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) ICE agents will help T.S.A. at airports amid the partial government shutdown, Homan says.
Erica L. Green, Hamed Aleaziz and Gabe Castro-Root, March 22, 2026
Erica L. Green is a White House reporter. Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy. Gabe Castro-Root covers travel.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, confirmed on Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would be deployed to U.S. airports on Monday, casting the operation largely as an effort to ease long lines that have caused frustration among travelers during one of the busiest travel seasons.
ICE personnel, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations, are planning to be at 14 airports, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. The airports span the country, including Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston and Phoenix.
The agents are expected to conduct tasks to free up Transportation Security Administration agents to handle processing travelers, according to an official from the Homeland Security Department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the location of ICE agents.
President Trump announced the measure on Saturday, first as a threat aimed at pressuring congressional Democrats to agree to a deal to fund the Homeland Security Department, which includes the T.S.A., and then as an aggressive operation. He said on social media that agents would “do security like no one has ever seen before,” which would include “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that his agency was drawing up plans for deployment and stressed that ICE agents would help support security officials whose ranks have thinned as thousands have gone without pay amid a partial government shutdown.
“It’s a work in progress, but we will be at airports tomorrow, helping T.S.A. move those lines along,” Mr. Homan said.
The Homeland Security Department said in a statement on Sunday night that the deployment was necessary because of long lines for screening passengers, and it placed the blame on Democrats. But it did not give details about what agents would do at the airports.
“Because of the Democrat shutdown, President Trump is using every tool available to help American travelers who are facing hours long lines at airports across the country — especially during this spring break and holiday season that is very important for many American families,” the statement said, adding: “This will help bolster T.S.A. efforts to keep our skies safe and minimize air travel disruptions.”
With the deployment less than 24 hours away, administration officials apparently have not nailed down many details. Mr. Homan said that “his opinion” was that agents would concentrate on airports with long wait times at security, prioritizing ones with lines of about three hours. He said that agency heads were still discussing how many agents to deploy, how quickly to deploy them and to where.
He said more concrete plans would be made on Sunday afternoon.
“When we deploy them more, we’ll have a well-thought-out plan to execute,” Mr. Homan said.
Airports around the country have been smothered with passengers over the past weeks, hit with the combination of the shutdown and heavy spring break travel. At LaGuardia Airport in New York on Sunday, the wait in the line at T.S.A. checkpoints was as long as three hours.
Sarah Estes, 41, a nurse from Dallas visiting for what she called a “girls’ trip,” said the airport website had estimated a 20-minute wait for T.S.A. PreCheck. But after they arrived, she said, they were told it would take at least two and a half hours.
Ms. Estes said she had conflicting thoughts about using ICE at the airports.
“I don’t trust those people,” she said. “So how can I trust them to help out at the airport? But the airports do need help.”
Mr. Homan noted that ICE agents were already working in airports, doing immigration enforcement and conducting investigations into reports of criminal activity like smuggling. He also said that the ICE agents — who are still being paid while T.S.A. agents are not — were “well trained” in security and identification.
But he indicated that the bulk of their work would be to cover exits and other areas that T.S.A. workers are now staffing in order to free up agents to do screenings and other functions to help reduce lines.
“This is about helping T.S.A. do their mission, and get the American public through that airport as quick as they can, while adhering to all the security guidelines and the protocols,” he said. “We’re simply there to help T.S.A. do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise.”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, blasted Mr. Trump’s idea on Sunday.
“The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country, potentially to brutalize or to kill them,” he said during an interview on “State of the Union,” referring to the killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January.
Mike Gayzagian, a T.S.A. officer at Boston Logan International Airport and the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2617, which represents T.S.A. employees across New England, said he was unsure whether ICE agents would show up to airports in his region on Monday. If they did, he said, they were not likely to be of much help, especially if they were stationed at exits as Mr. Homan suggested.
Mr. Gayzagian said the administration’s move shifted attention from the larger issue at hand. “None of this would be happening if Congress had just simply decided to pay us,” he said.
Johnny Jones, a T.S.A. officer at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and a secretary-treasurer with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing nearly 50,000 T.S.A. officers, said that stationing ICE agents at airports would “be a distracting scenario, to say the least.”
He said ICE agents’ presence could make airports less safe because of the widespread public anger at immigration officers’ recent conduct. He added that placing paid immigration agents next to unpaid T.S.A. agents would inflame frustrations.
“All we want is a paycheck,” Mr. Jones said. “We don’t need all these optics.”
Tara Terranova contributed reporting from New York, and Michael Gold from Washington.
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2) Sidelined by War With Iran, Gaza Residents Remain in Limbo
The new war has led to panic buying and a surge in food prices for Gazans as they try to recover from Israel’s two-year offensive against Hamas.
By Bilal Shbair, Isabel Kershner and Abu Bakr Bashir, March 23, 2026
Bilal Shbair reported from Deir al Balah, Gaza; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; and Abu Bakr Bashir from Sheffield, England.
Palestinians celebrating Eid al-Fitr on Friday amid the ruins of Gaza City. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
As the effects of the American and Israeli war with Iran rippled across the Middle East, people in one corner of the region, Gaza, were feeling sidelined, stuck in a kind of limbo.
The fighting has set back the already slow progress toward a more peaceful reality in postwar Gaza. Israel briefly closed all the crossings into Gaza. Now only one cargo crossing is operating. The sole crossing for people entering or leaving the territory — including patients seeking medical treatment abroad — was closed for nearly three weeks after the war with Iran broke out on Feb. 28. It reopened last week for limited numbers of passengers.
The Palestinian enclave was only just emerging from a devastating Israeli campaign that killed tens of thousands of people, according to Gaza health officials, and reduced much of the coastal territory to rubble.
Now, the new strife has left residents of Gaza feeling ever more abandoned.
“The bitter truth is that Gaza has been forgotten,” said Fuad Shahin, 40, who runs a small cafe in Deir al Balah, in the southern half of the territory.
Adham al-Mabhouh, 46, a soccer coach who trains amputees injured and displaced by the Gaza war and during previous fighting, echoed the sentiment. “The eyes of the world are on Iran and the Gulf,” he said.
“Whatever happens, Gaza seems to lose,” he added.
The price of food and other basic goods has surged as people have returned to panic buying, afraid that crossings into Gaza would not reopen, or would close again. Unscrupulous merchants have hoarded stock, apparently hoping to profit from high demand should there be shortages.
“People rushed to the markets and bought everything they could with all the money they had — people with money of course,” said Hussain Ghaben, 37, a father of three from the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City.
Mahmoud Bolbol, 43, a father of six from Gaza City, has no work and relies on charity to feed his family. “I worry more about getting some cooking gas than what happens to Iran,” he said.
Gaza has been slowly trying to recover from the two-year Israeli offensive prompted by the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
A fragile cease-fire went into effect five months ago, though the Israeli military carries out near-daily strikes, saying it is responding to violations by militant groups.
The next stages of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which was endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, appear to have stalled. A committee of Palestinian technocrats meant to replace the Hamas administration has still not entered Gaza, and an international stabilization force intended to bring security has yet to materialize.
Any progress hinges on the thorniest issues, including disarming Hamas and ensuring a withdrawal of the Israeli military, which controls about half of Gaza.
Israel has conditioned the start of any meaningful reconstruction on disarmament. Hamas is reluctant to part with its weapons, which are core to its identity as a fighting force against Israel. The militant group also relies on its guns to maintain its hold over Gaza’s roughly two million people. Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace is waiting for Hamas to respond to a proposal for relinquishing its weapons.
Gaza’s residents feel stuck between the competing demands of Hamas and Israel. “We are living inside a vicious circle, caught in a whirlpool,” said Rami Abu Reida, 46, a nut seller from the southern Gaza town of Khuzaa.
Mr. Ghaben, the father of three in Gaza City, said that his house was completely destroyed during the Gaza war. He and his family are sheltering in a tent near the rubble of their home.
“I could not buy anything, as I had no cash at all. I totally depend on charity,” he said. Before the war he was selling clothes in a stall on the street, but now he is jobless.
Like others in Gaza, Mr. Ghaben remembers the months of severe hunger that gripped Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas. He recalled not eating for four days and being shot in the leg while waiting for an aid convoy near a crossing. Others around him were killed, he said.
He said he had five bags of flour and enough beans stored in his tent to last about three months. Prices for staples have skyrocketed, he said.
The United Nations says more crossings into Gaza must be opened to aid the humanitarian response.
While the intensity of fighting has decreased considerably, Israeli strikes still pose a danger. More than 670 people have been killed in Gaza since the cease-fire in October, according to local health officials, whose data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Some residents worry that after the focus shifts from Iran, Israel could resume the Gaza war to try to defeat Hamas completely.
“We still haven’t escaped either our past or our present crisis,” said Hanin al-Qishawi, 29, an unemployed university graduate who returned from southern Gaza to her damaged home in Gaza City.
“Gaza is always affected by whatever happens in the region,” she said. “It moves with the wind.”
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3) Born Abroad and Fearful of ICE, Adoptees Try to Prove They Belong
Up to 200,000 people adopted as children from abroad are vulnerable to deportation by an administration searching for problems with their citizenship.
By Elizabeth Williamson, March 23, 2026
Reporting from Washington and Minneapolis-St. Paul
Tiko’ Rujux-Xicay worries about increased immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities of Minnesota as residents report people being questioned and detained regardless of their citizenship status. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Born in Guatemala and adopted as an infant by a Minnesota couple, Tiko’ Rujux-Xicay scarcely considers himself an immigrant, much less a vulnerable one. But after federal immigration agents arrested some of his neighbors in January, he began carrying his American passport and encouraging other adoptees to do the same.
That is how Mr. Rujux-Xicay, 27, (pronounced ruh-OOSH she-KYE) learned that faulty laws and practices surrounding international adoption had left many adoptees trying to prove they have a legal right to live in the only nation most of them have ever known. As many as 200,000 adoptees are vulnerable to deportation because they lack U.S. citizenship or important proof of it, immigration lawyers say.
The problem is decades old, but has taken on new urgency during the Trump administration’s determination to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Immigration lawyers say they know of no accurate count of how many international adoptees have been deported, but say they are increasingly being detained.
“Most immigrants know from the very beginning what they have to do to gain legal status, but many adoptees have never questioned whether or not they have it, until now,” said Mónica Dooner Lindgren, a family law attorney at Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services in St. Paul. Many international adoptees first learn they are not citizens when they apply for a drivers license, join the military or, these days, when federal agents stop them on the street.
Beginning with war orphans and refugees in the 1940s, Americans have adopted more than 500,000 children from abroad, more than any other nation. The practice peaked in 2004, and has since slowed dramatically as Russia, China, Guatemala and other countries have halted foreign adoptions because of evidence of corruption and other irregularities.
At the height of the international adoption boom, shifting requirements and corruption often made the process chaotic. Children who were adopted legally obtained new birth certificates with their adoptive parents’ names, but federal law also required that the children become naturalized citizens. Thousands of parents were either unaware of or did not take this step, which made their adopted children potentially subject to removal.
In 2000, Congress passed the Child Citizenship Act, which granted automatic citizenship to adoptees who were younger than 18 on Feb. 27, 2001, the day the law took effect. But up to 75,000 adoptees did not qualify because they were older than 18 on that date.
Tens of thousands of others faced different obstacles.
Some entered the country on tourist or medical visas that have long since expired. Others came in on so-called orphan visas, but their American parents did not complete the process for them to become citizens. Still others were sheltered by Americans posted abroad, often military members, who did not pursue legal adoption upon returning with them to the United States.
The State Department does not track how many international adoptees become naturalized citizens. But Gregory Luce, an immigration lawyer and executive director of Adoptees United in Minneapolis, scoured records back to 1968 and found that a total of about 200,000 children brought to the United States from abroad since that year had grown up without U.S. citizenship.
Mr. Luce said international adoptees who are not U.S. citizens often discover they are not naturalized when they apply for a U.S. passport, Social Security benefits or a Real ID.
Under federal law, people who make a false claim of citizenship are barred from ever acquiring it, but international adoptees who did so in error are exempted. Even so, Mr. Luce said that many adoptees who find themselves in these circumstances do not seek citizenship through the exemption, fearful of an administration that is using every legal avenue to meet deportation quotas.
“Naturalization in this environment is much harder and much riskier,” said Mr. Luce, whose organization sponsors a pro bono legal clinic for adult international adoptees. “Most people are super scared, and the hard question for me is always, what should they do? Naturalize, renew a green card, do nothing?”
Minnesota, with its strong public benefits system, network of support groups and one of the first adoption medicine clinics in the nation, has one of the largest concentrations of foreign-born adoptees of any state, including the highest number of Korean-born adoptees. At least 17,547 of 114,536 Korean children adopted by Americans between 1953 and 2023 lack U.S. citizenship, according to the Overseas Koreans Agency.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched one of the broadest immigration enforcement actions in history in Minnesota, “we found that ICE is not discriminating,” said Ms. Dooner Lindgren, the family law attorney in St. Paul. “All people of color are being targeted.’’
