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
When: 10 to 3pm PST, Monday, April 20
Who: Stacey Eads, Humboldt DA
Phone Number: 707-445-7411
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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Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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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) She Made Sure Her Baby Was Born an American. Then Federal Agents Separated Them.
Diana Acosta Verde, who came into the United States illegally when she was six months pregnant, had to leave her baby at a hospital while she returned to a detention center.
By Caroline Kitchener, Charo Henríquez and Hamed Aleaziz, April 17, 2026
The reporters reviewed text messages, medical records, government documents and photos from the parents’ time in detention.
Diana Acosta Verde and her baby, Gael, at a farm in Honduras owned by her partner’s family earlier this month. Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Diana Acosta Verde received the order from the detention officer less than 24 hours after she gave birth.
“Leave the baby in the crib,” Ms. Acosta recalled the officer saying as she held her newborn son. “You need to go.”
Her baby, Gael, was born a month early in a South Texas hospital. As Gael slept, the officer explained that a bus had arrived to take Ms. Acosta back to the detention center where she had lived for the past three months.
It was time to say goodbye.
Ms. Acosta felt her whole body tremble as she moved away from her son. A 27-year-old immigrant from Honduras, she and her partner had crossed the southern border in the fall, when Ms. Acosta was about six months pregnant, after being deported from the United States the previous spring. The couple knew they were taking a chance when they began their 1,700-mile journey back to the United States. But to give their first child together a chance at American citizenship — to be born on U.S. soil — they had agreed that they would do anything.
In arguing at the Supreme Court this month to overturn birthright citizenship, which many see as central to the country’s identity, the Trump administration asserted that the practice acts as a “powerful pull factor,” encouraging people to cross the border illegally and give birth in the United States. With a majority of justices appearing likely to uphold birthright citizenship, Ms. Acosta’s experiences reflect the often fraught choices and questions inherent in the policy.
Ms. Acosta and the baby’s father, Jaime Murillo Padilla, made decisions that put themselves and their future child at risk — desperate for their son to achieve citizenship in a stable country rich with economic promise. They also encountered an immigration system ill equipped to deal with the consequences of a practice that creates strong incentives for noncitizens to have children in the United States, with detention policies and conditions that can put mothers and their babies in jeopardy.
Of all the potential perils they had contemplated, the couple never imagined they would be separated from their newborn. Gael was in the hospital without a family member for more than 24 hours before his grandmother, a U.S. resident, came to collect him.
“I felt so much pain that I didn’t really know where it hurt,” Ms. Acosta said in an interview. “I wanted to vomit. I felt like my world was falling to pieces.”
U.S. Border Patrol does not track childbirths. Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that Border Patrol encountered over 15,000 pregnant women in 2023 under President Biden. She added that the number of pregnant women crossing the border dropped by 81 percent after President Trump took office.
The Biden administration issued extensive guidance on how to handle childbirth and pregnancy in Customs and Border Protection custody, including directives that required parents to be processed within 12 hours of a birth and stressed the importance of families remaining together. Much of that guidance has been rescinded by the Trump administration.
Ms. Bis said the Biden-era policy was “no longer needed.”
“With the most secure border in history, C.B.P. is not prioritizing releasing individuals into the country,” she said.
Ms. Acosta and Mr. Padilla were initially arrested by Border Patrol, according to court records, then transferred into the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service while awaiting prosecution for crossing the border illegally. Before and after Ms. Acosta gave birth, she was held at the East Hidalgo Detention Center, a facility in La Villa, Texas, operated by the GEO Group, a private company that runs immigration detention centers across the country. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Brady McCarron, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said pregnant prisoners have access to obstetric care, including prenatal and postpartum follow-up, and that the prisoners are responsible for arranging custody of the child immediately after birth. If the mother cannot find someone to take custody, Mr. McCarron said, the Marshals Service will notify child protective services.
Ms. Acosta said she was not given the option to keep her baby with her in detention.
When Gael was born, Ms. Acosta and Mr. Murillo achieved the goal they had gambled so much for: Their son was an American citizen. He would never have to sneak across the border, or get deported. He had full access to the country Mr. Murillo saw as the world’s “greatest nation.”
But back at the detention center, Ms. Acosta did not know if she would ever see her son again.
A Clear Path Forward
As soon as she found out she was pregnant last summer, Ms. Acosta started to cry.
“I’m scared,” she’d said, holding out the positive test to show Mr. Murillo.
Ms. Acosta and Mr. Murillo had just been deported to Honduras from the United States, where Ms. Acosta had lived for four years after seeking asylum under the Biden administration. Mr. Murillo, 34, had lived in the United States since he crossed the border at 10 years old, qualifying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that shielded from deportation undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children.
The couple had always planned to have a baby in the United States — far from the violence they had come to expect in Honduras. Ms. Acosta’s brother was killed there a few years ago, they said.
But then the couple was picked up by ICE in early 2025, arrested after the police found drugs in the glove compartment of a relative’s car Mr. Murillo had been driving. He was charged with possession of a small amount of cocaine — which he said was not his — and deported in March. Ms. Acosta, against whom all charges were dropped, was deported a few months later.
Back in Honduras, expecting a baby, Mr. Murillo saw a clear path forward.
“Our daughter or son is not going to be born here,” he recalled telling his partner.
Mr. Murillo, who ran a restaurant business in Chicago, where he had lived, started calling people he thought could help them get back into the United States.
“We knew the importance of that birth certificate,” he said. Mr. Murillo was also eager to return to his family. He has three other children in the United States from previous relationships who are American citizens.
The last time Mr. Murillo and Ms. Acosta had crossed into the United States, they had felt welcomed into the country. Ms. Acosta had obtained asylum papers. In 2002, when a 10-year-old Mr. Murillo first immigrated, he nibbled happily on a bologna sandwich he got from a Border Patrol officer, who had assured him that everything would turn out OK.
They knew it would be different under the Trump administration. But friends assured them that they could still find a way to cross safely.
Five months later, Mr. Murillo said, he and Ms. Acosta were sleeping in a shed just south of the border with blood stains on their mattress and AK-47s stashed in the corner. The man he had promised thousands of dollars to shuttle them across had lied to them, he said, by promising that they would be staying with families and traveling in a private car, far from the cartels.
A Border Patrol agent found them hiding in a bush on Nov. 3, he said, less than five minutes after they had crossed the border.
Ms. Acosta texted Mr. Murillo’s mother, who had been awaiting their arrival in Chicago, right before they got arrested.
“They got us,” she said.
Delivery and Detention
Three months later, on Friday, Jan. 30, Blanca Padilla Tejeda received a call from a U.S. marshal in South Texas.
Ms. Acosta had delivered her baby that day, the marshal said. Ms. Padilla, Mr. Murillo’s mother, had to get to the hospital by Sunday to take custody of her grandson, the marshal said in text messages reviewed by The New York Times.
Ms. Padilla had no idea how she would come up with money to travel to Texas in two days. But she feared her family could lose Gael if she didn’t.
“Is the boy OK?” Ms. Padilla asked the marshal on the phone. “Is Diana OK?”
“Yes,” she recalled him saying. “But you have to come for him now.”
At the hospital, a social worker noted that the baby was premature and would be kept in the nursery for monitoring, according to medical records. Medical providers had already designated Ms. Acosta as a “high-risk” patient, writing that, before arriving at the hospital, she had received “inadequate or lack of prenatal care.”
