV broadcast often alludes to but can’t fully capture. Yes, one nation’s thrill of victory is another’s agony of defeat. Yet the drive for excellence that the Olympics celebrate — and the courage, triumph and heartbreak of the men and women who compete there — speaks to elements of the human condition that effortlessly cross borders.
This desire for shared global experiences defies the nationalist retrenchment on the rise throughout the world — and the disdain for longstanding alliances that’s become a hallmark of President Trump’s foreign policy. Two days after Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany warned at the Munich Security Conference that “the United States’ claim to leadership has been challenged and possibly lost,” we were bonding with an international assortment of fans in the nosebleed seats of the Milano Ice Skating Arena.
A middle-aged German woman offered to help us hoist our big flag each time an American took the ice. Her son, Robert Kunkel, was competing in that evening’s pairs figure skating short program, so in a moment of bilateral cooperation we helped her raise an equally big banner with his face on it.
I spent a week at the Games and never saw a single display of national aggression or even resentment. (I did witness a mob of crazed fans nearly tear one another to pieces, but that was only because a fresh batch of stuffed stoat mascots had arrived at the official Olympic store.) While JD Vance was booed loudly during the opening ceremony in Milan, the American team was cheered.
People can tell the difference; our leaders, however misguided, are not us. “America is not just an idea,” said Mr. Vance at the right-wing Claremont Institute last year. “We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” In certain ways, this is obviously the case: At the men’s 1,500-meter short track competition, I rooted for American speedskaters, Dutch people for Dutch ones.
But the way Mr. Vance and his MAGA allies extend that claim — to argue that our distinct national culture is part of what makes international institutions suspect, immigration threatening and alliances based on shared principles unwise — is belied by what people spend time happily consuming: a swirly pop culture from anywhere and originally in any language, from “KPop Demon Hunters” to Bad Bunny to Ballerina Cappuccina to this year’s scheduled Grand Theft Auto VI release.
If the old geopolitical order “is not coming back,” as Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada warned recently, the global cultural order that rose alongside it isn’t going anywhere. On Thursday night the loudest cheers I heard were for Alysa Liu’s powerful, mesmerizing, joyous, life-affirming, gold-medal-winning free skate. But before that, the audience got nearly as loud for the Swiss skater Kimmy Repond, who finished second to last. Repond had just fallen for a second time. Her chances to set a season’s personal best score, let alone to win a medal, had vanished. Yet judging by the crowd’s reaction as she got back to her feet and resumed skating, you would have thought she was the champion of the world.
There were at least a dozen nationalities represented around us in the stands that night. Yet something that tied us together — other than a desire to see our own athletes win, of course — was the shared belief that in difficult times, there is nothing more impressive, nothing more Olympian, than figuring out a way to muddle through.
With our wallets, our attention, our time and our collective groans with every fall and cheers for every newly realized lifelong dream, the world’s citizens are sending a message: We proudly root for our countries, but we are more than just our countries. And in many cases we are better — much better — than the governments in charge of them.
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7) The Bible Tells Us to Love Immigrants
By Shai Held, Feb. 22, 2026
Rabbi Held is the president and dean of the Hadar Institute, and the author, most recently, of “Judaism Is About Love.”
Rachel Levit
A hallmark of the second Trump administration has been the hunt for the foreign born, from children to adults, criminal status apparently notwithstanding. Many of the administration officials who champion this project often invoke God in their speeches, asserting that their allegiance to the Constitution is rooted in their fealty to a far older text: the Bible. It is clear that many of our leaders lack the most fundamental understanding of the central biblical commandment to love and care for the immigrant.
The Bible explicitly commands three loves. The first and second many modern Christians and Jews cite easily — love of God and love of one’s neighbor. The third, and most often overlooked, is love of the ger. Several English translations interpret ger as “sojourner,” someone born elsewhere who has come to dwell among the people, most likely temporarily. Other translations render ger as “stranger,” “alien” or “foreigner.”
In recent decades, some biblical scholars have returned to an older idea: that ger should be translated as something close to “immigrant.” Writing about the book of Exodus, the 11th-century Jewish biblical commentator Rashi explains that “wherever ger occurs in Scriptures it signifies a person who has not been born in that land where he is living but has come from another country to sojourn there.” The word “immigrant” matters, in this context — it reminds us that in the ancient world, just as now, someone seeking a home among people foreign to him had likely endured significant upheaval in his life, like war, famine, political oppression or economic crisis.
