Tell Congress: No War On Iran!
On Saturday, February 28th, the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s capital. Shortly after, President Donald Trump announced a planned prolonged war against Iran and stated that American servicemembers would likely be killed in the process. He addressed Iranians, telling them to stay inside because bombs would be dropping all over Iran, and called on them to overthrow their government. The self-proclaimed “peace president” has launched yet another endless war – risking millions of human lives. The entire world should be outraged.
Tell Congress we want PEACE with Iran, we don’t want the US bombing Iran, we don’t want a regime change war, and we want to lift the sanctions that are hurting everyday Iranians.
https://www.codepink.org/iranaction
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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) Chicago’s Snowplow Naming Contest Got Political. The Pick: ‘Abolish ICE.’
An annual contest usually draws lighthearted quips. This year, Chicagoans chose a political pun.
By Julie Bosman, Feb. 24, 2026
Each winter, Chicago’s annual “You Name a Snowplow” contest brings out the creative, the cutesy, the sentimental, the painfully punny.
This year, the clear winner is political. The new snowplow is named “Abolish ICE.”
“Abolish ICE,” chosen soon after the Trump administration conducted an aggressive and broadly unpopular immigration crackdown in Chicago, came in first among more than 13,300 proposed snowplow names offered by the public, city officials said this week. Nearly 40,000 people cast votes on 25 finalists.
In second place was “Stephen Coldbert,” named after the talk-show host who spent his formative comedy years in Chicago. The third place was “Pope Frío XIV,” a homage to Pope Leo, who hails from the south suburbs of Chicago.
“Abolish ICE” will soon be stamped on the side of a snowplow truck and could be spotted around the streets of Chicago the next time a snowstorm hits. Chicago is divided into six “snow districts,” and each year, a new truck in each of the six districts is adorned with the name chosen by voters.
The contest, which began in 2023 under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, has never turned quite so newsy.
In previous years, the top entries have nodded to Chicago’s accomplishments in architecture (Mies van der Snow); city-leveling disasters (Mrs. O’Leary’s Plow); a popular landmark whose years-old name change remains unacknowledged by residents (Sears Plower); and heroic Polish-born figures of the Revolutionary War celebrated mostly in Chicago (Casimir Plowaski).
People who nominated the six winning entries will be offered city-themed swag at an unveiling event at a salt dome, a facility for storage of road salt, and the chance to pose with the snowplow they named. The names of those who proposed this year’s winning entries have yet to be made public.
Ryan Gage, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, referred questions about the “Abolish ICE” entry to the mayor’s office.
The annual contest, he said, is “a great opportunity to showcase the unmatched creativity and civic pride from Chicagoans and highlight the hard work of the city staff in clearing the roads of ice and snow.”
Chicago’s fleet of powder-blue snow-fighting vehicles is robust and organized, a welcome sight on the city’s streets throughout the winter. There are more than 300 trucks that clear snow and dump salt on thousands of miles of roads around Chicago, and more than 400,000 tons of salt is kept in strategically placed piles around the city, the streets department said.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished, thanked Chicagoans for joining the contest so enthusiastically.
“We are grateful and inspired by the record-breaking participation in the contest this year,” Mr. Johnson, a Democrat, said in a statement.
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2) Casey Means, Critic of Mainstream Medicine, Poised to Become Nation’s Top Doctor
Dr. Means, a wellness influencer and President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, is appearing before a Senate committee Wednesday.
By Dani Blum, Feb. 25, 2026
Deanna Donegan/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty
Dr. Casey Means is appearing before a Senate committee Wednesday to make her case to become the next surgeon general. The job would make her the face of the mainstream medical system — which Dr. Means, a wellness influencer and entrepreneur, has vehemently criticized.
Parts of Dr. Means’s résumé make her seem like a natural fit. She graduated from the Stanford School of Medicine and has worked as a biomedical researcher. She championed healthy eating and exercise as essential for good health, long before Make America Healthy Again became a political movement. And with hundreds of thousands of social media followers and a popular newsletter, Dr. Means is well versed in communicating with the public about health.
But Dr. Means has also repeatedly railed against the conventional medical system. She dropped out of her medical residency and does not have an active license to treat patients. She is skeptical of some vaccines and has repeated the debunked claim that they could be linked to autism. She has spoken out against bans on raw milk, which can contain dangerous bacteria. She has frequently told Americans not to trust the medical system, titling one chapter of her best-selling book: “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”
Dr. Means did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“We actually have to figure out new approaches to medicine, and that’s the kind of leadership that she’s going to bring to our country,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News after President Trump nominated Dr. Means for surgeon general.
The Senate is expected to confirm Dr. Means for the role. While the surgeon general cannot shape or enforce health policy directly, the position carries sizable influence over how Americans think and talk about health. Past surgeons general have pushed to slash smoking rates in America, beat back the stigma around AIDS and change the way the public talks about loneliness and mental health.
For decades, people have listened to the surgeon general’s voice because it “was speaking for what we knew from the best available science,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a science communication researcher and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it wasn’t saying, ‘Don’t trust your doctor, trust yourself,’” she said. “It was saying, ‘I’m a doctor you can trust. I’m speaking for a kind of science that is grounded in our traditional understanding of how science works.’”
Sign up to get Dani Blum's articles emailed to you. Dani Blum is a health reporter focusing on news and trends.
Dr. Jamieson added: “Now imagine that in this context, that voice was being used to say, ‘Drink raw milk.’”
The fact that Dr. Means is not a practicing physician and that she did not complete her medical training is also a sticking point. Critics say she is ill-equipped to take on the role, which involves issuing public health advisories and coordinating responses to public health threats, as well as leading the more than 6,000 health professionals who make up the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
To her supporters, Dr. Means’ focus on chronic disease, and her rejection of the medical establishment, is precisely what will allow her to improve Americans’ health.
“She’s not a career bureaucrat. She’s not a pharma spokesperson. She understands biomarkers, lifestyle drivers, environmental impacts, nutrition, how they all connect,” said Alex Clark, the host of the popular Turning Point USA wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary.”
How we choose health experts to talk to. Times reporters often spend weeks interviewing doctors, researchers and other health professionals to help report an article. We seek leaders in their fields, watch out for conflicts of interest and try to get a variety of viewpoints.
Some of what Dr. Means calls for is uncontroversial. Nearly every doctor would say Americans should eat better and move more. Many would agree the medical establishment, which Dr. Means has called a “sick care” system that focuses more on treating disease than preventing it, is not adequately serving the public. Dr. Means has said she wants to see warning labels on most ultraprocessed foods, which have been linked to a range of health problems and which nutritionists widely recommend avoiding.
Dr. Means has said she dropped out of her surgical residency in 2018 because she was frustrated and alarmed that she was cutting people open instead of understanding why they were sick in the first place.
“The system is rigged against the American patient to create diseases and then profit off of them,” Dr. Means said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.
In 2019, she started a small functional medicine practice in Portland, Ore., focused on what she calls the “root causes” of illness. (She has said she started “phasing out” that practice a year later and let her license become inactive in 2024, because she was no longer seeing patients.)
Dr. Means describes what she believes those root causes to be in her book “Good Energy,” which she wrote with her brother, Calley Means, a prominent adviser to Mr. Kennedy. In it, the siblings argue that cancer, infertility, diabetes, depression and many other chronic health issues can be blamed on diet, chemical exposures, prescription medications and Americans’ stressed-out and sedentary modern lifestyles.
While Dr. Means says that doctors can be helpful in an acute crisis, she has also suggested that getting more sleep, sunlight, time in nature, exercise and whole foods could help alleviate these health issues without the aid of traditional physicians. She has also said that the more prescription medicines Americans take, the sicker they get.
She regularly echoes these points on podcasts and in her newsletter, where she has also promoted supplements and other wellness products that are not always backed by rigorous science, including those sold by companies that paid to sponsor her newsletter. Dr. Means is also the co-founder of Levels, a company that offers wearable glucose monitors. (She has pledged to divest from her wellness interests.)
While Dr. Means positions herself as a truth-teller, critics say she sometimes uses her medical background to sell unscientific ideas.
“What Casey Means and MAHA do so well is take those little pieces of truth and really just turn them into something they’re not, turn them into a reason to find fault or to distrust scientific expertise and medical expertise,” said Matthew Motta, an associate professor of health law, policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health. He said that her confirmation could sow further distrust at a time when the public’s confidence in government health authorities has already plummeted.
Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the surgeon general under President George W. Bush, said that he thought Dr. Means lacked the credentials for the role. He had been a practicing physician for over 20 years when he stepped into the role, which involved spending time overseas to coordinate emergency plans with other countries.
“They saw me as bringing the best information from the United States forward and understanding it, so that we can make prudent decisions for the health, safety and security of the world,” he said.
Dr. Motta also worried that having Dr. Means in a role as prominent as surgeon general will add “an element of legitimacy” to her past statements that have strayed far from the established science, like her skepticism of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns or her condemnation of birth control pills.
To Dr. Means, though, straying from the mainstream is a badge of honor.
Americans need to “start really being the CEO of our health,” she told Megyn Kelly in a 2024 interview, “and not just fully outsourcing our health data to ‘Daddy Doctor.’”
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3) Fighting Fascism
The need for mass, independent organizations of the working class
By Bonnie Weinstein, March/April 2026
The continued extreme use of force against working people by the capitalist class here and across the globe is in preparation for what they know will become a massive uprising in opposition to the extreme austerity, anti-democratic, racist, sexist, police-state measures they are planning to enforce to guarantee a steady increase in profits for themselves.
Trump is pursuing a policy putting American business interests above all others worldwide—in essence—to, “…expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.” 1
His goal is to form “special economic zones” in countries around the world controlled by a select group of U.S. and international business partners devoted to establishing rapidly multiplying forms of private territories with their own business-friendly laws, like looser environmental regulations and labor standards. (It’s what the Trump administration brokered for Gaza in its cease-fire with Israel.) And not only internationally, but here in the U.S. as well.
It is a continuation and intensification of past U.S. imperialist actions, but with a new blueprint for establishing the military and political domination of U.S. capital over all the natural resources in the world, and to control the labor to extract them in every country in the world.
This is a new form of fascism—led by the United States—in this universal capitalist war against the working class.
The only thing that can hinder this new stage in this imperialist war on the world is the power of a massive, independent and democratically-organized working-class movement in solidarity against it. This movement must include working-class organizations, social justice groups, community organizing groups and, most importantly, all those unorganized people opposed to capitalism’s turn to fascism—all those who are not in any groups or organizations—the overwhelming majority of people in the world!
Capitalism’s inevitable decent into fascism
To accomplish their goal of crushing the working class, the Trump administration has used immigration enforcement to militarily occupy our communities and criminalize anyone opposed to ICE, racism, sexism and fascism. The U.S. has become a model for criminalizing immigrants in countries across the world—rounding them up, deporting them, incarcerating and killing them—and criminalizing anyone who dares to speak up in defense of immigrants.
The surveillance state
Along with the all-out assault on immigrants and anyone who supports them, they have an ulterior motive—to identify anyone who has been on a demonstration, a strike, students walking out of schools—targeting anyone opposed to Trump’s assault on immigrants and democracy and on the living standards of the masses of workers.
In order to enforce their plan, they have created a surveillance program that not only uses new technology—drones, satellite imaging, social media platforms, etc.—they are using facial recognition, car license cameras on public streets, private surveillance cameras—even hacking private cell phones—to identify us and put us in their data base of “undesirables.”
According to a February 3, 2026, article in the New York Times titled, “ICE Is Watching You,” by Tressie McMillan Cottom:
“You don’t need to understand how digital tracking works or have a degree in constitutional law to grasp what is happening to your privacy. You need only know this: Whatever is happening with your data, it is important enough to the most egregiously lawless administration in American history that it be collected and consolidated. It is important enough that a federal cowboy kept one hand on his phone even as his other hand reached for his gun. A militarized federal police force that acts out of loyalty on the whim of a political leader who relishes retribution and adulation is the tip of an iceberg. You don’t build a nuclear bomb for peace any more than you build a national surveillance apparatus just to manage a border wall. This kind of weaponry could effectively nullify our Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. It also could more easily enable the government to trample on your free speech. And it could do all of this without meaningful transparency or oversight.”
