Saturday, March 28
11:30 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Embarcadero Plaza
Market and Steuart Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
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Since Inauguration Day, the radical pages of Project 2025 and the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on America’s workers.
America wasn’t built by greedy billionaires and corporations, it was built by hardworking people all across the country. And labor unions are taking action, speaking up and fighting back!
The labor movement will be in the streets on Saturday, March 28, for No Kings Day to powerfully say that our government doesn’t answer to a king—it answers to working people.
Our solidarity is more important than ever. Please join us Tuesday, March 24, for our #NoKings labor activist call to mobilize our movement before Saturday’s events.
WHAT: AFL-CIO No Kings Labor Activist Call
WHEN: Tuesday, March 24, at 7 p.m. ET
WHERE: Zoom:
https://events.zoom.us/ev/AhfntEDd3A6WigV8sDEo0UQFWnSGDmcgfG_dKiz7A7xOHhk7-1wd~AmXj963Ovz7D_AqVbqIEcfngPhfUVq4XdkdCcDTJGDH3HZylNMDHbB7XKw?link_id=3&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
(on any internet-connected device or via call-in)
The Trump administration has committed the single biggest act of union-busting in history, attacked good jobs across the country, launched a brutal assault on immigrants, ripped health care from millions, jeopardized the essential services that working families rely on and threatened our fundamental freedoms. Enough is enough.
On the call, you’ll hear from union leaders, learn about your rights, how to take action safely, and how to host or join a #NoKings event and mobilize others to attend.
JOIN THE CALL:
https://events.zoom.us/ev/AhfntEDd3A6WigV8sDEo0UQFWnSGDmcgfG_dKiz7A7xOHhk7-1wd~AmXj963Ovz7D_AqVbqIEcfngPhfUVq4XdkdCcDTJGDH3HZylNMDHbB7XKw?link_id=3&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
HOST AN EVENT:
https://www.mobilize.us/aflcio/c/no-kings-march-28/event/create/?link_id=7&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
FIND AN EVENT:
https://www.mobilize.us/?q=No+Kings+AFLCIO&link_id=9&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
Will you join us on Tuesday as we take back our power?
When working people peacefully come together and fight for each other, we can stand up to the wealthiest bosses and the most powerful politicians.
In solidarity,
Team AFL-CIO
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Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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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) Cuba Is Going Dark
By Pablo Robles, Simon Romero and Tim Wallace, March 19, 2026
Cuba is facing what may be its worst electricity crisis since Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries swept to power 67 years ago. Following weeks of frequent blackouts, the national grid suffered a “complete disconnection” on Monday, according to the energy ministry.
Blackouts are getting worse, and on some days the entire island is plunged into near total darkness.
Cuba is facing what may be its worst electricity crisis since Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries swept to power 67 years ago. Following weeks of frequent blackouts, the national grid suffered a “complete disconnection” on Monday, according to the energy ministry.
Blackouts are getting worse, and on some days the entire island is plunged into near total darkness.
Cuba generates most of its electricity from oil, and for nearly three decades, Venezuelan oil has been the island nation’s energy lifeline.
The Trump administration ordered Venezuela to halt supplying oil to Cuba after it captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Mexico was soon pressured by the U.S. to stop shipments as well. No other country has come to Cuba’s rescue with oil supplies.
U.S. officials are now using the energy crisis to exert leverage over Cuba’s leaders, even as some in Cuba warn that the repeated blackouts could make it harder for Cubans to get food, running water and medical care.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has publicly acknowledged this month that his government has been holding talks with Washington in an effort to find solutions to Cuba’s standoff with the United States.
Mounting Crisis in the Capital
The capital, Havana, is usually a priority in electricity generation because it is the seat of government. But as the energy crisis grows, it is also not shielded from going dark.
The whole city is feeling the ripple effects.
Trash is piling up as garbage trucks are idled due to a lack of fuel. Without refrigeration, meat and dairy in homes and food markets are spoiling.
Because Havana’s water system depends on electric pumps, running water has been cut off for many residents, who now line up with jugs at gravity-fed community cisterns, according to Jorge R. Piñon, a University of Texas oil expert who tracks Cuba’s energy industry. Public health officials have postponed tens of thousands of surgeries, and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy have seen their treatments disrupted by power outages and a lack of refrigerated medicine.
The “Luxury Bubbles”
Lights largely remain on in resort areas like Varadero, Cayo Coco and Cayo Santa Maria, home to strings of beach hotels and spa complexes. Unlike residential areas that depend on the failing national grid, hotels in these places have their own generators, and fuel for these locations is a top priority, alongside hospitals.
That’s because tourism remains a crucial source of hard currency for Cuba’s government, even after some airlines suspended flights to Cuba because of a shortage of jet fuel at major airports caused by the U.S. blockade.
The energy crisis has created a bizarre reality in these areas.
They are some of the primary beneficiaries of recent efforts to create a decentralized network of small solar arrays using Chinese technology. That means workers at these resorts commute from places with little electricity, a lack of running water and rotting food to “luxury bubbles” where tourists enjoy air-conditioned rooms and refrigerated buffets. Military checkpoints strictly control access to these locations.
Unrest Flares Up in the Provinces
The rest of Cuba, far from the seat of power and the beach resorts, is hit hardest by the crisis.
After weeks of blackouts, hundreds of people in Morón, a city of 70,000 in central Cuba, took to the streets. On March 13, they ransacked the local office of the Communist Party, dragging furniture, computers and documents into the street to set them on fire.
In eastern Cuba, the provincial electricity company for the city of Holguín is providing electricity for residential neighborhoods for only about three hours a day. Major economic drivers, like nickel processing plants, have had to scale back operations, cutting the country’s exports.
Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, is suffering from severe disruptions to both electricity and running water. People there have started nighttime protests known as cacerolazos, in which they bang on pots and pans to express their anger.
An Outdated Energy System
For Cuba, the crisis has laid bare the risks of depending so heavily on foreign oil while trying to maintain a centrally planned socialist economic system.
While countries around the world are using diverse methods to produce electricity, such as natural gas, wind or battery storage, Cuba is still locked into a 20th-century model exceptionally dependent on oil. That makes the island nation extremely vulnerable to oil shocks.
The last confirmed arrival of a significant oil tanker was the Ocean Mariner, which docked in Havana on Jan. 9 with about 86,000 barrels of fuel from Mexico. Since then, Cuba has had to rely on its own meager production of extra-heavy crude oil, which covers only about 40 percent of energy demand.
That shortfall could bring Cuba’s whole economic system, not just its electricity grid, to the breaking point.
About the data
The nighttime lights analysis compares light intensity in Cuba from March 6 to 12, 2026, with the same period in 2025, using satellite imagery. The light intensity shown is the average of the seven-day period based on available data. There may be small gaps in the data where the satellite did not capture coverage. These gaps tend to occur in areas that were dimly lit in previous years.
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2) Home Health Care Aides Say It’s Time to End ‘Inhumane’ 24-Hour Shifts
The aides want the New York City Council to pass a law that would limit their shifts to 12 hours, except in the case of emergencies.
By Wesley Parnell, March 19, 2026
Home health workers demonstrated on Wednesday at City Hall, calling for better working conditions. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
For 10 years, Xue Zhen, a home health aide, has taken care of the same older man in Downtown Brooklyn, working 24-hour shifts for three consecutive days each week. She said that she has developed neck and back pain from lifting him, not to mention insomnia and chronic stomach issues from the long and irregular hours.
But on Wednesday, Ms. Zhen, 62, who would normally use her days off to recover and spend time with her family, sat in freezing temperatures outside City Hall alongside dozens of other home care workers.
They marched, sang and eventually began a daily four-hour sit-in that they expect to stretch into next week. Home care workers and their advocates are pressuring the City Council to pass a law that would all but end the grueling 24-hour shifts that home aide workers have long complained come at cost, physically and economically, because they typically are paid for only 13 hours of the shift.
The bill would limit their shifts to 12 hours, except in case of emergencies. The Council may vote on it later this spring.
“It is inhumane and takes advantage of us and our wages,” Ms Zhen said through an interpreter. “If you are doing your job properly, you are not sleeping, you are waking up in the night to check on your patient, making sure they are OK.”
Home care aides in New York City have been allowed to work 24-hour shifts because of a longstanding interpretation of state law that assumes that the aides work on average for 13 hours of their shift and sleep and take meal breaks during the other 11 hours.
But the aides said that they are rarely able to take breaks and are often pressured to not complain or risk losing work.
As New York City’s baby boomer population continues to leave the work force, the need for these workers is expected to grow. While New York State’s population overall is expected to increase by 3 percent between 2021 and 2040, the number of people 65 and older is projected to grow 25 percent, and the 85-and-older population could jump nearly 75 percent, according to a City University of New York study.
The movement to rein in their long days has been a decade-long battle for the nearly 130,000 home health workers within the five boroughs. Outside City Hall, the demonstrators, almost all of them women and immigrants, chanted, “no more to 24 hours” and held signs displaying Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s face, inscribed with the words, “Mamdani, you promised!”
Advocacy groups say that making the job less strenuous will draw more people into the field, helping meet the booming demand for their services.
Advocates had been hopeful that Mr. Mamdani, who spoke at a rally for home health care workers in December 2024, would provide momentum for reforms.
“Mayor Mamdani has always stood with home care workers in the fight for dignity on the job: fair wages, reliable hours and respect owed to those who make it possible for so many New Yorkers to live safely at home,” Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said.
“The mayor is committed to working alongside home care workers, the Council and state government to pass stronger protections that improve working conditions for caregivers and ensure they can provide the high-quality care their patients deserve,” Ms. Pekec said.
The bill’s sponsor, Council Member Christopher Marte, said that he was optimistic about the measure, and said that the Mamdani administration had been providing feedback, ironing out legal questions and policy differences.
When Mr. Marte previously introduced the bill, a handful of industry organizations and politicians had opposed it, arguing that it would raise Medicaid costs because workers would be paid for every hour they are present in a client’s home. The State Capitol in Albany is a better venue to consider such a measure because the state regulates Medicaid contracts, industry representatives and some politicians have said.
Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, a powerful union that represents health care workers, said that while it agrees with the intention of the measure, it was important to recognize that it would require $460 million in Medicaid funding. Without coordinating the cost with the Legislature, patients could be left in the lurch, they said.
“The City Council should recognize that the state Medicaid program will need to fund an additional 11 hours per day for every 24‐hour case,” Helen Schaub, political director of 1199 SEIU, said in a statement.
The Legal Aid Society, which has filed lawsuits trying to restore back pay or lost wages for home health attendants, echoed similar concerns.
“People who rely on 24-hour live-in care are not authorized for two 12-hour shifts, so coverage cannot simply be split without changes to state law and reimbursement — risking immediate gaps in care for seniors and people with disabilities,” said Belkys Garcia, staff attorney in the Civil Law Reform Unit at the Legal Aid Society.