Ms. Padilla arrived at Knapp Medical Center in Weslaco, Texas, on Sunday morning, ready to pick up her grandson.
At that point, Ms. Acosta was in solitary confinement at the detention center — unable to talk to Ms. Padilla or anyone who could give her news about her son. She said she sat in a freezing cell for more than two days without anything to cover herself, afraid to bathe in a bathroom covered in mold, hair and vomit. When she told officers her breasts were in pain, she said, they prohibited her from touching them to pump her breast milk, instructing her to bandage and ice her chest.
“I didn’t know if my baby had been taken by the state,” Ms. Acosta said. “I told them that, please, I need to communicate with my family. They gave me nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Medical experts provided with the details of Ms. Acosta’s case stressed the importance of newborn babies staying close to their mothers in their first weeks, especially those born prematurely. Separating the two can affect a baby’s neurological development and ability to bond, said Dr. Rose Molina, an obstetrician-gynecologist and fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
“The mom and newborn should always be together,” said Ms. Molina. “Especially in those first days.”
Mothers who are unable to pump their unused breast milk are at a higher risk of contracting an infection, Ms. Molina added.
That Sunday morning, Ms. Padilla, who is 53 years old and walks with a cane, collected her grandson from the hospital and took him back to a small house her other son had reserved on a remote country road. They planned to stay there until she could pick up her grandson’s birth certificate.
Within a few days, Ms. Padilla said, the baby turned bright red and started throwing up phlegm.
“I began to ask God not to take him away from me,” she said.
Ms. Padilla knew her grandson needed his mother and father.
When she took him to the detention center, she said, officers allowed the baby to see his parents for less than half an hour, separated by glass.
‘Your Future Is Set’
Gael was nearly 2 months old when his father held him for the first time at an airport in Honduras, where the couple had returned in February after being deported. The baby had just arrived on a plane with his grandmother — and his U.S. birth certificate.
The baby did not cry as Ms. Padilla handed him over, wrapped in a blue velvet blanket. First to his mom, then to his dad.
Mr. Murillo thought about the guns officials had pointed at the mother of his child in Mexico. The masked men at the house that he assumed was run by a cartel. The days Ms. Acosta had to spend in a cold, dark room alone.
To Mr. Murillo, it had all been worth it.
“Every day we get up and we thank God for the opportunity of our son being born over there,” he said. “It’s the biggest win for us. All we can think about now is, your future is set.
“He is a U.S. citizen.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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2) We Disagree on a Lot. But We Know This Law Must Change
By Mike Lee and Dick Durbin, Mr. Lee and Mr. Durbin are senators, April 17, 2026
Grade Solomon
We disagree on many issues. One of us is a longtime Democrat, the other a conservative Republican. But both of us are deeply concerned about warrantless government surveillance of the American people.
Early this morning, the House voted to briefly extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was originally enacted in 2008 to allow the government to gather vital intelligence about foreign governments, terrorists and spies.
The problem is that it has also allowed agencies like the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency to regularly gather and search through the private communications of American citizens without a warrant. That is a clear violation of rights protected by the Constitution.
Whether or not the House’s 10-day extension is approved by the Senate, it’s time to have a serious debate about this problem as we consider the future of the law.
It’s true that Section 702 doesn’t allow the direct targeting of Americans, but their communications are still often gathered during the warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad. Once the government has this data, agencies then have the ability to search through it. And they do: Transparency reports reveal that thousands of such searches are performed every year. A federal court previously found that some the F.B.I. had conducted had violated the Fourth Amendment.
Predictably, without a requirement for court approval of these searches, abuses have been rampant. As a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice highlighted, F.B.I. agents in recent years have searched for the communications of “protesters across the political spectrum; members of Congress; a congressional chief of staff; a state court judge; multiple U.S. government officials, journalists and political commentators; and 19,000 donors to a political campaign.” In a time of extreme partisanship, these abuses have provoked bipartisan outrage.
For too long, Congress has habitually reauthorized Section 702 without significant reforms. As in past years, some may reprise the perennial excuse that there is no time to debate the needed changes before the authority expires. They’re wrong. If it were to expire, the law permits existing surveillance to continue under an annual certification by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court until at least March 2027.
Congress should not needlessly rush to extend this authority without the American people and their elected representatives knowing the full truth about the extent of ongoing abuses and compliance failures. Government officials have failed to testify before Congress about their use of this authority since it was last reauthorized. And in the recent ruling on the annual certification, the court reportedly found problems — but the details of those concerns remain classified.
Congress should have a serious and informed debate on these issues rather than ramming through a reauthorization of Section 702 with minimal reforms yet again, sidelining Americans’ constitutional rights in the process.
That’s why the two of us have proposed the Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act, a compromise that would reauthorize the valuable core of this tool while enacting reasonable safeguards to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of all Americans.
The government would still be able to check its databases to uncover connections between targeted foreigners and Americans. But it would have to get court approval in the small number of cases in which these searches have generated results and the government has a proper basis for gaining access to the contents of the communications. Importantly, our warrant requirement also contains robust exceptions for legitimate emergencies, so that we can balance civil liberties with legitimate security needs.
Our bill would also cut off another form of warrantless surveillance: the widespread practice of circumventing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing Americans’ sensitive information from data brokers.
The Department of Justice (including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the F.B.I.), the Department of Homeland Security (including ICE, Customs and Border Patrol and the Secret Service) and the Defense Intelligence Agency have purchased cellphone location information for millions of Americans. Such information is highly sensitive and can reveal intimate details of that person’s life. Even more troubling, artificial intelligence could supercharge such surveillance, allowing the government to harvest and analyze mass quantities of highly personal and sensitive information about Americans without court approval. Our legislation would close these loopholes — again with pragmatic exceptions to accommodate legitimate safety and security needs.
Congress should not take an all-or-nothing approach to reauthorizing Section 702. We have the time and the responsibility to get this right. Members may disagree about what reforms are required — that’s why we have debates and amendments. But simply extending the law without any changes to protect Americans’ privacy should be off the table.
We owe it to the American people to meet this moment and do our jobs to protect both national security and civil liberties. Our bill offers a bipartisan solution to do just that.
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3) Iran’s Military Says It Has Reimposed ‘Strict Control’ of Strait of Hormuz
The military said it would tighten its grip on the vital waterway until the U.S. ended its blockade of Iranian ports. The statement added to the uncertainty over access to the strait.
Tankers anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, on Saturday. Credit...Asghar Besharati/Associated Press
Iran tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz again on Saturday, asserting that it was “under strict control” by Iranian forces — just hours after Iranian officials and President Trump had raised hopes for an end to the war by announcing that the waterway had reopened.
Iran’s military said in a statement that the strait had now “returned to its previous state” unless the United States ended its own blockade of Iranian ports. A shipping monitor run by the British navy said Saturday that it had received a report of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards firing at a tanker in the strait.
The new developments added to the confusion on Saturday over the status of transit through the strait, where Iran has choked global energy supplies by menacing passing ships during more than a month of war with the United States and Israel.
Just a day earlier, Iran’s foreign minister called the strait “completely open,” leading Mr. Trump to declare a breakthrough in the negotiations between the two countries on a permanent cease-fire.
Both countries immediately cooled that optimism, however. Iranian officials insisted ships still needed Iranian permission to cross. And Mr. Trump said the American naval blockade of Iran’s ports would continue until a deal was reached to end the war, prompting Iranian ire and vows to retaliate.