But this is not new. The surveillance state has been forming for a long time. In a February 4, 2026, article in the Times, titled, “ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants,” by David Wallace-Wells:
“Last month Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, bragged to Fox News about how he was pushing to ‘create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault — we’re going to make them famous.’ But Homan, Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, haven’t conjured a new surveillance state out of whole cloth. We are now several decades into the militarization of American law enforcement and the expansion of the homeland security mandate, which have together yielded an unnerving mix of imperial impunity and national-security-style policing that the historian Nikhil Pal Singh has called a new form of ‘homeland empire.’ Last May, researchers at Georgetown Law republished a 2022 report, ‘American Dragnet,’ which found that ICE spent $2.8 billion on expanded surveillance capabilities from 2008 to 2021. The spending had nearly tripled since 2015, and most of the increase was invested in geolocation. … By 2022, the researchers found, ICE had already scanned the driver’s license photos of one-third of American adults and had access to the information contained on a typical license for many more. It was tracking the movement of drivers in cities home to three-quarters of American adults and could locate three-quarters of American adults through their utility records. … This may not feel like a significant escalation, given how police officers routinely radio in to check the records of those they’ve pulled over, for instance. But giving indiscriminate checkpoint-style power to every agent in the field, Bier said, is ‘a total reshaping of law enforcement in the United States.’ Instead of investigating a crime by identifying a suspect and then pursuing information about him or her, officers instead begin with someone they want to treat as a criminal and then use the technology to find a justification.”
Taking the control out of the hands of the minority-
dictatorship of capitalism
Capitalist democracy is defined as the right of corporations to reap private profits by any means necessary. They have the right to buy businesses, land or property anywhere in the world it’s for sale. They are not bound by borders! They can kidnap and jail presidents of other countries as they have most recently done in Venezuela; they can shut-down virtually all trade with Cuba—essentially trying to starve the Cuban population into capitulation to U.S. imperialism.2
The U.S. is and has always been a slave-state
The U.S. is a country that was founded upon the right of European invaders to subjugate the indigenous population and enslave masses of Black, Brown, and Asian Americans as outright slaves—and subjugate Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Muslim, Jewish, and other American immigrants.
The power of grass roots
movements based upon democratic participation of groups and
individuals working together
There is a rich history of resistance to U.S. imperialism. Great victories have been won by workers in the early 20th century marking the beginning of the formation of a massive labor movement to organize unions, voting rights for women, the Civil Rights Movement, voting rights for Black Americans, the Vietnam Antiwar Movement.3
The most successful movements and organizations included mass participation of individuals and groups in a democratic decision-making processes. They were successful because masses of people became involved in the decision-making process.
The good news is that the people of Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the country, are organizing on a door-to-door basis in their communities. Churches are delivering food to undocumented families who fear going to the grocery store, neighborhoods have organized ICE “watches” in order to warn people when ICE is sighted in the area and then confronting them and actually forcing them to leave in some instances. So far, hundreds-of-thousands of people have signed up for “ICE Watch” training across the country.
This is a concrete example of true grass-roots organizing springing up among the working class. The overwhelming majority are opposed to ICE and to Trump and feel it’s important to take a stand in support of their neighbors under ICE attack. This is happening without the direction or leadership of political parties or organizations in the communities. It’s happening because there is a mass radicalization going on right now among the working class here and everywhere.
We need coalitions that welcome everyone—groups, labor unions, as well as people who are not in any organization—based upon an open, transparent and democratic structure with one person, one vote and majority rule—organizations that are independent of capitalist parties and controlled by the working-class majority with leaders chosen by that majority.
This is our most important message now.
If we are for socialism, we must be for empowering the working class to rule in our own defense and for the good of all.
1 Read, “Trump Is Not a Nationalist. He’s Something Worse.”
By Jean Guerrero elsewhere in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint.
2 Read, “Trump’s Assault on Cuba and the World,” elsewhere in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint.
3 Read, “Lessons of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement,” and “An Antiwar GI’s Story,” elsewhere in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint.
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4) Lessons of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
By Carole Seligman, March/April 2026
Martin Luther King Jr. famously labeled the U.S. government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech given at the Riverside Church in New York, citing the Vietnam War, military industrial complex, and systemic injustice.
Introduction
I begin with a quote from the Vietnamese declaration of independence from France delivered in a speech by Ho Chi Minh in 1945.
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples of the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: ‘All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.’
“Those are undeniable truths.
“Nevertheless, for more than 80 years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
“In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
“They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
“They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood.
“They have fettered public opinion; they have practices obscurantism against our people.
“To weaken our race, they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
“In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land.
“They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade.
“They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.”1
Much of what the Vietnamese were revolting for are the things people want for themselves and their children throughout the world, but to get these things, the Vietnamese were forced to make a social revolution. And their revolution could not be one like the U.S. revolution they hoped to model their revolution upon, because capitalism had exhausted all its progressive character, its ability to develop the productive capability that could improve life for the workers. They were forced to fight against the world’s most powerful capitalist countries—imperialist powers—especially the United States. They were forced to go beyond capitalism.
The Vietnamese revolution and the international response to the U.S. government’s efforts to smash it is an event full of rich lessons for people who want to learn from history with the idea of changing the world, especially those with the idea of ridding the world of its brutal wars and brutal capitalist system of oppression.
Background to the revolution
Vietnam gained independence from China in the 10th Century A.D. and took its present geographical shape early in the 19th century. Vietnam fought China six different times over its first 800 years and had a strong national identity as a people.
The modern 20th century Vietnamese Revolution and war take place during a century of war and revolution—all a result of the world capitalist system’s inability to solve the problems of humankind.
French colonial, and then imperialist, rule consolidated in 1913, treated Vietnam, and the other countries of formerly French Indochina, as a servile colony, extracting minerals and rubber and later developing and investing capital in the rubber industry and manufacturing. The great Russian Revolution, arising in part out of the First World War, is very much a part of the background to the Vietnamese Revolution, whose leaders were inspired by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and later, very negatively influenced by the Stalinist leadership of both the Soviet Union and China.
The Second World War, and its re-division of the world’s markets between the great imperialist powers saw the French colonial regime in Vietnam, when France was defeated and occupied by Germany, and declare its allegiance to the Vichy, Nazi-occupation government. Japan occupied Indochina in 1940 and ruled Vietnam through the old French colonial administration, but when the German armies were thrown out of France, Japan ousted the French administration from Vietnam and declared Vietnam independent, under Emperor Bao Dai, who cooperated with the Japanese.
That year, 1940, marks the beginning of indigenous guerrilla resistance in Vietnam to both the French Vichy colonialists and the Japanese invaders. Ironically, the Anglo-American Allies actually helped supply the Vietminh, which was a front of the Communist Party and nationalist forces in Vietnam lead by Ho Chi Minh, who was the leader of the underground Indochinese Communist Party. It was a popular front of workers, peasants and capitalist forces. During the anti-colonial struggle, the Vietminh succeeded in gaining control of most of the countryside and then, with the surrender of the Japanese to the Allies, a popular revolution swept the cities of Vietnam on August 19, 1945, and brought the Vietminh to power.
Ho Chi Minh issued a declaration of independence—quoted above—modeled on the U.S. declaration of independence of 1776 and set up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
At the end of World War II, the Potsdam Agreements provided that British troops were to occupy Vietnam. The Vietminh government, under the influence of the Stalinist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) welcomed the British soldiers into Saigon. Revolutionary forces, including Trotskyists, with influence in important sections of the mass movements of workers and peasants, mostly in the South of Vietnam opposed the British troops coming in and warned that they would come as conquerors, not allies.
Vietnamese Trotskyists wrote advocating a revolutionary policy of opposition to imperialism and support for world revolution, a worker-peasant united front, the creation of people’s committees (soviets), establishment of a constituent assembly, arms for people, seizure of land by the peasants, nationalization of factories under workers’ control, and the creation of a workers and peasants’ government.
Second betrayal
The Communist Party of Vietnam ordered the disarming of the revolutionary Trotskyists, many of whom were then shot without trials, and the revolutionaries’ prediction about the intentions of the British came true. The Brits attacked the independence forces and handed power in the Southern part of Vietnam back to the French colonists (now under the DeGaulle government in France). The French and the Vietminh signed an agreement in which France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) government as a semi-autonomous part of the French Union, but only in the Northern part of the country, and then only for a short time.
The same agreement allowed the French to land troops in Hanoi, from which they launched a massive bombing of Haiphong Harbor and drove the Vietminh into the countryside from which they launched a prolonged guerrilla war against the French.
U.S. involvement against the Vietnamese revolution began during the Truman Administration when the U.S. started to provide military aid to the French in their colonial war of aggression to reconquer Vietnam for its colony.
With the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, the U.S. stepped up its aid to the French, but the Vietnamese defeated the French during this eight-year war culminating in the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The Geneva Accords of 1954 were the formal agreements for ending the war with the French, and they constitute another major betrayal of the Vietnamese revolution. The Accords, although requiring free elections to reunify the country in 1956, also established a line of demarcation, the 17th parallel, both sides of which the French (to the South) and the Vietnamese nationalists and communists (to the north) were to withdraw troops. This division was supposed to be a temporary measure, with elections to be held in 1956 to reunify the country. Why, we may ask, would the victorious Vietnamese concede territory again to foreign influence?
The Pentagon Papers reveal that this disastrous concession was “the result of heavy pressure on the Vietnamese delegation at the Geneva Conference from Molotov and Chou En-lai, the two representatives respectively of the Soviet Union and China!”
France did withdraw from Vietnam, but, in violation of the Geneva Accords, the U.S. came in and set up a brutally murderous, repressive, puppet dictatorship government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, south of the 17th parallel. Diem, under the tutelage of the U.S., refused to hold elections as agreed to by the Geneva Accords for 1956. The South Vietnamese proxy government proceeded to undo the results of the war against the French in which the peasants had taken over much of the land from which the French-supported landlords had fled. New guerrilla fighting broke out and spread.
The war waged by the U.S. against the people of Vietnam mobilized the men and material of the wealthiest and militarily strongest state in the world against a small, war-torn poverty-stricken nation. Does this sound familiar?
The succession of proxy puppet governments set up by the U.S. in the South were so isolated from the people of Vietnam, they were chosen from among the Vietnamese mandarin class2 who had been part of the French colonial administration, like Diem, or had even fought on the French side during the anti-colonial war. The U.S. and South Vietnamese puppets (the first of who was Diem) violated the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords, which were supposed to unite Vietnam under the Vietminh government. The Vietminh was a coalition of the Vietnamese Communist Party and nationalists. It was a popular front of several classes. It enjoyed the popular support of the population of all of Vietnam. Even early U.S. government documents (as the publication of the Pentagon Papers3 proved) show U.S. political and military leaders acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh would have won the leadership of a united Vietnam if free elections were held in 1956.
The Geneva Accords, with U.S. maneuvers, turned the unqualified victory of the Vietnamese over the French into a defeat for the Vietnamese, in that it allowed time and territory for the U.S. to gain a foothold in the South of the country and build a small, privileged group of Vietnamese Catholics into a support base for the puppet government by giving them land and special economic incentives.
By 1959, American combat soldiers, called “advisers” to the South Vietnam army, were dispatched to Vietnam and in response, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), based in the north, began to help the resistance movement in the South. In 1960, the National Liberation Front was formed.
The U.S. War against the people of Vietnam lasted 15 years. By its end in 1975, the Vietnamese had won against the mightiest state of all time at a cost of over four million dead, millions wounded, the countryside poisoned, the economy destroyed. The U.S. lost over 58,000 killed; hundreds-of-thousands wounded; at least one-half-million veterans who suffer from postwar psychological trauma, chemical poisoning, hundreds-of-thousands drug-addicted and imprisoned, and an economy which had provided both “guns and butter” for the last time. In 1971, before the Vietnam war ended, a post-World War II trend of steadily-improved standards for American workers was permanently reversed.