Shirley Ranz attended the rally on Wednesday after her family’s experience with home care, she said. Her father qualified for 24-hour care after he fell ill in 2018. But Ms. Ranz, who chairs the domestic worker task force for the National Organization for Women, was appalled by the working hours. Her father had to be rolled over in the middle of the night because of bed sores. She appealed the coverage and tried to set up separate 12-hour shifts.
“It was a danger for my father, and it was dangerous for the worker,” Ms. Ranz said.
Her appeal was approved in 2020, she said, the day before her father passed away.
“Ultimately, it was a Pyrrhic victory,” Ms. Ranz said.
Emma Goldberg contributed reporting.
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3) The U.S. Economy Is Insulated From High Oil Prices. Americans Aren’t.
The overall economy has proved resilient in recent years, even as many households have struggled. The war with Iran is following the same pattern.
By Ben Casselman, March 20, 2026
Debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil site in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, on Saturday. The U.S.-led war with Iran is threatening to deliver another inflationary blow to American consumers. Altaf Qadri/Associated Press
The defining narrative for the U.S. economy over the past several years has been one of remarkable resilience in the face of inflation, tariffs and all manner of uncertainty. For individual Americans, however, the same period has often been defined by frustration, insecurity and, in many cases, real hardship.
The war with Iran looks set to repeat that pattern.
The jump in oil prices to over $100 a barrel in recent weeks will push nearly every major economic variable in the wrong direction. Inflation will be faster. Growth will be slower. Unemployment will most likely be higher. If the war were to last longer than expected, or energy prices were to go higher — as they have in recent days — the damage would grow.
Still, unless the situation takes a significant turn for the worse, the impact will most likely be modest, measured in tenths of a percentage point of economic growth. Federal Reserve policymakers, at their first meeting since the war began, made only small adjustments to their economic forecasts for the year and left interest rates unchanged.
In a news conference after this week’s meeting, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said it was too soon to predict how the war would affect the economy. But he noted that the economy had repeatedly exceeded expectations in recent years, including by defying the near-consensus view among forecasters that the Fed’s efforts to control inflation would lead to a recession.
“The U.S. economy has really been just doing pretty well through a lot of significant challenges over the past few years,” Mr. Powell said. “It’s just been amazing to see.”
Few Americans have shared that sense of amazement. Measures of consumer sentiment have been persistently weak as inflation and high interest rates have taken a toll on household finances. President Trump won back the White House partly by promising to control inflation, then proceeded to impose tariffs that drove up the price of imported goods, according to nearly all independent analyses.
Now the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is threatening to deliver another inflationary blow just as the effects of tariffs were beginning to fade.
The cost of gasoline has jumped by about a dollar a gallon nationally since the war began and is all but certain to head higher. The prices of food and electricity — already pain points for many households — could be close behind. Even housing is set to become less affordable: Concerns about inflation have pushed mortgage rates to their highest level in three months, just weeks after they fell below 6 percent for the first time since 2022.
Those higher costs are hitting at a time when many families are struggling with mounting debt and dwindling savings, and when a weakening labor market has sapped workers’ bargaining power and made them nervous about their job security.
“These price increases are very pervasive,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. “If you’re already struggling to pay your bills, it could be a very significant setback for you.”
Ripple Effects
Neither consumers nor the overall economy are as vulnerable to high oil prices as they were in the 1970s, when a succession of oil shocks contributed to the combination of rising prices and high unemployment that came to be known as “stagflation.” Cars have become more fuel efficient, partly because of reforms enacted after those crises. Energy-intensive industries account for a smaller share of economic output. And a surge in domestic production has turned the United States from a large importer of oil into a net exporter.
Wall Street forecasters estimate that the rise in energy prices will reduce U.S. gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, by less than half a percentage point in the second quarter. For comparison, that is a more modest hit to growth than last fall’s six-week government shutdown. A prolonged disruption to global oil supplies would have more significant consequences. But unless oil prices hit $200 a barrel for a sustained period — a scenario that energy experts say is plausible but relatively unlikely — most forecasters do not think the shock will be enough to cause a recession.
Because the United States is both the world’s largest producer of oil and its largest consumer, the economic consequences of higher prices are complex. Rising costs mean bigger profits for oil companies and their investors, and perhaps also more jobs for workers in Texas, North Dakota and other energy-rich states.
But for the businesses that rely on oil to produce and ship their goods, higher prices are a cost that they must either pass on to their customers or swallow in the form of lower profits. Diesel fuel has already crossed $5 a gallon, and the price of jet fuel is up more than 50 percent since the war began.
The effects of the war go beyond oil: Natural gas prices have soared globally, as has the cost of nitrogen-based fertilizer. That could push up food prices, and further strain the already battered agricultural sector. In a letter to Mr. Trump on Thursday, a coalition of farming groups asked for federal help dealing with the increased costs. Supplies of aluminum and helium, key industrial inputs that are produced in the Gulf region, have also been disrupted.
“This is not just an energy shock,” said Aditya Bhave, chief U.S. economist for Bank of America. “It’s difficult to sit here and figure out exactly how that is going play out through global supply chains.”
The most immediate impact, however, will be on consumers. Gasoline makes up a relatively small share of consumer spending, only about 3 percent for the average household, but it is an expense most Americans have little choice but to pay. People may be able to put off road trips or weekend excursions, but they mostly cannot avoid driving to work or school.
“It is a fixed cost,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy for the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive group. “You’re not going to not go to work because the price of gas is up, so you’re going to cut back somewhere else.”
A recent analysis by economists at Stanford found that the increase in gas prices could be enough to wipe out the benefits of the higher tax refunds that resulted from the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed last year. The impact will be particularly hard on low-income families, who typically dedicate more of their budget to energy and have less room to cut back spending elsewhere.
“I doubt we’ll see a big recession coming for the U.S. economy — in that sense it may not look like that big an impact,” said Matthias Kehrig, a Duke University economist who has studied the effects of high oil prices. “But in terms of pain for low-income people, it is a big recession.”
Even for households that can afford to pay more, gas prices are a uniquely visible reminder of the rising cost of living. Shoppers may notice when they have to pay more for eggs or beef, but only gas prices are posted in giant numbers alongside every highway in America.
Measures of consumer sentiment dropped sharply in the early days of the war, as surveys showed that Americans were anticipating not just higher prices at the pump but also a broader pickup in inflation over the next year. And unlike many consumer attitudes in a polarized era, concern about rising gas prices cut across partisan and ideological lines, said Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s long-running consumer survey.
“This isn’t ‘I don’t like this foreign policy and I’m going to tell you I hate the economy as a result,’” Ms. Hsu said. “People aren’t even specifically mentioning the word ‘Iran.’ They’re really reacting to the economic reality that they’re seeing with gas prices going up.”
Americans’ last experience with high gas prices came in 2022, when they hit a record $5.55 a gallon nationally after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
That price spike occurred in a very different economic context. Inflation was much higher then, but it was also a newer phenomenon — Americans had not yet been battered by years of high prices. And the labor market was much stronger, with employers competing with one another for workers as they tried to staff up in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. That gave workers leverage to demand raises that helped them offset the pain of higher prices.
Today, job growth has slowed to a crawl, and while the unemployment rate is still relatively low, it has crept up. Workers report feeling less confident about their ability to find a new job if they were to need one. As a result, wage growth has slowed, particularly for low-wage workers, making higher gas prices harder to absorb.
“This time, all the bargaining power really seems to lie with employers,” said Kayla Bruun, lead economist for Morning Consult, a polling firm.
In data released this week, Morning Consult found that consumers were already responding to higher gas prices by cutting back spending on discretionary expenses, such as plane tickets and restaurant meals, and on frequently purchased items like groceries, where they had the option to buy less.
Even before the war began, Ms. Bruun said, surveys were showing some erosion of sentiment among consumers as the labor market softened. Today, oil prices are adding a new source of concern.
“We’ve had this slow-moving story, and then now we have this fast-moving story,” Ms. Bruun said. “The slow-moving story has been this kind of gradual weakening that’s a little bit been undermining sentiment.”
Now, she said, “with this shock of gas prices, this thing that consumers have no choice really but to absorb, that’s putting pressure on budgets.”
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4) Pregnant in ICE Detention: Handcuffs and Pleas for Medical Care
Women describe conditions that violate longstanding agency guidelines for how pregnant detainees should be treated.
By Caroline Kitchener, Charo Henríquez and Hamed Aleaziz, March 20, 2026
The reporters interviewed women who have been held in detention as well as their family members and lawyers, and reviewed court filings, government documents and medical records.
Candy Castillo Collantes was six months pregnant when she stepped inside the giant tent where she would live for the next 47 days.
Her enclosure at the South Texas detention center held dozens of bunk beds, she said, with one tiny slit for a window. Women wailed late into the night for their husbands and children. When Ms. Collantes experienced vaginal bleeding and asked for medical care at the facility, she and her lawyer said, she was offered only water, prenatal vitamins and a temperature check.
“It’s not a center that we know has a doctor,” Ms. Collantes, a 38-year-old Venezuelan who obtained temporary legal status under the Biden administration, said in an interview from the facility in late February. “The people here can’t tell you that everything is fine.”
Ms. Collantes had heard from other detainees about a woman who had gone into labor at their detention center months earlier.
She was terrified that she could be next.
Pregnant women who have been swept up in President Trump’s immigration crackdown have been held in detention centers as late as eight months into their pregnancies without adequate food or medical care, according to a New York Times examination of 10 cases. The Times review found that, in those cases, the Department of Homeland Security violated longstanding agency guidelines for how to treat pregnant women in detention, subjecting them to conditions that medical experts say can jeopardize the health of mothers and their babies.
Pregnant women said they were served food covered in cockroaches and water that tasted like bleach. They described how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shackled their hands and feet, refusing to believe that they were pregnant until a bump appeared. One woman said ICE agents ignored her as she lay on the floor screaming in pain, and took her to the emergency room only after her fellow inmates began banging on the door for help.
This account is based on interviews with pregnant women either currently detained or recently released, as well as an analysis of court filings, government documents and medical records.
The Biden administration instituted a policy under which pregnant women could only be detained in “exceptional circumstances,” such as when a person poses a national security threat or an “imminent risk of death, violence, or physical harm” to someone. While Trump administration officials have offered conflicting opinions in court on whether that policy remains in effect, Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in a statement to The Times that it still stands.
Ms. Bis also said that pregnancy in ICE detention is “exceedingly rare,” comprising 0.18 percent of all undocumented immigrants in custody. That comes out to about 126 women, according to recent estimates of the number of people in detention. Ms. Bis added that no women had given birth in ICE custody under the Trump administration and that the medical care provided to women in detention was “the best health care many of these individuals have received in their entire lives.” She said that clean and bottled water was provided for detainees.
“Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support and accommodations aligned with community standards of care,” Ms. Bis said in a statement.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said that ICE detention facilities were “safe” and “clean,” and had the “highest standards.”
The issue of pregnant women in detention has galvanized an unlikely coalition of advocates, including antiabortion leaders eager to protect undocumented pregnant women and their babies.