The president has often made overly optimistic claims about the war, which began in late February. Although Mr. Trump expressed confidence late Friday about the negotiations with Iran that he said would happen over the weekend, no new face-to-face talks were announced as of Saturday morning.
Mr. Trump also claimed in a phone interview with CBS that Iran had “agreed to everything.” But Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly denied Iran had agreed to any of their adversaries’ core demands.
The announcement of the strait’s reopening had soothed energy prices on Friday, sending oil futures tumbling to around $90 a barrel. Oil markets are closed for the weekend.
Hopes for an end to the war were boosted by the 10-day cease-fire in Lebanon that went into effect on Friday. Thousands of displaced families made their way home, and there was heavy traffic again Saturday morning as people continued to head to Lebanon’s south.
Iran had demanded the truce with the United States extend to Lebanon as a condition for a broader deal. Mr. Trump and U.S. officials worked to make that happen, even as they denied they were trying to meet Iran’s conditions.
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4) Maduro Is Gone, and the Purge Has Begun
The successor to Venezuela’s captured President Nicolás Maduro is purging the people who kept him in power.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev and Mariana Martínez, April 18, 2026
Anatoly Kurmanaev and Mariana Martínez reported this article from Caracas, Venezuela.
Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s former vice president, in January in Caracas, the capital. The New York Times
U.S. Special Forces brought down President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela swiftly and publicly.
Now, the people who kept him in power are being purged gradually and inconspicuously. Some have been fired or detained, and others are anxiously looking over their shoulders, worried they might be next.
Oligarchs close to Mr. Maduro’s family have been snatched from their homes. His political allies have been summarily removed from their posts. His relatives have been sidelined from business deals and barred from media appearances.
The housecleaning is being carried out by Mr. Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who is running the country under instructions from the Trump administration. The detentions and leadership purges have unfolded without public explanation, but often with the approval — and sometimes at the urging — of the White House, according to people close to Ms. Rodríguez’s government.
After Mr. Maduro was dragged off in January to a New York jail, Ms. Rodríguez presented herself as a reluctant and temporary stand-in for a fallen leader, denouncing his capture as an illegal attack on her country.
But now, with Mr. Maduro gone, she is dismantling his ruling coterie and embarking on the largest redistribution of power in Venezuela in decades.
The overhaul of national leadership, combined with sweeping new laws and her alliance with President Trump, is reshaping Venezuela and its management of one of the planet’s largest oil reserves, just as the world grapples with the energy turmoil caused by war in the Middle East.
In the three months since Mr. Maduro’s capture, Ms. Rodríguez has changed 17 ministers, replaced military commanders and installed new diplomats. She has also overseen the detention of at least three businessmen tied to Mr. Maduro, fired several of his relatives and cut off most of his family from oil contracts.
In their places, she has appointed her own loyalists or championed businessmen beholden to her, while opening the doors to American oil and mining investors.
The changes have brought little transparency or pluralism to a government that remains authoritarian. Venezuela’s opposition says that rather than returning the country to democracy, Ms. Rodríguez is solidifying her rule.
But she is hardly making all decisions on her own. After capturing Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an overwhelming show of force, the Trump administration threatened to attack Venezuela again if the new leaders refused to cooperate. Several senior Venezuelan officials and government insiders have likened Ms. Rodríguez’s rule to governing with a gun to her head.
Ms. Rodríguez is now using that threat of U.S. coercion to go after ruling party power brokers once considered untouchable. The result has been a political win for Mr. Trump and Ms. Rodríguez, allowing U.S. officials to settle scores with Maduro allies who had defied them, while simultaneously cementing Ms. Rodríguez’s leadership.
Venezuela’s transformation from U.S. adversary to a protectorate has been head spinning for most Venezuelans.
Polls show a large majority of Venezuelans welcome the end of Mr. Maduro’s 13-year autocratic reign, which he enforced through violence, corruption and electoral fraud.
Many also remain skeptical of Ms. Rodríguez, a longtime official of the governing Socialist Party who has never held elected office.
But for Mr. Maduro’s friends, business associates and governing party companions, the new political landscape has ushered in an unfamiliar swirl of anxiety and danger.
More than a dozen spoke with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal. Some said they had been placed under surveillance by Venezuela’s secret police since Mr. Maduro’s ouster. Others said they had tried to stay out of Caracas, the capital, and have considered exile.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to questions for this article. A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said the Trump administration had a mutually beneficial relationship with the Rodríguez government.
“We are dealing very well with President Delcy Rodríguez,” Ms. Kelly said. “Oil is starting to flow, and large amounts of money, unseen for many years, will soon be greatly helping the people of Venezuela.”
The people who lost out from Mr. Maduro’s downfall are part of a disparate group. They include relatives of Mr. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, many of whom amassed great wealth in the nearly three decades of their combined rule.
They also include businessmen who owe their fortunes to personal ties to the two presidents, as well as veterans of the socialist movement formed by Mr. Chávez in the 1990s, which became known as chavismo.
One longtime friend of Mr. Maduro’s broke down in tears in an interview after his capture, calling Mr. Maduro the last bastion of Venezuela’s revolution.
Few apparatchiks have dared criticize Ms. Rodríguez publicly, but Mario Silva is one who has. A veteran propagandist, his state television program was canceled after Mr. Maduro’s capture, forcing him to turn to social media or radio graveyard slots.
Like many pro-government Venezuelan media figures, he built a career promoting official anti-imperialist dogma, only to fall out of favor when the new administration shifted to building a business-friendly, pro-American image.
“Damn it, keep following the gringos’ orders, then, go ahead,” Mr. Silva said on his radio show on March 18. “Just prostrate yourself and be done with it.”
Mr. Maduro’s disparate allies are united by a distrust of Ms. Rodríguez, who has transformed from a socialist firebrand into Washington’s lauded partner.
People close to the deposed president argued that Mr. Maduro had never considered her as his successor, seeing her as a capable manager rather than a leader.
Nor did Mr. Maduro’s inner circle prepare for the possibility that the clash with Mr. Trump could result in a government led by one of their own, the people said. “The plan was always either everyone falls, or nobody does,” said one senior Maduro official.
The apparent ease with which U.S. forces snatched Mr. Maduro from a heavily guarded military base has fueled suspicion that he was betrayed by people who benefited from his downfall.
One senior Venezuelan official, a day after the U.S. attack, said treason had been committed. Officials from Russia, which lost an ally in Mr. Maduro, have made similar claims.
The Trump administration had been considering Ms. Rodríguez as Mr. Maduro’s successor since 2025, and had indirect contact with her. There has been no evidence that she was privy to the U.S. military’s plans, yet that fact has not eased the distrust within the governing party.
Ms. Rodríguez’s caretaker post began hours after Mr. Maduro’s capture, on Jan. 3, with a fiery speech denouncing U.S. aggression. A week later, Ms. Rodríguez led a retinue of power brokers and Cuban officials to commemorate dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan servicemen who died in the American attack.
“We are not handing down a legacy of traitors and cowards,” Ms. Rodríguez said in a televised speech intended to project unity.
Most of those by her side that day have since been cast aside.
Mr. Maduro’s longest-serving minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, was fired as defense minister in March and later given a much less important post running agriculture. Mr. Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, and a son of Ms. Flores, Yosser Gavidia Flores, have been sidelined from lucrative business deals with the state, according to government insiders.