Unprecedented U.S. brutality
To provide a small inkling of the brutality the U.S. government unleashed against the people of Vietnam here are a few statistics about the air war: During World War II the U.S. dropped two million tons of bombs on all theaters of war put together.
By the end of 1971—and this is before the U.S. had stopped bombing Vietnam—the U.S. had dropped 6,300,000 tons of bombs in Indochina.
In the two-year period of 1968-69 the U.S. had dropped over one-and-a-half more tonnage of bombs in South Vietnam than all Allied Forces dropped on Germany throughout World War II.
By 1969 North Vietnam was being hit each month with bombs, the explosive force of which equaled two atomic bombs.
In the 1972 Christmas bombing alone, the U.S. dropped more tonnage on Hanoi and Haiphong than Germany dropped on England from 1940 to 1945.
From 1965-69 the U.S. dropped bombs with the equivalent of 50 pounds each for every man, woman, and child in Vietnam.
The U.S. created 21 million bomb craters in South Vietnam alone.
In the Northern part of Vietnam, the target of U.S. bombing was the economy, such that almost the entire modern industrial output was halted. Hospitals, schools and churches were especially targeted as well.
In the South, the U.S. targeted villages in order to force the peasant populations into eroded concentration camps, called strategic hamlets, or the Pacification Program. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy authorized massive chemical warfare, Operation Ranch Hand, which lasted over ten years.4 In South Vietnam alone the U.S. sprayed 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals including Agent Orange and napalm, to defoliate the land, poison the crops, farm animals, and the people, including American soldiers, and causing birth defects (through generations!), among other horrendous results.
My Lai
To cite only one specific event and give an idea of what the U.S. perpetrated in Vietnam, consider the village of Xom Lang—(the U.S. military mistakenly called it My Lai). U.S. Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, Americal Division went into the village Xom Lang. They were completely unopposed. They saw no soldiers of the National Liberation Front, no weapons at all, but they proceeded to massacre 504 villagers, mostly old men, women and girls (some of whom were gang-raped before being murdered), and children, including babies in arms. It was a racist slaughter against unarmed civilians. The massacre, which was not an exception to U.S. war policy in Vietnam, was a holocaust which, in its cruelty, rivals the slave trade and the Nazi death camps.
Another example of the extreme heartless brutality of the American side was revealed by television producers and reporters April Oliver and Jack Smith, fired from CNN for telling the story of a top-secret U.S. mission into Laos (where supposedly the U.S. never went,) to drop poison gas on American defectors and Indochinese revolutionaries and kill them. This story was revealed for the first time 28 years after the fact. Not only has the U.S. government again been caught in lies, because yes, it did make sarin gas weapons (30,000 of them during the Vietnam war), but it has been caught carrying out a secret war against another country, Laos. It has been caught using weapons of mass destruction that all international peace conferences have banned, using weapons which it accused Iraq of having, that it used for its reason for sanctions against Iraq that were responsible for killing hundreds-of-thousands of Iraqi children and other civilians.
These few facts indicate a most important lesson of the Vietnam war: the brutality of the U.S. ruling class, the lengths to which they are willing to go to get their way. This is a fundamental truth that those who want to change society must know and teach. This is a society that cannot be meaningfully reformed. To end this kind of brutality, power must be wrested from the U.S. ruling capitalist class and its government and state and taken over by those who have no reason to do violence against other peoples.
Vietnam was no mistake. The policies that led to these brutalities were the conscious policies of a capitalist system willing to use any and all means to maintain that system at any price. The beauty of the antiwar movement that developed in the U.S. is that it made the price to pay too high at home while the Vietnamese made the price to pay too high in Vietnam.
Many of the people in the antiwar movement against the war in Iraq (and subsequent antiwar movements) participated against the Vietnam War and were deeply and personally affected by it—especially the young men who were drafted to fight on the U.S. side. Some became socialists during the course of the war. Some veterans of the war became antiwar and revolutionary socialists. Some of the people who were born and grew up after the Vietnam war and revolution have also been effected because that war and all the events surrounding it changed the course of history in many ways.
Lessons from the antiwar
movement
The age of war and revolution affected the U.S. directly. Just ten years after the end of World War II, the Black Civil Rights Movement burst out throughout the South and spread throughout the whole country, winning majority support, forcing a division in the ruling class with the decisive sector moving to partially end the Jim Crow system of legal segregation in the South and granting civil rights for the Black population. The Civil Rights Movement dealt the decisive blow to McCarthyism and created the openings for a militant student antiwar movement and the student radicalization of the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was also a main inspirational source of the nascent radicalization in the United States. The spread of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. accounts for the different reaction of students, and later, the working class in its majority, to the war against Vietnam, in contrast to the response to the U.S. war against Korea.
From the very beginning of the movement against the Vietnam war in 1964 (which was five years after the U.S. had begun its direct military intervention) the various people and groups who participated in the movement engaged in sharp debates over the course, strategy, and tactics for the movement. Some of these debates had decisive consequences for the movement and the war itself. During the ten years of the antiwar movement from 1965 to 1975, the working-class revolutionary, Marxist wing of the movement, went from being a small minority within a small movement to becoming part of the leadership of a movement of millions, a movement which came to have a decisive impact on the course of the war itself. Not only that, but the impact of the Vietnamese Revolution on the U.S. population while it could not, at that time, lead to the U.S. workers coming to power here, contained within it many of the seeds of a future socialist revolution in the U.S. itself.
Likewise, the debates in the developing antiwar movement mirror in many ways the elements necessary for a change in the entire class structure of the U.S. This may sound far-fetched, but I don’t think it is and I will try to make the case for it.
The main task
Underlying the approach of the left wing of the antiwar movement, (which began as a mostly student movement), was the Marxist view that the class struggle is the engine of society, and that the working class is the only class with the potential and actual power to transform society. That fundamental, basic idea informed the whole approach of revolutionaries to the developing antiwar movement. Related to that idea is that masses of people generally only move into action, political action, as they perceive their self-interest is affected. Therefore, the task for the antiwar movement was to appeal to the masses of American people. This is true for the new Antiwar movements too.
Our strategy had these components: mass action; independence from ruling class politics and parties—Democrats and Republicans; organized on the basis of principled demands on the government that respect the rights of the Vietnamese people for self-determination. Our strategy was internationalist, that is, we sought to link the interests of the Vietnamese revolution with the interests of American people and ordinary people all over the world. Each aspect of this strategy is based on the idea that only a mass working class movement could force the U.S. out of its war.
Mass action provides the alternative to the government, independence from the Democratic and Republican Parties, and principled demands keep the movement from being co-opted by the ruling class. Mass action is a working class strategy, as opposed to say, petitions, letter writing, lobbying, electoral projects (though all of these could be useful tactics from time to time) because it involves the main strength that the working class has—its numbers, its relation to the functioning of society in industry, and the potential to rule society in its own name (though the Vietnam antiwar movement never developed to that point.)
The most effective tactics flowed from this basic strategy. The mass actions were street demonstrations called by united fronts of all who could agree to come together in common antiwar actions. We organized them to be peaceful and legal demonstrations with permits. (It’s important to remember that the early and mid-sixties were not that far removed from the Joe McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s.) Demonstrations in opposition to U.S. foreign policy at that time were not that common. In the beginning of the Vietnam antiwar movement there was a significant amount of red-bailing, intimidation, and even physical attacks on the antiwar movement. It was important to make it as easy as possible for people to take their first tentative steps into opposition to their government. Thus, the revolutionaries of the Socialist Workers Party promoted the tactic of peaceful, legal street demonstrations because we had the confidence that in fact the movement would be able to win a majority to the antiwar cause and this method would put no roadblocks in the way of that goal.
The strategy of independence was tactically implemented through the creation of independent, single issue, antiwar committees and single issue united front coalitions, usually organized to build a specific action with a date, time, and place. Some coalitions lasted for more than one action, others were so tenuous that they were really ad hoc coalitions that could only stay together for one event, then the political differences between the organized participants drove them apart.
The student movement, having organized first, and being the most supportive of self-determination for the Vietnamese, generally played the role of left-wing in the broad coalitions that formed to carry out city-wide, regional or national demonstrations. They were the left-wing because they were the most resistant to the electoral aspirations of the organized reformists in the peace movement—the Communist Party, the Social Democrats, and assorted liberals, who, every time an election campaign came around tried to get the movement to support the “lesser of two evils” candidates instead of demonstrating against the war. This problem got more difficult as the movement got bigger. At first there weren’t any antiwar candidates, but later, as the movement got massive, there were lots of “peace” candidates, and, when the American casualties started to become unacceptable to larger numbers of the American people, even Presidents Lyndon Johnson (Democrat), and Richard Nixon (Republican) ran for president on promises to de-escalate the war.
The slogans the revolutionaries advocated for the movement likewise reflected our strategic orientation to the working class. “End the War in Vietnam, Bring our troops home now!” was the central demand of the left wing in the antiwar movement. Believe it or not, it took several years before the majority of the organized antiwar movement came to agree with that slogan. After all, the conscious reformists, who played a big role in the organized movement, were opposed to that solution to the war. Many sought to compromise with the U.S. government and proposed calling for a negotiated solution to the war. The left wing said that the U.S. had no right to negotiate for anything in Vietnam and that the only demand on the U.S. government that honored the right of the Vietnamese people to determine their own destiny was for the U.S. and all foreign powers to withdraw.
The “Out Now!” slogan was the most important slogan because the biggest obstacle to real Vietnamese self-determination was the U.S. To withdraw U.S. troops, bombs, and bases was to guarantee the reunification of Vietnam and the carrying out of their social revolution. The conscious revolutionary wing of the U.S. antiwar movement understood this. But there was another important reason for the slogan to bring our troops home now, and that was the strategy of building the movement into a working-class movement with the social power to effect the actions of the U.S. government. Calling for bringing the U.S. troops home, was a concrete way of reaching out to the soldiers themselves and their families, friends, and loved ones at home with the message that the antiwar movement is not a movement to hurt the soldiers, but a movement that, if successful, would save their lives too.
The U.S. government and the capitalist media did everything in their power to convince the public, the workers, and the soldiers that the student demonstrations were against the soldiers, against “our boys,” would harm them and lead to their deaths. This was a cranked up, powerful propaganda machine coming out of the reactionary patriotic 1950s (an era which could produce soldiers who could go along with officers in carrying out brutal war crimes against civilians like the My Lai massacre). So, the far-sightedness and optimism of those in the antiwar movement who fought for this “Out Now!” slogan that could actually reach out to the soldiers themselves is quite amazing. The fact is that the impulse came from the revolutionaries who knew that historically, during great revolutionary developments, that masses of working people, even those serving in the armed forces of the capitalist state, could come over to the side of the revolutionaries, that they could change. And that happened.
The Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance were so serious about this orientation and the possibility that antiwar agitation could develop among the soldiers, who were overwhelmingly working class men, and disproportionately (to their numbers in the population as a whole) Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian, that they made a conscious campaign of educating the movement by publishing a pamphlet and touring the author of it, Mary Alice Waters, called “GIs and the Fight Against War.”
The subject of this tour and pamphlet was the actual events following World War II in 1945 and 1946 (but not written about in U.S. history books, a real hidden chapter). Then, a large-scale “Bring Us Home” movement developed among U.S. soldiers in the Pacific Theater who were being used to intervene in the Chinese civil war on the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist revolutionaries. This movement was suppressed but it probably played a role in demobilizing U.S. troops more quickly than the U.S. would have liked, which probably advanced the Chinese Revolution, which the U.S. would definitely have liked to stop.
The Bring Us Home Movement was organized within the armed forces with meetings, leaflets, and propaganda. Our point was that it could happen again and that the U.S. antiwar movement could, with an orientation toward the soldiers, help it to happen.