“I don’t think we should have the detaining of pregnant women, period,” said Lila Rose, the founder and president of the national antiabortion group Live Action. Ms. Rose recently signed an open letter to Mr. Trump urging the administration to enforce the Biden-era guidance. “It’s only putting lives that are already vulnerable in a more vulnerable position,” she added.
Of the cases examined by The Times, some pregnant women were deported, while others were temporarily released in the United States before they delivered their babies. Some remain in detention.
“It is alarming to hear how these women are being treated,” said Eunice Cho, a former senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union who coauthored a report last October that documented over a dozen cases of pregnant women in detention, none of which overlapped with the cases examined by The Times. “When people inform agents that they are pregnant, it’s not really being taken into consideration.”
In Texas, Ms. Collantes was detained at Camp East Montana, a makeshift 5,000-bed tent facility opened over the summer to accommodate the surge of immigrants under arrest. A group of congressional Democrats last month called for the site’s permanent closure, citing “inadequate medical care” amid an outbreak of measles there.
Ms. Bis, the Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said Ms. Collantes underwent a medical evaluation immediately upon arriving at the detention center, and never reported any bleeding to medical staff members.
Ms. Collantes said she felt isolated and terrified, unable to access the care she felt she needed.
“If you feel unwell, they say, ‘Well, it’s normal because you’re pregnant,” Ms. Collantes said in late February, fearful that she might go into early labor while living in a tent. “‘If you feel unwell, drink water.’”
Four days later, Ms. Collantes was rushed to the hospital.
Months Spent Waiting for Medical Care
From the moment they were arrested, women interviewed by The Times said, ICE agents appeared unconcerned with the fact that they were pregnant.
In five cases identified by The Times, ICE agents cuffed a pregnant woman’s hands and ankles, even after learning about their pregnancies, according to the women, their lawyers, their family members and legal briefs. Two said the agents wrapped chains around their bellies, refusing to remove them even after one woman began bleeding on the airplane bound for a detention center.
When ICE agents arrested Djeniffer Benvinda Semedo, 22, in the Boston area last month, she said they put her in handcuffs and chains and pushed her into a van, without providing a warrant or telling her where she was going.
“I told them, ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m pregnant and it hurts. My belly is big,’” said Ms. Semedo, who was between five and six months pregnant at the time. “They just said, ‘We have to do this.’”
Pregnant women are supposed to receive special care in ICE detention, according to national detention standards published by the Department of Homeland Security, robust guidance that dates back to the early 2000s.
The standards prohibit the use of handcuffs or other restraints on pregnant women “absent truly extraordinary circumstances that render restraints absolutely necessary.” In its written statement, D.H.S. maintained that ICE complied with these standards, saying that a pregnant detainee would only be restrained “in the exceedingly rare situation where doing so would protect the life and safety of the detainee.”
The national Department of Homeland Security standards also require pregnant women to receive “close medical supervision” and “access to prenatal and specialized care.”
Most women interviewed for this article said that while in ICE detention, they received little or no prenatal care — a regimen to facilitate a healthy pregnancy that is supposed to include regular medical checkups, tests and ultrasounds.
While ICE is responsible for overseeing the medical care provided at all of its detention centers, many are operated by private contractors, which sometimes hire other companies to handle medical services. Acquisition Logistics, a small Virginia-based company, received roughly $1.2 billion from the federal government last year to operate Camp East Montana, where Ms. Collantes was detained. (Acquisition Logistics did not respond to a request for comment.)
Women interviewed for this article who did see a doctor while in detention either received that care at a hospital during a medical emergency, or reported waiting months for detention personnel to arrange an appointment.
Amanda Fanego Cardoso, 22, was several months pregnant when she was detained by ICE in Florida last fall following a shoplifting arrest. When Ms. Cardoso asked to see a doctor immediately upon arriving at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico, she said, detention center staff members promised that they would soon make her an appointment. But then another month passed, and another.
When she finally saw a doctor last December — almost six months pregnant — she said she learned that she had gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, both serious health conditions that classify a pregnancy as high risk. After that initial visit, Ms. Cardoso said, she was taken to a medical facility for a checkup every few weeks.
“I was scared,” said Ms. Cardoso, who was granted temporary parole after coming into the United States from Cuba in 2023. “I thought I was going to have some kind of problem because of so many months without attention. You just don’t know what’s going on.”
Ms. Cardoso was released in February, at 33 weeks pregnant. Her lawyer, Sam Badawi, had by that point filed several emergency motions citing the “grave physical and emotional harm” that would result from continued detention in the final stages of her pregnancy.
Ms. Bis at the Department of Homeland Security said Ms. Cardoso was “prescribed a daily prenatal vitamin and referred to an off-site OB/GYN, who saw and treated her regularly until she was released.”
Some women said they struggled to get the attention of ICE agents even in acute medical emergencies.
Last spring, Iris Dayana Monterroso Lémus had a miscarriage almost six months into her pregnancy while detained at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., records show. Ms. Monterroso Lémus, whose miscarriage received widespread media attention at the time, came into the United States illegally from Guatemala in 2018 and had been arrested on charges of child abuse, neglect or endangerment in Tennessee. She also had a warrant for homicide in Guatemala, which, according to a document surfaced by The Daily Beast, was dismissed last May.
Government documents reviewed by The Times show that Ms. Monterroso Lémus raised alarms about her health almost one month before her miscarriage. She reported what felt like contractions, stomach pain and 21 pounds of weight loss, and asked for an ultrasound to check on her baby, according to the documents.
There is no indication in the records reviewed by The Times that Ms. Monterroso Lémus received medical services between the time she made that report and when she was taken to a nearby hospital to receive treatment for the miscarriage. In the records from the hospital, a doctor noted that Ms. Monterroso Lémus told detention center staff members that her pregnancy “didn’t feel right” for a few days before she arrived at the hospital, but that “nothing was done.”
Also around six months pregnant, Ms. Semedo spent three days last month in a holding cell with no beds at an ICE office in Burlington, Mass. At 2 a.m. on her third night in the facility, Ms. Semedo said she felt abdominal pain so intense that she started screaming and crying on the holding room floor.
The ICE agents, she said, “were sitting right there, watching TV” for about 10 minutes before they came to check on her. When an officer eventually appeared, she said, he surveyed the room and asked, “Which one of you needs help?”
“He could see me. I was literally lying down on the floor in front of him,” said Ms. Semedo. “It was just terrifying.”
Ms. Bis at the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE officers took Ms. Semedo to the hospital “immediately after she complained of upper abdominal pain.”
Ms. Semedo came into the country at age 13 from Cape Verde with her mother as a conditional permanent resident, according to her lawyer. By the time Ms. Semedo was arrested for not appearing in court for a domestic violence charge, her status as a permanent resident had been terminated without her knowledge, Ms. Semedo said.
While still in detention, Ms. Semedo was hospitalized for several days with gallstones and a possible obstruction in her bile duct that could have increased her risk of infection, according to a legal brief prepared by Blair Johnson Wylie, the chair of the Obstetrics and Gynecology department at the hospital where Ms. Semedo was treated. She also had electrolyte deficiencies, Dr. Wylie said, which could have been caused by her diet in detention, where Ms. Semedo said she was offered only microwavable macaroni and cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Ms. Semedo’s detention at an ICE facility put her “at higher risk of preterm labor,” Dr. Wylie wrote.
“Prenatal care is critical throughout pregnancy,” the doctor added, “and specifically when a patient experiences complications.”
‘What Will Become Of Me?’
Several months after she arrived at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center last December, 29-year-old Ely Yohana Lopera learned that she could be deported to Ecuador — a country she had never been to — months before she was due to give birth.
“We don't know Ecuador, nor do we know anyone in Ecuador,” said Ms. Lopera’s husband, Robinson Carvajal. His wife had sought asylum four years ago when she came to the United States from Colombia.
“She has no idea what would happen there — with the baby, or with her,” he said.
Ms. Bis at D.H.S. said Ms. Lopera had received regular medical checkups and that “she has not made any complaints or concerns regarding the pregnancy.”
Ms. Cardoso was also informed while in detention in New Mexico that she would be deported to Ecuador.
“I thought, I have no one there. I have nothing,” said Ms. Cardoso, who has been temporarily released from detention but could still be deported. “If I have my baby in Ecuador, what will become of me? Where am I going to live? Where are they going to leave me? What am I going to do? How am I going to get medical care?”
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that “no pregnant women have been threatened with removal to a third country,” and that “any illegal alien is subject to third-country removal if they cannot be removed to their home country.”
Women in ICE detention have been deported well into their third trimesters. In one case last spring, ICE agents tried to deport a Mexican woman with a high-risk pregnancy on an ICE plane when she was about eight months pregnant, according to the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution from the U.S. government.
When officials on that flight turned her away, saying she was too far into her pregnancy to fly, ICE agents returned her to the detention facility, she and her lawyer, Helen Vargas-Crebas, said.
The woman was “in the final stages of a high-risk pregnancy,” Ms. Vargas-Crebas wrote in an email to several ICE officials on May 19, 2025, asking for her client to be released from ICE custody. “We are gravely concerned that she may give birth while in detention, which poses significant risks to both her health and that of her unborn child.”
The woman, who Ms. Vargas-Crebas said had an order of removal at the time, said ICE agents pressured her to sign a release that would have allowed her to board a commercial flight at such a late stage in her pregnancy.
Terrified, she said, she decided to sign the release and board the plane — arriving in Mexico before she gave birth.
In South Texas, Ms. Collantes, the woman who feared giving birth in detention, left Camp East Montana on Feb. 25, bound for a nearby hospital.
Officials at the detention center had agreed to take her in, she said, after she spent the day vomiting, with a high fever. By the time she got to the hospital, she said, she was one centimeter dilated, a possible sign she could be starting to progress toward preterm labor.
Ms. Collantes did not have her baby that day. Amid her pregnancy complications, immigration agents agreed to release her, said one of her lawyers, Iris Ramos.
Around the time she is due to give birth, Ms. Collantes is scheduled to return to court for a hearing on her immigration status. The judge could grant her application for asylum, Ms. Ramos said — or order her to be deported.
“She is still in removal proceedings,” Ms. Ramos said. “Being released doesn’t mean she is out of the woods.”
Miriam Castillo, Campbell Robertson and Brent McDonald contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Julie Tate contributed research.
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5) The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By
Across the United States, plasma centers are opening in wealthier areas as more people struggle with the high cost of housing, groceries and health care.
By Kurtis Lee and Robert Gebeloff, March 20, 2026
Kurtis Lee reported from the Houston suburbs. Robert Gebeloff analyzed plasma donation center data.
Centers like this one in Webster, Texas, pay people for their blood plasma, which is used to make medical therapies. The United States provides around 70 percent of the world’s blood plasma. Christopher Lee for The New York Times
Joseph Briseño arrived at CSL Plasma around 8 a.m., just as the morning rush of donors was thinning out. He took a few small sips from his water bottle, preparing for what he ruefully described as his second job.