Mr. Maduro’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, was fired, given a consolation post, and then fired again. Camilla Fabri, Mr. Maduro’s immigration envoy, lost her post. Days later, her husband was detained.
And then there’s Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez. Since attending Ms. Rodríguez’s speech, he has watched his country’s decades-long alliance with Venezuela unravel in weeks.
As Ms. Rodríguez has tightened control, the dismissals grew bolder.
The first Maduro confidant to fall was Alex Saab, a Colombian-born businessman and Ms. Fabri’s husband, who has made billions from preferential food and oil trade contracts and is under indictment in the United States on corruption-related charges.
On Jan. 16, Ms. Rodríguez wrote on social media that Mr. Saab was no longer Venezuela’s industry minister, thanking him “for his service to the Fatherland” and saying he would “assume new responsibilities.”
Two weeks later, Mr. Saab was detained. American officials and Ms. Rodríguez are now negotiating his fate, which includes potential extradition to the United States.
People close to Ms. Rodríguez said she had overseen the detention of two other prominent businessmen close to Mr. Maduro’s family: Raúl Gorrín and Wilmer Ruperti. Mr. Gorrín also faces a corruption-related indictment in the United States.
Mr. Saab’s lawyer declined to comment. Legal representatives for Mr. Ruperti and Mr. Gorrín did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Rodríguez’s administration has neither commented on the detentions nor announced any charges, leaving Mr. Maduro’s allies to speculate who might be next.
Ms. Rodríguez in March widened the purge to the armed forces, firing Venezuela’s entire military leadership, including General Padrino López, once considered one of Venezuela’s most powerful men.
One Venezuelan general said that many see the dismissals of senior commanders as the start of a much deeper, U.S.-guided overhaul of Venezuela’s armed forces.
People close Ms. Rodríguez’s government said she had coordinated some replacements with the Trump administration. U.S. officials, they said, have also pressured her to go after American adversaries like Mr. Gorrín and Mr. Saab.
Ms. Rodríguez’s allies include younger chavistas with weaker connections to the movement’s roots. Some are scions of the governing party’s aristocracy more interested in the fruits of a market economy than in maintaining Mr. Chavez’s legacy.
Ms. Rodríguez has also found willing enforcers in Venezuela’s security forces who have pledged their allegiance, hoping to avoid retribution for decades of human rights abuses. Her new defense minister is Gen. Gustavo González López, Venezuela’s former head of secret police, who was placed under sanction by the Obama administration for crushing protests.
Some former government opponents have been lured by career opportunities. Venezuela’s new envoy to North America and Europe, Oliver Blanco, had worked as personal assistant to an opposition leader.
The winners of Ms. Rodríguez’s economic restructuring include Venezuela’s traditional economic elites, who once sided with the opposition but made peace with chavismo. Their bet on stability over democracy has given them access to foreign markets and the U.S. banking system.
Western investors are other beneficiaries. They have recently been descending on Caracas’s luxury hotels searching for bargain assets in the oil, mining and tourism industries.
Only one senior minister in Mr. Maduro’s government remains in his post: Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister who oversaw the governing party’s repression apparatus.
Mr. Cabello is wanted by the United States on drug-trafficking charges and had clashed with Ms. Rodríguez in the past. But his connections to armed pro-government groups have also made him a valuable ally — and a risky target.
To hang on to power, Mr. Cabello has recast himself, from ruling party pit bull to a patriotic guarantor of stability.
“Let’s accompany our sister Delcy,” Mr. Cabello said at a government rally. “Let’s confide completely in the ability, work ethic and conscience of comrade Delcy.”
His adaptation has so far borne fruit. Mr. Cabello’s cousin and brother have kept their government jobs running Venezuela’s secret police and tax service. His daughter is Venezuela’s new tourism minister.
Inside the governing party, most officials have adapted, jettisoning their avowed anti-imperialism for a chance to stay in power.
One senior official said his colleagues did not trust Ms. Rodríguez, but felt they had no choice.
“We need her, and she needs us,” another said.
Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting from Buenos Aires, and Tyler Pager from Washington.
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5) In Angola, Pope Faces the Legacy of Colonialism
His visit includes a trip to a shrine where enslaved Africans were baptized before being forced into the treacherous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.
By Cláudio C. Silva and John Eligon, April 18, 2026
Cláudio C. Silva reported from Luanda, Angola, and John Eligon from Johannesburg.
Pope Leo XIV in Cameroon on Thursday. He is scheduled to visit Angola on Saturday as part of his 10-day trip through Africa. Credit...Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
When Pope Leo XIV visits the African nation of Angola on Saturday, he will encounter one of the Roman Catholic Church’s enduring challenges on the continent.
Angola has more than 20 million Catholics, but not a single cardinal, making the country a stark example of Africa’s lack of representation in Vatican leadership.
Only 14 of the 121 cardinals eligible to elect a pope are from Africa, where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. There are 365,000 Catholics for every bishop in Africa, a ratio higher than any other continent.
But the Angolan church is the oldest Catholic community in southern Africa, with a history that goes back more than 500 years.
Portuguese settlers arrived in the Kongo Kingdom, which is part of present-day Angola, toward the end of the 15th century. Its Black rulers quickly embraced Catholicism. They were baptized, established local clergy and sent an envoy to represent them at the Vatican.
Within just a few decades, Catholicism had become the kingdom’s dominant religion, leading to a rare instance, historians say, of African and European states interacting as equals during slavery.
But a power imbalance quickly emerged.
The kingdom asked Vatican officials to appoint a local bishop. Instead, at Portugal’s urging, they gave control of the kingdom’s church to a bishop nearly 800 miles away on the tiny Portuguese island colony of São Tomé. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Since then, Angola has only ever had two cardinals, and just one of them was Angolan. Portugal, which colonized Angola in the 16th century, currently has six cardinals.
“I believe we have not been treated with the same attention that the Vatican gives to other regions,” said Albino Pakisi, a former priest and now a professor at Catholic University in Luanda, the capital of Angola. “We feel a bit like stepchildren when other churches have cardinals and we do not.”
While many members of the Angolan clergy are looking at the pope’s visit through the lens of spiritual enrichment rather than Vatican politics, some analysts see Leo as uniquely positioned to address the needs of the church in Africa.
He has African roots — something many Africans remain unaware of — and a familiarity with the continent, having visited more than a dozen times as a bishop, including at least nine trips to Nigeria and five to Tanzania. He belongs to the Order of St. Augustine, a bishop who did some of his most important work in Algeria and encouraged the church to speak out on biblical values, such as the rights of the most vulnerable.
Many African Catholic leaders, including in Angola, have had to grapple with those values in the face of autocratic governments.
Leo is scheduled to meet with Angola’s president, João Lourenço, whose government has been accused by the church and civil society leaders of failing to address grinding inequality. Despite the country’s oil wealth, more than half of the population lives on less than $3.65 per day.
Three out of four Angolans are under 30. Young people in the country face mass unemployment and lack of access to health care and education. Young Africans more broadly represent a critical demographic in the church’s growth. While other regions struggle with aging populations, Africa is experiencing a youth boom.
José Manuel Imbamba, the archbishop of Saurimo in eastern Angola, said he hoped that Leo’s visit would help heal the political and societal tensions that have lingered in Angola after its 27-year civil war, which ended in 2002.