Fred Halstead’s book Out Now! A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War5, quotes a speech by James Johnson, one of the Fort Hood Three, soldiers who were among the very first to speak out publicly against the war and announce that they were refusing orders to go to Vietnam. Private first class (Pfc.) James Johnson said:
“Now there is a direct relationship between the peace movement and the civil rights movement. The South Vietnamese are fighting for representation like we ourselves…. Therefore, the Negro in Vietnam is just helping to defeat what his Black brother is fighting for in the United States. When the Negro soldier returns, he still will not be able to ride in Mississippi or walk down a certain street in Alabama. There will still be proportionately twice as many Negroes as whites in Vietnam….
“It is time that the Negro realizes that his strength can be put to much better use right here at home. This is where his strength lies. We can gain absolutely nothing in Vietnam. All this is leading to the decision I have made. I know it is my right to make this decision.” [p. 182]
Another one of the Fort Hood Three, David Samas, made a speech in which he urged the peace movement to:
“Give the G.I. something to believe in and he will fight for that belief. Let them know in Vietnam that you want them home, let them know that you are concerned about their lives also. Tell them you want them to live, not die. Bring home our men in Vietnam!….
“In the end we depend entirely upon the public. We have placed ourselves in the hands of the people of the United Staes, and all of our hopes lie with them….” [p.183]
These speeches and the signs of GI resistance to the war were early signs of what was to come later, when antiwar sentiment and opinion became so strong amongst the soldiers that the strongest military machine in the world became an unreliable fighting force in Vietnam!
In 1971, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. wrote an article in the Armed Forces Journal entitled the “Collapse of the Armed Forces (1971).”6 He wrote:
“The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few silent exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
“By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited when not near mutinous.
“Elsewhere than Vietnam the situation is nearly as serious.”
In the same article Heinl wrote that the “conditions among American forces in Vietnam have only been exceeded in this century [the 20th Century] by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.” He documents the existence in 1971 of 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases [having increased 40 percent from the previous year]; the existence of at least 14 GI dissent organizations including two made up solely of officers; the existence of 11 to 26 off-base antiwar GI coffee houses, and more.
These conditions of breakdown in the military, which constitutes a breakdown in a pillar of the capitalist state apparatus, had their roots in the war itself, the many casualties, the fact that politically the war could not be justified to the U.S. soldiers and, the alternative of peace presented by the civilian antiwar movement.
But just as significant, and in fact fundamental, was the effect of the Civil Rights Movement, the growth of Black nationalism, and the role of the conscious Black leadership in opposing the Vietnam War as well as exposing the disproportionate deaths and wounding of non-white soldiers in Vietnam, due to the disproportionate numbers of these soldiers in combat.
A pivotal turning point for the growth of Black GI resistance to the war and the antiwar movement as a whole was a speech made by Reverend Martin Luther King in 1967 at Riverside Church in NYC. This was a thoroughly revolutionary speech that defends the right of the Vietnamese people to revolt against their puppet dictators and the U.S.
King laid out all the key arguments against the war from the point of view of Black people. That “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such.”
King pointed to the irony of sending “young Black men who had been crippled by our society 8000 miles away to [supposedly] guarantee liberties which they hadn’t found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” He pointed out the irony of the country sending Black and white soldiers to kill and die together but unable to seat them together in the same schools. “So, we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”
King said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” What a bombshell this speech was—calling the U.S. government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world!
In 1970 Commander George L. Jackson, writing in the Naval War College Review acknowledged that the effect of Martin Luther King’s speech “was of profound significance on the national scene.” To quote:
“The growing public disillusionment with the Vietnam war, of which Dr. King’s declaration was an essential part, made it more difficult for the military…by reducing its ability to generate effective military-political pressure….Just as the civil rights movement has served as a restraint upon the ability of American forces in Vietnam…so it has altered and restricted the use of military resources….”
“The most apparent effect that the civil rights movement has had upon military force employment has been the necessity of using troops to quell civil disturbances. The National Guard has traditionally been used for this purpose. During the fiscal year 1968, 104,665 National Guardsmen were called to quell civil disturbances, many of which were precipitated by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King….”
In this same article the author states that the most important constraint on the military introduced by the civil rights movement “is that produced by the coalition of civil rights organizations and the antiwar organizations. This coalition has spearheaded the shift of public opinion away from support of the Vietnam conflict.”7
The Pentagon Papers confirm that the U.S. government agreed with just this analysis. One recommendation from the Secretary of Defense to President Nixon acknowledges that “In dealing with public opinion and congress, the administration would have to prove that the administration would have the resources ‘for the ghetto fight’ in order to justify continued intervention in Vietnam.”
While objective factors of the body bags and the experience of being part of an invasion force against a popular revolution played a giant role in shaping the attitudes of soldiers and working people in general toward the Vietnam War, the actions of the antiwar movement helped the objective factors to become part of the conscious response to the war.
One of the biggest debates in the antiwar movement, a debate held almost twice a year for ten years, was whether or not to call another mass street demonstration nationally. The left wing of the movement was consistent in calling for escalating street demonstrations. This was the form that made it possible to reach more and more workers, as objective events changed their minds, and more and more soldiers as well.
In 1969 almost 1000 Marines participated in an antiwar march in Oceanside, California. An anti-racism rally in Heidelberg, Germany in 1970 drew over 1000 GIs. One thousand sailors out of a crew of 4500 on the Naval Attack Carrier USS Coral Sea, scheduled to sail to Vietnam for a bombing attack tour in the Fall of 1971 signed a petition circulated secretly on board the ship stating that “We do not believe in the Vietnam War,” and that the ship “should not go to Vietnam.” Three hundred men from this ship led the antiwar demonstration November 6th in San Francisco.
During the debates over whether or not to call another mass demonstration, there were those who argued that the government ignored the antiwar movement, so what was the point? The publication of the Pentagon Papers proved once and for all that the government only pretended to ignore the movement. The movement, and its steady growth, its growth in the Black and Chicano communities, its impact on the armed forces, all these were watched and carefully gauged by the government. At the same time, the government decided to give up its effort to win the war. They calculated that the system would have more to lose vis a vis the American population than if they persisted in escalating and trying to militarily defeat the Vietnamese people.
While it is true that the Vietnam antiwar movement didn’t develop into the kind of a movement that could prevent the next series of U.S. imperialist interventions into the affairs, and revolutions of other countries—Chile, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Afghanistan—it did alter and narrow the U.S. government’s prerogatives in future ventures.
In order to deprive U.S. imperialism of the ability to use its military might against other countries and revolutions, we need a massive antiwar movement. But, for a permanent end to war we also need a self-conscious, organized working class who will take control and run society democratically in its own name for its own benefit.
During the Vietnam War the U.S. working class was at a very low ebb of class-consciousness, though probably most of the participants in the antiwar movement, at least at its height from 1968 on, were working class people. Most, however, were not there with the support of their unions or other working class organizations. The unions themselves never joined in the antiwar actions in a major way, with some exceptions among hospital workers, teachers, and other progressive unions. That is the major reason that the antiwar movement couldn’t go beyond its single issue of ending the war, to ending the U.S. war machine permanently. That will take more than a movement. That will take a revolution.
Postscript
The conscious intervention of a working-class Marxist organization—the Socialist Workers Party8—had a strong influence on the antiwar movement. Many people became converts to Marxism and revolution in the course of participating in the antiwar movement. That is the strongest reason for continuing to build and recruit to the socialist movement now, while a new mass movement is developing in response to the government’s attack on immigrants—fellow workers. The success of a social revolution in this country depends on building a strong revolutionary political party before, and in the course of, the development of a social revolution.
I hope that this talk/essay has proven that a consciously organized movement, serious about reaching out to ordinary people in great numbers can affect the war aims and the attacks on working people here and abroad of even the most powerful country in the world.
Talk given at a Socialist Action Educational Conference August 1998.
1 Vietnam Declaration of Independence, September 2, 1945, prepared and read to a massive crowd win Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh.
2 The Vietnamese mandarin class refers to the Confucian scholar-official bureaucracy that historically managed state affairs, often characterized as conservative, intellectual elites. During the era of the Vietnam War (specifically the 1950s-60s), this traditional, authoritarian governing style was embodied by South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, described as a “Cold War Mandarin” whose autocratic, centralized approach alienated the population.
3 “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Robert McNamara] Vietnam Task Force,” is a 7,000-page top-secret history of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
4 1961—1971
5 “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War” By Fred Halstead, 1978, Monad Press for the Anchor Foundation, Inc.
6 Published in “Vietnam and America, A Documentary History” edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, 1985, Grove Press, Inc.
7 p. 318 in “Vietnam and America, A Documentary History”
8 The SWP is no longer a revolutionary organization, having completely abandoned its support for Palestinian self-determination and adopting a position of support to Zionism and the Israeli and U.S. assault on Gaza and the West Bank.
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5) Birds Aren’t Just Declining. They’re Declining Faster, a New Study Finds.
Scientists studying data collected over more than three decades found accelerating losses. Their research offers clues about the causes.
By Catrin Einhorn, Feb. 26, 2026
"In 2019, Dr. Marra and a team of scientists published landmark findings that the number of birds in the United States and Canada had fallen by 2.9 billion, or 29 percent, since 1970."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/climate/bird-declines.html
The steepest losses in the study, from 1987 to 2021, were seen in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Arizona. Credit...Don Johnston, via Alamy
Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research. Overall drops in bird population, measured from 1987 to 2021, were sharpest in warm and warming areas, suggesting that climate change may play a role.
The study, published on Thursday in the journal Science, shows only correlation with intensive agriculture and temperature, not causation. It does not factor in other circumstances that may be affecting birds along migratory routes or while they are overwintering. But it adds to an ever more robust body of evidence that birds — one of the best measured families of animals on Earth, and a sentinel for the health of other species — are not OK.
Whatever the specific drivers, the accelerating losses make sense given society’s focus on economic growth, which often comes at a cost to the natural world, said Peter P. Marra, an ornithologist and dean at Georgetown University who specializes in bird populations and was not involved with the new research.
“The American dream turns into the American nightmare as we start to look at what we’re doing to biodiversity and systems that we depend on as humans,” he said.
In 2019, Dr. Marra and a team of scientists published landmark findings that the number of birds in the United States and Canada had fallen by 2.9 billion, or 29 percent, since 1970.
Thursday’s study relied on one of the same data sources, the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a monitoring project led in part by the United States Geological Survey. Observers count birds along designated routes of roughly 25 miles each. To analyze rates of decline, the new research was limited to 1,033 routes that offered yearly or almost yearly counts, and ultimately included 261 bird species.
In 1987, the team found, each route had 2,034 birds on average. By 2017, that average had decreased by 304 birds per route, or 15 percent. The steepest losses were seen in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Arizona. Generally, they correlated with warm places and, to a lesser degree, with places that saw rising temperatures over the past 30 years.
The researchers also found that bird declines have sped up over time. On average, each route lost what amounted to an additional quarter of a bird per year compared with the previous year. While that change may sound small, accelerating declines can quickly snowball. For example, a 25-mile route that lost roughly 10 birds per year early on was losing around 19 birds annually by the end of the 34 year period, said François Leroy, a postdoctoral macroecology researcher at Ohio State University and the study’s lead author.
When the team analyzed and mapped the rates of decline, hot spots of acceleration lit up in California, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic region.
“We were quite surprised to see those patterns,” Dr. Leroy said. The team decided to add further analysis, using statistical modeling to look for associations. Among 20 metrics, they looked at fertilizer use, pesticide use and area of cropland. “What we found is that any metric of agricultural intensity was always the best predictor of acceleration of the decline.”
But the authors themselves and scientists who were not involved in the work emphasized that more study was needed to determine what was actually driving the losses.
“We want to be very careful here,” said Marta Jarzyna, one of the authors and a professor at Ohio State who specializes in macroecology. “It’s very difficult to really get the mechanism of change with a large-scale, continental-scale correlative study such as ours.”
In 2023, a study on European birds tried that, finding that agricultural intensification, in particular pesticides and fertilizer use, was the main driver for most population declines, especially in birds that ate invertebrates such as insects.