The commandment to love immigrants is one of the Bible’s greatest moral revolutions. Other ancient Near Eastern cultures instructed people to care for widows and orphans. The Bible expands the category of those who deserve special protection to include those who live among our community but are not quite of it.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the biblical mandate to love the immigrant and the question of how many immigrants the United States should take in over a given year. But this does not mean that the Bible has nothing to say to our present moment. On the contrary, the Bible offers an ethos, an approach we might take in confronting immigration policy. Those of us who follow the Bible as a moral guide can conclude that demonizing, mocking or dehumanizing immigrants — let alone violently pursuing them — is, religiously speaking, an abomination, a direct affront to a biblical vision of what a good and holy society ought to look like. Xenophobia is, then, spiritually speaking, an illness, a failure to see people as God does, to treat them as God demands they be treated.
The book of Exodus explicitly forbids the people from mistreating an immigrant. Contrary to popular assumptions, the prohibition on abusing the vulnerable does not derive only from the children of Israel’s past experience of slavery and oppression. It is a basic demand of morality: We must not take advantage of the weak. The people’s memory of having suffered in Egypt amplifies and intensifies a demand that is already in place: Don’t take advantage of the vulnerable.
The book of Leviticus repeats the injunction not to oppress — then adds a mandate to actively love the immigrant. These commands resurface in the book of Deuteronomy, which implies that loving immigrants is a way of emulating God’s love.
Readers of the Bible are thus invited to engage in a double act of moral imagination. First, they must imagine that they themselves, and not merely their ancestors, were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. And, second, they must ask themselves who in their midst is most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
The biblical text also admonishes societies to offer immigrants legal protections, fair wages and social benefits like harvest gleanings and tithes for the poor. In a truly good society, the immigrant cannot be left dependent on other people’s generosity. The law must also ensure his well-being.
The immigrant was protected by the law but was also obligated to observe much of it. The Bible commands the people to love and protect the stranger, but it also expects at least some degree of assimilation on the immigrant’s part.
Those of us who treat the Bible as authoritative in our lives are aware — through the very text we cite most often — that unchecked, unbridled power is always abhorrent, let alone when it is deployed to attack precisely those who are most vulnerable.
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8) What Happened in Chicago When Science Became the Enemy
By Jeneen Interlandi, Feb. 23, 2026
Ms. Interlandi writes about public health for Opinion.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And, along the way, trust has been broken between scientists, the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.
It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it: central air conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world, and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.
The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all-encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.
Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.
It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.
The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” says Tom Frieden, author of “The Formula For Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”
Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really only flourishes among society’s most marginalized groups.
The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic, no later than 2030, by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.
The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.
On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.
Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a massive research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, had been abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.
Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was now suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationships.
Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health, and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.
Her husband, Dan (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding) paced frantically behind her, as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinner time,” he said. “Oh my God. What are we going to do?”
“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category, if not several. All of their salaries (including her own) were reliant on N.I.H. funding and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.
And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.
When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field, while others, like her, were severely maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”
Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.
Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.
In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.
“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side, and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”
In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.
Among others, they enlisted Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.
Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl, but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced: how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her own goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.
To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.
With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood says. “We celebrate queer identity and then, in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”
The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up, or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.
On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with implementing those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”
In the weeks after the March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as Macapagal’s boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.
Macapagal’s own job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet, and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” She accepted, and for many months afterward, would tear up just recalling the kindness.
In April, the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and of racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when, or whether, or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.
Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Jim Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. Pickett, who had presided for long decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But Macapagal felt awful.
Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms, or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage actually was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.
Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.
In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.
It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now, Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.
She found herself making other changes, too, including dying her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.
As spring bled into summer, and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her own lab, and began doing what she could to help each person secure other jobs. It was a risky gambit: If they did leave, and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.
Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa and if his funding was cut, would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. She found herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.
In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broke the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch, and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.
Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country), and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicine those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.
What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one where science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled (as a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political). But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.
This past June, the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would only need to receive twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July, the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”
The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Dr. Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science, but on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to Dr. Bhattacharya’s stated goals.