Ms. Dooner Lindgren and her husband are adoptees from Colombia, as is their daughter. Ms. Dooner Lindgren was adopted as an infant, and said confusion over the law meant that it took three years for her to become a full U.S. citizen. “I was only 3 years old, but I remember the naturalization ceremony and being given a United States flag,” she said. “My parents and many others did their due diligence, but for some it wasn’t a priority or they didn’t know.”
Mr. Rujux-Xicay, who uses his Mayan name, was born in 1998 and adopted the following year by Laurie Stern and Dan Luke, Minneapolis-based filmmakers who spent nearly a year navigating Guatemala’s complicated adoption procedures.
The Child Citizenship Act cemented Mr. Rujux-Xicay’s legal status, but he did not automatically receive a certificate of citizenship. Although not required for citizens born in the United States, it is the most permanent proof of citizenship for those who are naturalized. Unlike a passport, which has to be renewed and can be revoked for certain financial crimes, not paying child support or if a person is deemed a flight risk, a certificate of citizenship is difficult to revoke.
“The Department of State website says that a U.S. valid passport is sufficient to prove citizenship, but that is not preventing agents from detaining adoptees,” Ms. Dooner Lindgren said. She said international adoptees were “scrambling” to apply for the certificate, which is available from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices after an approval process that involves submitting several supporting documents.
That agency recently waived the $1,300 filing fee for adult international adoptees, and wait times range from six months to 18 months, Mr. Luce said.
When Mr. Rujux-Xicay drives to his high school teaching job or ferries his young daughter to day care, he carries his passport, birth certificate and an enhanced driver’s license embedded with a radio frequency identification chip that allows border agents to readily access his traveler information. A kidney transplant recipient, he also carries a long list of medications and a note from his doctors saying that without them, he could die.
Despite the risks, he says he will not apply for a certificate of citizenship, calling it “bureaucratic B.S.”
“I have all this stuff that says I’ve gone through the right channels,” he said. “I’m a citizen, I have a job and family, and I’ve never committed a crime.”
“I have to believe in the system. If you don’t, then what’s the point?”
Congress has tried for a decade to plug legal gaps that endanger adoptees. The latest effort, the Protect Adoptees and American Families Act, introduced in late September, would provide automatic citizenship to international adoptees regardless of their current age, provided they still live in the United States and were adopted lawfully by parents who are American citizens.
The bipartisan legislation has support from evangelical Christians, who have long embraced adoption. But it has yet to receive a committee hearing.
Some adoptee advocates say the legislation’s chances for passage are slim, given the Trump administration’s refusal to admit or protect any but a handpicked few foreign-born people.
Mr. Luce said he was less pessimistic.
“It has bipartisan support and could be sold to everyone seeking immigration reform as some small symbolic step, because everyone recognizes the system is broken,” he said.
“If it passed, I have clients who would instantly become citizens.”
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4) The Pets Left Behind When Their Owners Are Deported
As immigrant detentions and self-deportations soar, animal welfare groups in cities like New Orleans scramble to feed, foster and re-home the pets left behind.
By Miriam Jordan, Photographs by Kathleen Flynn, March 23, 2026
Miriam Jordan, who traveled to New Orleans to report this article, covers immigration and is the proud owner of an Australian Shepherd rescue.
Kathleen Flynn for The New York Times
The adoption listing described Heinz, a Shih Tzu-poodle mix, as sweet, happy and energetic.
“But he also has a sad story,” said the bio on the website of Rolling River Rescue, a nonprofit in New Orleans.
The caramel-colored pup hadn’t run away, nor had he been given up by owners who no longer wanted him. He had “lost his family,” the listing said, as a result of “recent events in New Orleans,” a reference to immigration enforcement that has swept up people under President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Federal agents have conducted large-scale crackdowns in New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and smaller roundups from Hawaii to Maine. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been arrested. Most have remained locked up and many have been deported.
Left behind have been their dogs, cats and bunnies, even chickens, according to pet rescue groups and animal control agencies.
“What many Americans don’t realize is that there are companion animals being left by families that disappeared overnight,” said Maria Thomas, president of Rolling River, which has been scrambling to find foster and adoptive families for dogs and cats in New Orleans.
“We were already working at such a deficit because there are so many pets in need all the time,” she said. “Now we have the additional challenge of animals who need re-homing when their owners are deported or they self deport.”
New Orleans is a place all too familiar with displacement. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced many people from their homes and, in some cases, out of the city altogether. Abandoned animals roaming the streets became part of the post-Katrina tableau. The disaster also led people to forge new ways to help each other.
More recently, as the federal immigration crackdown upended life, that same spirit spurred mutual aid groups into overdrive. With many immigrants afraid to leave their homes, volunteers have delivered food and other provisions for families, and often for pets, including those taken in by neighbors or wandering the streets after their owners vanished.
Exactly how many displaced pets there are is impossible to quantify. The problem is not tracked by the patchwork of government agencies responsible for animals or by the local and national nonprofits that fill gaps in care.
What agencies and organizations do say is that there have been unmistakable surges in stray or abandoned pets in the aftermath of immigration crackdowns.
In Minnesota, St. Paul Animal Services, a government agency, recorded a 38 percent increase in stray, seized and relinquished cats and dogs in January 2026 compared with January 2025, coinciding with Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities region.
A rescue group in the area, The Bond Between Us, said that it received nearly twice as many surrenders early this year than it had during the same period last year.
In Los Angeles, where thousands of people were arrested in sweeps last year, the County Department of Animal Care and Control added a pet plan to its website for people “facing immigration-related challenges.”
But Marcia Mayeda, the department’s director, said that the burden nationwide has fallen mainly on rescue groups because immigrants fear interacting with animal control.
“We are the government, our officers look like law enforcement and we euthanize,” she said. “What we get is the tip of the iceberg.”
In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed deportation, Mercy Full Project in Tampa is caring for three times as many pets as it was last year.
“It’s big dogs, little dogs, well-cared-for French bulldogs,” said Heydi Acuna, a co-founder of the nonprofit. “We are facing a major crisis.”
During an interview with The New York Times, she received a text from a woman who had just rescued a hound puppy named Damian, who needed a home. “Unfortunately, his owners were deported,” she wrote.
As much as Americans seem to love pets, shelters have long struggled to accommodate all the animals in need, and the immigration raids have added to the strain. With limited space, shelters routinely euthanize animals if they haven’t been adopted.
At Animal Rescue of New Orleans, calls have been pouring in.
“People reach out begging us to take animals,” said Ginnie Baumann Robilotta, the nonprofit’s vice president.
“The worst part is, we are so full — with a waiting list,” she said. “All we can do is offer free food and supplies.”
Becky Warpinski, a retired veterinary technician, said New Orleans has been tackling the issue with a zeal borne of battling big disasters. “We are approaching this crisis with the emergency protocols of a hurricane,” she said. “If we get a mass deportation, we are going in there and saving these pets.”
New Orleans East is among the neighborhoods feeling the fallout, according to animal welfare groups. Isolated and swampy, the area has long been a dumping ground for unwanted dogs. Now, it’s worse, the groups say.
In late February, Cristiane Rosales-Fajardo, who runs the mutual aid group NOLA Village, placed donated pet food outside vacant houses where dogs lingered, perhaps waiting for owners who were unlikely to return.
She also distributed it to households fostering pets that had been left behind by former neighbors. One bag went to a family that had taken in a 2-year-old Labrador and a Rottweiler puppy.
Even after leaving the United States, some families hold out hope of being reunited with their pets. It can be complicated and costly.
Ms. Rosales-Fajardo has fostered Cheddar, an athletic Bluetick Coonhound, for a couple who self-deported to Honduras and hoped that their dog would follow.
Medical exams and travel documents for Cheddar are ready, but the transport cost, $4,500, is prohibitive.
Last month, a Guatemalan man surrendered his two cats. He wept as he said goodbye, knowing he would probably be detained when he reported to court days later.
“He adored those cats, and they loved him,” said Ms. Robilotta of Animal Rescue New Orleans, who met the man.
For weeks, the cats cowered in a corner, she said. On a recent afternoon, Pantera, a velvety black cat, watched from a felt cave as other cats played. When two strangers approached, she retreated deeper into her small sanctuary.
Heinz, the caramel-colored pup with a white splotch on his tummy, was spotted near homes where immigration enforcement had occurred. After his picture went up on pet databases and no one claimed him, Roving River Rescue tapped its roster of fosters.
Shannon Dugan, a teacher, agreed to take him on Feb. 24.
That evening, he arrived house-trained and neutered, sporting a glossy coat.
“He obviously came from a family that loved him,” Ms. Dugan said.
The next day, Ms. Dugan posted a short biography of Heinz on the rescue’s website. Within a week, he had a new home.
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5) A Murder Charge in Georgia Exposes Complexities of the Abortion Debate
A woman who took medication to induce an abortion, and then delivered the baby, was arrested on a murder charge. But on Monday, a state judge expressed deep skepticism about the case.
By Rick Rojas, Pam Belluck and Susan Cooper Eastman, March 23, 2026
Rick Rojas reported from Atlanta, Pam Belluck from New York and Susan Cooper Eastman from Woodbine, Ga.
A 31-year-old pregnant woman was rushed to a Georgia hospital on Dec. 30, complaining of severe abdominal pain, law enforcement officials said. She told doctors and nurses she had taken medication she bought online to induce an abortion. She then went into labor, delivering a girl apparently in the second trimester of development. The newborn was declared dead within about an hour.
Two months later, the police arrested the woman, Alexia Moore, on a murder charge. In the warrant, investigators said she had “unlawfully and with malice aforethought caused the death of Baby Girl Moore.”
But in court on Monday, a state judge expressed deep skepticism about the charge and set Ms. Moore’s bail at just $1, clearing the way for her release after being jailed for roughly two weeks.
“I think that charge is extremely problematic,” Judge Steven G. Blackerby of State Superior Court said during the hearing. “That is going to be a hard charge to convict upon.”
The case has highlighted the complications of the fractured reproductive health landscape that has emerged in the nearly four years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
In Georgia, as in other states with some of the most severe restrictions on abortions, lawmakers have long avoided criminally punishing women who seek to terminate pregnancies, instead focusing on prosecuting providers and others who help facilitate access to the medication or procedures.
Still, Ms. Moore’s case reflects one of the rare circumstances in recent years in which those seeking abortions have ended up exposed to prosecution.
In the hospital, according to court documents, Ms. Moore expressed her frustration with how difficult it was to obtain an abortion in Georgia. The state bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically about six weeks into a pregnancy, often before women are aware they are pregnant.
So instead, she bought medication online. She told investigators, according to the documents, that she did not know long she had been pregnant but believed it had been less than 14 weeks. After she gave birth, doctors determined that she had been about 22 to 24 weeks into her pregnancy.
In states where abortion is legal, abortion pills can typically be taken through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. For pregnancies that are further along, terminations are done with a surgical procedure. The vast majority of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, or first trimester, of pregnancy.
How prosecutors will proceed remains unclear. Ms. Moore has not yet been indicted on the murder charge. In the hearing on Monday, Keith Higgins, the district attorney overseeing the case, said that his office “didn’t advise” the police on arresting Ms. Moore on the murder charge and that he was not steeped enough in the full details of the case to discuss it more extensively.
Mr. Higgins did not oppose the low bail amount, telling the judge, “Whatever bond the defendant can make that will allow her to get out of jail is appropriate.”
In brief interviews on Monday, Ms. Moore’s relatives acknowledged the uncertainty that has gripped her family since the arrest. “I’m just praying,” Teresa Soh, her grandmother, said. Still, they said they were relieved that she would be able to leave jail. Ms. Moore’s total bond was $2,001, including for two other lesser charges that she faces related to drug possession.
In a statement after the hearing, the Georgia Public Defender Council, whose lawyers represent Ms. Moore, said the outcome was a success.
“Today’s decision is a reminder that justice is not served by accusation alone,” the statement said. “Our system works best when courts carefully weigh the facts, uphold constitutional protections, and safeguard the rights of every person who comes before them.”
Ms. Moore was arrested in early March in Kingsland, Ga., a small city on the southern Georgia coast. According to court records, she told doctors and nurses that she had taken about eight pills of misoprostol, a typical dose of a drug that induces contractions. She also took oxycodone for the pain, the records said.
The charges against Ms. Moore did not specifically cite Georgia’s abortion ban, although the affidavit supporting the warrant did include language that echoed aspects of the ban, including saying that “the baby was well beyond six weeks of conception.” But the affidavit said that she was charged with murder because “the victim became a person at the moment of live birth.”