Four days a week, Mr. Briseño, who lives in the Houston suburbs, works long shifts seated at the controls of a crane at a local waste disposal company, where he is a supervisor. It’s his full-time job, and he earns around $50,000 a year. On two of his days off, he sits in a cushioned recliner for an hour with a needle in his left arm, donating blood plasma to be used in making certain medical therapies. Donating is a misnomer. He earns an average of $70 for each visit.
“That can be gas money, grocery money, money put into savings for emergencies,” said Mr. Briseño, who started going to this plasma collection center a year ago after struggling to find a part-time job that didn’t conflict with his work schedule. He needed to do something to offset the increased costs of living.
“In this economy, it’s expensive,” he said, “and donating helps.”
Every day, an estimated 215,000 people donate plasma, the yellowish liquid component of blood. Mr. Briseño is among them. He is not jobless or facing eviction, but, like many in the American middle class, he is caught in the vise of rising expenses and wages that aren’t growing fast enough to cover them. So he is turning to a method more commonly associated with the lowest-income Americans. For people like him, an extra $600 or so a month can mean making a mortgage payment or covering increased health-insurance costs.
While no one publishes statistics on the exact incomes of people who sell their blood plasma, the location of the centers suggests a shift toward a less financially desperate clientele. A recent study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, observed that while older plasma centers are clustered in low-income areas, newer centers were increasingly likely to open in middle-class neighborhoods. A New York Times analysis shows the trend has continued: Centers have sprung up in more than 100 such neighborhoods, in suburbs and wealthier sections of cities, since researchers finished collecting their data in 2021.
In the Houston suburb of Webster, Texas, a short drive from the Johnson Space Center, two sites opened in 2022 along a stretch that perfectly embodies a certain slice of suburbia. The CSL Plasma location, where Mr. Briseño goes, is in a strip mall a few doors down from an Orangetheory Fitness. And BioLife Plasma Services, a little more than a mile away, is in a stand-alone building next to a man-made pond and a Charles Schwab branch.
On recent mornings, people waited in long lines outside both locations. Many described themselves as middle class, and said that even a few years ago they would not have imagined exchanging their plasma for cash. There was a 30-something tech worker trying to save for a house, a sixth-grade special education teacher looking to cover rising health care costs, a night-shift nurse struggling to pay child care fees.
Most of them donate twice a week — the maximum allowed under Food and Drug Administration regulations — and earn an average of $70 per visit, although pay can vary depending on things like the collection amount and incentives.
“If people need to do this to supplement their incomes, then there are a lot of jobs out there just not paying high enough wages for people to live on,” said Emily Gallagher, a professor of finance at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and one of the authors of the study of the plasma industry.
Mr. Briseño, 59, scrolled his phone as he donated plasma at CSL on a recent morning. There were many other places he would rather have been — at home with his wife, clocking overtime at his job, taking a vacation, which he had not done in years.
“It would be great to not have to do this for extra money,” he said.
‘A Shadow Safety Net’
The United States provides around 70 percent of the world’s blood plasma. Because it is one of around a dozen countries that allow payment for plasma — a practice discouraged by the World Health Organization — the industry has established itself here.
It has become a multibillion-dollar business.
In 2024, the United States exported $6.2 billion worth of plasma. For companies like CSL Limited and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, which own the centers in Webster, plasma is the raw material necessary to make some of their medical products — therapies for patients with immunodeficiencies, liver disease and bleeding disorders, as well as burn victims.
Between 2014 and 2021, the number of plasma centers in America more than doubled, according to the study. Today, there are around 1,200. The practice is considered safe, although there is little research on the long-term health effects, and serious adverse events and deaths are rare. (In Canada, however, officials recently began investigating two deaths possibly tied to plasma centers owned by the company Grifols.)
Last year, donors in the United States produced 62.5 million liters of plasma, the highest volume ever collected and an 8 percent increase from the year before, said Peter Jaworski, a professor at Georgetown University who studies the economics and ethics of the global blood plasma industry.
Mr. Jaworski said that, more than in the past, plasma centers were looking for reliable donors — “people who will show up at 3 p.m. if they reserved a donation time at 3 p.m.” — and could be finding them in more suburban areas.
“They want people who will come back and become repeat donors,” he said.
(CSL said in a statement that it chose locations based on population density, along with factors like access to parking or public transportation.)
For decades, plasma centers have been concentrated largely in impoverished and under-resourced neighborhoods and faced charges of exploitation. In her 2023 book, “Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry,” Kathleen McLaughlin explored how plasma centers targeted, among others, laid-off autoworkers in the Rust Belt and communities along the U.S-Mexican border.
“There isn’t anyone really that you’ll find who’s doing this for purely altruistic reasons,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “A lot of people like it because they get paid and they do something that they feel is giving back to society. But the primary motivation is always financial.”
The presence of these centers, however, might be offering people an alternative to predatory loans. When a plasma center opens in an area, the study found, demand for high-interest payday loans among younger borrowers declined nearly 20 percent within the first three years.
Plasma donation centers function like “a shadow safety net,” said Mr. Jaworski, who has at times served as a paid consultant in the plasma industry. “We have Lyft and Uber and different side gigs, and here is yet one more option.”
That was the reality that drew Mr. Briseño to donate.
Even with careful budgeting, his savings account was stagnant. He and his wife have lived with their daughter, son-in-law and young grandsons in a two-story brick home in a sprawling subdivision for three years. It’s the kind of place with lush lawns and homeowners’ association rules. Mr. Briseño, who has not received a raise in several years, helps pay part of the mortgage. He purchases groceries for the family. His health-insurance co-pays kept rising.
“I was starting to pull from my savings because prices have been going up,” he said.
He was reluctant when a friend and neighbor encouraged him to donate for additional cash, but he needed the money.
“For me personally, this is not something I am the most proud of,” he said. “But it’s quick and effortless and offers consistent pay.”
When Social Security Isn’t Enough
The line outside CSL Plasma had grown to nearly two dozen people. It was after 8 a.m., and the center should have opened an hour earlier.
“A nurse is running late,” one woman, a regular, reassured each new arrival.
People stood with blankets that would keep them warm inside the air-conditioned center; others scrolled phones or listened to podcasts through earbuds.
Arnold Williams arrived after driving 45 minutes to and from downtown Houston, where he had dropped off his wife at her administrative job.
Mr. Williams, 66, who served in the Air Force and later worked in management at food distribution centers around the South, has donated plasma for the past year. He and his wife rent a two-bedroom apartment for $2,100. Despite the income from her job and his $1,800 monthly benefits from Social Security, things are tight. He found himself using credit cards more and more to cover bills until his benefit checks arrived.
“It’s in those in-between times where this is beneficial,” said Mr. Williams, who donates on Monday and Thursday mornings.
Each visit begins with a screening questionnaire that asks about everything from sexual history to medications. It then includes a brief check of vitals and a finger prick to measure the amount of red blood cells and protein levels. The hourlong donation process for Mr. Williams then begins, and he has about a liter of plasma collected. Sixty dollars was loaded onto a prepaid card. Donors can receive bonuses for returning frequently or referring others.
Often, after Mr. Williams is done, he goes home to rest because donations sometimes leave him fatigued, before driving in the evening to pick up his wife from work.
“Do I want to be doing this forever?” he pondered after the recent morning session. “No, but right now it’s working to my benefit.”
Wendy Baker started donating plasma twice a week in December after seeing an advertisement on Facebook that promised $500 for first-time donors. Ms. Baker, 54, who has a college degree, left her job in biosciences about two years ago to deal with a personal matter. She and her husband and their two teenage daughters live comfortably on her husband’s salary, but she was intrigued by the Facebook posting.
Her family’s health insurance premiums had been going up, and they had stopped eating out quite as much. It would be nice, she thought, to have a little extra money to put toward Christmas gifts.
“Why not?” she thought.
When Ms. McLaughlin researched her book on the plasma industry, she found that many people saw donating as a bit taboo and did not tell anyone outside their small circle.
Some people still feel that stigma. In nearly two dozen interviews outside the Houston-area locations, many people would speak only anonymously, saying they felt a sense of shame having to donate to make ends meet. But that may be changing. Several others, like Ms. Baker, said they felt proud that their plasma would ultimately help someone in need.
Anita Brikman, president and chief executive of the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, which represents plasma collection centers, said that “plasma-derived medicines are indispensable for patients with rare and chronic diseases, many of whom have no alternative treatment options.” A secure and reliable plasma supply, she said, is critical.
Even so, plasma companies are looking for ways to bring down costs. Improved plasmapheresis machines are now being used to increase volume.
Other efforts could trickle down to donors. Last year, CSL announced that it would be closing 22, or 7 percent, of its less productive centers in the United States. And in an analyst call, the company said it would maintain profit margins “with improved efficiencies and a gradual decline in donor fees.”
For now, though, it works for Ms. Baker.
Recently, she noticed that the other collection center nearby was offering a higher introductory pay meant to entice first-time donors. She had to decide if she would donate there.
Methodology
To assess demographic patterns of blood plasma center locations, The Times obtained facility information from the Food and Drug Administration website and connected their locations with neighborhood income data obtained from the Census Bureau.
The current locations were compared with a similar data set provided by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, who documented the location of facilities as of September 2021.
This allowed The Times to identify the neighborhoods where centers operate today, and determine whether they already had a facility in 2021, or whether the industry is new to the local area.
Income classifications are based on per capita income by census tract. For each metropolitan area, tracts were divided into deciles, and the bottom 10 percent are considered poor, and other tracts that are below the 50th percentile are labeled working class. Middle-class neighborhoods are those with above-average income levels, except for tracts above the 90th percentile, which are labeled upper income.
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6) Record Number of Student Loan Borrowers Are in Delinquency and Default
Recently released data from the Education Department showed that by the end of last year, 7.7 million borrowers had defaulted on $181 billion in federal student loans.
By Stacy Cowley, March 20, 2026
Roughly a quarter of the 43 million recipients of federal student loans are significantly behind in their payments. Credit...Tony Luong for The New York Times
A record number of borrowers have fallen far behind on their federal student loan payments, another pressure point among millions of increasingly stretched American consumers.
Recently released Education Department data showed that by the end of last year, 7.7 million borrowers had defaulted on $181 billion in federal student loans. Three million other loan recipients were at least three months late on their payments.
That’s the highest combined rate of serious delinquency and default since the government began its data reporting system nearly a decade ago. Of the nearly 43 million recipients with federal student loans, roughly a quarter are significantly behind.
And the problem is likely to grow. Last week, after years of legal limbo, a federal appeals court ordered the end of a generous Biden-era repayment plan known as SAVE. That decision will soon force nearly seven million borrowers to begin paying loan bills — with interest still accrued for the last seven months — that had been suspended while the litigation played out.
The stark delinquency data is the latest sign of distress from those on the downside of what economists call a “K-shaped economy”: one in which the richer get richer, while the financial health of many lower-income households declines. Unemployment is increasing, gas prices have spiked and people are stretching to manage higher costs for food, medical care, housing and other essentials.