If health officials wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.
At every turn, Trump and his deputies had done the exact opposite. They had tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They had cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They had also weakened the social safety net, sown terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.
If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net, that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his own clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.
Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”
In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after I.C.E. had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”
A few miles away in West Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. They had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts, but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color], which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar.
They were getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on their backs was starting to show. One of their regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they had before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.
She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”
By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet. The university’s funding had been unfrozen in December and, thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that Macapagal’s group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money actually be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?
No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now, and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and S.T.I. test kits that they had originally planned to send to study participants.
“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s [sexually transmitted infections] in the context of a research study,” Macapagal says. “And now they’re just sitting there and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future, now. On one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s own stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.
On the other hand, though, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was, new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention, and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now, what the point of any of that had been.
She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.
Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States, but also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen, but who also happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.
“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work, and two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”
More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like, and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work, or treat words like diversity, equity and inclusion as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.
Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.
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9) For Many Cash-Strapped Americans, ‘Basic Living Has Become A Burden’
President Trump says that he has brought down inflation, but families are still struggling to pay bills and plan for the future.
By Audra D. S. Burch, Feb. 23, 2026
Maribel McBeath in Charlotte, N.C., this month. Travis Dove for The New York Times
For 13 years, Maribel McBeath has cleaned plane cabins at the airport in Charlotte, N.C. She earns $16.50 an hour, which is not enough to cover her expenses — about half goes to rent — or allow her to save for the future.
At 66, Ms. McBeath would like to be counting down to retirement. She had hoped that by now, she could regularly visit her family in Puerto Rico, explore new places and enjoy going out to dinner occasionally. But with a pile of medical bills and no cushion for a financial emergency, “I have to keep working,” she said.
For millions of Americans, affordability has become a defining issue as the soaring cost of big-ticket necessities such as housing, education, health care and child care take a toll on household budgets.
Though unemployment is lower and inflation has slowed — data points that President Trump will likely cite in his State of the Union address on Tuesday — recent economic gains have largely benefited the wealthy. In interviews, some working Americans said the improved economy does not reflect their real-world struggles to pay bills or plan for the future. They have a hard time making sense of Mr. Trump’s claims that he has defeated inflation, and the rising stock market has no bearing on their income.
Kristin Errico, 43, a managing editor at a small publishing house in New York, wishes Mr. Trump would dispense with the “I’ve won affordability” rhetoric and use Tuesday’s speech to explain in detail how he plans to address the cost of groceries, housing and child care. “Everything is up 20 percent in cost except my salary,” she said.
The financial crunch has forced even solidly middle-class people to make difficult decisions, from delaying retirement or college to cutting grocery lists or relying on food banks. Some have taken second and third jobs in recent years to stay afloat, inspiring the modern term “polyworking.” The number of people with multiple jobs in January was about 8.6 million, according to monthly figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“For so many people, basic living has become a burden,” said Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market. “The fact is that there are so many people that don’t have a couple extra hundred dollars if faced with an emergency or, they can pay their bills but can’t save for their retirement.”
Even as overall inflation is cooling, prices of many everyday staples remain uncomfortably high.
Grocery prices, often the barometer for people’s perception of the economy and their own financial stability, are still rising. Though the price of eggs has dropped, the price of coffee was up nearly 20 percent in January from a year earlier; beef prices were up by 16.4 percent and the price of frozen fish had jumped 8.6 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“People are dissatisfied because what they are looking for is not the inflation rate to get smaller, but for the prices to get smaller,” said Michael Walden, a professor emeritus in economics at North Carolina State University.
For Ms. McBeath, every financial decision is a trade-off. She missed the initial enrollment window for Medicare after she turned 65, but plans to enroll as soon as possible. Without insurance, she pays about $105 a month for medication. She doesn’t own a car, so she generally depends on public buses and Ubers for transportation.
“It is a struggle every month. I pay my rent and then I pay enough to keep the lights and water running,” said Ms. McBeath, who is employed by an American Airlines subcontractor and has worked with a service workers union to press for higher wages.
For average consumers, the data points and political sniping over affordability barely register as they try to make ends meet.