Leo will be the third pontiff to visit Angola, after John Paul II in 1992 and Benedict XVI in 2009. Diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Angola span seven centuries. António Manuel Nsaku Ne Vunda of Angola was the first African diplomat to reach the Vatican, said Carlos Bumba, a historian in Luanda.
Ne Vunda met with the pope in Rome in 1608 to negotiate better treatment and representation for African Catholics in the kingdom before succumbing to a severe illness shortly after his arrival.
Despite his short stay in Rome, Ne Vunda became a popular figure at the papal court. He was immortalized with a bust in the Vatican and buried in the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where Pope Francis is also buried.
Filomeno do Nascimento Vieira Dias, the archbishop of Luanda, said in a news conference this month that he hoped Leo would, “at his own pace and without pressure,” appoint an Angolan cardinal because the country had one of the oldest Catholic communities in Africa, according to the Angolan newspaper Novo Jornal.
Some in Angola say that the country should have an archdiocese with a cardinal’s seat, meaning that the bishop who occupies it would automatically become a cardinal.
While in Angola, Leo will also pray with pilgrims at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Conception of Muxima, a shrine along the Cuanza River where enslaved Africans were baptized before being forced into a treacherous voyage to the Americas.
Today, the shrine, known as Mama Muxima, is one of the most popular pilgrimages in southern Africa, where visitors offer up their prayers to the Virgin Mary. The shrine’s visitors rarely focus on its role in the slave trade, and several Angolan clergy members said they looked forward to Leo sharing a positive message while in the country.
Pope John Paul II prayed for forgiveness for the church’s role in the atrocities of slavery during visits to Africa in 1985 and 1992.
In the present day, the church has to contend with other challenges. Although about 40 percent of the population is Catholic, the church has stiff competition from evangelical Christian sects. They combine local faith systems, like the belief in modern-day prophets, with evangelical Christian teachings. They host huge conferences throughout the country that reach into both rural and urban areas.
One of the most popular evangelical churches in Angola, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has experienced huge growth over the last two decades, including among politicians, and built large cathedrals in Luanda.
Father Celestino Epalanga, who leads a commission of justice and peace in the Angolan bishop’s conference, said the growth of evangelical churches in the country reflected the richness of its religious diversity. But those churches also present “a challenge to society” because of what he said were their predatory practices, such as equating support for particular politicians with salvation.
Catholic leaders and analysts say that the challenges for the church in Angola and other African nations are both internal and external. The Angolan church does not have enough bishops and priests writing about “profound theological issues,” said Mr. Pakisi, the Catholic University professor.
Manuel de Jesus João Dias Brandão, the director of liturgy in the Saurimo archdiocese, said African priests and bishops needed to show more leadership and influence in their communities. He pointed to the church in Latin America as a model.
Even though the church in Latin America is younger than Africa’s, it has greater representation at the Vatican and is more influential worldwide, Father Brandão said. Latin American Catholics also have more parishes and missionaries around the world than Africans, he said, “which tells me we need to be more conscious of our responsibilities.”
Father Epalanga questioned whether the church in Africa was doing enough to help people live the message of the Gospel, and added that could be one reason for the lack of African representation at the Vatican.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s difficult to judge if really the Vatican is looking down upon us or we Africans are not doing enough.”
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6) Migrant Children Removed From New York Shelter After Abuse Allegations
Federal officials received complaints about the treatment of children and adolescents at a facility in Westchester County, N.Y.
By Ana Ley, April 18, 2026
The Department of Health and Human Services said that it was aware of abuse claims leveled at the Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Seth Harrison/The Journal News, via USA TODAY NETWORK, via Imagn Images
Federal officials have moved migrant children and adolescents out of a shelter in Westchester County, N.Y., after receiving reports that detainees there had been mistreated.
The allegations of abuse at a facility run by the Children’s Village, a shelter operator in Dobbs Ferry, were first reported by CNN on Thursday. The Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement to The New York Times that it was aware of the abuse claims and, as a result, transferred unaccompanied children to other locations and notified investigators.
An audit of the facility was completed on Jan. 20, and the children were removed from the facility the next week. Unaccompanied migrant children are the responsibility of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, known as O.R.R., within the Health and Human Services Department.
“The safety and well-being of children in O.R.R. care is a top priority,” Andrew Nixon, a D.H.S. spokesman, said in a statement. “Any credible concerns are addressed swiftly and thoroughly.”
A lawyer who had visited the facility said that children who had been detained there had been punished with restraints and seclusion. Leecia Welch, the chief legal counsel at Children’s Rights, a nonprofit organization that represents children in government custody, said that adolescents had complained about being placed alone for days in what they described as a “red room.”
“There’s just no question kids have been harmed,” Ms. Welch said. “Children’s behaviors continue to worsen the longer they are detained in these facilities, and these types of harmful practices create a perfect storm for them to get seriously injured.”
Christopher Rucas, a spokesman for the Children’s Village, which was founded in 1851 to care for children legally removed from their parents, said that the allegations were distressing.
“We have zero tolerance for any form of punishment,” Mr. Rucas said in a statement. “All teens in our care deserve the highest level of care, support and professionalism from every adult responsible for their well-being.”
The New York State Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs, a state agency, had received complaints about the shelter and said that it was investigating them. The agency declined to comment further.
The Children’s Village has several facilities across New York, and unaccompanied migrant children have stayed there since 2004. The organization tries to find relatives or suitable sponsors who can care for children until their immigration hearings. The Children’s Village offers help to children struggling with mental health problems, and it receives funding from the federal government.
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7) Corporate Profits Are at Record Highs. These 4 Factors Could Sink Them.
Experts have different theories about what’s driving steep gains. But many agree the window for growth is shrinking.
By Peter Coy, April 18, 2026
An Amazon data center being built in New Carlisle, Ind. Jim Vondruska/Reuters
Times are good for big business. In the last quarter of 2025, even though economic growth and job creation slowed to a crawl, pretax corporate profits set a record, reaching their highest share of gross domestic product since record-keeping began in 1947.
This year, Wall Street analysts are predicting that profits are likely to be even stronger despite dismal consumer sentiment and high energy costs. For example, Mike Wilson, the chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley, is sticking to his prediction that earnings of the S&P 500 companies will rise 17 percent in 2026.
Optimism that the profit juggernaut will keep rolling drove the S&P 500 to a record this week. Will it? To figure that one out, you need to be able to explain why it’s happening in the first place, which is not easy. Experts have different ideas. However, many of them share a belief that the headroom for further profit growth is shrinking.
Here are some of the leading theories for why profits have soared so high — and what could sink them.
Technology
Suppliers of technology got a huge profit boost from sales of networking gear during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, and they’re getting an even bigger boost from the artificial intelligence boom. The tech sector as a whole has experienced much faster growth in stock prices and measured productivity growth than the rest of the economy, said Jim Paulsen, a veteran market strategist who writes the Paulsen Perspectives newsletter.
Surprisingly, though, strong profit growth hasn’t been confined to tech. An analysis last spring by Ricardo Marto, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that “the recent surge in corporate profits was driven by retail and wholesale trade, construction, manufacturing and health care,” not tech. Marto said this week that the surge in profits had continued across most of these industries in the year since.
One possible explanation for Marto’s finding is that tech investment is genuinely paying off outside the tech sector. If so, that would indicate that there’s room for profits to run. Artificial intelligence is beginning to boost profits by automating some jobs out of existence. And before A.I., there was the postpandemic productivity dividend.