Many scientists believe that trouble in the insect world, where declines are much harder to quantify, is creating trouble for birds. Most terrestrial bird species in North America depend on insects at some point in their life cycles, often when they are young. One study found that the 2.9 billion birds lost since 1970 came from species that depended on insects. Those that did not rely on insects actually increased by 26 million, an 111-fold difference, it found.
But there are lots of other pressures facing birds. They get eaten by cats, slam into glass windows during migration and face habitat loss. Climate change is affecting insects, birds and the timing of natural cycles.
In a bright spot from the research, forest-dwelling bird populations were found to be stable or increasing, perhaps related to an expansion in habitat as unused farmland in certain areas returns to woods.
Morgan Tingley, an ornithologist and quantitative ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, praised the study’s use of sophisticated statistical modeling, particularly in finding the accelerating declines.
“While this study is not definitive of the causes why” Dr. Tingley said, “it at least suggests, pretty convincingly, that it’s not just one thing.”
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6) Transgender Kansans Sue After Driver’s Licenses Are Abruptly Canceled
As Kansas invalidates hundreds of licenses and birth certificates, transgender people say their constitutional rights have been violated.
By Amy Harmon, Feb. 27, 2026
The law set off protests at the statehouse in Topeka, Kan. Credit...John Hanna/Associated Press
Two transgender Kansans asked a state judge on Friday to strike down a new law that abruptly invalidated the driver’s licenses of residents who had changed their gender designations.
The law, which took effect Thursday, requires the gender marker on a driver’s license to match a person’s sex at birth. Indiana, Florida, Tennessee and Texas have similar policies. But Kansas was the first to explicitly bar gender-marker changes, and to invalidate those licenses.
The law also invalidates the birth certificates of residents who had changed the document to reflect their current gender identity, and allows private citizens to seek financial damages from transgender Kansans who use a bathroom that does not match their sex at birth.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs have requested a temporary restraining order and a temporary injunction to stop the state from enforcing the law while the case is being decided.
The measure “is a cruel and craven threat to public safety all in the name of fostering fear, division and paranoia,” Harper Seldin, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a news release.
The plaintiffs, who are suing under pseudonyms, have been living as men for many years and have driver’s licenses that say they are men, according to the declarations filed with the court. Many transgender Kansans received a letter this week from the Kansas Department of Revenue notifying them that the Legislature had not included a grace period for updating credentials.
“Your current credential will be invalid immediately,’’ the letter said. It then directed recipients to “surrender your current credential” and exchange it for one that reflects their birth sex. Driving without a valid license, it noted, could result in other penalties.
About 1,700 driver’s license holders in Kansas are affected by the new law, according to state officials. Transgender people age 13 and older account for about 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Williams Institute, a demographic research center at U.C.L.A.
Lawyers with the A.C.L.U. filed the lawsuit in Douglas County. The plaintiffs claim that the law violates several provisions of the state Constitution, including the right to due process and personal autonomy. They argue that because other Kansas drivers can choose how they are represented on their license — by changing their name, listing their status as a veteran or disclosing a disability — the law violates their guarantee of equal protection. They also contend that it infringes on freedom of expression by requiring them to adopt the state’s view of sex and gender.
“By forcing trans people, and only trans people, to have a license that says ‘F’ when they live their lives as men, or vice versa for trans women, it is requiring them to convey the state’s belief that transgender people don’t exist,’’ said Mr. Seldin, the A.C.L.U. attorney.
The Kansas law is part of a wave of state-level legislation that rejects gender identity as a meaningful category, arguing that recognizing solely biological sex is important for protecting women and for accuracy. Transgender advocates argue that gender is central to identity, and that barring transgender people from access to bathrooms and government-issued documents is unlawful discrimination.
The Trump administration has prioritized stripping transgender Americans of legal recognition, including a requirement that U.S. passports reflect the sex on a person’s original birth certificate. And some Republican strategists believe that instituting more restrictions at the state level could help paint Democrats as out of step with voters in the midterm elections.
President Trump sought to make that point in his State of the Union address, calling Democratic members of Congress “crazy’’ when they did not react to his call to ban school policies that allow students to socially transition without informing their parents.
Republican lawmakers in Kansas this month overrode a veto on the driver’s license measure by Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat. Representative Susan Humphries, the bill’s sponsor, said during debates over the bill that it was necessary for accuracy in government record-keeping, and that it “has to do with truth.’’
The law’s rapid implementation left many transgender Kansas residents feeling under siege this week.
Some rushed to obtain new licenses, judging the peril of navigating life without one to be greater than carrying one that effectively outs them as transgender — and that they say could draw harassment and allegations of misrepresentation.
Others say they are waiting to see whether the state tracks them down before surrendering a license that they say accurately identifies them.
Anthony Alvarez, 21, a senior at the University of Kansas who transitioned in high school and changed the marker on his passport to “M” at age 19, said several transgender friends were considering moving after graduation to a state that will recognize their identity. Allowing themselves to feel comfortable using bathrooms and expressing their trans identity, he said, had been a yearslong process that they thought was behind them.
“When you first come out and you’re scared, and it all feels weird — I haven’t had to think of that in forever,’’ said Mr. Alvarez. “Suddenly, I’m back in the head space again.’’
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7) Employment Commission Says Agencies Can Restrict Bathroom Use by Gender Identity
The ruling extends the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s intervention on President Trump’s gender and race priorities.
By Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Feb. 27, 2026
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, led by Andrea Lucas, has been recast as an extension of President Trump’s executive authority and an enforcer of his agenda. Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said federal agencies can bar employees from using the bathroom that fits their gender identity, a decision with potentially far-reaching consequences for transgender rights in the workplace.
The decision released late Thursday shows the extent to which the commission, which enforces federal civil rights laws against employment discrimination, has been recast under Republican leadership and its chair, Andrea Lucas, as an extension of President Trump’s executive authority and an enforcer of his agenda.
The decision opens with a line from Mr. Trump’s executive order setting two immutable genders as U.S. policy. The 2-1 majority wrote that federal law “permits a federal agency employer to maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar intimate spaces. And it permits a federal agency employer to exclude employees, including trans-identifying employees, from opposite-sex facilities.”
The commission’s sole Democratic member, Kalpana Kotagal, issued a pointed dissent, describing the decision as rushed and legally suspect.
“The decision rests on the false premise that transgender workers are not worthy of the agency’s protection from discrimination and harassment and that protecting them threatens the rights of other workers,” Ms. Kotagal wrote. “Worse, it suggests that transgender people do not exist. That belief is contradicted by science and is not grounded in the law.”
The decision arose from a complaint made by a U.S. Army civilian IT specialist at Fort Riley, in Kansas, who had used male designated bathrooms and locker rooms but in 2025 asked to use female bathrooms and locker rooms in keeping with her gender identity. Management rejected the request, citing the president’s executive order, and the complainant appealed.
While the E.E.O.C.’s primary role is to enforce federal civil rights laws in the private-sector workplace, it has some authority over complaints and appeals concerning the federal government.
Still, Thursday’s decision was ambitious. Neither Title VII nor the Supreme Court has defined “sex,” and the E.E.O.C. does not have authority to interpret the law. The majority of commissioners said it was doing so in this case “only because circumstances dictate we must.”
“There is an active controversy before us, and we cannot simply press the pause button to await authoritative guidance from the courts,” the decision read. “The appeal must be decided, one way or the other.”
Ms. Kotagal wrote, in her dissent, that the Supreme Court has “recognized the principles that underlie support for protections for transgender workers for decades.”
The decision also refers to the complainant as a male, saying: “A man who identifies as a “transwoman” is still a man; a woman who identifies as a “transman” is still a woman. Both may be excluded from opposite-sex bathrooms as such.”
Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California and chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, condemned the decision as a “slap in the face to every American who has faced discrimination because of their gender identity.”
He added: “Authorizing vigilante bathroom police doesn’t just endanger transgender people — it puts every girl and woman at risk, especially those who don’t fit Republican extremists’ idea of what women ‘should’ look like or act.”
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8) U.S. and Israel Strike Iran as Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government
Iran vowed retaliation after President Trump pledged to eliminate its nuclear program and devastate its military. Israel joined the U.S.-led attack and said it had targeted a gathering of senior Iranian officials.
By Aaron Boxerman, Tyler Pager, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, February 28, 2026
Watching from a rooftop after a strike in Tehran on Saturday. Associated Press
The United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday in a major assault that threatened a broader regional conflict, with President Trump vowing to devastate the country’s military, eliminate its nuclear program and bring about a change in its government.
Waves of large explosions shook the Iranian capital, Tehran, starting around 9 a.m. local time — 1 a.m. in Washington — and witnesses described chaos in the streets as people rushed to seek shelter, find loved ones or flee the city. Israel’s military said it had, in part, targeted a gathering of senior Iranian officials in the opening strikes.
Satellite imagery showed a plume of smoke and extensive damage at the high-security compound of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Though the status of Iran’s leadership was not immediately known, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that Mr. Khamenei and Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, were still alive “as far as I know.”
Mr. Trump, had threatened an attack for weeks, saying earlier that he was considering limited strikes to compel Iran to accept U.S. terms for a deal restricting its nuclear program. Instead, he launched a much more ambitious venture that analysts call more perilous.
The president said in a video posted to Truth Social on Saturday that in addition to targeting Iran’s nuclear program, the United States would also “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy,” arguing that Iran had refused to reach a deal that would have averted war.
Dozens of U.S. strikes were carried out by attack planes from bases and aircraft carriers around the Middle East, with officials saying the initial focus was Iranian military assets. Israel’s military said it was also bombing dozens of sites across the country.
Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, promised that Iran’s army “will teach aggressors the lesson they deserve.” He added that by attacking Iran, Mr. Trump was serving the interests of Israel — Iran’s main regional rival — rather than the United States.
In retaliation, Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting booms as Israeli air defenses sought to repel them. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — all of which host U.S. military bases — said they had come under attack, as did Jordan. Falling debris from an Iranian ballistic missile attack killed at least one person in the Emirates, according to its government.
Analysts warned that the fighting could easily devolve into a protracted war with no clear exit. Many world leaders urged restraint, although Canada and Australia backed the American campaign against Iran.
Mr. Trump suggested that the conflict might end with Iranians rising up against their own authoritarian government after the American assault. “It will be yours to take,” Mr. Trump said, speaking to the Iranian public. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Here’s what else to know:
· Chaos in Tehran: Ali Zeinalipoor, a Tehran resident, described watching a massive plume of smoke billowing from nearby Pasteur Street. “I rushed to school to get my daughter from middle school, the girls were hiding under the stairs and crying,” he said. Read more ›
· The crisis: The latest tensions with Iran began after Mr. Trump vowed in early January to aid antigovernment demonstrators there. The Iranian government quelled those protests in a bloody crackdown that killed thousands, according to rights groups. Mr. Trump has more recently focused on Iran’s nuclear program. American and Iranian officials held a last-ditch round of mediated talks on Thursday over the program that ended without a breakthrough.
· Reports of casualties in Iran: Iranian state media reported that one of the attacks had struck a girl’s elementary school in the southern town of Minab, killing dozens of children. Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, said there were about 40 killed and 48 injured. The report could not be independently verified. The U.S. and Israeli militaries did not immediately comment.
· Last year’s strikes: The United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last June during a 12-day-war between Israel and Iran. While Mr. Trump said repeatedly that the Iranian nuclear program had been “obliterated” by those American strikes, it later emerged that the effort had been degraded, not decisively destroyed.
Read more:
The U.S. last bombed Iran in June, striking three nuclear facilities.
By Anushka Patil, February 28, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/28/world/iran-strikes-trump?smid=url-share#the-us-last-bombed-iran-in-june-striking-three-nuclear-facilities
The latest U.S. military strikes on Iran came roughly eight months after American forces bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities, attacks that directly involved the United States in Israel’s 12-day war on Tehran.
Those June attacks came after President Trump — who campaigned against American interventionism and has billed himself as a peacemaker — lost patience with diplomatic efforts and shifted his position on Iran under pressure from Israel.