Until late last year, Aviva W., a preschool teacher, and her husband, a warehouse manager, earned about $80,000 a year combined. They rent a three-bedroom house for $3,300 a month in North Miami Beach, straining their finances because, as Orthodox Jews, it allows them to be within walking distance of their synagogue. Aviva asked that her last name not be used because she did not want people to know about her financial struggles.
In October, Aviva’s husband was laid off, and he has not found a comparable position. Instead, he has been stringing together odd jobs, and relatives have stepped in to supplement their income. They have also relied on a kosher food bank owned by Jewish Community Services of South Florida. The couple searched for a less expensive rental near the synagogue but did not find one, she said, and could not afford the cost of moving regardless.
“It’s been very tight,” said Aviva, a 42-year-old mother of four, adding that she is looking for a summer job. “We are taking things day by day and hoping things turn around.”
The financial struggle has shifted the way she thinks about her future. Some days, purchasing a house or paying for college tuition feels far away.
Bonnie Schwartzbaum, the director of the food bank where Aviva shops twice a month, said the average number of people using their service each month had increased by more than 50 percent since 2020. She said that after families tackled their biggest costs, there was little left for groceries.
“People across the board have been priced out,” Ms. Schwartzbaum said.
Even many of those whose income places them in the middle class find themselves making hard choices.
Ms. Errico is just on the other side of a series of events that threatened to upend the life she and her husband had built in Mineola, N.Y.
It started with the cost of child care, one of the biggest expenses that families face. “The day care bills set us back,” she said. “In fact, we tumbled into debt.”
In 2018, the couple was earning about $182,000 combined. But with two young daughters, they struggled to afford the $3,500 monthly day care bill, which was more than their mortgage. That year, they got a home equity loan to help cover their costs. In 2021, when interest rates dropped to record lows, they refinanced their house and wiped out their debt.
But a year later, as inflation was soaring, Ms. Errico’s husband suffered a devastating medical episode and lost his six-figure job. Faced with the loss of his income and mounting bills, the couple took out a second home equity loan with a much higher interest rate and reduced their younger daughter’s day care hours.
In 2023, Ms. Errico started a second job as a freelance copy editor, working evenings and weekends. “We were quickly reaching a precipice that’s hard to come back from,” she said.
That same year, her husband returned to the work force, again earning six figures. Ms. Errico finally felt stable and started using the money from her second job to rebuild their savings and pay for a few extras, such as her daughters’ dance lessons and the occasional discounted theater outing.
Still, she worries about the cost of replacing an aging boiler, and how long their two 15-year-old cars will last. And she worries about how quickly they can build a college fund for their daughters, now 8 and 11.
“I want to be able to afford a comfortable life,” she said, “not just a roof over my head and food on the table.”
Colette Coleman contributed reporting, and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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10) Supreme Court Considers Fate of Docks and Other Assets Seized by Cuba in 1960
Amid rising tensions with Cuba, the Trump administration is backing lawsuits that would allow Americans to get compensation for property confiscated by Fidel Castro’s regime.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 23, 2026
“Before the Cuban revolution, American companies owned or controlled 90 percent of the island’s electricity generation, its telephone system, much of its mining industry, sugar-cane fields, and many oil refineries and warehouses. Most confiscated assets were transferred to state-owned companies controlled by the government.”
Revolutionaries confiscated the property of the Havana Docks Company in 1960.Havana Docks Company
More than 60 years ago, Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba and began confiscating the assets of all American-owned businesses, including the Havana Docks Company. The port business was seized at gunpoint by revolutionaries and never compensated for its lost property.
But a change in policy during the first Trump administration allowed the company to sue major cruise lines for parking ships at the docks and bringing nearly a million people to Havana after rules were loosened in 2016 to allow tourism to the island. Filed in 2019, the case will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday.
The case, and another involving similar claims from Exxon Mobile over its confiscated oil and gas assets, lands at a fraught time for U.S.-Cuba relations. The Trump administration has ratcheted up political and economic pressure on the communist country by crippling its tourism industry and cutting off access to fuel shipments.
The pair of cases involve discrete, narrow legal questions about the extent to which thousands of Americans can get compensation in U.S. courts from the entities that currently hold or profit from property taken by the Cuban government. But if the Supreme Court sides with the companies, it could also give the administration more leverage over Cuba.