“In my previous job before Covid, I had a video monitor that was set up to do videoconferencing at my desk,” said Diane Swonk, the chief economist of the consulting firm KPMG. “I never used it once. It was kind of a big eyesore.” Since Covid, she said, “a lot of things we didn’t use suddenly got applied.”
Continuous growth
Recessions crush profits far more than they reduce wages, so every year without one is a year the profit share holds up. Outside of the pandemic shock in 2020, the United States has not experienced a recession since the financial crisis ended in 2009.
That’s a remarkable stretch, and it could continue. The traditional preconditions for a downturn — overextended consumers, overleveraged businesses, excess staffing — are largely absent, Paulsen said. Household debt-to-income ratios have been falling since 2009, corporate balance sheets are strong, and pessimism itself has kept everyone cautious enough to avoid the kind of overreach that typically ends an expansion.
“You usually don’t have a recession when everybody expects a recession, because everybody’s on their best behavior,” he said.
Market power
Corporate concentration has been rising for a century, according to research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Typically, fewer than 1 percent of corporations now account for more than 90 percent of corporate profits.
Fewer, bigger firms tend to have more pricing power, which translates into fatter margins. Ownership matters, too. A 2025 Chicago Fed study found that a one-percentage-point increase in concentrated institutional ownership of a firm is associated with a 0.17 percent reduction in its payroll — evidence that dominant shareholders are pressing companies to keep labor costs lean.
Concentration may not keep rising, though. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, Biden-style trustbusting could return, constraining profit growth. That’s a segue into the last theory: policy.
Policy
Congress and the Federal Reserve have a lot to do with the profit surge. Over the past four decades, the federal tax rate on corporate profits has fallen to 21 percent from 46 percent. Interest rates have fallen as well. Michael Smolyansky, a Fed economist, has calculated that declining interest rates and declining tax rates “mechanically” explain more than 40 percent of real corporate profit growth from 1989 to 2019.
Corporate profits have also benefited from the erosion of labor-market regulation, the decline of union membership and the broader political realignment that began with the election of President Ronald Reagan, said Michalis Nikiforos, an economist at the University of Geneva and the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.
But interest rates aren’t falling anymore, fiscal policy has become less stimulative, and the pro-business realignment under Reagan seems to be coming undone.
There are lots of forces acting on profits, but one clear one is that profits this far above the historical norm tend to generate pushback. “What’s happening to workers will be a major issue in the midterms,” Swonk said. “It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. A backlash can be quite disruptive to profits.”
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8) For Iran, Flexing Control Over Waterway Is New Deterrent
Iran’s government could emerge from the conflict with a blueprint to keep adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
By Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, Reporting from Washington, April 18, 2026
A satellite image showing ships’ movements in a section of the Strait of Hormuz this month. Copernicus Sentinel-2, via Reuters
The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.
It turns out that Iran already has a deterrent: its own geography.
Iran’s decision to flex its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows, has brought global economic pain in the form of higher prices for gasoline, fertilizer and other staples. It has upended war planning in the United States and Israel, where officials have had to devise military options to wrest the strait from Iranian control.
The U.S.-Israeli war has significantly damaged Iran’s leadership structure, larger naval vessels and missile production facilities, but it has done little to restrict Iran’s ability to control the strait.
Iran could thus emerge from the conflict with a blueprint for its hard-line theocratic government to keep its adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
“Everyone now knows that if there is a conflict in the future, closing the strait will be the first thing in the Iranian textbook,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israel’s military intelligence agency and now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “You cannot beat geography.”
In several social media posts on Friday, President Trump said that the strait, which in one post he called the “Strait of Iran,” was “completely open” to shipping. Iran’s foreign minister made a similar declaration. On Saturday, however, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that the waterway remained closed, suggesting a divide among Iranian military and civilians on the issue during negotiations to end the war.
Whereas just the prospect of sea mines is enough to scare off commercial shipping, Iran retains far more precise means of control: attack drones and short-range missiles. American military and intelligence officials estimate that, after weeks of war, Iran still has about 40 percent of its arsenal of attack drones and upward of 60 percent of its missile launchers — more than enough to hold shipping in the Strait of Hormuz hostage in the future.
A central goal of the U.S.-led military campaign in Iran is now reopening the strait, which was open when the war began. It is a precarious position for the United States, and its adversaries have taken notice.
“It’s not clear how the truce between Washington and Tehran will play out. But one thing is certain — Iran has tested its nuclear weapons. It’s called the Strait of Hormuz. Its potential is inexhaustible,” Dmitri Medvedev, a former president of Russia and deputy chairman of the country’s security council, wrote on social media last week.
Iran’s control over the strait forced President Trump to announce a naval blockade of his own, and this week the U.S. Navy began forcing cargo ships into Iranian ports after they transited the waterway.
Iran responded with anger, but also taunting. “The Strait of Hormuz isn’t social media. If someone blocks you, you can’t just block them back,” one Iranian diplomatic outpost, which has posted snarky messages throughout the war, wrote on X in response to Mr. Trump’s move. The dispute over the strait has been the focus of numerous A.I.-generated videos depicting American and Israeli officials as Lego characters.
Still, the impact of the American blockade has been real. Seaborne trade accounts for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s economic output — approximately $340 million per day — and that flow in recent days has largely ground to a halt.
Iran considers the blockade an act of war and has threatened to attack it. But so far it has not, nor has the United States tried during the current cease-fire to reduce Iran’s grip over the strait when the conflict finally ends.
“It may be that both countries see there is a real window to have negotiations” and don’t want to escalate the conflict right now, Adm. Kevin Donegan, who once commanded the U.S. Navy’s fleet with responsibility for the Middle East and is now retired, said during a seminar hosted by the Middle East Institute this week.
Iran tried to block the Strait of Hormuz once before, mining it and the Persian Gulf during the conflict with Iraq during the 1980s. But mine warfare is dangerous, and decades later Iran has effectively harnessed missile and drone technology to threaten both commercial and military maritime traffic.
While the U.S. and Israeli war significantly damaged Iran’s weapons manufacturing capability, Iran has preserved enough of its missiles, launchers and one-way attack drones to put shipping in the strait at risk.
U.S. intelligence and military estimates vary, but multiple officials said that Iran has about 40 percent of its prewar arsenal of drones. Those drones have proved to be a powerful deterrent. While they are easily shot down by American warships, commercial tankers have few defenses.
Iran also has ample supplies of missiles and missile launchers. At the time of the cease-fire, Iran had access to about half its missile launchers. In the days that immediately followed, it dug out about 100 systems that had been buried inside caves and bunkers, bringing its stockpile of launchers back up to about 60 percent of its prewar level.
Iran is also digging out its supply of missiles, similarly buried in rubble from American attacks on its bunkers and depots. When that work is done, Iran could reclaim as much as 70 percent of its prewar arsenal, according to some American estimates.
Officials note that the counts of Iran’s weapon stocks are not precise. Intelligence assessments offer a broad look at how much power Iran retains.
But while estimates of Iran’s missile stockpiles differ, there is agreement among officials that Iran has enough weaponry to halt shipping in the future.
Iran’s government chose not to block the Strait of Hormuz last June, when Israel launched a military campaign that United States eventually joined to hit deeply buried nuclear sites.
Mr. Citrinowicz, the former Israeli official, said that decision probably reflected the cautious approach of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who may have been concerned that blocking the strait could have led other countries to join the military campaign against Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei was killed during the first day of the current war, a move that signaled to Iranian officials that American and Israeli goals for this conflict were far more expansive.