In most states, murder charges can be filed for the intentional killing of a newborn baby. But legal experts said the circumstances in Georgia did not appear to fit that description. Ms. Moore is accused of taking actions that were intended to terminate a pregnancy and happened before the child was born, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion expert at the University of California, Davis.
“It would be a really big deal to prosecute a woman for murder for abortion, which is what this amounts to,” Professor Ziegler said.
Misoprostol is a widely available drug that can be used for several conditions, including stomach ulcers and to help induce labor. In the typical medication abortion regimen, patients first take another drug, mifepristone, and then take misoprostol 24 to 48 hours later to induce contractions to expel the fetal tissue.
Misoprostol can be used on its own to terminate pregnancy, although that approach is considered somewhat less effective and more likely to cause side effects like nausea.
Mifepristone has been the focus of recent lawsuits filed by states with abortion bans, seeking to force the Food and Drug Administration to sharply restrict access to that pill. Misoprostol has not typically been highlighted in those lawsuits, partly because it has a range of other medical uses.
There have been cases in other states in which women who seek abortions have faced charges. Last November, a South Carolina woman was charged with attempted murder and unlawful neglect of a child. The police said she took a drug to induce contractions when she was 27 weeks pregnant. After the baby was born, the authorities said, she left it in the toilet while a family member called 911 and emergency responders took the infant, who was in critical condition, to the hospital. The case is ongoing.
In January, prosecutors in Kentucky announced that they had charged a woman with fetal homicide, saying that the she took abortion pills and buried the remains of what police described as a “developed male infant” in her backyard. Prosecutors later dropped the fetal homicide charge, saying that Kentucky’s law prohibited filing that charge against women seeking abortions. The woman continues to face charges of concealing the birth of an infant, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence.
The arrest records in the Georgia case said that the bottle of misoprostol that the police examined did not list a prescription number or a doctor’s name. That appeared to be the reason that Ms. Moore was also charged with misdemeanor drug possession. But an assistant public defender, Kelly Turner, said on Monday that the misoprostol was prescribed by a licensed physician and dispensed by an online licensed pharmacy.
Ms. Moore also faces a felony drug possession charge for also having oxycodone, which the arrest records said she also obtained without a prescription.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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6) Boston University Pulls Pride Flags, Raising Free Speech Worries
The university said the flags broke a rule against hanging signs, a policy embraced by other campuses that cracked down on protests. Professors and others say such rules chill speech.
By Alan Blinder, March 23, 2026
Boston University removed Pride flags from view on campus. Sophie Park for The New York Times
Boston University removed Pride flags that were displayed in campus buildings this month, angering professors who believe school leaders may be suppressing expression because they fear the Trump administration.
University officials have suggested the displays could imply the school endorses them, violating its pledge to be evenhanded with its standards around speech.
The university’s decision is a new skirmish in academia about campus expression, and it comes after more schools across the country embraced so-called neutrality policies, curbing the views they express publicly. Universities have also imposed more stringent limits on protests in the years since demonstrations over the war in Gaza rocked campuses.
But the debate in Boston involves flags, not encampments. According to the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the school temporarily removed at least three Pride flags, including one belonging to the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. That one was taken down and folded neatly during spring break.
Elsewhere on campus, Nathan Phillips, a physiological ecologist, said workers had twice taken down the flag he displayed in his office overlooking Commonwealth Avenue.
“I don’t think that any passerby that would glance up and happen to see this Pride flag in this random fourth-floor window would somehow think, ‘Oh, that’s B.U.’s official position,’” he said in an interview, adding, “I think it would be reasonable to think, ‘Oh, there's a person who is up there that is expressing that viewpoint.”
The First Amendment’s speech protections on their own do not apply at the private university, giving campus leaders more authority than some of their counterparts to determine what may be displayed on school property.
The university said in a statement that it “upholds a content-neutral policy” around campus expression and that “outward-facing signage moves speech from an individual perspective to an institutional perspective.”
Some professors nevertheless contend that the university unevenly enforces its policies since it has left undisturbed, for example, a flag celebrating Seattle’s National Hockey League franchise.
Susanne Sreedhar, the director of the women’s studies program, noted that the university acted weeks after a Trump administration directive led to the removal of a Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan.
“I would have thought they did not want to take any action which would associate them with that kind of homophobic response,” said Dr. Sreedhar, who said her program had rebuffed a university request last year to remove the flag. “But they did.”
The university said in its statement that “the suggestion that the university is singling out specific communities with this policy is untrue.” It added that officials were “committed to ensuring B.U. is an inclusive, welcoming and supportive place for the LGBTQIA+ community and for all people.”
Generations of students and professors alike have argued that American universities should be hubs of open debate and expression, though some critics of academia argue that campuses had lately grown far too intolerant.
Boston University has said it has “a responsibility to allow and safeguard the airing of the full spectrum of opinions on its campuses and to create an environment where ideas can be freely expressed and challenged.”
University policy prohibits “unattended placards, banners or other signs,” unless they are displayed at “a location that has been approved for posting.”
Dr. Phillips suggested that the university may be acting beyond the scope of its rules because he said he believed the policy applied to events. And other critics warned that although the First Amendment is not directly enforceable at the university, the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act bans “threats, intimidation or coercion” to interfere with a person’s federal or state rights.
In a letter last week to the university’s president, Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam, the co-presidents of the campus’s A.A.U.P. chapter urged an end to “selectively targeting speech that the Trump administration does not like.” The co-presidents, Mary Battenfeld and Joseph Harris, said Monday that Dr. Gilliam had not responded to the letter.
But there is some skepticism that White House worries fueled the university’s decision.
“This is not going to save Boston University if Trump decides to go after us,” Dr. Sreedhar said, noting that her program was in the process of developing an undergraduate major.
The university has grappled with the question of signage for decades and lost a legal battle in the 1980s over whether students could hang banners urging divestment. Other schools have faced similar debates.
The Harvard Crimson reported this month that Harvard officials, working not far across the Charles River from Boston University, had rewritten their guidance to allow the public display of signs from private areas, such as offices. Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose offerings include the university’s undergraduate programs, had drawn criticism last year over the forced removal of a Black Lives Matter display that could be seen from the outside.
Dr. Phillips and Dr. Sreedhar said Monday that the Pride flags had gone on display again. So far, they said, they had gone untouched.
Dr. Sreedhar added that her program had bought other Pride flags in case university officials confiscate theirs.
“We have a nice stockpile,” she said.
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7) Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years
Artificial intelligence could reshape work, but for now a low-hire, low-fire labor market is the main impediment for young people seeking employment.
By Sydney Ember, March 24, 2026
In January, an administrator from the career center at the University of Delaware posed a question on a private message board for educators: “Has anyone else noticed a decrease in employer fair registration for their spring events?”
Responses came swiftly.
“We are definitely seeing similar issues!”
“It seems the current environment is not conducive to hiring.”
“The struggle is real.”
The forum, which included administrators from schools across the country, encapsulated the intense anxiety gripping college students, recent graduates and virtually everyone else who knows anyone preparing to start a career.
They have reason to worry: This is the worst spring for young degree holders since the depths of the pandemic.
The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, up sharply over the past three years and outstripping the overall rate of 4.2 percent at the time. For those who were employed, more than 40 percent held jobs that do not typically require college degrees, the highest level since 2020.
“The appetite for hiring is definitely decreasing,” said Alli Goossens, the assistant director of employer engagement at North Dakota State University. Fewer employers attended the school’s spring career fair, she said, and some told her it was because they were being more conservative in their recruiting.
“It was just reduced hiring numbers,” she said. “They just weren’t hiring quite as many.”
The diminished prospects for young graduates are colliding with questions over whether artificial intelligence is destroying the kinds of jobs they have long sought. Fueling those concerns have been dire warnings from A.I. leaders including Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, who predicted the technology could obliterate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. A report in November from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found “substantial declines in employment for early-career workers” in fields that were most vulnerable to A.I., such as software development.
Although A.I. may be replacing some entry-level jobs on the margins, there is little evidence it is the main culprit — at least not yet. Rather, many economists believe employment challenges for young people with college degrees stem more from the “low hire, low fire” dynamics in the labor market.
Job openings have been trending down and are below prepandemic levels even as layoffs have remained low. A result has been a broad hiring stasis among employers that has hurt all new entrants to the labor market, a group that includes young workers with college degrees — and those without them.
“There’s just a general slowdown in hiring and less churn,” said Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank. “And so those who need their first jobs are probably disproportionately affected.”
Erin Torres, 22, graduated in December from Barnard College in New York with a degree in psychology. When she started looking for jobs, she aspired to work in product management at a technology company.
She has broadened her search to include all manner of entry-level corporate jobs and business analyst roles. In the past two months, she said, she had applied to close to 200 jobs and had gotten four interviews.
“Things don’t necessarily come to me easily, but I was hoping that at this stage, I would have something lined up,” Ms. Torres said.
She is living with her parents in Huntington, N.Y., to save money. She has been working part time as a hostess at Gastronomy, a restaurant at a Saks Fifth Avenue on Long Island, though she recently learned the department store location is closing.
Searching for a job has been so dispiriting that she has started seeing a therapist, she said. She is thinking about starting her own company because, she has taken to joking, it might be easier than joining a company that already exists. She hopes companies might hire more vigorously as the year goes on.
“If I really cannot find anything, I am just going to go haywire,” she said.
Young workers tend to suffer more during economic downturns, in part because companies become less willing to hire inexperienced, entry-level employees. During the aftermath of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate for people in their early to mid-20s spiked higher than 16 percent. The pandemic brought an even bigger surge in joblessness, though young people benefited once the economy reopened and employers raced to fill open positions.
Recent graduates generally fare better than people without degrees in periods of weak hiring, and this moment is no different. While the gap has narrowed in recent years, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates remains lower than for all young workers. Young people with college degrees remain more likely to be employed and to have higher paying jobs.
“As much as people are concerned about the current state for young grads, the encouraging news is we have been here before,” said Grace Zwemmer, an economist at Oxford Economics, an advisory firm.
Still, the increase in joblessness for recent college graduates against the backdrop of the A.I. revolution has incited a unique frenzy of speculation on its root cause.
“It’s sort of like a murder mystery of what is responsible for the weakening of the labor market for college graduates,” said Luke Pardue, policy director at the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group.
A possible contributing factor is that the labor market’s cool-down in the past few years has been concentrated in industries that generally attract young graduates, including technology, media, accounting and consulting. More people are also graduating with college degrees, heightening the competition for entry-level white-collar jobs.
Some economists have hypothesized that the challenging labor market for young degree holders could be the outcrop of a longer-term demographic shift that is making it more difficult for them to procure white-collar jobs.
Since the 1970s, the share of older workers in the labor force, particularly in private-sector white-collar jobs, has grown as life expectancy has increased and Americans have worked longer, Mr. Pardue said. That has created congestion in the workplace, resulting in less progression for mid- and early-career employees who would otherwise have moved up the job ladder when more senior workers retired. Without as much movement in their ranks, many businesses found they did not need to replace as many entry-level workers.
“As the U.S. population has aged, older workers are continuing to hold on to their positions,” Mr. Pardue said. “That is now showing up in terms of diminished job prospects for younger workers.”
In limbo are soon-to-be graduates.
On campuses nationwide, counselors are advising students to apply liberally to jobs. At Temple University in Philadelphia, the career center recently hosted an ask-me-anything-style gathering where students could air their worries about the job market. Washington University in St. Louis held a session for job seekers in late February on the subject of resilience.
Taleah Reyes, 22, initially decided not to go to college after graduating from high school with an associate degree. Born and raised in central Florida, she got her own apartment and took a full-time job at a theme park in Orlando.
Two years later, enticed by the prospect that a higher degree would open doors to more opportunities, she enrolled at Rollins College, a private liberal arts school in Winter Park, Fla. She started studying art history, which felt like a natural extension of her love of art, writing and research.
She continued to work part time at the theme park, where she operates rides. But with graduation approaching in May, she has also been applying to fellowships and internships at art museums, a library and a magazine.
“It’s been a lot of rejection,” she said. “The field is so competitive.”
It seems like more people with advanced degrees are looking at lower-level positions they previously would have ignored, she said, perhaps because the job market is so tough. Positions that used to be reserved for undergraduates suddenly are requiring a master’s degree.
Ms. Reyes said she was considering other fields, including library science. A supervisor has suggested that she could go into publishing or copywriting. Someday, she said, she could get a master’s degree.
Her fallback is to return to her theme park job full time, making $20 an hour.
“I went to school to further my career and to have some sense of personal fulfillment,” she said. “And then I’m leaving again to enter a job I previously had.”
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8) High Oil and Gas Prices Could Outlast Trump’s War With Iran
While the president has promised rapid relief, Americans could feel the financial sting of the conflict for some time after it ends.