“President Trump will be listening for the outcome,” said John S. Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. A ruling that clears the way for the lawsuits, he added, could lead to less investment in the island and put “pressure on Cuba to make the changes Trump wants.”
Justice Department lawyers filed briefs in support of the port business and Exxon, telling the court that the suits, first authorized by Congress in the 1990s, have become an important foreign-policy tool for discouraging investment from Cuba.
The lawsuits “deter private actors from collaborating with that government to exploit expropriated property, deprive the Cuban government of funds that undermine the United States’ longstanding embargo of Cuba, and increase economic pressure to achieve democratic reforms in Cuba,” wrote D. John Sauer, the solicitor general.
The cruise industry says it acted lawfully and was following the lead of the Obama administration, which encouraged travel to Cuba during a brief period of renewed diplomatic relations starting in 2016. Cruise itineraries for Havana included visits to Ernest Hemingway’s home outside the city and outings to see dance performances. President Barack Obama declared the tours an opportunity for Americans to appreciate “the incredible history and culture of the Cuban people.”
A decade later, the Trump administration has taken a different tack, announcing tariffs against any country that sends oil to Cuba, stifling tourism and announcing that the communist government is “going down for the count.”
Before the Cuban revolution, American companies owned or controlled 90 percent of the island’s electricity generation, its telephone system, much of its mining industry, sugar-cane fields, and many oil refineries and warehouses. Most confiscated assets were transferred to state-owned companies controlled by the government.
After the seizures, American investors filed claims with the U.S. government through the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an agency at the Department of Justice. In 1971, the commission certified Havana Docks’ claim of $9.1 million, or nearly $100 million adjusted for inflation, which remains unpaid. In total, the commission certified $1.9 billion in claims held by almost 6,000 claimants or about $9.3 billion in current value, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
In 1996, Congress tightened the U.S. trade embargo after Cuban fighter jets shot down two planes flown by members of the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Three U.S. citizens and one permanent resident were killed.
The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, also known as the Helms-Burton law, also included language declaring that resolution of the property claims should be a key condition for restoring economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. It included a provision at issue in Monday’s court cases that provided a path for Americans to sue in federal court over the “trafficking” or use of assets seized by the Cuban government. Known as Title III, it also allowed presidents to suspend the litigation stipulations, which were politically and diplomatically controversial.
Until 2019, presidents of both parties had suspended that provision. The Trump administration chose to activate it, opening the door to the lawsuits. The decision came despite an intensive lobbying effort by Carnival Corporation and a team that included Pam Bondi, then a lobbyist who had just finished her second term as Florida’s attorney general and had developed a close relationship with Mr. Trump. European officials also objected, arguing that the move would harm their businesses.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to allowing such lawsuits early last year.
Mickael Behn, who succeeded his grandfather as president of Havana Docks, had been patiently waiting for just such an opening. For decades, the company continued to operate on paper, paying taxes, maintaining records and holding annual meetings in the hopes of someday getting the terminal back or getting compensated, court records show.
The company built, owned and operated Havana’s dock facilities in the early 20th century in exchange for a right to operate the docks until at least 2004, a 99-year agreement granted by the pre-Castro Cuban government. When the communist regime took over and seized the docks, the company still had 44 years left in its agreement.
Mr. Behn’s legal team, led by Roberto Martinez, a former U.S. attorney in Miami, says the company’s interest in the property did not “expire” in 2004 because it was confiscated before the clock ran out. Congress intended the 1996 law’s protections to “continue to this day,” the company said, because Cuba has never paid for the confiscated property.
From 2015 to 2019, cruise lines paid entities connected with the Cuban government at least $130 million to use the port facilities, according to court records.
Havana Docks notified the cruise lines of its claims, according to court filings, “but all four cruise lines proceeded to moor their ships and disembark their passengers on the very same piers and the very same terminal” seized from the company.
Ahead of Monday’s arguments, cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Carnival Corporation, said in court filings they cannot be on the hook to pay the port business because of the chronology of events.
The cruise ships did not set sail for Cuba or dock in Havana until 2016, after the Obama administration reopened travel to Cuba, their lawyers said, and also after Havana Docks’ rights to the pier complex ended.