Iran “saw the June war as an Israeli war for their own strategic objectives,” Mr. Citrinowicz said. “This is a regime change war.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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9) Trump Says U.S. Officials Will Travel to Pakistan for Talks
President Trump said the officials would arrive Monday evening in Pakistan, which has been mediating negotiations. The Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed on Sunday, after Iran said the parties were far from a final deal to end the war.
By Aaron Boxerman, Tyler Pager and Shirin Hakim, April 19, 2026
Officials are expected to return to Pakistan for talks on the war in Iran. Credit...Farooq Naeem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump said Sunday that American officials will travel to Pakistan for further negotiations on ending the war with Iran, as a two-week cease-fire was set to elapse this week without an agreement in sight.
Vice President JD Vance will again lead the U.S. delegation, accompanied by the top Trump aides Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, according to a White House official. There was no immediate comment from Iranian officials.
At the same time, Iran said it had effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, defying one of Mr. Trump’s conditions for the temporary truce between the United States, Israel and Iran. The Persian Gulf waterway, critical for global energy supplies, appeared largely shut on Sunday. Mr. Trump also said Iran had fired on passing ships in a “total violation of our cease-fire.”
Mr. Trump said on social media that the American delegation would arrive on Monday evening in Pakistan, which has been mediating between the two countries.
Last weekend, Mr. Vance led a similar round of negotiations in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, which ended without a breakthrough. The meeting had been the highest-level encounter between Iranian and American leaders in decades.
In recent days, Mr. Trump had repeatedly said Iran had assented to nearly all of his demands on the country’s nuclear program. But Iranian leaders vehemently denied that, dampening hopes for an immediate agreement.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the chief Iranian negotiator, said in a televised address late Saturday that the United States had failed to pressure Iran through ultimatums or secure international backing for the war, which began with a U.S.-Israeli air assault in late February.
Now, Iran hopes to consolidate what Iranian leaders view as their military achievements with diplomacy, said Mr. Ghalibaf, who is also the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. Nonetheless, he added, its army was ready to restart fighting at any moment.
A trigger for renewed conflict — should negotiations collapse — could be the deadlock in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian forces are still choking global energy markets through their blockade of the Persian Gulf waterway, a conduit for a significant share of the world’s energy.
The U.S. Navy, as well, is continuing to blockade Iranian ports in an effort to pressure Iran’s leadership to accept American conditions for a durable peace.
Iran’s foreign minister had declared the strait open on Friday to commercial ships, as long as they followed an Iranian-designated route. The announcement came in response to the start of a cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia.
But less than a day later, Iran’s military again tightened its grip on the strait, which it said would stay closed in retaliation for Mr. Trump’s decision to impose a U.S. blockade on ships from Iranian ports.
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10) In Qatar, Trapped Between the U.S. and Iran, War Forced a Reckoning
The gas-rich Gulf nation is in a state of “strategic shock” after the war dealt a serious blow to its economy, sending ripples around the world.
By Vivian Nereim. Reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 19, 2026
Qatar, though on good terms with both the United States and Iran, has been harmed economically by the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran and endured retaliatory attacks from Tehran. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To grasp the global collateral damage from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, consider the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.
A close U.S. ally and longtime mediator between Washington and Tehran, Qatar’s government sought to avert the war. When that failed, Qatari officials warned of the dangers of a prolonged conflict.
Resource-rich Qatar nonetheless faced more than 700 Iranian missile and drone attacks, which have targeted Gulf countries that host American military bases. These attacks forced Qatar to suspend natural gas production, which generates its vast wealth and normally accounts for a fifth of the global supply.
It was one of a number of disruptions caused by the war that sent economic shock waves around the world.
A fragile cease-fire announced on April 7 suspended U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and Iran’s retaliation against Israel and the Gulf Arab states. Yet, even if the truce holds, the war has struck at the heart of Qatar’s interests, upending the economy and shaking the nation’s reputation as a haven for business.
As it takes stock, the Qatari government will be forced to swallow a bitter pill, analysts say: Neither its strong ties with the United States nor its cordial relationship with Iran have spared it from pain.
Qatar’s case reflects the thorny position that Gulf countries have found themselves in during the war. Trapped between their chief ally and their neighbor, they are now forced to rethink their security strategies.
The war has caused a state of “strategic shock” for Qatar and its neighbors, said Rashid Al-Mohanadi, the vice president of the Center for International Policy Research, a think tank in Qatar.
“There was an assumption that such a big move in the region, like starting a war with Iran, would at least happen in consultation with the Gulf,” he said. “We thought we had a better working relationship with the United States.”
At the same time, he added, “the level of Iranian aggression on our capitals and on our cities and on our infrastructure has been just crazy.”
While many Gulf Arab countries have historically had an antagonistic relationship with Iran, Qatar — along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — has invested considerable political capital in building warmer ties in recent years. Many Gulf officials saw this as the most pragmatic way to contain the threat posed by Iran.
Now, all of these countries are re-evaluating their approaches to Iran.
Qatar, a peninsula roughly the size of Connecticut, has fewer than 400,000 citizens and is dwarfed by regional powers on either side: Iran across the gulf, and Saudi Arabia on its western border. The perils of being a small state in a turbulent region have shaped its political trajectory for decades.
Seeking to protect the nation, Qatar’s royal family leaned on its relationship with the United States, which has a major air base in Qatar and had pledged to defend the country. Qatari officials have also tried to make their country indispensable to the world’s economy and to global diplomacy, serving as a mediator with difficult parties like Iran, Russia and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
In recent years, the government sought to cultivate close ties with President Trump, donating a Boeing 747 jetliner to him. A Qatari government-owned real estate firm sealed a deal last year with Mr. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, to construct a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar.
And when Mr. Trump visited Qatar last May, he signed an agreement with officials there “to generate an economic exchange worth at least $1.2 trillion,” the White House announced.
Despite all of that, Qatar was able to exert little control over a war that directly involved it.
The uncomfortable realization that Israel appears to have more influence over Mr. Trump’s decisions than Gulf leaders do has reverberated through Gulf royal courts, analysts said.
“This is a very eye-opening moment for the Gulf states,” said Sinem Cengiz, a researcher at the Gulf Studies Center in Qatar University. “There is going to be a very, very significant rethinking.”
There are hard limits to how far that rethinking can go, however, because most Gulf countries have no viable alternative to U.S. protection.
“They’re just dependent, and there’s not much they can do,” said Dina Esfandiary, the Middle East geoeconomics lead for Bloomberg Economics. “It was also a bit of a slap across the face that they thought they had this sway, particularly over the Trump administration, and then clearly it was secondary to Israel’s sway.”
The war’s human toll in Qatar has been mitigated by air-defense systems that intercepted most attacks.
Qatari authorities have reported no civilian deaths.
Still, the effect has been palpable. Tourism withered. Qatar Airways planes that once crisscrossed the globe, stopping off in the capital, Doha, were grounded. Many foreign residents with the means to do so left.
Qatar’s all-important energy sector has been hit by the worst shocks.
The state-owned QatarEnergy shut down liquefied natural gas production at its main site, Ras Laffan, early in the war. The company was unable to safely export gas through the Strait of Hormuz — the only waterway through which its gas reaches global markets.