That has led to more unpaid debts. The rates of serious delinquencies are climbing on credit cards, mortgages and auto loans, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s latest analysis of household debt.
Delinquent debts affect credit scores, which have declined — especially for younger Americans — in part because of missed student loan payments. Those lower scores can affect consumers’ ability to rent a home or obtain auto and mortgage loans.
People who are maxed out “face scary choices,” said Winston Berkman-Breen, the legal director of Protect Borrowers, a consumer advocacy group. “Maybe you either stop paying other debts that don’t have such draconian collections, or you change your family’s grocery budget, or stop saving for the future. That can have quiet intergenerational wealth concerns, like the ability to save for a home.”
The government has aggressive ways to collect on defaulted student loans, including garnishing wages and seizing tax refunds, but it’s holding off on those — for now. In January, the Education Department reversed its plan to send out garnishment notices.
Involuntary collections will be paused, for an unspecified length of time, while the Trump administration “implements significant improvements to our broken student loan system,” said Nicholas Kent, the department’s under secretary.
On Thursday, the Trump administration announced plans to move management of the $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department. The Education Department was “never intended to operate what would be the fifth-largest commercial bank in the United States,” the two agencies said in a joint announcement.
The plan is likely to face legal challenges. “The last thing student loan borrowers need is more chaos from the federal government,” said Kyra Taylor, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.
The federal report on the high number of borrowers who are struggling with their payments confirmed what economists and student loan experts had long predicted: After the government lifted its pandemic-era student loan collection freeze in 2023 and resumed sending borrowers monthly bills, many people didn’t start paying again.
Today, the total tally of borrowers in default is roughly the same as it was in December 2019, shortly before the collection moratorium began, the Education Department noted in an online post about the data.
But the number of people teetering on the edge, or making no payments because their loans are still paused, is much larger than it was six years ago.
In late 2019, three million borrowers were a month or more delinquent on their loan payments, and just over six million had loans in deferment or forbearance, which temporarily halts collection. At the end of last year, more than four million people were a month or more behind, and 12 million — mostly those on the SAVE plan — had loans that were deferred or in forbearance.
Officials had warned that getting borrowers to resume payments after such a long timeout would be complex, but a turbulent legal and logistical landscape made the anticipated problems even worse.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. tried to ease borrowers’ burdens with a mass debt forgiveness plan that would have wiped out $400 billion in loans. The Supreme Court killed that effort, ruling that the president had exceeded his authority.
He then introduced SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education), an income-linked payment plan that cut many borrowers’ monthly bills in half and would forgive any remaining balance after 20 to 25 years of payment. But court challenges from Republican-led states doomed that effort, too.
Last week, four borrowers sued the Education Department in a last-ditch effort to preserve SAVE. Elizabeth Robeson, one of the plaintiffs, said the government’s ever-shifting repayment rules “forced millions of working Americans like me to live in a labyrinth with no clear exit.”
Ms. Robeson borrowed $12,000 in 1987 to pursue a graduate degree from the University of Mississippi. Because of interest and fees, that balance has ballooned to more than $90,000.
Under both SAVE and one of its predecessor repayment plans, low-income people like her could qualify for monthly payments as low as $0. Following those rules, she made more than 325 payments on her loans — far more than the 216 required to be eliminated through SAVE. The plan’s termination has jeopardized that relief.
Adding to borrowers’ woes is a troubled loan servicing system that relies on contractors to handle borrowers’ questions and collect payments. For many years, across multiple presidential administrations, government auditors have focused on glaring problems with those companies’ operations and oversight.
President Trump has tried to dismantle the Education Department, and the number of people working at the agency’s Federal Student Aid office plunged 45 percent last year, from more than 1,400 employees in January 2025 to fewer than 800 by December.
Citing “lack of staff capacity,” the agency stopped auditing the accuracy of its loan servicers’ borrower records and the quality of their customer service calls, according to a Government Accountability Office report released this month. Before the agency halted those audits, four of its five loan servicing contractors were failing to meet the department’s performance standards.
In a written response to the accountability office’s report, the Education Department said measuring loan servicers’ compliance “would not improve the financial health of the federal student loan portfolio.”
Millions of people enrolled in SAVE will now need to shift to other payment plans. Mr. Kent, the department’s under secretary, said the agency would provide guidance for that transition “in the coming weeks.”
Starting in July, new borrowers will have only two choices for repayment: fully repaying their loans on a fixed term of up to 25 years, or using a new income-linked plan called RAP (Repayment Assistance Program) that can stretch up to 30 years.
Most borrowers with existing loans will be able select one of those two plans or a Income-Based Repayment plan, which lets many borrowers shed their debts after 20 years.
Loan servicers are bracing for a fresh deluge of questions from confused borrowers.
“The resumption of payments after five years was always going to be a very, very bumpy ride,” said Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, an industry trade group. “And it has been.”
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7) Aid Ship Departs for Cuba as Island Grapples With a Fuel Blockade
The “Nuestra América” humanitarian convoy plans to deliver more than 20 tons of critical supplies to Cuba. Some Cuban exiles view it with suspicion.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Paul Antoine Matos, March 20, 2026
Reporting from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where one of the convoy’s boats sailed out on Friday.
Activists set sail on Friday for Cuba from Mexico’s Yucatan state with essential goods as part of the “Nuestra América” convoy. Lorenzo Hernandez/Reuters
An aid ship departed on Friday from the Mexican port of Progreso, on the Yucatán Peninsula, carrying medical supplies, food and solar panels to a fuel-thirsty Cuba paralyzed by a severe energy crisis.
The voyage is part of an enormous international effort to deliver humanitarian aid by air, land and sea to a country strangled by an oil blockade on Cuba that the Trump administration has enforced since January, pushing the country’s economy to the brink of collapse.
Before the 75-foot fishing vessel — named the Granma 2.0 — cleared the harbor in Mexico, dozens of volunteers gathered on the pier to load boxes of medicine, water, rice, beans, formula, food cans, bicycles and 73 solar panels on to the ship.
“Solidarity can’t be blocked,” said Thiago Ávila, 39, from Brazil, one of 32 participants who traveled to Mexico to board the ship. “Cuba needs our solidarity.”
Others joining include members of the European Parliament, Christian Smalls, a U.S. labor leader, and a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America — the left-wing group that includes New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The ship is expected to arrive in Havana as early as Monday, and two other Cuba-bound convoys are expected to depart from the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres later on Friday. One of the leaders of the effort, which has received the blessing of the Cuban government, organized a similar flotilla to Gaza last year that was thwarted by Israeli forces, who maintain a blockade there.
The convoy’s departure comes at a moment of desperation for Cuba. On Monday, the island’s national electric grid collapsed, causing a nationwide power outage — the third such failure in four months. Blackouts are becoming part of daily life. Gasoline prices have soared. Public transportation is now a luxury. Tens of thousands of surgeries have been postponed.
Organizers behind the coalition — named the Nuestra América Convoy (or Our America Convoy), after an essay by the Cuban thinker José Martí, in which he criticized the U.S. expansionism — believe grass-roots efforts can bypass Washington’s attempts at isolation.
“What country, what society anywhere in the world could survive one, two, let alone three months without any access to fuel?” said David Adler, a lead organizer and a coordinator of Progressive International, a movement aiming to unite different sectors of the global left. (Mr. Adler was one of the organizers of the Gaza flotilla.) “We can’t let this go unchecked and unchallenged.”
This week, Mr. Trump escalated his rhetoric against Cuba, telling reporters that he would be “taking Cuba in some form,” and adding, “I could do anything I want with it.”
The convoy has mobilized hundreds of volunteers from more than 30 countries. Some are sailing with solar panels and generators. Others have landed in Havana with suitcases stuffed with medicine or are arriving on charter flights loaded with food. In total, the mission expects to deliver more than 20 tons of supplies.
Last year, Mr. Adler helped coordinate the Global Sumud Flotilla to break Israel’s siege of Gaza. But the fleet was intercepted by Israeli forces before it could reach its destination. Hundreds of participants, including the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, were arrested and taken to a prison complex where they said they were mistreated.
While the Trump administration renewed an emergency order authorizing U.S. authorities to intercept, detain and seize vessels traveling to Cuba, the restriction applies only to U.S.-registered boats. Other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, have successfully sent large humanitarian shipments in recent weeks. Even the United States announced $6 million in aid last month.
But it remains unclear whether the U.S. Coast Guard would target and board the Granma 2.0, which flies a Mexican flag and is expected to travel Mexican and Cuban waters. Yet as the mission’s profile has grown, so have questions regarding its political nature.
“I understand that international groups want to help Cuba,” said Norges Rodríguez, a Cuban engineer and journalist living in Miami. But many people have joined the movement, he added, “without really understanding the reality of the country” or “without truly listening to what the Cuban people have to say about what they are going through.”
Mr. Adler, for example, said that the donated supplies will not be handed to the Cuban state. Instead, some delegations plan to deliver aid directly to hospitals and clinics, with European activists beginning to do so this week.
But one of the convoy’s local partners facilitating logistics and distribution is the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples. Though organizers describe the institution as an independent nonprofit, declassified C.I.A. reports identify it as a front for Cuban intelligence services and a tool for state propaganda.
For some Cuban exiles, such partnerships are a bitter pill. The Cuban government, they said, shares the blame for many of the hardships that ordinary people have endured for decades — from a crumbling electrical grid and food shortages to the suppression of dissent.
“These delegations are going there to uphold that power instead of joining the demand of Cubans inside and outside the country to end that system,” Salomé García, a Miami-based Cuban activist who tracks political prisoners on the island, said of the convoy.
Suspicions were further fueled by the presence of Mariela Castro, the daughter of Raúl Castro, the country’s former president who is still viewed as the island’s most powerful figure, on Progressive International’s advisory council.
Mr. Adler did not answer specific questions regarding the criticisms, maintaining that the mission’s focus is humanitarian.
“The purpose of our convoy is simple,” he said. “To collect aid, bring it to the island, and demonstrate that international solidarity is powerful enough to break Trump’s siege.”
The ship that departed on Friday, a shrimp fisher called Maguro, was symbolically renamed in honor of the Granma, the famous yacht used in 1956 by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Fidel and Raúl Castro, among other revolutionaries, to reach Cuba.
The boat was scheduled to depart on Thursday, but was delayed as the activists rushed overnight to secure the proper authorizations from Mexico to depart and port officials inspected the vessel, which initially lacked life jackets and other safety measures.
Participants sailing from Progreso on Friday expressed confidence that Cuban organizations, syndicates and government officials would distribute the goods correctly.
Still, some exiles feel a stinging irony. While foreign delegations were being welcomed into Havana to converge there on Saturday, many Cubans living abroad are denied the right to return to their homeland.
“Why not allow Cubans who were born there to enter with humanitarian aid?” Mr. Rodríguez said. “I have a home in Cuba, where I was born, and I haven’t been back to my neighborhood in six years. I would love to go with friends to deliver aid directly. That’s also a legitimate demand.”
Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
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8) Striking Down Pentagon Press Limits, Judge Vindicates Independent Journalism
The ruling cut deeper than left-versus-right politics, declaring that the policy imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is unconstitutional.
By Charlie Savage, Published March 20, 2026, Updated March 21, 2026
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He reported from Washington.
Reporters carried their belongings as they left the Pentagon after turning in their press passes last year. Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A federal judge on Friday forcefully defended the constitutional freedom to report independently and without government control, striking down the Trump administration’s unprecedented restrictions on reporters that have emptied the Pentagon’s halls of traditional journalists at a time of expanding war.
“A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription,” wrote Judge Paul L. Friedman of the Federal District Court in Washington.
“Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech,” he continued. “That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”
In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman dissected the policy imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has made Pentagon press passes available since October only to people who signed agreements not to solicit information the Trump administration has not approved for release.
A broad range of news outlets balked at the requirement. They included mainstream publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, broadcast news programs and wire services, and conservative-leaning outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller.
When the reporters turned in their credentials, a new press corps took their place. Passes were issued to Trump loyalists like Laura Loomer, an activist; Matt Gaetz, a former congressman President Trump initially wanted to make attorney general; James O’Keefe, the founder of a conservative sting video group; Mike Lindell of MyPillow, who has started a digital news site; and a handful of other commentators, conspiracy theorists and outlets that are mostly unabashed political boosters of Mr. Trump.
The New York Times filed suit in the name of one of its national security reporters, Julian E. Barnes. Strikingly, multiple large news outlets declined to risk joining the litigation, although the Pentagon Press Association filed a friend-of-the-court brief.
It has been a grim time for press freedom. The Pentagon’s policy, overseen by its chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, is just one way in which Mr. Trump and his administration have challenged or undermined norms of independent journalism, penalizing news organizations for articles they deem to be critical and seeking greater control over coverage.
Mr. Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against news organizations owned by corporations with business before the government and sued or threatened to sue others, including The Times. Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded protections for reporters caught up in leak investigations, and the F.B.I. searched a Washington Post reporter’s home. The chairman of the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has threatened to pull licenses over coverage he dislikes.
Against that backdrop, the judge’s repudiation of rules that led to the exodus of credentialed Pentagon reporters from virtually every mainstream news outlet stands, at least for now, as a vigorous affirmation of constitutional press freedom.
The policy, the judge wrote, violated the First Amendment because it amounted to viewpoint discrimination and was unreasonable, and violated the Fifth Amendment because it was vague and granted too much arbitrary power to officials who could dispense favors or punishment at will.
“The considerations that may or may not lead to a reporter being deemed ‘a security or safety risk’ include obtaining or attempting to obtain any information that the department has not approved for release, regardless of whether that information is classified,” the judge wrote. “But to state the obvious, obtaining and attempting to obtain information is what journalists do. A primary way in which journalists obtain information is by asking questions.”
The ruling is just a first step. Judge Friedman was appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. The Trump administration has lost many cases before judges at the lower court level, only to prevail on appeal, especially before the Supreme Court, which is dominated by a Republican-appointed supermajority.
But the core part of the ruling — its finding that the policy was aimed at and produced unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination — cuts deeper than left-versus-right politics in American democracy.
The Trump administration had argued that its policy could not be discriminatory because journalists at conservative outlets were among those who refused to sign it. True enough, the judge wrote, but beside the point. The viewpoint Mr. Hegseth was discriminating against, he said, was not liberalism or conservatism, but the view that journalism must be independent.
“The record evidence supports the conclusion that the policy discriminates not based on political viewpoint but rather based on editorial viewpoint — that is, whether the individual or organization is willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership,” he wrote.
The judge concluded that “the undisputed evidence” showed the policy’s “true purpose and practical effect: to weed out disfavored journalists — those who were not, in the department’s view, ‘on board and willing to serve’ — and replace them with news entities that are.”
The cited quotation came from a statement by the press secretary for the Pentagon, Kingsley Wilson, at a Dec. 2 briefing in which she approvingly told the reconstituted press corps that it was composed of people “on board and willing to serve our commander in chief.”
Judge Friedman called this “viewpoint discrimination, full stop.” He also described it as a “sea change” in the Pentagon’s relationship with journalists who, in the past, did not have their credentials effectively revoked even when they were critical of the Defense Department or published classified information like the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
“The court recognizes that national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected,” he concluded, adding that the ruling was coming at a particularly crucial time.
“Especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran,” he wrote, “it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing — so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election.”
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9) The End of the Free-Range, Device-Free ‘Stand By Me’ Childhood
By Sarah Wildman, March 22, 2026
Ms. Wildman is a senior staff editor in Opinion.
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Columbia Pictures and Ackun/Getty Images
Last fall I watched the 1986 movie “Stand by Me” with my 12-year-old daughter, on a lark. She is the same age as the film’s characters, four boys who set out on a quest through the Oregon woods in search of a dead body. The soundtrack, a midcentury greatest-hits compilation — ranging from Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” to Ben E. King’s song that gives the film its title — was music of my parents’ generation: They both turned 13 in 1959, the year in which the film is set. The songs were an auditory madeleine of the summer I finished elementary school; I hadn’t thought of the film in years. The layered nostalgia I found in revisiting it as a parent was, predictably, not only for the era that “Stand by Me” depicts but also for the time when the movie premiered.
What took me by surprise was my daughter’s fascination. She has since watched the movie half a dozen more times, on her own, and read the Stephen King novella, “The Body,” on which it was based. It was she who realized the film turns 40 this year and insisted we attend an anniversary screening in a theater.
After first seeing the film, my daughter asked my father, who spent his childhood in a small city in the Berkshires, if the freedom the film depicts was the freedom he had, if childhood once looked and sounded like that. She wondered if this sort of unobserved life was as he remembered it, if he might, just as these boys did, have set off for days without parental concern. He told her, with amusement, that he was, in fact, expected to be home for dinner, but beyond that, yes, he could roam, without surveillance. (He quibbled with the 12-year-olds’ smoking.)
The central premise of the film is, essentially, a postwar, middle grade “Odyssey.” The boys of “Stand by Me” — played by Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman and River Phoenix — encounter obstacles: brutal or absent parents, a purportedly terrifying dog, bloodsucking leeches and a set of drag-racing teenage hoodlums who wield as weapons pocketknives and lit cigarettes. News arrives via overheard gossip (one boy learns the location of the dead body from his brother) or hand-held transistor radio. They live almost entirely outdoors. Along the way, they come to realize their friendships far outrank the prize of their discovery.
I, too, was struck by the sheer wildness once permitted children. The autonomy of the boys in “Stand by Me” is vastly different from the freedoms allowed a child living in 2026, when each is practically AirTagged, when we can track a car or a person’s phone across a map on a device in our palms, when we can know each moment of every day where each and every person in our home can be found. A gathering of children is more likely to be in front of a screen than with a rucksack and a deck of cards, as in the movie. Children are all too often found languishing alone in their bedrooms, direct messaging their friends, which not only reduces the likelihood of them being covered in leeches but also vastly decreases their chances of discovering anything at all.
The friendships and independence were somewhat autobiographical, Stephen King told me.
We recently saw “Stand by Me” again, this time in a joyful, Gen X-heavy audience of over 1,300 people, at a music hall outside Washington, D.C., followed by a panel of some of the surviving cast members. (An anniversary wide release in theaters is planned for this month.)
“I was born in 1972. I was a feral kid,” Wil Wheaton told me by phone. He plays the central character, Gordie, in the film. “We had an incredible amount of independence,” he said. “It was easier to be anonymous. It was easier to just disappear for a little while.” Even, apparently, as a child actor.
Nostalgia aside, I thought I remembered the film well — the quest, the camaraderie. But on my recent viewings, I realized that as a child, I had missed the melancholy of the two central characters, which wallops me now.
As we begin the movie, Gordie’s older brother, Denny, has been killed in a Jeep accident; his mother is somnambulant, and his father vibrates with rage. The father makes it clear the wrong son is dead. Chris Chambers, the character played by Mr. Phoenix, believes he is condemned to remain limited by his family of delinquents. Through the course of their two-night journey through the Oregon wilderness, Chris and Gordie come to show each other what each wants to believe in himself — that Chris needn’t follow his family to sink below the surface of society and that Gordie is worthy of pride and affection. Their friendship offers them an alternative family and future.
Mr. Wheaton told me he had channeled a difficult childhood and a desperation to be loved into the role of Gordie. And yet he had not known loss at 13, at least not as he did now. In the intervening years, the cast lost Mr. Phoenix, and, recently and terribly, the movie’s director, Rob Reiner. Their absence shadowed the stage conversation. For my daughter Hana, who lost her older sister, Orli, to cancer, to see a bereaved sibling onscreen and hear open conversation about death were revelatory. “I’m envious of my friends, that they can cry over little things,” Hana said.
The audience we saw the film with had come mostly to laugh and reminisce, not to cry. It was a romp. The discussion ranged, frequently, to slapstick. (One cast member kept telling the room his edible had just kicked in.) It only delicately touched on death.
“I wish more people were here to talk about grief,” Hana told me, as we left the theater.
All the way home, we talked about happiness and sadness, about freedom then and freedom now and about what it means to see a film one way, when everyone else has come to remember it in another. And yet in this 40-year-old film, a benchmark of my — and now, unexpectedly, my daughter’s — childhood, in the empty chairs left onstage to mark the absence of Rob Reiner and River Phoenix, we still saw ourselves.
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10) ‘I Am the News’: The Absurd Drama (and High Stakes) of the Don Lemon Affair
A Minnesota church protest made the former anchor a star again — and a target for the Trump administration.
By Matt Flegenheimer, March 22, 2026
Matt Flegenheimer writes profiles of powerful figures. For this article, he conducted two interviews with Don Lemon and spoke with dozens of his friends, critics and former colleagues.
Gillian Laub for The New York Times
Don Lemon was working through some new material.
“So, uh, a little bit different tonight,” he told a live Manhattan audience of some 300 Lemon Heads (his term, and theirs) in early February, with a bowl of on-the-nose citrus beside him onstage. “I’m just going to sit and talk to you guys. Is that OK?”
A born-again YouTuber who retains his anchorman’s baritone, Lemon had come to City Winery, a lounge-style venue on the Hudson River, as part of a speaking tour with the comedian D.L. Hughley, a friend of his. Typically, the 60-year-old lapsed cable host would begin such evenings by serving up the latest news headlines with a Lemonian spritz: heavy opinion, light yuks, have-you-no-decency monologues about “this administration — well, I should say regime” from a man no longer bound by the standards and practices of what he likes to call “corporate media.”
“But,” he reminded the room, there had been a development: “I am the news.”
Six days earlier, while out West to cover the Grammys, Lemon had been arrested in his Beverly Hills hotel on charges that he had violated the religious freedom of worshipers in St. Paul, Minn., during an anti-ICE protest inside a church in January. Lemon had descended on the state — like many journalists, influencers and political thrill seekers — to film himself covering the violent federal immigration crackdown and the throbbing local opposition for his followers.