As the war with Iran began to send oil and gas prices soaring around the world, President Trump shrugged off the fallout as a temporary setback for the U.S. economy.
“When this is over,” he told reporters this month, “oil prices are going to go down very, very rapidly.”
In the end, it may not be so simple.
Even if Mr. Trump were to broker an end hostilities with Iran before his new, self-imposed Friday deadline, it may still be weeks, if not months, before American families and businesses see a true break in their spiraling energy costs, economists and industry executives say.
An end to the war would abate a geopolitical crisis and most likely help to reopen clogged shipping lanes in the Middle East, nudging down oil and gas prices from their recent highs. But any relief would arrive gradually for most consumers — and probably not fast enough to undo the damage to the U.S. economy.
By midday Tuesday, the markets seemed downbeat about the odds of a swift and easy resolution to the war. The price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international benchmark, hovered around $100, up nearly 40 percent since the war started. An average gallon of gasoline also topped $3.97 nationally, according to AAA motor club, which reflected a roughly one-dollar jump from a month ago.
Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, said the prospect of sustained high costs affirmed a well-worn adage in the energy industry: “Prices rise like a rocket, fall like a feather.”
If the war were to end soon, he predicted that it would still take about six to eight weeks for oil production and shipments to normalize. At that point, oil could settle around $80 per barrel of Brent crude, higher than before the bombing began. Prices at the pump would probably fall slowly, too.
The exact timeline will depend on many factors, including the extent of the damage to the energy infrastructure in the Middle East and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil and gas thoroughfare that has been all but closed for weeks. The trajectory for prices will also vary by fuel type: The war has strained the global supply of diesel and jet fuel, in particular, meaning those prices could stay higher for a longer period.
Such spikes tend to ripple across the economy in myriad, lasting ways. Groceries could become more expensive because of higher shipping costs, for example, while airfares in the summer travel season similarly could rise. In an early, ominous sign, the top executive of United Airlines warned Bloomberg Television on Tuesday that it could raise ticket prices by 20 percent if the war with Iran continued to bog down jet fuel.
“We don’t have any idea where the price is going to go,” said Mike Sommers, the chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil industry. “We don’t know what the condition of the assets are going to be. We don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get the production that’s come offline, how long that’s going take to get back up and going.”
Asked about the administration’s economic projections, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, maintained in a statement that prices would drop “rapidly” once the war concluded.
“President Trump has been right about everything, and he will be right again when these short-term disruptions are past us,” she said.
The ever-shifting economic variables only add to the stakes for Mr. Trump, as the U.S.-led war with Iran now stretches into its fourth week. Even as experts continue to raise alarm about the consequences of a protracted conflict, the president has maintained that his war is worth the cost — and will yield substantial benefit by delivering a more stable Middle East.
“Our economy was fantastic,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, as he sought to make the case for why he had to “stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.”
In fact, the U.S. economy had been showing signs of strain before the war began, evident in persistently high consumer prices and a recent rise in the nation’s unemployment rate. Those stresses had helped to contribute to sense of frustration among Americans, many of whom blamed Mr. Trump for their financial woes in recent polling ahead of the midterm election.
Many analysts have warned that the nation’s trajectory could worsen considerably if the Iran war continues and oil prices stay sky high into next month or beyond, raising the risks that the United States could slip into a recession. But an early glimmer of relief arrived on Monday, after Mr. Trump said he would suspend his threat to escalate the bombing — by attacking Iranian energy facilities — so that the two sides could begin early discussions about an end to the conflict.
Within hours, however, leaders in Washington and Tehran offered competing assessments about the scope of the negotiations and their progress. That discrepancy underscored a hard truth: While the United States and Israel may have started the war, all of the countries would have to agree to end the fighting if they hoped to bring calm to energy and financial markets around the world.
Michael Pearce, the chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, said the market response reflected the reality that it “takes two to tango.”
In a report on Friday, his firm predicted that persistently high oil and gas prices could push up the cost of groceries and other goods, causing inflation to “rise sharply” in March and April. The resulting hit to consumers, the firm found, could contribute to a slowdown in the economy, which they said would grow 2.4 percent this year, down from their previous 2.8 percent projection.
Even if Mr. Trump can broker a faster end to the conflict, however, Mr. Pearce said there would not be a “sudden switch” that brought energy costs back to their prewar levels.
Once the Strait of Hormuz is opened, the traffic may not return immediately, and the risk of traversing a recent war zone may keep prices elevated for some time, analysts say. It may also take time to restart energy production in countries including Saudi Arabia, which have halted some of their operations in recent weeks as storage tanks have filled up in the face of drone attacks and mounting security risks.
“How quickly that production can actually come back online is an uncertainty that we’re going to have to deal with as we go forward,” Mike Wirth, chief executive of Chevron, said Monday at an energy conference in Houston, CERAWeek by S&P Global. “It’s going to take some time to come out of this.”
The comments have offered a stark contrast with Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated claim that energy prices will plummet once the hostilities conclude. To help prevent even further price shocks, the administration in recent days has released oil from the nation’s strategic stockpile and moved to lift some sanctions on adversaries, including Iran, in the hopes of boosting global supply.
Any decline in gasoline, in particular, would happen only gradually: By Mr. Zandi’s calculations, every $10-per-barrel increase in oil corresponds with a 25-cent increase in gas prices. Given the time it takes to process crude into gasoline, the pain at the pump may not dissipate as quickly as Mr. Trump has suggested.
“The administration may want oil prices and gas prices to drop very quickly, but they are likely to be confronted by the laws of gravity in the energy markets,” said Neale Mahoney, a top economics professor at Stanford University who served at the White House under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Mahoney pointed to the price shock after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, which constrained the global supply of energy and left consumers reeling at the gas pump. Then, he said, “prices shot up during the spring, then there was a slow drift down of prices in the summer and into the fall of 2022.”
This time, Mr. Mahoney said, the dynamic in the Persian Gulf is much different, given the reduced output of the region. But he said the impact of those sustained higher prices would be acute, since “history tells us those get passed” to consumers.
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9) Trump’s Threat to Iran Crosses a Line, Rights Experts Say
Intentionally targeting the country’s energy infrastructure could constitute a war crime under international law.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay, March 24, 2026
Tehran in 2024. President Trump threatened over the weekend to attack Iran’s power plants. Credit...Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump’s threat to “obliterate” power stations in Iran if its leaders failed to open the Strait of Hormuz suggests that the United States is willing to violate international humanitarian law as part of its military campaign, according to current and former human rights officials.
“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday.
He later extended the deadline to Friday.
The president’s threat appears to be part of his erratic messaging campaign, which is often construed as bluster or misdirection.
“Trump is openly threatening a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “And people aren’t saying anything because they’re numb to it.”
By threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, Mr. Trump has once again pushed the United States into territory more familiar to its enemies than its allies.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued four arrest warrants to Russian military officers and officials charging them with war crimes for attacking “Ukrainian electric infrastructure.”
International law, specifically Article 52 of the first additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions, prohibits attacks on civilian objects. These laws are meant to protect civilians and those who can no longer fight, such as wounded soldiers, from the “barbarity of war.”
Energy infrastructure such as power grids often has civilian and military uses. In the case of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, prosecutors deemed the strikes a violation of humanitarian law. Despite the charges, Russian forces continued their campaign.
“I see no difference between what Trump is threatening to do in Iran and what the International Criminal Court charged four Russian commanders for doing in Ukraine,” Mr. Roth said.
The court also issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Trump’s close ally, accusing the Israeli military of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Human rights groups say Israel’s actions in the territory constituted genocide.
“What we are seeing from all sides — the United States, Iran and Israel — is a race to the bottom in which threats against civilian infrastructure are becoming normalized,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “This kind of rhetoric doesn’t just escalate tensions irresponsibly, it signals a dangerous willingness to erode the very rules designed to protect civilians in war.”
The U.S. military’s recent history of targeting power infrastructure goes back to the early 1990s, when the American-led air campaign during the Persian Gulf war damaged the Iraqi power grid, water treatment plants and parts of its oil industry.
At the war’s end, most of Iraq’s electricity-generating plants were destroyed. The country, once an urbanized modern society, was set back decades, drawing condemnation from human rights groups.
By 1999, when the United States and NATO started an air war over Yugoslavia to protect civilians in Kosovo from further repression and abuse by Yugoslav forces, the Pentagon had changed its tactics targeting energy infrastructure. U.S. forces dropped a new weapon designed to temporarily shut down power stations without destroying them.
The weapons currently in the Pentagon’s arsenal spread tens of thousands of thin graphite strands over several acres. Released by hundreds of small submunitions the size of a soda can, the strands wreak havoc on unprotected electric wires and transformers. Their effect is designed to be temporary. Power can be restored once the graphite strands are cleared off and damaged electrical components are replaced.
According to a 2009 U.S. Air Force fact file, the devices are called Power Distribution Denial Munitions and can be released from Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs.
In a 2001 report, the RAND Corporation said a cluster bomb version was used in 1999 during attacks on several Yugoslav power distribution centers, “draping enemy high-voltage power lines like tinsel and causing them to short out.”
The munitions were used again in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq, according to a U.S. defense official involved in the current targeting process for the war in Iran.
The U.S. military currently does not have plans to completely destroy Iranian power plants, added the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military matters. But the military could disable the plants if there were a need to do so.
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10) T.S.A. Tipped Off ICE Agents Before Arrests at San Francisco Airport
Transportation Security Administration officials told ICE that a mother and daughter under a detention order had planned to fly domestically, federal documents show.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Heather Knight, Published March 24, 2026, Updated March 25, 2026
Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, D.C., and Heather Knight from San Francisco.
“The documents shed new light on how the Transportation Security Administration is sharing with ICE officials the names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by a judge. That has made it easier for the Trump administration to detain and deport undocumented immigrants as they pass through airports.”
Angelina Lopez-Jimenez and her 9-year-old daughter were detained at the San Francisco International Airport and later deported to Guatemala. Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached.
“Angelina?” he asked.
“Sí,” she responded.
Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter, according to video footage that went viral this week.
Government documents obtained by The New York Times explain the events leading up to the tense scene, including the exchange between the agent and Ms. Lopez-Jimenez.
The documents shed new light on how the Transportation Security Administration is sharing with ICE officials the names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by a judge. That has made it easier for the Trump administration to detain and deport undocumented immigrants as they pass through airports.
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, 41, a native of Guatemala, and her daughter, Wendy Godinez-Lopez, were flagged by T.S.A. officials on Friday when they showed up on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the documents.
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were living in Contra Costa County, Calif., on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the congressman for that region, John Garamendi. She had no criminal history, though she entered the country illegally.
Democratic officials recoiled this week at the detention. Mr. Garamendi, a Democrat, said that it was the latest example of how the Trump administration was rounding up mothers and children instead of focusing its immigration enforcement on dangerous criminals.
He also condemned the sharing of passenger information by T.S.A. with ICE, saying that data sharing seemed to be “omnipresent” under the Trump administration, putting personal information at risk and bypassing due process.
“The real story here is the way in which databases are being used,” he said in an interview. “A mother and her daughter are detained, and within 36 hours, they’re sent to Guatemala.”
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez came onto the U.S. government’s radar during Mr. Trump’s first term, on April 27, 2018, when Border Patrol agents spotted her and her daughter, then a toddler, 14 miles from the point of entry at San Luis, Ariz., according to the federal documents.
The agents determined that she and her daughter were born in Guatemala and were in the United States illegally. They took her to a facility to photograph her and obtain her fingerprints and biographical information. She was given a notice to appear in court for removal proceedings and was released.
She showed up for some appointments, but not others, according to the documents. On May 8, 2019, an immigration judge ordered her to be deported at a hearing she missed.
Nothing further happened in her case. Until Sunday night.
At 9:30 p.m., the two ICE agents, knowing that she had planned to fly to Miami, found her in the terminal concourse. Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was carrying two Guatemalan passports and handed them over at an agent’s request. The information matched the identity of the woman who was ordered to be deported in 2019.
The agents told Ms. Lopez-Jimenez to follow them to the international terminal.
At that point, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez tried to run away, the documents said, and the agents got a hold of her and sat her down.
The agents tried to handcuff her, but she wriggled and cried, and they could cuff only one wrist. A growing crowd watched, some of them recording the scene on their phones and yelling “Shame on you!” at the agents.
San Francisco police officers responded to a 911 call from a bystander and formed a boundary between the crowd and the agents. The agents placed Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, who was refusing to walk, into a wheelchair and wheeled her away, according to the documents.
The encounter was not part of the Trump administration’s effort to use ICE to staff airport security lines while T.S.A. agents are going unpaid because of the government shutdown.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday on social media that Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were “illegal aliens” who had final deportation orders and had resisted arrest.