Israel set off the war on June 13, 2025, with surprise attacks across Iran that took out much of its defense capabilities and killed a string of its senior military commanders and nuclear scientists. Israel’s widespread bombing campaign in the following days destroyed Iranian military, government and nuclear sites, but also multiple apartment buildings in densely populated neighborhoods, a TV station broadcasting the news and a prison.
In all, the Israeli strikes killed more than 1,000 Iranians, most of them civilians. Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel killed 31 people, according to Israel’s foreign ministry.
Though Mr. Trump had spent the early months of his administration warning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel against striking Iran, Mr. Trump privately and publicly marveled at what he called an “excellent” operation within hours of its start. As his team began monitoring prominent Trump supporters for their reactions to the prospect of the United States directly joining the war, Mr. Trump was closely watching Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of the Israeli attacks and featuring guests urging him to get more involved.
By June 17, Mr. Trump had largely decided to move forward with striking Iran. As top military commanders tried to finalize preparations in secret, Mr. Trump seemed to relish keeping the world on its toes and making threatening statements about whether the U.S. would attack.
The attack was carried out on June 22, when the United States fired bunker-busting bombs and a barrage of missiles at three Iranian nuclear facilities, including two major uranium enrichment centers. Mr. Trump quickly declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” But initial assessments by the U.S. and Israeli militaries were far more cautious, and senior Trump administration officials conceded that they did not know the status of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
In retaliation, Iran fired missiles at the biggest U.S. air base in the Middle East, Al Udeid, but gave advance notice of the strike. The Pentagon said there were no reports of casualties, and Mr. Trump thanked Tehran for exercising restraint.
In the days after the bombings, a preliminary classified U.S. report found that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back by only a few months and that much of its uranium had been moved before the strikes, according to officials familiar with the findings.
Weeks later, a new American intelligence assessment found that Fordo, the mountain facility that was Iran’s most critical uranium enrichment plant, had been badly damaged by the U.S. strikes. But U.S. and Israeli officials said Iran likely still held a stockpile of near-bomb-grade fuel, and the question of how long the strikes set back Iran’s overall nuclear program or its ability to use its existing uranium remained unsettled.
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9) A Tale of Two Seasons at Columbia, and Two Responses to Student Arrests
When Mahmoud Khalil was detained by immigration agents last year, the university’s response was restrained. It was different with Elmina Aghayeva this week.
By Troy Closson, Sharon Otterman and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Feb. 28, 2026
“'This was a frightening and fast-moving situation and utterly unacceptable for our students and staff,' she said in a recorded address Thursday night, describing in detail how immigration officers had asked for entry into the building to search for a missing child. 'Let me be clear — misrepresenting identity and other facts to gain access to a residential building is a breach of protocol.'”
The message at Columbia University was clear this week after federal immigration agents again detained a student. Credit...CS Muncy for The New York Times
A graduate student at Columbia University had been detained by immigration enforcement agents in the lobby of his university-owned apartment building. Within 24 hours, the arrest — done without a warrant — became a national story and drew widespread outrage.
But Columbia’s reaction to the detention of the student, Mahmoud Khalil, was restrained.
“There have been reports of ICE around campus,” the university wrote in an unsigned public statement one day after Mr. Khalil’s arrest. “Columbia has and will continue to follow the law.”
Nearly one year later, the university landed on a far different approach after Elmina Aghayeva, a 29-year-old senior from Azerbaijan, was taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from her university-owned apartment on Thursday.
Before the morning was over, Columbia had sounded the alarm to the campus in an urgent letter. The university’s leaders began dialing up influential elected officials to raise concern. And its acting president, Claire Shipman, later denounced the behavior and conduct of federal agents.
“This was a frightening and fast-moving situation and utterly unacceptable for our students and staff,” she said in a recorded address Thursday night, describing in detail how immigration officers had asked for entry into the building to search for a missing child.
“Let me be clear — misrepresenting identity and other facts to gain access to a residential building is a breach of protocol.”
In the worlds of academia and law, some observers who have closely followed the university’s posture in recent years immediately noticed the shift.
“The response was quite different,” said Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor and vice president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
“It’s not clear whether this reflects the difference in the public stands these students have taken, or a fundamental change in the university’s approach,” Professor Thaddeus said. “I hope it will prove to be the latter.”
In some ways, the contrasting responses provided a vivid illustration of just how much has shifted during the past 12 months, for Columbia, an Ivy League school, and the nation.
The conduct of immigration agents has fallen under scrutiny from New York to Minnesota, where the Trump administration mounted an aggressive operation and federal agents fatally shot two people during the recent protests.
“The context has changed,” Reinhold Martin, the president of Columbia’s chapter of the professors’ association, said. “We thank our friends in Minneapolis, who set an example for others to follow.”
At this time last year, elite universities were entering the cross hairs of the White House. One day before the detention of Mr. Khalil, a leader in a pro-Palestinian campus movement that drew both support and condemnation, the Trump administration had announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants to Columbia.
But the dispute was settled over the summer, with Columbia making a deal to receive its funding anew. This school year, the Morningside Heights campus has been comparatively quiet.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s recent immigration crackdown in several U.S. cities is provoking criticism from a broad cast of elected Democrats. Many rank-and-file voters, too, have registered their rage in large-scale protests.
A poll last month from The New York Times and Siena University found that a sizable majority now believes that ICE has gone too far.
To some, it all seemed to inform Columbia’s response to Ms. Aghayeva’s arrest, and to provide cover for the university if it chose to strike a different tone.
“Public opinion has certainly shifted against ICE and their warrantless arrests,” said Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat and the Manhattan borough president. “I think the university was on firmer ground to protect its student population.”
Columbia officials declined to discuss their strategy publicly.
The university has navigated life under a spotlight since protests erupted on campus after the Hamas-led incursion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the university’s president at the time, Nemat Shafik, testified before Congress about its response to campus antisemitism.
The cancellation of federal funding and the detention of Mr. Khalil, all within 48 hours last March, thrust the university back into the center of the story.
Katrina Armstrong, the university’s interim president when Mr. Khalil was detained, said in a letter at the time that she empathized with the distress the school community felt over the presence of ICE agents around campus.
But Dr. Armstrong did not name Mr. Khalil — or even mention the arrest — publicly.
The approach angered some faculty members and others, particularly as the Trump administration’s dragnet expanded to include other Columbia students, including Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations who was arrested at a citizenship interview.
Some pointed to Tufts University’s backing of its graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained on the street, and asked why Columbia hadn’t more forcefully defended its students.
Columbia took a different tack this week when five plainclothes immigration agents demanded to be let inside Ms. Aghayeva’s apartment building on Thursday morning. The Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested Ms. Aghayeva because her student visa had been terminated in 2016 for her failure to attend classes.
University leaders told city officials that the agents had misrepresented themselves as police officers searching for a missing child in order to gain entry. The Department of Homeland Security disputed Columbia’s account, saying its officers had “verbally identified themselves and wore badges around their necks.”
Mr. Mahdawi, one of the students detained last year, said that the release of Ms. Aghayeva “is the right outcome, and Columbia’s response, legal support and public advocacy is exactly what a university should do.”
“When I and other students were detained by ICE for our support of Palestinian rights, Columbia did not respond that way,” he said.
Unlike those arrested last year, Ms. Aghayeva was not openly political. Her large social media presence, with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, focuses on the stress of trying to be perfect and why it is important to make something of yourself.
After Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked President Trump on Thursday to intervene to secure the student’s release, Ms. Shipman referred to Ms. Aghayeva by name in her recorded address.
And she put it plainly: “The agents took our student.”
The contrast frustrated some of those close to Mr. Khalil, who had criticized the conduct of Columbia’s leadership after his arrest.
Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy and legal group, said that the university was far more responsive this week “than they were to the equally unlawful arrest of Mahmoud.”
“I think a lasting shame for the university for how they failed to intercede on his behalf or prevent his abduction when they knew it was possible,” Mr. Azmy, who is one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, said in a statement.
Some lawyers saw no major distinction between the legal cases of Ms. Aghayeva and some of the other detained Columbia students. “The only thing that I can see different is the politics of it,” Joshua Bardavid, an immigration lawyer in New York, said.
Still, Mr. Bardavid said that the swift release of Ms. Aghayeva offered a valuable lesson.
“When the university was willing to allow the government to have its way with their students, the government did,” he said. “When strong institutions and bodies are willing to fight, that can make the difference.”
For others, the takeaway from Thursday’s episode was different.
Aharon Dardik, a senior and an organizer with the Columbia Student Union, said Ms. Aghayeva’s arrest at her university housing showed Columbia remains unprepared to protect students from ICE.
He pointed to other incidents across the United States in recent months in which immigration agents were accused of using deception and intimidation to gain access to private spaces. Columbia, he said, had not trained its workers to be prepared for a similar scenario.
It has instituted a protocol since Ms. Aghayeva’s arrest.
“If you leave your doors unlocked, and every day on the news there’s talk about how there were more burglaries,” Mr. Dardik said, “you don’t get to say the burglar fooled you.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Ana Ley contributed reporting.
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10) Judge Approves $345 Million Verdict Against Greenpeace in Pipeline Suit
Greenpeace has said the verdict could bankrupt it. The lawsuit was over the group’s role in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
By Karen Zraick, Published Feb. 27, 2026, Updated Feb. 28, 2026
Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016. Credit...John L. Mone/Associated Press
A North Dakota judge finalized a potentially fatal verdict against Greenpeace on Friday, affirming a $345 million jury award against the storied environmental group that Greenpeace has said may force it into bankruptcy in the United States.
The verdict was reached last year after a bruising trial brought by the pipeline company Energy Transfer over Greenpeace’s role in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, an 1,172-mile pipeline that carries oil from North Dakota to Illinois.
Energy Transfer claimed Greenpeace had played a major role in the protests a decade ago, forcing construction delays and costing the company money. Greenpeace has said that the lawsuit, which was argued last year in state court in Mandan, N.D., was baseless and designed to silence it, and that the verdict undermined free-speech rights in the United States.
“Speaking out against corporations that cause environmental harm should never be deemed unlawful,” said Marco Simons, interim general counsel at Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace Fund. “This is a setback, but the movement to defend people and the planet has always faced setbacks and resistance, and Energy Transfer will fail in its goal of silencing its critics.”
Greenpeace said it would seek a new trial and, if necessary, file an appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
Energy Transfer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The judge in the case, James Gion, had previously cut the jury award nearly in half, from roughly $670 million to about $345 million, split among three different Greenpeace entities.
On Tuesday, Judge Gion noted in court filings that the Greenpeace groups — two based in the United States and one in the Netherlands — had asked him to overturn or at least further reduce the verdict, which was much larger than expected. But he said he did not find reason to do so.
Judge Gion wrote that the jury had heard evidence from both sides about the claims, which included defamation, conspiracy, trespass and interference with business operations. The lawyers for Energy Transfer had argued that Greenpeace played a key role in galvanizing the raucous protests, which drew tens of thousands of people to a remote area near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 and 2017.
Greenpeace countered that it had played only a supporting role in nonviolent protests led by Native American groups. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe maintains that the pipeline is a danger to its sole source of drinking water.
“The jury heard that evidence and made their decision,” Judge Gion wrote. He added that the jury “must have found the evidence presented by the plaintiffs to be more credible.”
Greenpeace has said the verdict was a threat to First Amendment rights. The group called the suit, first filed in federal court in 2017, a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or a SLAPP suit. That’s a term for complaints filed by powerful individuals or organizations aimed at shutting down critics by raising the risk of long, expensive court battles. Many states have anti-SLAPP laws that make it difficult to pursue such cases, though not North Dakota.
Martin Garbus, a veteran free-speech lawyer who was among a group of legal observers who attended the trial, said he feared the North Dakota case would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, where he predicted Greenpeace would lose. The justices “will use the case to murder the First Amendment,” he said.
Many European countries also have anti-SLAPP statutes. That has allowed Greenpeace International (which is based in the Netherlands, and is one of the three Greenpeace organizations that are defendants in the case) to bring a countersuit against Energy Transfer in an Amsterdam court.