In so doing, he walked into a very modern indictment. The defendant, embedded with activists and plainly sympathetic to their cause, had livestreamed and narrated the evidence. Lemon hopes it will show prosecutors dangerously overreaching to menace a constitutionally protected journalist who repeatedly identified himself as such on camera.
Before making things official, President Trump and his acolytes had taunted Lemon for days, with the Justice Department’s lead civil rights official floating a statutory megatroll: charging one of the nation’s most recognizable Black journalists under the so-called Klan Act, a Reconstruction law originally aimed at racist vigilantism. (Another Black journalist at the church, Georgia Fort, was also charged.) “When life gives you lemons …,” the White House posted on X on Jan. 30, beside Lemon’s picture and a chain emoji.
Airing online at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. each weekday, “The Don Lemon Show” had become a popular destination for the kinds of news consumers who kept their Obama-Biden bumper stickers and really believed in Robert Mueller. The show toggles between guerrilla-style man-on-the-street dispatches and deskbound dissections of Trump’s return to power. A live chat of subscriber comments whirls on the screen beside Lemon’s face through each episode, like a slot machine of resistance-y group texts. His video titles are algorithm-friendly: “LEMON DROP: Donald Trump Has Lost Control And He Knows It!” “HOT TAKES! Donald Trump Is A FAKE Christian!”
As some of the president’s less retributive campaign promises sputtered, Lemon presented a tantalizing offering. “A perfect Big Mac for Trump to eat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has long been friendly with Lemon, told me: Black, gay, outspoken, CNN-bred (through his 2023 ouster).
“Central casting,” Lemon told me of his value to Trump. So why not accept the part?
Cradling the mic at City Winery, Lemon quoted Representative John Lewis on the nobility of “good trouble” and appeared to choke up while repurposing a civil rights spiritual that he said his grandmother taught him. “Ain’t gonna let noooooo jailhouse … turn me around … turn me around …”
Hughley joined the stage and compared himself and Lemon, “on a much lower scale,” to James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, pining for a future “progressive Trump” to take the White House and countergovern with equivalent force.
“So,” Lemon replied, “should I run?”
The Lemon Heads roared. It had struck him in Los Angeles, he continued, while he was detained “in that holding room,” that maybe he had “been playing at too small a level.” Soon enough, Hughley was comparing Lemon to Rosa Parks, too.
By then, as with so many high dramas on Trump’s watch, the Lemon affair was registering already as both wildly consequential and borderline absurdist, sideshow and showpiece, its madcap particulars congealing into a sobering whole whose stakes were only just becoming clear.
Legacy war horses like CBS News and The Washington Post were wheezing through some combination of institutional schizophrenia, financial distress and federal appeasement. The administration was swapping nonpliant Pentagon reporters for newly credentialed far-right bloggers and threatening disfavored late-night comedians. And Don Lemon, the CNN guy who once asked if a missing plane might have been sucked into a black hole, who got wasted on air in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve, who now broadcasts a dozen feet from his kitchen, wearing a “LEMON LIVE” T-shirt beneath a “LEMON LIVE” sweatshirt — that guy was the First Amendment referendum for our times.
“I have spent my entire career covering the news,” Lemon said upon his release, wearing a white suit he later joked about auctioning off. “I will not stop now.”
Much like Trump during his 2024 Republican primary, Lemon appeared likely to experience his legal trouble as a short-term boon. Subscriptions to his show on YouTube have climbed by some 200,000, to more than 1.26 million. His guest bookings are starrier. “When you heard about what happened to me, what did you think?” he asked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called his arrest an attack on “free speech in America and the entire journalistic press corps.” Jane Fonda showed up at the federal courthouse to declare, “They arrested the wrong Don!” The singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, wearing an “ICE Out” pin, walked the Grammys red carpet with him. Jimmy Kimmel invited him on his late-night show and razzed him warmly (“Like many recently freed prisoners, you went right to the Grammy Awards events”) in Lemon’s highest-visibility TV interview in nearly two years.
It could feel as if Lemon and Trump had a common goal: to make Don Lemon the face of American journalism — unmistakable proof that today’s press is either hopelessly timid and compromised (except Don Lemon) or stocked with bad-faith lefties cosplaying as proper newspeople (like Don Lemon).
“Best thing that’s happened to Don’s career, certainly post-CNN,” Jeff Zucker, Lemon’s friend and former CNN boss, told me.
“Best thing that could happen to him,” Trump grumbled to reporters aboard Air Force One.
The livestream began in a parking lot on a Sunday morning in the Twin Cities, where Lemon shared that he had learned of a planning meeting for what he called “Operation Pull-Up.”
It was Jan. 18, 11 days after the first resident had been killed by a federal agent (“Justice for Renee Good!” several people chanted outside their vehicles) and six days before the death of a second, Alex Pretti.
“I can’t tell you where they’re going,” Lemon said, before returning to his car. His driver was a college student, Jerome Richardson, who later said, in his own legal-defense GoFundMe, that he had offered to connect Lemon with “local contacts” and “support his work” exposing injustice. A cameraperson focused on Lemon from the back seat.
For months, right-wingers had dominated the political streamer wars, posting about (and sometimes from) the blue-city front lines of immigration clashes. The Minnesota escalation itself was spurred by the work of a 23-year-old influencer, Nick Shirley, whose videos purporting to expose fraud at day care centers run by Somali immigrants quickly gained notice inside the administration.
Lemon, after covering the conflict at a distance, had come to see things for himself. From his passenger seat, he held up a Starbucks cup, handed to him that morning by a barista who recognized him and scrawled: “Thank you for your work. Crush ICE.” The host’s “Lemon Nation” ski hat also might have given him away. As they neared Cities Church in St. Paul, Richardson suggested that he and Lemon trade hats.
By the time Lemon entered the church, without his cameraperson, the activists were inside. They had learned that a pastor there was also an ICE official. (It would later emerge that this pastor was not presiding that day.) Lemon’s followers initially saw only the church’s entrance from outside. The live chat crackled:
“Don off CNN is the best Don.”
“Is this what is called GOOD TROUBLE?”
“Don, please be careful.”
Protesters could be heard shouting down the church’s lead pastor, Jonathan Parnell, and chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Congregants scattered. Richardson ran inside, with a camera trailing him.
“I’m just here photographing, I’m not part of the group,” Lemon said, still offscreen. “I’m a journalist.” He stood to the side, mostly observing aloud. A young man in the corner, he noticed, was unsettled and crying.
But the protest, Lemon intimated, was a natural consequence of recent events. Minnesotans’ due process had been violated, he said. People were being brutalized. “You have to be willing to go into places and disrupt and make people uncomfortable,” Lemon said, as demonstrators (many also recording) and worshipers circled one another in the confusion. “That is what this country is about.”
Lemon reappeared in the shot to interview an organizer, Nekima Levy Armstrong. Then he found the lead pastor.
“I mean, this is unacceptable,” Parnell said. “It’s shameful.”
“But there are folks who will say,” Lemon told him, as they began speaking over each other, “‘Listen, there’s a Constitution and a First Amendment.’”
“We’re here to worship,” Parnell said. His hand was near Lemon’s midsection, grazing him.
“I’m going to be very respectful,” Lemon said. “Please don’t push me, though.”
Parnell asked Lemon to leave unless he wanted to worship. “I have to take care of my church,” the pastor said.
The church seemed to be pumping in music — “It’s kind of loud, so I can’t hear,” Lemon said after interviewing Parnell — as some parishioners still prayed. Lemon urged viewers to “like and subscribe, become a member, support independent journalism.”
Lemon exited the building about seven minutes after Parnell asked him to, speaking to others outside and briefly re-entering to seek interviews near the exit.
“I’m sorry that you guys are so angry,” one man told Lemon, leaving with his son.
“I’m just chronicling,” Lemon said. “I’m a journalist. They’re activists.”
The man said he loved everyone and wanted them in heaven.
“But don’t you think,” Lemon persisted, “that there should be some sort of peace here on Earth and that people should have agency and we shouldn’t be beating people up off the street and we should be abiding by the Constitution?”
The man stared back at him. “I think that’s just a little bit loaded for me right now,” he said.
When an older congregant suggested that the president was merely trying to right the immigration wrongs of his predecessor, Lemon’s voice dipped into the kind of performative resignation he once reserved for Trump defenders in CNN prime time.
“Do you believe that?” Lemon said flatly, ticking through relative crime rates among immigrants and nonimmigrants. “Honestly.”
“You’re not a journalist,” the congregant said, pushing past him.
Finding himself alone, Lemon delivered a direct-to-camera recap (“They won’t listen to facts”) with the congregant in earshot.
“No, no, no, no,” the man said, re-engaging. “You pose as a journalist, and you ask me questions, and then you start correcting me” — he lifted both hands to scare-quote in heavy winter gloves — “with ‘facts.’”
A short time later, Levy Armstrong gave something like a news conference about the group’s actions as Lemon held out his microphone. Richardson stood beside her, raising his cellphone to the camera to show online evidence of the absent pastor’s ICE connection. He was wearing the “Lemon Nation” hat from the car. It had all taken about 45 minutes.
Lemon wandered toward his parking spot, sloshing through snow, past three local police vehicles. He smiled.
“I might get arrested, people,” he said. “One never knows.”
On a Thursday morning a few weeks later, Lemon was gazing into his laptop again, sitting before a glimmering “Lemon” sign and a decorative sheep beloved by his comment section.
“All right!” he said. “Rise and shine, Lemon Heads.”
He was stationed at his control-room-slash-anchor-desk inside the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his husband, Tim Malone, a 41-year-old real estate agent, operating his own lighting equipment from a cellphone. Three dogs (one wearing a diaper) stirred at Lemon’s shoeless feet despite Malone’s efforts to corral them. Beside the host were two plaques sent by YouTube: one toasting his first 100,000 subscribers, another his first million. “The next one will be our 10 million,” he told me matter-of-factly.
During an ad break, as the dogs fussed, Lemon retrieved a high-frequency whistle and tapped a button.
“Only they can hear this,” he said. “It’s like a little eep.”
“It’s an actual dog whistle?” Allison Gollust, his spokeswoman, asked.
“Not a whistle,” he explained. “We don’t hear it, but they can.”
“That’s what a dog whistle is.”
He protested again.
“That’s what a dog whistle is, Don,” Gollust said firmly.
He turned to me and cackled, feigning humiliation: “Don’t write this!”
At CNN, where Lemon spent 17 years, he had uttered “dog whistle” more than occasionally to describe Trump’s race-baiting. But as with many cable hosts and the president, their relationship had once been friendlier. Invited to Trump Tower in 2015 to interview the new Republican front-runner, Lemon posed for photographs — including one posted on his show’s Instagram page — and chatted up the candidate’s children. “He’s like, ‘I like this guy,’” Lemon remembered. “‘He’s fair.’”