It is not clear if she knew that she and her daughter were under a deportation order. Representatives and relatives for Ms. Lopez-Jimenez could not be found on Tuesday.
Nancy Tung, who is the chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party and a member of the airport commission, condemned the detention. Ms. Tung, who said she was speaking in her political capacity and not as an airport representative, said it was frightening to her that airports were now among the growing list of everyday places where immigrants could be picked up.
“These are not the violent criminals that the Trump administration talks about,” Ms. Tung said. “It’s just wrong.”
At 10:51 p.m. on Sunday night, after she was wheeled away from the stunned crowd, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was booked into a holding room at the airport. At 7:50 p.m. on Monday, she and her daughter were checked into the McAllen Plaza Hotel and Suites in Texas.
They were checked out at 3 a.m. Tuesday.
Just over five hours later, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were on a flight from Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, bound for Guatemala.
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11) Plan to Disarm Hamas in Gaza Is Detailed at U.N.
A Board of Peace member said the most dangerous weapons would be collected first. He linked compliance with disarmament to reconstruction beginning in the enclave.
By Ephrat Livni, March 24, 2026
Hamas fighters in Gaza City in November. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
As the United States and Israel struck Iran, and as Iranian retaliatory attacks rocked the Middle East, the United Nations Security Council met Tuesday to discuss progress on plans for peace in the Gaza Strip, which were adopted in November amid a fragile truce between Israel and Hamas.
The high representative for Gaza on President Trump’s Board of Peace, Nickolay Mladenov, said that a transitional Palestinian group had been established to govern in the enclave, and he detailed elements of a framework for disarming Hamas and other armed factions in Gaza. He had hinted at the proposal before.
“Serious discussions are underway as we speak,” he said. The plan that the guarantor countries — the United States, Egypt, Turkey and Qatar — had agreed to has been presented to relevant armed groups, Mr. Mladenov said, and it established “the principle of one authority, one law and one weapon.”
It applies to all armed groups, he said, singling out Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their military wings in particular, and will require them to transfer their arms to a transitional governing authority run by Palestinians. The plan would involve collecting the most dangerous weapons first, he said, and monitoring compliance ahead of any reconstruction, and it would allow fighters to return to civilian life.
“The people of Gaza want reconstruction, and reconstruction requires the decommissioning of weapons,” said Mr. Mladenov, calling this link the “driving force” of the framework.
He did not, however, provide a timeline or the status of discussions with relevant groups or for any potential parallel Israeli military withdrawal. “The framework requires space,” he said, asking for time and flexibility.
“The future of Gaza is entirely dependent on Hamas decommissioning its weapons,” said Michael Waltz, the U.S. representative to the U.N., calling on the international community to pressure the group to disarm.
Addressing speakers, like Denmark’s representative, who said progress was not happening fast enough and that Israel was still restricting aid to the enclave, Mr. Waltz said that supplies had increased amid the cease-fire. “Have we made the progress as quickly as some have demanded in their speeches today? No,” he said.
The Palestinian representative to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, endorsed Mr. Trump’s plan, as he has before, and said that Palestinians would continue to work with the international community to ensure it is implemented. But he said that Israel was attempting to annex Palestinian land even as the world condemns such actions.
He lamented Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid and groups in Gaza, the military’s violence, the rise in attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the Israeli government’s settlement expansion plans, plus inflammatory rhetoric and actions from the country’s far-right leaders. Palestinian land is not for sale or up for grabs, Mr. Mansour warned.
At the heart of the Trump peace plan, “were a number of cardinal principles,” Mr. Mansour said, which he called on Israel to respect. “No bloodshed, no starvation, no occupation, no annexation, no forcible displacement.”
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12) In Secret Deportation Deal, U.S. Leveraged Favors and Funds
In Cameroon, the Trump administration found a partner it could pressure into accepting covertly deported migrants.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Pranav Baskar, March 25, 2026
Police officers during a protest against the presidential election results in Douala, Cameroon, in October. Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
The Trump administration this winter secured a secret deal with the government of Cameroon to deport hundreds of migrants after remaining silent about a deadly crackdown against protesters there and withholding $30 million from a local United Nations office, according to officials and U.S. government documents.
The deal is part of a broader Trump administration campaign to coax countries to accept migrants who cannot be legally deported from the United States to their home countries because they would likely face persecution. It is also the clearest example to date of the diplomatic horse-trading the United States uses to engineer such agreements.
The documents obtained by The New York Times include confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo, which connects the money transfer to the Cameroon deportation arrangement. The files, coupled with confirmation from officials, reveal how the U.S. government used financial pressure and political incentives to secure a deal that the deportees’ lawyer compared to “selling people.”
Cameroon has, for more than four decades, been led by a strongman president, Paul Biya. The Trump administration opted not to criticize his disputed re-election in October, and said nothing afterward when security forces waged a deadly crackdown on protesters.
That gave the United States leverage weeks later, diplomats wrote, when it came time to negotiate a deportation deal. The correspondence does not say that the U.S. withheld criticism in exchange for taking the migrants, but diplomats made clear that they believed the silence would play to their advantage in negotiations.
To mount further pressure, the U.S. government withheld a $30 million disbursement to the Cameroon office of the U.N. refugee agency until Mr. Biya’s administration agreed to the deportation deal, according to a senior Cameroonian official. He, like other Cameroonians and Americans briefed on the arrangement, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Through arrangements made with other governments, the United States has deported hundreds of people to at least 25 third countries with which they have no ties, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is “actively pressing” dozens more.
The State Department’s communication shows that U.S. officials seized a moment when Mr. Biya, was particularly isolated. In November, a team of American negotiators traveled to Cameroon to complete the deportation deal, as Mr. Biya, 93, faced international condemnation for his post-election protest crackdown.
Then on Jan. 12, two days before the first flight carrying deportees left Louisiana bound for Cameroon, the State Department announced a $30 million payment to the United Nations’ refugee program in Cameroon. According to the funding memo obtained by The Times, the payment was made in support of the deportation agreement between the two countries.
The Cameroonian official said Cameroon was initially against the agreement and likened it to “blackmail.” The government later came around, he said, reasoning that the deal might eventually encourage the United States to repatriate Cameroonian dissidents and separatists who had fled to America.
A U.S. official described the payment as part of an emerging Trump administration pattern of withholding money for country-specific United Nations programs as leverage in deportation deals.
For now, most of the deportees are being held in limbo at a state-run detention facility in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. But behind closed doors, officials there have made it clear that the migrants would be sent back to their home countries.
“You are going to go back to your country,” an official of Cameroon’s foreign office told the deportees this month, according to a video recording obtained by The New York Times. “The new U.S. government has a policy,” he added, “and they will do everything to deliver on that.”
At least 17 migrants, accused of entering the United States illegally, have so far been deported to Cameroon since January as part of the deal. None of them is a citizen of Cameroon. The U.S. courts granted almost all of them protections intended to prevent the Trump administration from repatriating them to their home countries.
Among them are people who sought refuge in the United States because they were fleeing war or imprisonment for their political beliefs, or persecution because of their sexuality.
In interviews, deportees said they were placed on Department of Homeland Security flights in handcuffs and shackles. Many were unaware of where they were being taken. The Times interviewed five of the migrants after their deportations to Cameroon. They described feeling traumatized and afraid, stuck between seemingly endless detention and the possibility of being returned to danger in their home countries. Two of them called the deal dehumanizing, saying it amounted to an exchange of money for human lives.
All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
The State Department said it would not comment on the content of confidential communication or on how the payment to the United Nations was connected to the deportation agreement.
But in the public statement announcing the $30 million payment, the department said it had given the money to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ office in Cameroon to “facilitate the voluntary return of refugees” and “combat illegal immigration.”
A separate U.N. body, the International Organization for Migration, which facilitates migration pathways for displaced people, said it had referred some of the migrants now in Cameroon to the UNHCR to apply for asylum.
But a spokesman for UNHCR said the $30 million had not been earmarked to help the deportees apply for asylum or be resettled. And the Cameroonian foreign office representative flatly told the group, “You are not refugees, you cannot seek refugee status in Cameroon.”
When presented with The Times’s findings, the UNHCR spokesman, Chris Melzer, said the organization had not been told that the State Department payment was made in support of the deportation deal. The funding, he said, was typical of the amount the office receives from the United States on an annual basis.
Mr. Melzer said Cameroon was facing its own migration problems. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Central African Republic need resettlement in eastern Cameroon, according to the United Nations, and tens of thousands of Nigerian refugees crowd camps in the country’s far north.
It was unclear whether Cameroon received any money directly in exchange for accepting the deportees. The U.S. government has paid $32 million directly to countries in other third-party deportation deals, according to a recent investigation by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
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13) ‘The First Losers in All of This Were Women’
By Meher Ahmad, March 25, 2026
Ms. Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
Oprah Winfrey with a woman covered in a burqa at a 2001 event in New York. Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
A documentary called “Beneath the Veil,” filmed and released just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, was played seemingly on loop on CNN after them. The film, which documented the harrowing conditions of Afghan women during the first Taliban regime, drew in five and a half million viewers and helped fuel a frenzy of concern for Afghan women, a concern that conveniently materialized soon after the Taliban became — at least for a while — America’s No. 1 enemy.
This concern manifested itself in a way that transformed the Muslim veil itself into a totem of repression. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat who represented one of New York’s fanciest congressional districts, wore a blue burqa on the House floor to deliver a speech justifying the invasion of Afghanistan. “We are at war with the Taliban strictly because they are harboring Osama bin Laden,” she said, but then went on: “The women in Afghanistan who are fighting for freedom should know that they are not fighting in vain. The women in Congress, the women across this country, are standing with them.”
This sentiment has seeped into American foreign policy toward the Middle East on both sides of the aisle. From Laura Bush declaring the war on terror a “fight for the rights and dignity of women” to Hillary Clinton justifying the invasion of Afghanistan as a means of bettering Afghan women’s lives, these statements gave a sheen of morality to wars that have killed close to a million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, many of them women and girls.
In Afghanistan, alongside the spectacular violence and the suffering that came with it, there were hard-won gains made during the American occupation. Girls’ primary school enrollment went from almost zero during the first Taliban regime to 2.5 million in 2018. Literacy among women nearly doubled during the nearly 20 years American troops were in the country. Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech executive who grew up under the first Taliban regime, told me, “For us, it was the golden era.” Ms. Mahboob, who benefited from the NGOs and missions that helped educate Afghan women, said that the contrast with the Taliban regime was night and day: “We had freedom of speech. We had human rights.”
“I mean, there were challenges; I’m not saying everything was perfect,” Ms. Mahboob said. “But it was much better.”
That progress was hardly uniform. Where war raged, women suffered. And by the time the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, the rights of Afghan women had been erased almost entirely. “It was personal,” said Ms. Mahboob, who has since left Afghanistan. “It felt like watching 20 years of hope collapse in a single day.”
I was hard-pressed to find American politicians as concerned with Afghan women’s rights that summer as they were after Sept. 11, despite the platitudes coming from President Joe Biden and his administration. The United States offered asylum to a limited number of Afghans in the wake of its retreat from the country; millions of Afghan women and girls have been left to try to uphold their rights without any of the institutional backing America and its allies once provided.
Ms. Mahboob says the lesson in Afghanistan is not whether U.S. intervention is better or worse than no intervention at all, but that intervention must come with long-term institution building — exactly the kind of nation building President Trump and his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, forswear. “We were totally relying on the international community,” Ms. Mahboob said. “We took for granted our freedoms.”
The story in Iraq is somewhat different. Saddam Hussein was a secular enemy of the United States rather than an Islamist one, but the focus on the regime’s repression of women was part and parcel of President George W. Bush’s campaign justifying the war. “Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed,” Mr. Bush said at a White House event in 2004. At the same event, he hailed the war on terror as a liberation of the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, vowing to continue so that they could claim “their rightful place in societies that were once incredibly oppressive and closed.” He did not mention the rape and torture of female prisoners at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison, which began in 2003.
The final decade of Saddam Hussein’s regime ushered in significant backsliding for women. Before the 1991 war, Iraqi women had freedoms that were codified much sooner than many neighboring countries in the Middle East. After it, many of those eroded as Hussein coalesced his power by making alliances with more religious forces in the country.
But what came after the American invasion has undoubtedly damaged the fate of Iraqi women. Ms. Mohammed, the Iraqi activist, described post-occupation Iraq in an interview on the American news program “Democracy Now” in 2003: “The story that does not reach this part of the world is how the women are treated in postwar Iraq, what happened to us, how our destinies were totally devastated by this war,” she said. “What is told to everybody is that we got rid of a bloody dictator, which is a true story. But the part that nobody knows is that we did have sort of a secure life.”
“The steps backward cannot be counted,” Ms. Mohammed told The Times in a 2015 interview. “There were too many.” Ms. Mohammed is one of many Iraqi women who have been killed in recent years, some of whom worked not as women’s rights’ advocates, but as influencers and salon owners. What they had in common was that they dared to be a part of public life.