Greenpeace International has maintained that its only involvement in the pipeline protests was signing a letter to banks expressing its opposition, a document that was signed by hundreds of groups and that had been drafted by a Dutch organization. The Dutch case is expected to be an early test of a new European Union directive that sets out stringent goals for reining in SLAPP-style lawsuits.
Energy Transfer has asked the North Dakota Supreme Court to issue an injunction to block the Dutch suit. That’s an extraordinary request, as it would be a state-level court in the United States taking action to block a court case in another country, being conducted under that nation’s laws. The cases remain pending in both courts.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight to stop the pipeline, which has been operating since 2017, continues at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
In December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a long-awaited environmental review, a critical step for the pipeline to receive full permits, which may weaken the tribe’s arguments. Lawyers for the tribe said the report minimized spill risks and failed to honor treaty rights.
The Army Corps said in a statement that it had incorporated input from tribes, federal and state agencies and the public, and it declined to comment on the pending litigation. The report is expected to be finalized soon.
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11) What Are ICE Agents Allowed to Do on College Campuses?
Federal agents do not have any special privileges on campuses. To arrest a student at Columbia University this week, they used a tactic of questionable legality.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Published Feb. 27, 2026, Updated Feb. 28, 2026
Barricades in front of the main entrance of Columbia University where protesters gathered on Thursday. Credit...CS Muncy for The New York Times
A Columbia University undergraduate this week was arrested by federal immigration agents who falsely told the superintendent of a university-owned apartment building that they were the police and that they were searching for a missing child.
The student, Ellie Aghayeva, was released after Mayor Zohran Mamdani met with President Trump and asked that her case be dismissed. But the episode has raised questions about whether the agents’ actions were legal and, more generally, what immigration agents are permitted to do on college campuses.
Federal agents do not have any special privileges on campuses. While certain parts of campuses are considered public property, many are considered private. Agents need federal judicial warrants to search private property, meaning a judge would have to be convinced that there was probable cause that a crime was being or had been committed. Illegal immigration, per se, is not a crime; it is a civil violation of the law.
The Homeland Security Department, asked for comment about its understanding of its role on campus, resent a statement from earlier about Ms. Aghayeva. It said that the United States was still seeking to deport her and that she had been released to wait for her hearing.
Here’s what you need to know about what happened:
What happened at Columbia University this week?
Shortly after 6 a.m. on Thursday, five federal immigration agents were let into a university-owned apartment building by the building’s superintendent. They gained entry by posing as police officers searching for a missing child. They had no warrant.
They entered Ms. Aghayeva’s apartment holding posters for the fictional missing child. Despite a public security officer’s protest that they had no warrant, they took her.
The university’s president, Claire Shipman, said that the episode was “utterly unacceptable.”
The Homeland Security Department said its officers “verbally identified themselves and wore badges around their necks.” It said it arrested Ms. Aghayeva because her “student visa was terminated in 2016 under the Obama administration for failing to attend classes.”
Do immigration agents need to identify themselves fully?
In 2005, the acting director of ICE, John Torres, issued a memo officially endorsing the use of ruses, including “adopting the guise of another agency.” When doing so, the memo said, immigration agents should contact the local agency in question. Agents have also posed as delivery people or used fake photos to suggest they are involved in a fictional investigation.
It is unclear whether the immigration agents on Thursday identified themselves as New York police officers or merely as “the police.” If they said they were New York officers, it would have required them to contact the N.Y.P.D., which a spokeswoman for the Police Department said they did not do.
But if they said they were the police, they would not have been required to seek permission.
Judges have not weighed in directly on whether such tactics are permissible, or what might cause them to run afoul of the constitution. In a Columbia Law Review article in 2022, Min Kam wrote that two U.S. appeals courts had adopted a rule in which the ruse would be a categorical violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
But that law is not binding in New York, and any challenge to the ruse would have to be evaluated again by a judge.
What are immigration agents permitted to do?
In the past, the law has been understood to be fairly straightforward. Agents would usually need to obtain federal judicial warrants to conduct arrests on private property. Exceptions can be made in what are known as “exigent circumstances” — a legal term that often means a warrantless arrest is necessary, either to prevent a suspect from fleeing or someone else from being harmed.
During the Trump administration, immigration agents have sought to circumvent that requirement in a number of ways.
In May 2025, Todd Lyons, the acting leader of ICE, drafted a memo telling agents that they could enter homes on the basis of an administrative warrant, according to a whistle-blower complaint released last month. Also last month, federal agents were told they had broader power to make warrantless arrests than previously understood.
The first policy is being challenged in court. In January, a group of Latino organizations in the Massachusetts area filed a lawsuit against the Homeland Security Department, writing that Mr. Lyons’s May memo “established an official policy that is unlawful and unconstitutional.”
The federal judiciary is increasingly looking askance at the Trump administration’s immigration practices more generally, with more and more judges accusing the government of willful violations of law.
“The Trump administration is acting as if the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do not apply to non-U. S. citizens and that is just not true,” said Elora Mukherjee, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Columbia’s law school.
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12) The C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.
The killing of Iran’s supreme leader and other top Iranian officials came after close intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel, according to people familiar with the operation.
By Julian E. Barnes, Ronen Bergman, Eric Schmitt and Tyler Pager, March 1, 2026
A satellite image shows black smoke rising and heavy damage at the compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Credit...Airbus, via Reuters
Shortly before the United States and Israel were poised to launch an attack on Iran, the C.I.A. zeroed in on the location of perhaps the most important target: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
The C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the operation. Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically, the C.I.A. learned that the supreme leader would be at the site.
The United States and Israel decided to adjust the timing of their attack, in part to take advantage of the new intelligence, according to officials with knowledge of the decisions.
The information provided a window of opportunity for the two countries to achieve a critical and early victory: the elimination of top Iranian officials and the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei.
The remarkably swift removal of Iran’s supreme leader reflected the close coordination and intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel in the run-up to the attack, and the deep intelligence the countries had developed on Iranian leadership, especially in the wake of last year’s 12-day war. The operation also showed the failure of Iran’s leaders to take adequate precautions to avoid exposing themselves at a time where both Israel and the United States sent clear signals that they were preparing for war.
The C.I.A. passed its intelligence, which offered “high fidelity” on Ayatollah Khamenei’s position, to Israel, according to people briefed on the intelligence.
They and others who shared details about the operation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and military planning.
Israel, using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.
The United States and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a strike at night under the cover of darkness, made the decision to adjust the timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.
The leaders were set to meet where the offices of the Iranian presidency, the supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council are located.
Israel had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defense officials, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; and others.
The operation began around 6 a.m. in Israel, as fighter jets took off from their bases. The strike required relatively few aircraft, but they were armed with long-range and highly accurate munitions.
Two hours and five minutes after the jets took off, at around 9:40 a.m. in Tehran, the long-range missiles struck the compound. At the time of the strike, senior Iranian national security officials were in one building at the compound. Ayatollah Khamenei was in another nearby building.
“This morning’s strike was carried out simultaneously at several locations in Tehran, in one of which senior figures of Iran’s political-security echelon had gathered,” an Israeli defense official wrote in a message reviewed by The New York Times.
The official said that despite Iranian preparations for war, Israel managed to achieve “tactical surprise” with its attack on the compound.
The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
On Sunday, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, confirmed the deaths of two high-level military leaders whom Israel said it had killed on Saturday: Admiral Shamkhani and General Pakpour.
People briefed on the operation described it as a product of good intelligence and months of preparations.
Last June, with planning underway to strike Iran’s nuclear targets, President Trump asserted that the United States knew where Ayatollah Khamenei was hiding and could have killed him.
That intelligence, a former U.S. official said, was based on the same network that the United States relied on Saturday.
But since then, the information the United States has been able to gather has only improved, according to the former official and others briefed on the intelligence. During that 12-day war, the United States learned even more about how the supreme leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps communicated and moved while under pressure, the former official said. The United States used that knowledge to hone its ability to track Ayatollah Khamenei and predict his movements.
The United States and Israel had also gathered specifics about the locations of key Iranian intelligence officers. In follow-on strikes after the attack on the leadership compound Saturday, locations where intelligence leaders were staying were hit, according to people familiar with the operation.
Iran’s top intelligence officer escaped, but the senior ranks of Iran’s intelligence agencies were decimated, according to people briefed on the operation.
Farnaz Fassihi and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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13) Trump, the Self-Declared Peace President, Goes to War Seeking Regime Change
President Trump has become increasingly willing to assert American power overseas, a decade after propelling himself to the highest office by promising to focus on “America first.”
By Peter Baker, Published Feb. 28, 2026, Updated March 1, 2026
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent. He reported from inside Afghanistan and Iraq in the days the U.S. wars in those countries started.
When he first ran for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump disavowed the military adventurism of recent years, declaring that “regime change is a proven, absolute failure.” He promised to “stop racing to topple foreign regimes.”
When Mr. Trump ran for president in 2024, he boasted of starting “no new wars,” and asserted that if Kamala Harris won, “she would get us into a World War III guaranteed,” and send the “sons and daughters” of Americans “to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”
Barely a year later, Mr. Trump is racing to topple foreign regimes, and is sending American sons and daughters to wage another war in the Middle East. The self-declared “president of PEACE” has chosen to become the president of war after all, unleashing the full power of the U.S. military on Iran with the explicit goal of toppling its government.
What the Donald Trump of 2016 would think of the Donald Trump of 2026 will never be known. But they are starkly different figures when it comes to overseas intervention. A decade after propelling himself to the highest office by promising to focus on “America first,” Mr. Trump has become increasingly willing to assert power overseas. The bombardment of Iran on Saturday was the ninth time he had ordered the military into action in his second term, even as he has decapitated the government of Venezuela and threatened to overthrow Cuba’s dictator.
In his middle-of-the-night social media video announcing the opening of this new war, Mr. Trump laid out a bill of particulars against Iran going back nearly half a century, including its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, its support for terrorist groups that attacked Americans and allies, the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the recent massacre of Iranian protesters. But he never explained why those aggressions required action now rather than earlier, or why his thinking evidently changed.
Nor did he reconcile his conflicting statements on the status of the Iranian threat. After joining Israel in attacking Iran last summer, he said that he had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. He repeated that claim in last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, and again in his early Saturday morning video. But he did not clarify why it was necessary to strike a program that had already been obliterated.
He did, however, go further than ever in making regime change the goal, calling on Iranians to overthrow their leaders. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be yours to take.” He repeated that in a social media post Saturday afternoon announcing that the strike had killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader — “one of the most evil people in History,” as the president put it.
But how Iranians should go about taking over was left unclear. Mr. Trump wrote that police and revolutionary guard forces should “peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves” — a remarkable notion suggesting that Iranian security officials would somehow team up with the same people they were gunning down in the streets just weeks ago.
“His stated goal here, regime change, is the very thing he ran against in 2016,” said Brandan P. Buck, a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Previously, the president used airstrikes, raids and covert military power when he believed it could achieve discrete ends with good optics at little cost. This attack on Iran has broken that formula and constitutes a leap into the unknown.”
Mr. Trump’s critics quickly resurrected his past statements to accuse him of abandoning his own promises, circulating video clips of his campaign rallies and social media quotes assailing Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Kamala Harris as warmongers.
Mr. Trump, 2012: “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”
Mr. Trump, 2013: “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly — not skilled!”
Mr. Trump, 2016: “We’re going to stop the reckless and costly policy of regime change.”
Mr. Trump, election night 2024: “I’m not going to start wars. I’m going to stop wars.”
And there were plenty of quotes from advisers like Stephen Miller, now the deputy White House chief of staff (“Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” Nov. 1, 2024), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (“The War Department will not be distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change,” Dec. 6, 2025).
Among those lashing out at Mr. Trump on Saturday were not just liberals but also prominent leaders of the Make America Great Again movement who complained that he had been captured by the neoconservatives he once spurned, criticism led by the right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.
“It’s always a lie and it’s always America Last,” Ms. Greene, who resigned her seat last month after breaking with Mr. Trump, wrote on social media. “But it feels like the worst betrayal this time because it comes from the very man and the admin who we all believed was different and said no more.”