“The notion that cruise lines should pay hundreds of millions of dollars for following the executive branch’s lead in reopening travel to Cuba defies both common sense and other aspects of the Helms-Burton Act,” the cruise line lawyers, led by the former solicitor general Paul Clement, told the justices.
A federal judge in the Southern District of Florida ruled against the cruise lines in 2022, rejecting their claim that the use of the docks amounted to lawful travel and ordering the four cruise lines to pay at least $110 million each.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed the ruling, finding that the company’s rights to the pier property and operations had a time limit. Even if the confiscation had not occurred, the majority said the company’s interest would have ended in 2004.
In dissent, Judge Andrew L. Brasher characterized the majority opinion as “counterfactual,” because it asked what would have happened had the property not been seized in 1960.
In Exxon’s case, the company, then known as Standard Oil, had supplied, refined and distributed fuel throughout the island with more than 100 service stations, and its assets were abruptly confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960. Exxon sued three government-owned companies that it says have been exploiting its stolen refineries and service stations without compensation ever since. The company’s loss was valued at more than $70 million in 1969.
Foreign governments and the businesses they own are generally shielded from liability in U.S. courts under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. In ruling against Exxon, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said its case against the Cuban companies could not immediately move forward unless Exxon could meet one of the exceptions to the immunities law.
Lawyers for the Cuban companies, led by Michael R. Krinsky, urged the justices to send the case back to the lower courts to determine whether Exxon could essentially pierce the government’s traditional protection from liability. The 1996 law does not give the president the authority to sweep aside immunity protections, the companies said.
Exxon’s lawyers, led by a former acting solicitor general, Jeffrey B. Wall, urged the Supreme Court to find for the company, saying the appeals court majority “imposes yet another in a long line of barriers to recovery for victims of the Castro government’s illegal confiscations.”
The Trump administration agreed, telling the justices that the lower court ruling “upends Congress’s carefully calibrated authorization of private suits against Cuban agencies and instrumentalities and thwarts a critical foreign-policy tool.”
International law scholars, however, cautioned the court that embracing the position of Exxon and the administration could destabilize foreign relations by exposing other countries — including Brazil, China, Russia and Singapore — to liability if their state-owned companies export goods to Cuba, use its airports or finance projects.
The Supreme Court, the scholars wrote in a brief to the justices, “should leave the choice of whether to embroil the United States in such tensions to the political branches.”
Frances Robles contributed reporting.
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11) Border Patrol Shoots Armed Person Near Canadian Border, Authorities Say
The F.B.I. said that the person, who was not killed, “allegedly fired at” a Border Patrol agent in Pittsburg, N.H., around 1 a.m. on Sunday.
By Madeleine Ngo, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 23, 2026
Outside the town of Pittsburg, N.H, in 2024. Federal authorities said that a Border Patrol agent shot an armed individual near the Canadian border in Pittsburg early on Sunday. Credit...John Tully for The New York Times
A Border Patrol agent shot a person who was armed near the Canadian border in Pittsburg, N.H., early on Sunday, according to federal authorities.
The F.B.I. said in a statement that the person “allegedly fired at the agent” before “the agent returned fire” at about 1 a.m. The person, who was not named, is receiving medical care at a nearby hospital, said Kristen Setera, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. Boston field office, which is investigating the shooting.
The agency is collecting “all relevant evidence from the scene,” Ms. Setera said. The U.S. attorney’s office for the District of New Hampshire is also investigating the shooting, she said.
Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, said in a statement on Monday that the Border Patrol agent was not injured after firing his weapon “during an encounter with an armed subject.”
Shootings involving federal immigration agents have been under scrutiny in recent weeks amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and intensive care nurse, was killed last month in Minneapolis after he was shot by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer.
Witness videos of that encounter appeared to show Mr. Pretti recording immigration officers on his phone and helping a civilian stand back up before several officers pinned him to the ground. His death came about two weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis.
Internal reports made public last week also showed that an ICE officer shot and killed another US. citizen in his car in South Texas in March, months before the deaths of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti. The man, Ruben Ray Martinez, was shot multiple times after he did not follow commands to exit his vehicle, according to internal ICE documents reviewed by The New York Times. Lawyers for his family have said that eyewitness accounts were not consistent with the government’s report.
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