War is bad for all living creatures, but it is especially bad for women. According to Oxfam, one in five women displaced by war suffer sexual violence. In wartime, their education is the first to stop. More than 60 percent of preventable maternal deaths happen to women living through displacement and conflict.
Yet we find ourselves, more than 20 years from the start of the war on terror, once again falling prey to the idea that bombing can liberate women in still another majority-Muslim country. The belief remains persistent because of deep-rooted misconceptions of Muslims: Western feminism is unable to square that women who wear the veil could be empowered and have rights, but it’s also that the Western imagination — or Western policymakers anyway — is incapable of recognizing the depth and variety of Muslim life.
In my years reporting and living in majority-Muslim countries, some of the most vocal women I encountered wore the veil. Often, a veil is what allows them to be in a public position in the first place, the midway point for societies in the midst of social change. And some of the most secular Muslim women I know — myself included — fiercely defend their right to wear one. It’s not just an on-off switch; there are so many ways to be a Muslim woman. But these imagined ideas of what freedom for a Muslim woman must look like ignore that reality.
This mapping of Western stereotypes onto how Muslim women do or don’t dress won’t go away any time soon, but in moments when it’s used to justify the frightening might of the American military and its allies, it becomes particularly dangerous.
That’s why this moment in Iran feels so pressing. The enforcement of public veiling was one of the strongest symbols of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s grip on the country. It’s part of the reason that the tired meme trotted out by Senator Tuberville — look at Iranian women before the revolution! — remains relevant. I visited Iran in 2015 to film a documentary shortly after President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal was put in place. It was an optimistic time in the country, one that’s heartbreaking to look back on now. I still remember my veil slipping in the streets of Tehran and someone rushing to alert me, not out of anger that my head was uncovered, but concern for the trouble I could face from the religious police.
That reality has changed. After Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman who was accused of wearing her mandatory hijab improperly, died after being taken into custody by morality police, the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement in 2022-23 brought hard-fought material changes to the lives of Iranian women. The streets of Iranian cities filled with women who didn’t cover their hair, arguably the most tangible and pervasive challenge to the Islamic Republic’s regime in its 47-year history. It came at the costs of hundreds of protesters killed and countless more arrested and tortured in Iranian prisons. But it’s a change Iranian women made themselves, from within Iran.
There are two images from the peak of those protests that stick in my mind: One is of a woman standing on a car, burning her hijab at the end of a stick; another is of a group of schoolgirls with their veils off, faces turned away from the camera, lifting up their middle fingers to the photos of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, hanging in their classrooms. They stay with me because they depict Iranian women taking their fate into their own hands. They didn’t need Oprah or an Israeli fighter pilot to remove their veils for them.
Co-opting their arduous struggles in support of a campaign of bombing that has already killed more than 1,300 Iranians flies in the face of what women’s liberation actually looks like. Freedom for Muslim women is fought the way it is for women everywhere: in moments of immense societal upheaval, but also in the every day, in the small, slow interactions that add up to progress the world over. There’s nothing about war that supports that kind of change.
As the bombs continue to fall, the words of Ms. Mohammed, the Iraqi activist — and her fate — haunt me: “The first losers in all of this,” she once said, “were women.”
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14) It’s Not Trump. It’s America.
By Lydia Polgreen, March 26, 2026
Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
Like a lot of other Americans, I’ve oscillated in these dark times between two emotional poles. At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. The story doesn’t stop state violence in the streets or illegal military operations abroad. Yet it has its comforts. Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.
On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him. This explanation offers its own consolation. At least it is something a rational mind can grasp.
This oscillation can feel a bit like whiplash. Trump’s loss in 2020, interventions by the courts to block some of his most brazen moves and the prospect of a Democratic romp in the midterm elections sustain the aberration theory. But other developments — Trump’s popular-vote triumph in 2024, the near total submission of the Republican Party to his will and the Supreme Court’s grant of sweeping immunity to Trump for potentially criminal acts committed as president — suggest the opposite.
The war in Iran has shattered this binary. It is, to be sure, the product of Trump’s unique recklessness, as he plunges heedlessly into a conflict his predecessors had been wise to avoid. Yet it is also the logical terminus of decades of American history — the country’s addiction to technological wizardry to wage war at a distance, the blinkered belief that it could shape events in faraway places by force, the steady whittling away of constitutional limits on the presidency.
Is Trump a freak of history or its fulfillment, an aberration or a culmination? The answer, surely, is both. But in the course of his presidency, Trump has revealed a much older malady: America’s unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one. Beyond Trump, it’s this disfiguring mentality we Americans must face.
In December 1952, a Scottish scholar named Denis Brogan published a remarkable essay titled “The Illusion of American Omnipotence.” Writing as the United States was emerging as the world’s pre-eminent power, Brogan diagnosed a peculiar feature of the American mind. The United States, fueled by its myths and unswervingly certain of its vision for the world, could not see difficulty, much less defeat, as a reason to question its aims. Failure was never brought about through the strength or power of rivals. It came, instead, through blunder and betrayal.
“Very many Americans, it seems to me, find it inconceivable that an American policy, announced and carried out by the American government, acting with the support of the American people, does not immediately succeed,” Brogan wrote. “If it does not, this, they feel, must be because of stupidity or treason.” An admiring but canny observer of the country, Brogan captured something essential. America, in its own imagination, could never fail; it could only be failed.
In its struggle against global communism though the Cold War, the country had ample opportunity to show off the reflex. When China’s insurgent communists triumphed, Brogan wrote, it was widely understood as a result of American bungling or treachery. China, a vast and ancient civilization, was seen as something for America to win or lose. That failure helped give rise to the paranoia of McCarthyism. Korea, Vietnam and more covert disasters were further tinder to recrimination, long after the senator had gone. Failure could come only from internal betrayal, an idea that paradoxically bolstered the illusion of omnipotence.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, America had the chance to experience the full weight of its might. It had defeated the evil empire and stood alone as the most powerful nation the world had ever known, its former failings folded into a story of success. America’s swift and decisive victory in the gulf war that year was a showcase of the superpower’s military prowess. The United States would become the world’s policeman, putting its soldiers on the line to protect a rules-based order it led.
Yet it didn’t take long for the old pattern of failure followed by recrimination to re-emerge. America persuaded a rapidly growing China to further liberalize its economy, confident that it would become something more like America — an open and free society. When this gambit produced the China shock, hollowing out American manufacturing as China grew richer, more powerful and more autocratic, Americans would cry betrayal by their political leaders. China and its leaders hardly featured in the narrative.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001, shattering the fiction of American invulnerability to attack. There was plenty of blame to go around. Yet George W. Bush transformed the grievous wound into extraordinary power. He took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq with an absurd plan to turn them into liberal democracies. His administration argued that in Iraq, a country with no role in the attack on America, the crisis was so urgent that the constitutionally mandated role of Congress in declaring war could be abandoned. After Sept. 11, constraints on presidential power themselves were identified as potential betrayers and stripped away.
It didn’t work, of course. The wars dragged on, killing thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. Afghanistan today is ruled by the same movement that sheltered Osama bin Laden, the Taliban. Iraq is an exceedingly fragile and divided nation. The war gravely destabilized the Middle East, giving rise to fearsome new terrorist groups like the Islamic State and setting off a bloody civil war in Syria.
The election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a critic of the post-9/11 wars, seemed to be a moment of reckoning with American illusions. But Obama was soon bogged down by the conflicts and a global financial crisis to boot. Notwithstanding his feints toward American humility in the world, he embraced many of the outsize powers he inherited to make high-tech war in distant places with little oversight. America continued to act unbounded.
Striding onto the national stage in the aftermath of these disasters, Trump tapped into an old American story. America’s elites had betrayed the American people, he declared. Trump’s whole life was a dress rehearsal for this moment: constantly imposing his will, wriggling out of scrapes, never held accountable, born on third base and thinking he’d hit a triple. He was the American illusion of omnipotence incarnate.
Trump collapsed the distance between his personal will and American will, declaring as he accepted the Republican nomination in 2016 that “I alone can fix it.” Like America, Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed. Everything is always someone else’s fault. Handed the tools of the imperial presidency, he clearly regards America as identical with his person. He jettisons all pretense of constitutional order. He will know in his gut when wars are won, he’s said, and the only limits are his own sense of morality.
In the Persian Gulf, that illusion has come face to face with material reality. Trump’s hope of a rapid collapse of the Iranian regime was always fantastical. Geography is having its revenge: The oil and gas that power so much of the global economy pass through a narrow strait that Iran effectively controls. A ground invasion on its vast and forbidding terrain could far exceed the Vietnam quagmire. The Iranian regime, ruthless to its neighbors and its own people alike, appears unshaken by Israel and America’s relentless assaults. It seems dug in for a long war.
Yet Trump seems unable to conceive of a force immune to America’s omnipotent might. And he cannot imagine that a distant war could possibly harm America, blessed with bountiful land and natural resources, separated from the troubled world by two oceans. But soaring gas prices, rising interest rates and the prospect of a stock market collapse have put paid to any delusions of splendid isolation from the global economy. If this war grinds on, Americans will suffer greatly.
There has been plenty of suffering already: More than 58,000 names are etched onto the black granite of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington. As yet, there is no national memorial for the so-called forever wars, but over 7,000 Americans died serving in them. In those wars, there was at least a veneer of American idealism, as thin and self-deceiving as it may have been. Trump has dragged America into a war completely unmoored from any pretense to virtue. It is a naked exercise of power with no cloak of providence or moral superiority. In its brazenness, it is almost bracing.
Writing at the same time as Brogan, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr published a short book called “The Irony of American History.” A favorite of Obama’s, it is a call to Christian humility in world affairs, addressed to Americans who misunderstand their virtue. “Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature,” Niebuhr writes.
That line made me realize the folly of my own oscillation: Both views — Trump as aberration or Trump as history’s fulfillment — had America as the protagonist of its own story, with the world as a stage. I needed a wider frame, an honest engagement with history and a willingness to admit that America is, like any other nation, just one place in the world.
America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control. Since its inception, America has assured itself it was simply too big, too far away and too richly endowed to suffer any serious consequences for its actions. But there will be no escaping the cataclysm in Iran. In its wake, there is a chance to recognize our place in an interconnected world and see ourselves clearly. The way out of the cycle of failure and betrayal is to shed our illusions, once and for all.
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15) It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price.
By Stuart A. Reid, March 26, 2026
Mr. Reid is the author of “The Lumumba Plot.”
Patrice Lumumba in Léopoldville (today Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) after his arrest in December 1960. Bettmann/Getty Images
A Brussels court this month ordered Étienne Davignon, a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat, to stand trial for war crimes related to the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of Congo. Human rights groups cheered. The Lumumba family called it “the beginning of a reckoning that history has long demanded.” After decades of equivocation, Belgium finally seemed willing to confront its colonial past.
If only it were so simple.
The desire for accountability is entirely legitimate. Mr. Lumumba’s overthrow and assassination was one of the Cold War’s great crimes — a conspiracy involving White House officials, C.I.A. spooks, U.N. diplomats, Congolese separatists, and, yes, Belgian envoys. It cut short the life of a young and charismatic leader, installed a kleptocratic dictator in his place and set what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo on a ruinous path from which it has never entirely recovered.
No one apart from the Congolese people has ever paid a price. Neither the United States nor the United Nations has formally apologized. In 2002, Belgium’s foreign minister expressed “profound and sincere regrets” for Mr. Lumumba’s death, but hedged by pinning blame on “some members of the government, and some Belgian actors at the time.” A 2020 letter from Belgium’s king to Congo’s president about the early colonial period, when his great-great-granduncle King Leopold II ran an ivory- and rubber-producing slave state, merely observed that “acts of violence and cruelty were committed.”
The Belgian court’s decision is a poor substitute for a true reckoning. The accused nonagenarian, Mr. Davignon, was a bit player in the events. He is the sole survivor among a list of a dozen or so Belgian officials whom the Lumumba family alleges bore responsibility for Mr. Lumumba’s death.
The legacy of Mr. Lumumba’s assassination is weighty and enduring. Early meddling distorted Congo’s politics, and in the 65 years since Mr. Lumumba’s killing, his country has been ruled by corrupt, unresponsive leaders of various stripes, often with the backing of foreign patrons. The vast majority of Congo’s population lives on less than $3 a day. Outside powers still treat it as little more than a source of violence and misery — and minerals, in which Congo is extraordinarily wealthy.
Mr. Lumumba’s death was the culmination of a coordinated, largely foreign effort to remove him from power. An uncompromising nationalist whose party won Congo’s first free democratic elections, he became prime minister of the newly independent country in June 1960. Within weeks, an army mutiny and the Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga plunged Congo into crisis.