Mr. Trump’s allies pushed back against that. Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, argued that Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran would head off a worse threat down the road and pave the way for a new Middle East that would be friendlier to the United States. “To those who say, ‘Well, President Trump said he wasn’t going to take us into any wars,’ he’s keeping us out of wars in the long run,” he said on CNN.
Advocates of action against Iran maintained that Mr. Trump still had not gone far enough by failing to fully commit to changing the government in Tehran, but instead leaving it to the Iranian people. “Trump’s speech wasn’t a regime change speech — and I wish it had been,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that has long pressed for tougher policy on Iran.
The only “durable solution,” he added, is not a military strike that sets the Iranian nuclear weapons program back by months or years, but the end of the regime. “But that’s not exactly what Trump prioritized tonight,” Mr. Dubowitz said, “and we need to be honest about what he did, and didn’t, say.”
Mr. Trump’s increasing willingness to deploy military force underscores the broader change between his first term and second term. He is far more comfortable using the instruments of power than he was the last time around, at home as well as abroad. What he sometimes threatened or considered doing in his first stint in the White House, he more readily acts on now, whether it be sending federal forces into American streets, prosecuting his perceived enemies, purging the government of those deemed disloyal or imposing tariffs on countries around the world.
The team he assembled in the first four years included establishment Republicans or career military officers who often restrained his most radical impulses. But there is no John F. Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark T. Esper or Mark A. Milley this time around. Instead, he has surrounded himself with more aggressive break-the-china advisers pushing for more ambitious action along with figures like Mr. Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, who view their jobs as facilitating the president’s desires rather than talking him out of them.
Mr. Trump’s journey as commander in chief has been a fitful one. He had no experience in either the military or public office when he first arrived in the Oval Office in January 2017. He promoted a more aggressive war against the Islamic State, but sometimes hesitated to use force, at one point calling off a retaliatory military strike on Iran with just minutes to go, deeming it not worth the casualties.
He was intent on pulling back from much of the world, seeking to bring U.S. troops home from places like South Korea, Germany and Syria. He negotiated a peace agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan, a deal then executed by his successor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in a disastrous operation.
But he was also emboldened when a U.S. strike in 2020 targeted and killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani without instigating the devastating reprisals or prolonged regional war that some critics had predicted. Likewise, in this second term, the successful commando raid that captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela also energized Mr. Trump.
His public posture, however, has veered wildly over the past year. One moment, he presents himself as a historic peacemaker, forming a so-called Board of Peace and griping that he has not won the Nobel Peace Prize while claiming, inaccurately, that he has ended eight wars — including one with Iran. The next moment, he threatens to seize Greenland, take back the Panama Canal, strangle Cuba and even go after Colombia’s president as he did Venezuela’s.
Charles Kupperman, who was a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump in the president’s first term, said he did not think Mr. Trump had evolved in his thinking about foreign threats. But in the case of Iran, Mr. Kupperman said, the president set himself up by investing in a diplomatic effort that was always doomed to fail, leaving little alternative but to take military action.
“It is difficult to determine Trump’s decision-making process given the serious downgrade of the N.S.C. and its policymaking role,” he said of the National Security Council. “What options were developed and presented to Trump and the process for generating them are key questions.” But he added that “the diplomatic effort to engage Iran was never going to yield the results that Trump sought. Pure Kabuki theater.”
The outcome of Mr. Trump’s geopolitical gamble will depend not just on how the military operation proceeds, but what comes next. Success has a way of making voters forget about broken promises. There is little love lost for the Tehran regime, and video showed Iranians in the streets cheering Ayatollah Khamenei’s death. If Mr. Trump manages to push the remaining government from power, he will have something to boast about that none of his predecessors dared try.
Unlike the so-called forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that helped fuel his political rise, Mr. Trump has not made any major commitment of ground troops in Iran, and seems determined to stick to air power, avoiding the sort of grinding guerrilla warfare that turned Americans against past wars.
Still, as Mr. Trump himself warned in his overnight video, there could be American casualties. And if the Tehran government does fall, it could yield a replacement that is still hostile to the United States, or result in fratricidal chaos, as happened in Libya after Muammar el-Qaddafi was deposed and killed in 2011.
One way or the other, his allies were already talking about it being a legacy moment for Mr. Trump. What kind of legacy is not yet clear. But it will not be the one that he originally promised.
More on the Assault on Iran
· Iran’s Supreme Leader Killed: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died during the U.S. and Israeli military strikes. In more than three decades of authoritarian rule, Khamenei brutally crushed dissent at home and expanded the Islamic Republic's influence abroad. Large crowds of people in the country celebrated his killing, while many others gathered to mourn.
· Trump and the American Public: Hours after the U.S.-Israeli attacks began, President Trump made unsupported and exaggerated claims in a video posted to social media. The American public’s appetite for an attack on Iran was low before Trump and Israel took action.
· Hope for Regime Change?: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has portrayed the Islamic republic as a singular threat to his country and the world for more than three decades. Israel and the United States declared that their attacks would pave the way for regime change in Iran. Trump urged for Iranians to “take over” their government, but questions remained about how much effort his administration would put into changing the Iranian government.
· Iran Claims Children Killed in Strikes: HRANA, an Iranian rights group based in Washington, said late Saturday that at least 133 civilians had been killed and 200 others wounded in the attacks. A strike in the town of Minab was one of two that appear to have hit schools on Saturday.
· Israel’s Shelter Shortage: Iranian missile and drone attacks repeatedly targeted Israel on Sunday, forcing much of the country to take cover and highlighting a shortage of bomb shelters in the country. The Israeli ambulance service said nine people were killed and nearly 30 others wounded in Beit Shemesh, a city about 18 miles west of Jerusalem.
· U.S. Congress Weighs In: After the attack, Democrats and a few Republicans escalated their calls for swift votes on whether to curb Trump’s power to continue using force against Iran without explicit authorization.
· Iranian Americans Find Hope: Some Californians of Iranian descent said they welcomed the possible end of an oppressive government in Tehran that their families had fled.
· World Reacts: Global leaders urged all sides to exercise restraint after the attacks, although some officials backed the campaign.
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14) Can Nations Agree How to Mine the Sea? This Is the Year, She Says.
Leticia Carvalho heads a global authority that’s been struggling to set rules for a decade. President Trump’s aggressive push on ocean mining makes her task more urgent.
By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Published Feb. 28, 2026, Updated March 1, 2026
After a decade of debate, by year’s end the world should finally have a rulebook for mining the deep sea, Leticia Carvalho, the head of the International Seabed Authority, said in an interview.
It’s her job to help make it happen. And in the past year, the Trump administration has made the task far more urgent. She called it “absolutely existential” that the 170 nations in the authority now reach an agreement.
That’s because the Trump administration has said it will start unilaterally issuing permits for seabed mining in international waters, the vast stretches of the ocean that are not the domain of any one country. Regulators in the United States are now considering applications from companies that want to mine in these areas for valuable minerals, a practice that is environmentally controversial and has never been done on a commercial scale.
“The world agreed 30 years ago that this is an area that belongs to all of us, and we should go there collectively,” Ms. Carvalho said. In a world without international rules, she said, the oceans could turn into a kind of “Wild West” where each nation makes up its own.
This week, the seabed authority that she leads began its annual meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, to try to end the impasse. The authority was created in 1994 under a global treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as an independent body to regulate use of the seafloor in international waters, which cover nearly half the planet.
The United States has not ratified the U.N. convention, but has observer status at the authority’s deliberations and, until recently, followed its standards.
“It was quite extraordinary that such assertive messaging is coming out from the secretariat already, ahead of this meeting,” said Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance at the Oceano Azul Foundation, a Portuguese science and advocacy group, who has attended several years of the authority’s meetings. He is among the experts concerned that rushing to complete the rules this year might lead to sloppy work.
Reaching an agreement on these rules, often called a mining code, would make history. The authority has been locked in debate over what the rules should look like for more than a decade. At the same time, the potential environmental toll of the industry has come under increasing scrutiny.
A completed mining code wouldn’t necessarily give the greenlight for commercial mining. But The Metals Company, which is leading the race to the seafloor, has told investors it will be ready to start mining by the end of 2027 with the assistance of the Trump administration.
Much of the activity would happen in the Pacific Ocean in an area known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico. There, the ocean floor is blanketed with fist-sized nodules of valuable minerals and metals including cobalt, nickel and manganese that have accumulated over millions of years. (Some countries, like Japan, are planning to mine for similar resources in territorial waters rather than international ones.)
By some estimates, these deep ocean riches could eclipse all land-based reserves. But accessing such remote areas is technologically complex and costly. Some critics say that the industry may not turn a profit.
Scientists also say mining would damage deep sea ecosystems. There, all manner of animals exist, like tuba-shaped sea sponges and delicate, featherlike corals, that live on the nodules and around them. A scientific study of a Metals Company test run found that collecting nodules could reduce the abundance and biodiversity of seabed life by 30 percent.
Ms. Carvalho was elected to run the authority last year, and, as a trained oceanographer, she is its first secretary-general with a background in science. She is also a former oil industry regulator from Brazil.
United States actions in international waters circumvent the authority, Ms. Carvalho said.
Particularly concerning, she said, is that U.S. regulations were recently modified to combine the permitting process for exploration licenses and commercial ones. As a result, half as many environmental review periods are required before a company’s application can be approved.
Gerard Barron, the chief executive of The Metals Company, said he was doubtful that the International Seabed Authority could finalize its regulations this year. “Unlike the I.S.A., the U.S.A. has a complete and modernized set of regulations,” he said, noting that at least 10 mining applications have been submitted under United States law. “The industry has clearly demonstrated which regime it believes in,” he said.
His company also holds exploration permits from the seabed authority and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on tests and scientific studies in an allotted area of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
Last year, shortly after President Trump ordered federal regulators to prioritize seabed mining, the company applied for new permits from the United States in the same location.
Environmental groups have staunchly opposed seabed mining. “We shouldn’t see deep sea mining as inevitable simply because the front-runner company is now essentially pretending that international law doesn’t exist,” said Louisa Casson, a project leader for Greenpeace International’s campaign against the practice. The organization is among the environmental groups and 40 countries calling for a ban or moratorium on the industry.
The U.N. convention was also designed to protect the interests of small and less wealthy countries, a core promise that Greenpeace argues it is failing to deliver. A recent study, commissioned by Greenpeace International, found that under the seabed authority’s current proposal, developing countries would get a small fraction of the estimated revenue.
In the interview, Ms. Carvalho said she viewed moratoriums as counterproductive. Banning mining outright, she said, takes money away from scientific research into deep sea ecosystems and delays the authority from establishing strict environmental standards.
“Being able to make the rules before activity starts is unique in human history,” she said, adding that the time for ideological debate is over. If the United States acts independently, then other nations may follow, she said. A patchwork of rules could result, which she said would leave the environment less protected and provide fewer benefits for developing countries.
As the authority gets to work this week, Ms. Carvalho said there were 32 specific issues that need to be resolved, some as small as a few words in a sentence, others as hefty as a paragraph. She said she believed the draft could be completed this year without rushing or risking mistakes.
The completed regulations wouldn’t be set in stone, Ms. Carvalho said, and could continue to be perfected over time. “The most important thing that the member states in the council now need to decide is what is desirable versus what is tolerable,” she said. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Ms. Carvalho has not made her goals a secret. Ahead of this year’s meeting, she met with European leaders to urge them to support a mining code.
To some, her current view may come as a surprise. During the 2024 election that elevated her to lead the seabed authority, she had argued that several years of work most likely remained before a code could be finalized. Her predecessor’s tenure ended amid criticism from diplomats who said he was rushing the process to favor The Metals Company.
As the authority’s head, Ms. Carvalho is expected to remain impartial and not take a position on mining itself, but rather to facilitate deliberation among the 170 member states. “My job is not to design these regulations,” she said. “I know my job is to set the table.”
Still, the mission has become personal. “If I am the lucky one, if this agreement can be reached under my watch, then I would say that is the biggest achievement of my career,” she said.
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