That August, the pair teamed up for one of the race’s most news-making early moments: Speaking to Lemon on air by phone, Trump complained about Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, who had moderated a Republican primary debate the night before. The candidate seemed to suggest that Kelly must have been menstruating — that she had “blood coming out of her wherever” — prompting the kind of bipartisan scolding that feels quaint in hindsight.
Once Trump was in office, and eager to make CNN his foil, Lemon positioned himself as a truth-to-power crusader. He lobbed slashing asides about Trump to guests during commercials and often went just as far on camera. “This is ‘CNN Tonight.’ I’m Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist,” he began one evening in 2018.
When Trump lost the presidency in 2020, the news media — and CNN in particular — was facing its own upheaval. The merger in 2022 of Discovery and WarnerMedia, CNN’s parent, hastened the network’s shift away from the MAGA antagonism that Lemon embodied. He was exiled to a doomed morning show, where, in February 2023, Lemon, then 56, suggested that Nikki Haley, a 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate, “isn’t in her prime, sorry,” because a woman’s prime spanned “her 20s and 30s and, maybe, 40s,” to the visible horror of his female co-hosts.
Lemon was fired that April (“WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG?” Trump posted), on the same day that Fox News axed Tucker Carlson. Carlson told me that he called Lemon in a brief fraternity of the recently terminated. “Just to laugh,” Carlson said in a text message.
Initially, both men planned partnerships with an unlikely collaborator, Elon Musk, to produce long-form videos for X, Musk’s recent purchase. Lemon and Musk christened the arrangement by filming an interview at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, where Lemon pressed the executive on his drug habits and the rampant hate speech on X. Musk looked miserable. He killed their deal afterward, calling Lemon’s approach “Jeff Zucker talking through Don.”
Dismissed twice in 11 months, Lemon was hamstrung by a noncompete clause in his CNN exit package — the company is still paying him through the end of his contract this year — which precluded another cable news job. “He found himself looking and saying, What am I good at?” Jay Sures, his agent, told me.
“The Don Lemon Show,” revamped after the Musk debacle, was the answer. Lemon has projected that he will eventually earn more than he did at CNN, where he was paid in the high seven figures, according to a person with knowledge of his former compensation. He is already making well north of $1 million from his YouTube channel alone.
And he is working harder for it, he said, straining his bandwidth even before a federal criminal defense demanded his attention. “Little overwhelmed,” Lemon told me in the back seat of an Uber in February, looking bug-eyed after a Brooklyn festival panel on independent media.
Lemon’s perma-hustle owes partly to the piecemeal nature of new-media revenue: ads during the show, which also airs on Substack and other social platforms; monetized posts on Instagram (2.8 million followers), Facebook (1.7 million) and TikTok (2.2 million); a cut if sponsors use his likeness on their own accounts; merchandise; paid speeches (CNN had stricter ethics rules than “‘The Don Lemon Show’ newsroom,” as he calls it); live events like the Hughley tour; extra dollars from premium subscribers. On YouTube, where the core program is free, Lemon offers three tiers of bonus material for those seeking more of him: “Lemon Nation” ($2.99 a month), “Lemon Heads” ($9.99) and “Lemon Legends” ($49.99). Trolls are considered a net positive. “For them to comment, they have to be at least a subscriber,” Lemon told me. “So they’re trolls who are paying me.”
Market peers include anti-Trump content makers like MeidasTouch and The Bulwark and TV veterans like Jim Acosta and Joy Reid. Chris Cillizza, a fellow CNN expat with a less partisan reputation, told me he had found independent media workable but less lucrative than Lemon. “I always tell people: If you want to start something and you’re solving for money primarily,” Cillizza said, “be as consistently pro-Trump or anti-Trump as possible.”
Lemon’s perspective is recognizable enough from his CNN days that he cannot quite be accused of chasing clicks. But he also does some things that other journalists would not. He recently addressed a Senate Democratic communications summit organized by Cory Booker. He openly supported Kamala Harris in 2024 and has seemed invested in her reciprocal validation. (“Madam Vice President, I hear that you are a Lemon Head,” he said in an interview last October. Harris, perplexed, said she admired his work but was “nobody’s head.”)
Some who think little of Lemon nonetheless regard this chapter as more sincere. “An irony now is that Lemon is more honest,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, told me. “When he was at CNN, he was smuggling left-wing opinion between the perception of the Walter Cronkite straight-news television personality.”
Lemon has felt the most freedom in his bookings — no more election-denier types for nominal balance — saying that today’s CNN has repelled its audience. (The proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by David Ellison, the son of a centibillionaire Trump ally, has only reinforced Lemon’s concerns that his former workplace might follow the rightward drift of CBS, Ellison’s other recent news acquisition.) When I asked how he identified himself in the journalist-streamer-influencer space, Lemon said he was agnostic so long as “journalist” came first. “I do consider myself an influencer,” he added, “because I do think that I have cultural influence.”
Among fans, Lemon has inspired comparisons to swaggering journalist-entertainers past, the kinds of news slingers who hooked their audiences with more than straight-ahead reporting. “The Geraldo Rivera in this era,” a supporter posted (affectionately) to Lemon’s Facebook page.
But Rivera himself worries about Lemon. “I say to any journalist, or certainly any street reporter, ‘Stay away from churches,’” Rivera, an acquaintance of Lemon’s from their time on cable, told me. “There’s nothing but problems.”
Lemon’s indictment, filed on Jan. 29 after a federal magistrate judge first rejected the case against him, lumps him in with co-defendant “agitators” who prosecutors say conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” those inside the church.
Some of its claims seem fairly incontestable: Lemon helped ensure “operational secrecy” beforehand by reminding others not to disclose the protest location on camera. He acknowledged that a churchgoer was scared and crying, and said, “I imagine it’s uncomfortable and traumatic for the people here.” Other allegations are a bit more dubious. Lemon, the indictment reads, “stood so close to the pastor that Lemon caused the pastor’s right hand to graze Lemon.” The pastor, it says, was “largely surrounded” and “physically obstructed” (he is seen walking away) as Lemon “peppered him with questions to promote the operation’s message.”
“That’s what reporters do!” Lemon later said of such peppering.
Officially, Lemon was charged under the Klan Act and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law intended to plug a legislative gap after the Supreme Court ruled that the Klan Act did not extend to menacing non-Klan demonstrations at abortion clinics. The measure offered similar protections for houses of worship.
“I don’t know if it’s such a dog whistle,” Lemon, who has often discussed his ancestral connection to enslaved Louisianans, said of the case. “This is a regular whistle.”
“Amazing detail,” Rufo said of the Klan wrinkle, admiring the craftsmanship from Trump’s Justice Department. He suggested that Lemon is best compared to those prosecuted after entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to document the action in a place they were not supposed to be.
Unsurprisingly, no corner of the media, excepting “The Don Lemon Show,” has devoted more attention to him than his counterparts on the streaming right. In early March, Megyn Kelly (now reincarnated as a new-media MAGA ally) welcomed Parnell, the pastor, who accused Lemon of “trying to incite me,” as Kelly mocked her former cable peer for “cloaking himself in the protection of journalism like he’s Ben Bradlee.”
Before charging Lemon, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, telegraphed her plans to Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump commentator. “Quote-unquote ‘committing journalism,’” Dhillon told Johnson, provided no “shield” against being “an embedded part of a criminal conspiracy.”
Because of the latitude historically afforded to reporters at news-making events, the case has few clear precedents. Lemon has largely avoided discussing details that might factor in his defense, citing the ramifications for all journalists “if this goes the wrong way.” But he did volunteer something his therapist had shared recently. “He said, ‘You are Black history,’” Lemon told me. He wept, he said, but he did not disagree.
Unsurprisingly, no corner of the media, excepting “The Don Lemon Show,” has devoted more attention to him than his counterparts on the streaming right. In early March, Megyn Kelly (now reincarnated as a new-media MAGA ally) welcomed Parnell, the pastor, who accused Lemon of “trying to incite me,” as Kelly mocked her former cable peer for “cloaking himself in the protection of journalism like he’s Ben Bradlee.”
Before charging Lemon, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, telegraphed her plans to Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump commentator. “Quote-unquote ‘committing journalism,’” Dhillon told Johnson, provided no “shield” against being “an embedded part of a criminal conspiracy.”
Because of the latitude historically afforded to reporters at news-making events, the case has few clear precedents. Lemon has largely avoided discussing details that might factor in his defense, citing the ramifications for all journalists “if this goes the wrong way.” But he did volunteer something his therapist had shared recently. “He said, ‘You are Black history,’” Lemon told me. He wept, he said, but he did not disagree.
Lemon’s choice of lead attorney, Abbe Lowell, has placed him in suitably conspicuous company. As the ranking superlawyer for targets of Trump’s retribution, Lowell has represented New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James (who won a fraud judgment against Trump and his business), and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors whom Trump has hoped to replace. Lemon has also hired Joseph H. Thompson, a former senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota who resigned in January over the Justice Department’s push to investigate Renee Good’s partner (and not her shooter).
At least one of the Cities Church congregants has sued Lemon civilly, claiming emotional distress. Red-state lawmakers are weighing measures to punish church protests. (“The Don Lemon law,” an Idaho legislator joked.) The Trump administration has pressured mainstream reporters to concede that Lemon is an imperfect standard-bearer. “There’s a lot of things that Mr. Lemon did that you would never do as a journalist,” Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, told CNN’s Dana Bash days after the arrest. “Let’s be honest.”
While news organizations, including CNN, have condemned Lemon’s arrest as an affront to press freedom, his turn as an avatar for the profession remains disorienting for some who knew him. Asked if it was healthy for journalism to see Lemon elevated to ambassador status, S.E. Cupp, a longtime CNN contributor, laughed. “You can quote me: ‘No comment.’”
Yet if Lemon is not the most statesmanlike figure committing journalism in 2026, or the most evenhanded, or the most likely to be held up as a model at journalism schools, he has achieved a more relevant distinction, whatever the outcome in court: Here is our most 2026 journalist, unaffiliated and unbound, self-immolating and self-regarding, deeply trusted by a fragmented audience in an age of fragmentation and collapsing audience trust, telling his followers a story about the country and its leader with such total commitment that he became that story’s central character.
“I’m not afraid to do this,” he had said inside the church. The danger is the credibility. He is the news.
As if narrating a segment about someone else’s life, Lemon can seem detached from the notion that he is the accused criminal in the headlines. The morning before his arraignment in St. Paul, Lemon and his three producers had been mapping out marathon coverage for his plea, planning a guest roster of influencers, legal minds, elected Democrats. Lemon had his flight to Minnesota in a few hours. He politely showed me the door, past the sheep.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” he asked.
Moments later, he was consumed with a different question. His arrest had been an international spectacle. His name, as he noticed with satisfaction during a supervised trip to the bathroom while detained, was back on CNN. Helicopters followed the car that ferried him from the courthouse.
But what would his news value be tomorrow?
“Do you think,” Lemon wondered, “there’s going to be crazy media?”
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