The Eisenhower administration, worried that Mr. Lumumba was aligning with the Soviet Union, authorized a C.I.A. scheme to assassinate the prime minister. A C.I.A. chemist flew to Congo with poison, but the plot was never carried out — in part because by then, a different scheme was in motion.
On Sept. 5, 1960, President Joseph Kasavubu, Mr. Lumumba’s chief rival, announced that he had dismissed Mr. Lumumba. Nine days later, Col. Joseph Mobutu, the country’s 29-year-old army chief, seized power in a C.I.A.-backed coup, marking the beginning of decades of misrule.
Mr. Lumumba was eventually detained at a military camp outside the capital, Léopoldville. But by the end of 1960, his supporters in the country’s east were amassing power, and the incoming Kennedy administration seemed poised to shift toward a less hard-line U.S. policy that might involve a deal restoring his government. Among Mr. Lumumba’s opponents, a search was underway for a more permanent solution that could offer some plausible deniability.
As Colonel Mobutu’s cabal developed plans to send Mr. Lumumba somewhere it was certain he would be killed, the C.I.A. station chief effectively gave a green light. Belgian officials lobbied Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway province of Katanga and a sworn enemy of Mr. Lumumba, to accept the prisoner. On Jan. 17, 1961, Colonel Mobutu’s security chief arranged for Mr. Lumumba to be transferred from military detention and flown to Katanga. That evening, after hours of torture, he was executed by a firing squad of Congolese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers. His body was later dissolved in a barrel of sulfuric acid.
Mr. Davignon’s role in this atrocity was, by all accounts, limited, and he has denied the charges against him. In the summer of 1960, he was a 27-year-old trainee diplomat at the Belgian Embassy in Léopoldville, junior in rank but with direct access to Congolese political leaders.
Like his superiors, Mr. Davignon apparently considered Mr. Lumumba an erratic, hostile leader and worked to remove him from power. He and a Foreign Ministry colleague were tasked with providing the legal pretexts the president would use to dismiss Mr. Lumumba. In a cable to Brussels, they explicitly referred to their goal as the “overthrow of the government according to our wishes.” After that had been accomplished, Mr. Davignon lamented that Mr. Lumumba had “not yet been neutralized.”
As Mr. Lumumba languished in prison, Mr. Davignon was back in Brussels. By then, he was a valued member of “the Congo cell” at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, helping to draft the foreign minister’s correspondence on the crisis. The record shows that Mr. Davignon knew that Mr. Lumumba was being transferred somewhere he would surely be killed. If there is evidence that Mr. Davignon’s role went beyond this, it has not appeared in the extensive public records now available.
That’s not to say that Mr. Davignon bears no responsibility. He was, at the very least, a cog in a machine that helped topple an elected prime minister and send him to his death — or, as Mr. Lumumba’s family put it, “one of the links in the chain.”
But an ordinary criminal court in Brussels is an awkward vehicle for delivering restorative justice of this scale. The Congolese people will gain little from prosecuting a man who drafted cables.
What would actual atonement look like? For Belgium, it would entail a forthright apology and an admission of institutional responsibility. For the United States, it could mean the same, as well as investing in Congo’s governance, its institutions and its people, instead of merely racing to secure its cobalt. In other words, Washington could treat Congo as a nation with aspirations of its own rather than a mine to be managed.
The U.S. government could also open up the Congo files. Sixty-five years on, C.I.A. documents about the agency’s role in Mr. Lumumba’s demise are still studded with redactions related to bribes, collaborators and other important information.
Mr. Lumumba’s daughter Juliana once told me that she is often asked, after Belgium’s various quasi-apologies, what more she wants. Her answer: “We want the truth.”
I was unaware of this part of our history. How much we have to atone for. History must be spotlighted whether we are the hero or the villain. The Lumumba family deserves the truth they are asking for.
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16) U.S. Military Kills 4 People in Boat Strike in Caribbean
At least 163 people have been killed in the Trump administration’s campaign against suspected drug smuggling.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, March 26, 2026
The Pentagon said it blew up a boat in the Caribbean on Wednesday, the 47th such attack since the campaign started in early September. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Pentagon said it blew up a boat in the Caribbean Sea on Wednesday, killing four people. The strike raised the death toll in the Trump administration’s campaign against people it accuses of smuggling drugs at sea to at least 163 people.
The U.S. military’s Southern Command announced the strike on social media with a 15-second video clip that showed a stationary boat floating in the water and then suddenly exploding.
Legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts. The Trump administration has not provided evidence of drug smuggling.
Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean from its headquarters near Miami, cited unspecified intelligence in its announcement. It said the boat had been traveling on “known narco-trafficking routes” and was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The attack, the 47th since the U.S. campaign against boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific started in early September, continued a recent increase in the pace of strikes.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, acknowledged last week that the U.S. strikes “aren’t the answer” to the nation’s drug problem.
In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Donovan said the strikes had forced narco-terrorist groups in the region to change their operational patterns but were not a long-term solution.
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17) Olympic Committee Announces a Broad Ban of Transgender Athletes in Women’s Events
Kirsty Coventry, the first woman to lead the International Olympic Committee, has frequently spoken about what she says is the need to protect women’s competitions at the Olympic Games.
By Tariq Panja, March 26, 2026
Kirsty Coventry, president of the International Olympic Committee and a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe. Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
The International Olympic Committee banned transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category at the Olympics, after telling its members to conduct mandatory genetic testing for women’s competitions.
The decision, the most consequential since Kirsty Coventry was elected last year as the first woman to serve as president of the I.O.C., followed a board meeting and months of speculation over the organization’s policy on one of the most contentious issues facing global sports. The rules will be applicable from the next Olympics, in Los Angeles in 2028.
As Ms. Coventry, a decorated Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe, campaigned to lead the organization, she frequently said how important it was to protect the women’s category amid broader — and often bitter — debates about the participation of transgender athletes in sporting competitions.
Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.
The I.O.C. consulted a number of experts as it grappled with how to handle an issue that was becoming a growing concern for sports leaders. Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
Until now, the I.O.C.’s guidance had permitted transgender women to compete with reduced testosterone levels, but left the final decision to individual sports federations. Track and field, swimming, boxing, and rugby generally restrict transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category.
Women’s sports have been a critical front in a polarizing and public debate over transgender issues that was further inflamed last year when President Trump signed an executive order prohibiting transgender athletes from competing in women’s college sports.
Track and field became the first major sport to introduce mandatory DNA sex testing for athletes entering women’s competitions last March. That came less than a year after the issue of eligibility erupted at the Paris Olympics in 2024, when the boxing competition was upended by ugly scenes inside and outside the ring over the participation of two women who went on to secure gold medals.
The I.O.C.’s announcement comes just days after boxing officials cleared featherweight champion Lin Yu-ting to return to the sport after her status — along with that of Algeria’s Imane Khelif, the other woman at center of the gender storm in Paris — had been put in doubt. Lin, 30, can now compete at the Asian Boxing Championships this weekend, her first international event since the Paris Olympics.
The I.O.C. ruling eliminates from women’s competition a minority of athletes who do not have the typical female XX sex chromosomes, and have one of several conditions that together are known as differences in sex development, or DSD. Such people can be female to outward appearances, and some do not know they have DSD. But their unusual genetics can result in high levels of testosterone, and possibly greater muscular development, giving them some of the athletic advantage that men have.
Track and field has been at the forefront of the debate since the South African runner Caster Semenya exploded into the public consciousness by winning gold in the 800 meters at a world championships in 2009. Her victory prompted a backlash from rivals who complained about Ms. Semenya’s appearance, leading to the governing body at the time ordering sex tests. At issue was a rare trait giving her naturally elevated levels of testosterone.
Ms. Semenya has for years battled against previous rules demanding she and others reduce their testosterone, losing a challenge at sport’s top court in 2019. She was among nine African athletes to sign a letter sent to the I.O.C president, Ms. Coventry, in which they detailed “cruel and degrading treatment” they faced due to eligibility regulations for women with sex variations, describing invasive examinations, forced surgeries and harmful hormone treatment that have led, they say, to physical and emotional trauma and come at significant financial cost.
“I have carried this weight. So have other women of color who deserved better from sport,” Ms. Semenya said in a statement to The New York Times. “Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress — it is walking backward,” she said, adding, “This is just exclusion with a new name.”
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18) ‘Lethality’ Used to Be a Pentagon Buzzword. Now It’s a Worldview.
By Nitsuh Abebe, March 26, 2026
“Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, dropped that memorable rhyme last fall, just weeks before an address to military leadership that invoked lethality seven times. The White House celebrates “the most lethal military on Earth.” The Heritage Foundation crows about “a military focused on lethality.” One office within the Pentagon recently tweeted the following extremely online self-description: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”
Lethality has been a defense-policy buzzword for nearly a decade, but lately it has swelled into a rhetorical fixation. “It’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone.” That’s not some concerned officer’s assessment of today’s Pentagon; it’s Hegseth himself, in 2024, declaring his priorities for a military he believed had allowed itself to “go woke.” He aimed to eliminate any distraction from, or impediment to, the core task of killing people America wants dead and destroying stuff America wants destroyed, whether those obstacles were legal, ethical, strategic or just superficial culture-war fixations. No programs to minimize civilian deaths. No “stupid rules of engagement” that tie soldiers’ hands. No “fat troops” or “beardos” or ships named after Harvey Milk or Harriet Tubman. “Maximum lethality,” he once wrote. “Anything else is [expletive].”
That’s from “The War on Warriors,” a 2024 book about how the “tough, manly and unapologetically lethal” armed forces are beleaguered by “beta-male” “candy-asses” and “micromanaging dilettantes” — people who ensure that “modern warfighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys” and “will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything.” In a chapter whose title might bother readers of a language column on multiple levels (“More Lethality, Less Lawyers”), he describes telling his command in Iraq to ignore the rules of engagement laid out by a judge advocate general. “Our job is to kill the enemy,” he writes elsewhere — “and when we get rid of the [expletive] consuming our military right now, we are the best in the world.”
Lethality was not always quite this pungent. It took off in 2017, when James Mattis became secretary of defense. He sought to put the military on a war footing: less counterterrorism and anti-insurgency work, more preparation for world-historic conflict with powers like China. (The goal, I was told by Jeff Schogol, a journalist at the military news outlet Task & Purpose, was combat readiness for “the kind of war that the U.S. has not fought since World War II.”) Lethality was the watchword for this effort. Its precise meaning went undefined, despite wonkish debate and stabs at quantitative metrics, but it was added to the department’s mission statement and took pride of place its 2018 strategy summary.
From there, it was “like bunnies reproducing on PowerPoints,” one expert told Schogol that year. Everything had to be pitched as satisfying senior leadership’s latest priority, from Air Force meals (“the right nutrition to increase lethality”) to remote-control dog doors (“adds lethality for K9 unit”). Navy grooming rules on ponytails and dreadlocks were described as creating “an inclusive team that is focused on being more lethal to our competitors, more lethal to our rivals, our enemies, and much more inclusive.” Even the day-old bread of an inclusion policy could be stuffed full of the hot new thing — meaty, cheesy lethality.
Every era has its defense jargon. Often it’s rife with euphemism, designed to make unpalatable, controversial or legally murky events seem dry and juridical — from “friendly fire” to “enhanced interrogation” (torture) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping). Some stretch across eras and uses. “Kinetic strikes” once referred to kinetic weapons, but it grew into a tech-y catchall for any direct physical engagement: Donald Rumsfeld used it as part of his professorial guru-of-war vibe, while Obama aides seemed to deploy it to make foreign interventions sound surgical and low-touch. (Libya, 2011: “Not a war,” just a “kinetic military action.”) Hegseth, too, will adopt this language, announcing something like a “lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel” in the Caribbean.
Lethality is different. It’s blunt instead of vague, brash instead of evasive, bold instead of cautious. For some, the machismo can gradually wear away and leave the word sounding almost boyish. The Pentagon that peppers its communications with “lethality” is led by an official who says he wants the “biggest, most badass military on the planet.” “Video games are definitely not combat,” Hegseth once wrote — yet the department pumps out attitude-heavy meme videos in which images of missiles striking Iran mingle with clips from “John Wick” films and Call of Duty games. Lethality begins to operate in an action-blockbuster, Mountain-Dew-Code-Red sort of register.
All that certainly makes it feel like the opposite of a euphemism, at least the first hundred times you hear it. But it’s possible it obfuscates almost as much as the old jargon. Inside the Pentagon, it’s a policy aim. Outside, it seems to promise simplicity: We will “unleash American power, not shackle it.” The military will focus on its core utility of killing and destroying, unhampered by lawyerly scolding — or by the kinds of strategic conundrums that frustrated its years in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was unclear who, if anyone, should be fought or killed, in what numbers, to achieve the desired outcomes. The job, supposedly, is narrower than that now: lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone.
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19) Immigration Slowdown Hits Every Metro Area in the U.S., Census Shows
Large urban counties and the border were the most affected. And in three-quarters of U.S. counties, population growth either slowed or turned negative.
By Jeff Adelson and Amy Qin, March 26, 2026
The population of Los Angeles County, the country’s most populous, declined by nearly 54,000. Credit...IMAGO/Zoonar, via Reuters
In the Laredo metro area, on the Texas border, immigration screeched to a virtual standstill.
El Centro, a metro that has historically served as a desert gateway into California, lost more people to other countries than it gained.
In Denver and its suburbs, the net immigration rate fell by almost three-quarters. In the Chicago area, it was slashed by nearly two-thirds.
Every metro area in the United States, in fact, experienced lower immigration rates during the year leading up to July 2025 compared with the previous year, according to new estimates released on Thursday by the Census Bureau.
In about 75 percent of all counties, overall population growth — including immigration, domestic migration, births and deaths — either slowed or turned negative. Only 25 percent grew faster.
And large urban counties and border counties, which had experienced a surge in new arrivals in recent years, were among the hardest-hit parts of the country.
The new census estimates offer the most detailed picture yet of the demographic impacts from the immigration restrictions that started late in the Biden administration and have ramped up during the Trump presidency. The previous year brought record levels of immigration.
The census attempts to account for both legal and illegal immigration, as well as deportations and voluntary departures.
The numbers also captured the continuing effect of declining birthrates, as deaths outnumbered births in about two-thirds of U.S. counties. It is a sign that many communities are still struggling to keep their population levels up, even as the impact of Covid-related deaths has waned.
The nation’s overall population still increased last year by 1.8 million people, but the combination of low birthrates and dramatically slowing immigration led to one of the slowest growth rates in U.S. history.
The U.S. census numbers are a measure of the country’s demographic health, and take account of births and deaths as well as immigration, emigration and deportation. The country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals and health care for older residents. Growth that is too rapid can also present problems, straining resources and pushing up the cost of housing.
Some of the strongest population gains came in suburban counties, especially in the South, which continued to grow rapidly as they attracted people from other parts of the country.
About 18,000 people moved into Pasco County, Fla., a suburban community about 30 miles outside Tampa, enough to increase its population by nearly 2.8 percent.
But for counties along the Mexican border, things looked quite different. In contrast to years when they experienced a surge in immigration, total populations in more than half of these counties dipped in the new estimates.
In Webb County, Texas, which includes Laredo, net international migration dropped by about 95 percent. It gained fewer than 700 people total in the new estimates.
San Diego County in California lost about 5,300 people. Net international migration fell to about 6,100, from about 18,000 in the previous year.
In big metro areas, which have long sustained themselves through immigration, population growth also slowed or declined outright.
Los Angeles, the country’s most populous county, experienced a loss of nearly 54,000 residents. In Miami-Dade County, the population shrank by more than 10,000 people, after growing by over 64,000 residents the year before. New York City also experienced a decline of about 12,200.
Some of those counties lost residents to other parts of the United States, a trend that has been ongoing for years. But immigration was a major driver of the decline. Net international migration across all those urban counties fell to about 932,000 from about two million.
Those new immigrants often required a lot of resources and assistance, said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a research center in Washington. “So some cities,” she added, “might be relieved to have a pause in those people who need initial assistance.”
But, she cautioned, if immigration remains low for too long, it could lead to problems maintaining a population and a work force.
The decline in immigration is expected to continue as the Trump administration moves forward with its efforts to bring down levels of illegal immigration and narrow pathways for legal immigration.
That could spell further trouble for big cities that were already grappling with a steady outflow of residents to the suburbs and rural areas, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. These cities would no longer have immigrants to act as a “demographic cushion” of sorts, he said.
Lower immigration levels would also throw into stark relief America’s growing demographic crisis. Birthrates are falling, and the oldest baby boomers are entering their 80s. If that trend continues, deaths would outpace births, and without immigration, the national population would naturally decline.
Rural counties, which tend to have older populations, recorded nearly 100,000 more deaths than births in the new census estimates. That’s in contrast to nearly all major urban counties, where the number of births has kept the population growing.
Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said that normally, the main driver of population growth is people having children. But the decline in birthrate has shown few signs of reversing course.
“Now, it’s immigration fueling much more of the gain,” he said. “So any change in immigration has a huge impact on demographic trends.”
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20) Cuban Patients Are Dying Because of U.S. Blockade, Doctors Say
Cuban health care was once the pride of the island. Now the U.S. oil blockade is upending even basic medical care.
By Ed Augustin and Jack Nicas, Photographs by Jorge Luis Baños, March 26, 2026
Ed Augustin and Jorge Luis Baños reported from Havana.
Liagny Acosta holding her 2-week-old baby, Aíran, who is hospitalized for a respiratory illness in Havana. Cuban medical workers are triaging patients because of an energy crisis caused by the U.S. oil blockade.
As a nationwide blackout in Cuba stretched into a second day this past weekend, the stakes were rising for Jorge Pérez Álvarez.
The 21-year-old suffers from a genetic disease preventing his lungs from pumping air on their own. He needs a ventilator at all times to keep breathing.
His ventilator’s backup battery is supposed to last more than a day, but that has been tested repeatedly in recent weeks, including three nationwide outages that each pushed up against its limits. And with the power out for hours every day, there is hardly enough time to recharge it.
“I don’t know how long we can keep going,” said his mother, Xenia Álvarez, standing near her son’s crumpled body in his bedroom in a poor neighborhood of Havana. “His life depends on electricity.”
The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba is fast exhausting the country’s supply of fuel, causing daily blackouts, food shortages, canceled classes and black-market gas prices approaching $40 a gallon. It is also crippling Cuba’s universal health care system, a state institution once considered a triumph for a poor nation, but is now struggling to provide basic care.
In interviews, six Cuban doctors said that rapidly deteriorating conditions at hospitals and clinics across Cuba were causing deaths that would otherwise be preventable.
“I can’t tell you how many deaths, but I’m sure there are more than in the same period last year,” said Dr. Alioth Fernandez, chief anesthesiologist at Havana’s largest pediatric hospital. “I see it in shift handovers, in colleagues’ comments and in children I’ve operated on.”
The blockade’s effects are cascading through the system. Hospitals are canceling surgeries and sending patients home because doctors and nurses can’t commute to work. Clinics are struggling to administer treatments like chemotherapy and dialysis because of power outages.
Many ambulances are parked because drivers can’t find gas. Pharmacies are largely empty because the virtually bankrupt state is struggling to buy medicine.
Production of medicine has been mostly halted because factories run on diesel. Vaccine makers are searching for ingredients because flights that once carried them are canceled because of a lack of jet fuel. And refrigerated vaccine stocks could soon spoil if the blackouts continue.
“This is not subtle, this is extreme,” said Paul Spiegel, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University who has led public health responses in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza. “You’re already seeing hospitals changing how they are operating.” As happened during crises in those other places, he said the conditions were forcing Cuban health workers throughout the system to triage patients. “The magnitude and who will be affected will depend on these horrible decisions they have to make,” he said.
The blockade is compounding problems that were already mounting for Cuban health care.
While Cuba’s stagnant state-planned economy and international isolation have fueled decades of widespread poverty, the nation’s free health care system has long been a bright spot. That is in part because the government has spent about a fifth of its budget on health, about twice the global average, according to the World Health Organization.
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy and infant mortality rates in Cuba were comparable to those in developed countries, while doctor-to-patient ratios were among the world’s best, according to the World Bank.
But stricter U.S. sanctions on Cuba, which began under the first Trump administration, have posed major challenges. They have prevented hospitals from replacing aging equipment, complicated international payments and logistics, and caused U.S. and European medical suppliers to halt contracts because they feared running afoul of U.S. rules. Economists estimate the sanctions also cost the state billions of dollars in lost income.
Those sanctions, along with the pandemic and Cuba’s failed economic policies, have led to a deep recession. The state’s major bet on tourism, including millions of dollars invested in towering hotels, backfired. Mistimed monetary policies destroyed the value of the Cuban peso, driving down the already minuscule average state salary to the equivalent of $13 a month. And despite a slow opening of the economy, the Communist government’s political repression has disabled true economic alternatives.
In 2018, the infant mortality rate in Cuba was four per 1,000 births, lower than in the United States. By 2025, that rate had more than doubled, to 10 deaths, almost twice as high as the U.S. figure.
The sanctions’ consequences took several years to ripple through the health system, said Ruth Gibson, a Stanford University doctor who studies the impact of sanctions on public health. The impact of the oil blockade, she said, “will likely be exponentially more severe.”
Dr. Liliam Delgado Peruyera, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Cuba’s leading maternity hospital, said the damage was already clear.
Sanctions helped leave the hospital short on antibiotics, medicine and equipment, while food shortages have been leading to more underweight pregnant mothers and their newborns. Now doctors, nurses, cleaners and mothers all struggle to get to the hospital because of the lack of fuel. This translates into dirtier delivery rooms, fewer health workers to deliver babies and mothers arriving after labor is dangerously far along.
“We are receiving much more severe cases,” Dr. Delgado Peruyera said, noting that three newborns died in February, the most she could ever recall in one month. “Especially in recent weeks — extreme prematurity has hit us hard.” She attributed the increase in premature births partly to rising infections because of a shortage of antibiotics.
The Cuban government said this month that 96,400 patients were awaiting surgery, though it was unclear how many were added to the list since the blockade. Fuel shortages have delayed vaccines for more than 30,000 children, the government added, and caused inconsistent radiation therapy and kidney dialysis for nearly 20,000 patients.
Medicine is also in desperately short supply. This month, a pharmacy in one poor Havana neighborhood was locked in the middle of the workday and its empty shelves could be seen through a cracked window. Handwritten signs on the door warned customers that purchases were strictly limited.
“It’s been reported that people are reselling medicine, and thus we’ll inform the police,” one sign said.
Across town, the William Soler Pediatric Hospital was eerily quiet. The hospital is operating with a skeleton staff, with many doctors, nurses and patients trudging miles under the Caribbean sun to get there.
The government prioritizes electricity for hospitals, which helps to keep their lights on when other parts of the city are dark. Yet this month, hospitals have had to rely on backup generators during three nationwide power outages.
Dr. Fernandez, the chief anesthesiologist, was keeping a 2-month-old boy sedated during surgery when one blackout hit. The lights and equipment monitoring the baby’s vital signs suddenly went dark for a few minutes, until the generator kicked in. “When you’re in the middle of it,” the doctor said, “it feels like an hour.”
Elsewhere in the hospital, doctors and nurses dashed to ventilators that were pumping air into the lungs of sick newborns. The machines’ battery systems died years ago, so health workers have to squeeze a rubber pump to keep the babies breathing until the generators start to work.
With fuel running so short, the gas generators may be only a temporary savior. Nurses in the hospital’s neonatal unit said they already have plans for a fully powerless hospital: swaddle newborns in blankets and put them back into dead incubators, hoping they stay warm enough to survive.
Cuba’s last shipment of oil arrived on Jan. 9. Nations had halted shipments after threats from President Trump, but now eyes are on a Russian tanker that could arrive by early next week.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel has warned Cubans that the nation’s power grid is deeply unstable and that thing are likely to get worse.
In response, the government has installed solar panels on neighborhood health clinics and nursing homes, as well as the homes of 120 sick children who require access to air-conditioning. The government said it has also given solar panels to 10,000 health and education workers so they can work remotely.
But new challenges are cropping up across the island. Taps are running dry because water pumps depend on the failing power grid. Sanitation is getting worse. And food is becoming harder to find, according to the top United Nations official in Cuba.
One hallmark of the Cuban health care system was regular packages of food, supplements and medicine for new mothers and infants. As a result, until the pandemic, Cuba had one of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the region, according to UNICEF.
Cuban mothers and their doctors said those monthly deliveries have been arriving smaller and far less frequently. Dr. Roxana Martínez Rodríguez, a community doctor in one Havana neighborhood, said this year her patients haven’t received any milk or supplements like folic acid, which the state once provided regularly. That is occurring as overall food prices have shot up since January, another result of the soaring cost of fuel.
“A salary is barely enough for breakfast,” Dr. Martínez Rodríguez said. “It’s a luxury to buy a cabbage.”
She said she was seeing more malnourished infants as a result.
Dr. Martínez Rodríguez said her patient load has doubled in recent years, to 1,930 patients, because many doctors and nurses have quit the health system for higher salaries in the growing private sector, while others have left the island. The remaining health workers are exhausted, especially since they must deal with the same daily challenges of life as their roughly 10 million fellow Cubans.
“We have the same blackouts as the rest of the population, we face the same shortages,” she said. “And whether you want it to or not, it’s going to affect you.”
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