In mid-March, Iranian attacks hit Ras Laffan directly, inflicting extensive damage. Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, announced that it could take up to five years to repair, and estimated that the annual loss in revenue for Qatar would be about $20 billion, equivalent to 37 percent of the total government revenue Qatar expected to bring in this year.
“This has taken the whole region back 10 to 20 years,” Mr. al-Kaabi told Reuters in an interview soon after the attacks.
The ramifications have spread far beyond the Middle East, threatening energy supplies in places as far-flung as Italy and Japan. Qatar also produces more than a third of the world’s helium, a gas needed to operate M.R.I. machines and manufacture computer chips.
Qatar itself should be able to cope with the budget hit, said Farouk Soussa, an economist who monitors the Middle East for Goldman Sachs.
“The good news is that the Qataris have deep pockets,” he said. Less certain is what the consequences will be for its model as a hub for foreign workers, investors and tourists.
“Probably the idea that confidence is lost forever and nobody is coming back is going too far,” Mr. Soussa said. “It will depend on what the postwar regional order looks like.”
Adam Rasgon and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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11) Syrian Billionaires Needed a Favor in Washington. They Invoked the Trump Name.
The attempt by the Khayyats to influence foreign policy while discussions are underway about potential Trump family deals is an increasingly common feature of the president’s second term.
By Eric Lipton, Reporting from Syria, Qatar and Washington, April 19, 2026
Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, two of three Syrian-born brothers, at their company’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Laura Boushnak for The New York Times
Last summer, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, sat in his Capitol Hill office in rapt attention as Middle Eastern investors laid out their plans in a video call to develop coastal property in Syria.
A cruise ship port. A polo club. A Bugatti car showroom. A world-class golf course. All in a country that had just recently been torn apart by civil war.
Nor was this everything. While Mohamad Al-Khayyat, a powerful Syrian-born businessman, was pitching the proposal, his brothers were winning more than $12 billion in government-sponsored contracts to rebuild a wide swath of the devastated Syrian economy.
There was a hitch, though. The Khayyats needed a big favor from Congress with the support of President Trump: the permanent lifting of crippling sanctions imposed on Syria before the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
That is when Mr. Wilson, himself a former real estate lawyer and proponent of the sanctions repeal, offered a tactical suggestion.
“I know how to get the president’s attention,” Mr. Wilson said. “Make it a Trump National Golf Course in Syria.”
Mohamad Al-Khayyat was already a step ahead. He said he had planned to propose a Trump-branded resort.
At the same time, his two older brothers were negotiating an even bigger real estate partnership with Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, to help them finance a multibillion-dollar resort in Albania.
Such a mixing of personal and diplomatic affairs has long been the norm in Middle Eastern nations, where a small set of players have historically run, and profited from, their dominant role in society. But it has become the way Washington operates in Mr. Trump’s second term, too.
Business discussions involving the president’s family, be it merely aspirational like the golf course or active like Mr. Kushner’s project, are consistently blurred with important policy decisions or consequential nation-to-nation negotiations.
It is also a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become. To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.
Other presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have taken steps to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest, while in Mr. Trump’s world it is almost the reverse. The family has been open that it intends to keep doing business deals around the world.
That has led to a warped system of executive patronage in which investors donate millions to the president’s pet projects, or invest alongside the Trump family, in hopes of achieving their policy goals, even if no explicit ask is ever made.
In fact, the White House and the Trump Organization assert that they were not aware of the proposed Trump golf resort for Syria, and the Trump Organization said that no discussions were underway.
And White House officials rejected any suggestion that Trump family-related real estate discussions had any impact on the president’s foreign policy choices related to Syria.
“President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious,” David Warrington, the White House counsel, said in a statement.
The Khayyat family also said their financial partnership with Mr. Kushner was unrelated to the sanctions repeal effort.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had favored lifting the sanctions, to enable Syria to draw the hundreds of billions of dollars that would be needed to repair the devastated country. Mr. Trump himself had been in favor of lifting them early in his current term, and did so temporarily last spring.
Still, some members of Congress were reluctant to repeal the legislation permanently without leverage, in case the new Syrian regime turned out as brutal as the old one had been.
The golf course proposal became part of a lobbying effort on Capitol Hill, a hint of how simply invoking the Trump brand has become politically advantageous to certain political causes.
Mohamad Al-Khayyat returned to Washington late last year toting a special stone celebrating the proposed golf course, carved with the Trump family emblem. He presented it to Mr. Wilson in his Capitol Hill office to deliver to the White House. Mr. Al-Khayyat then joined meetings with other lawmakers to push the sanctions repeal.
Weeks later, legislation for a permanent repeal won approval in Congress and was signed into law by Mr. Trump in late December.
Sharing Dreams
The Trump and Khayyat families came together at an Italian restaurant in Doha in 2022.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were in Qatar for World Cup soccer matches, and they dined at Carbone Doha, an extension of the New York City restaurant that sits on an island with a view of Doha’s impressive skyline.
The restaurant’s owner worked his way over to meet the famous diners. It turned out that Ramez Al-Khayyat and his family owned not just Carbone Doha, but every restaurant along that street on an artificial island the family had built in just six months, at the request of the Qatari royal family, to create an entertainment zone for the World Cup.
Soon the Kushners and the Khayyats were sharing their histories as scions of real estate developers, along with their dreams for the future.
Mr. Kushner had recently tapped Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including those from Qatar, to set up a $3 billion private equity firm after serving in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Now he had designs on building a multibillion-dollar resort on an island off the coast of Albania. Not too different from the one he was sitting on, in fact.
Ramez and his brothers had moved to Qatar full time in 2011. The Khayyats developed a relationship with the Qatari royal family, and built them a mountaintop vacation palace outside of Damascus.
It was one of several high-profile projects that had grabbed headlines for the family, including a wild episode when, after several neighboring countries imposed a blockade on Qatar in 2017, they flew in thousands of cows to supply milk and other dairy products to the small oil-rich nation.
Despite their success in Qatar, the Khayyats never gave up hopes of returning to Syria in some way.
A Change of Fortune
In late 2024, two monumental events changed the Khayyats’ fortunes and set them up for some globe-trotting: Mr. al-Assad was deposed, and Mr. Trump was returned to the presidency.
Weeks later, Ramez and his older brother, Moutaz, were on their way to Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
While in Washington for the festivities, the Khayyats engaged with the parents of Mr. Kushner. They also met Michael Boulos, the spouse of Tiffany Trump, the president’s younger daughter, as well as Mr. Boulos’s father, Massad Boulos, who had helped coordinate outreach to Syrian American voters during Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, photographs posted on social media show.
“Amazing experience,” Ramez Al-Khayyat, 41, said, recalling the event and an inauguration dinner they attended, during a recent interview. “Once in a lifetime.”
Access to the candlelight dinner generally required a minimum donation of $250,000 for a pair of tickets. Ramez Al-Khayyat said that a number of foreign business executives were invited, and that he and his older brother had not paid for the invitation.
That same month, Khayyat family members flew to Damascus to visit with the new president of Syria. The president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, only weeks earlier had been a rebel leader with a $10 million antiterrorism bounty on him from the United States. Now he was in charge, but of a country in tatters. Much of its infrastructure needed to be rebuilt.
The Khayyat family was a natural pick to get these projects jump-started. “We’re ready to move, and we are ready to move fast,” Ramez Al-Khayyat said, recalling his message to the new Syrian leader.
An extraordinary string of deals in Syria emerged.
The Khayyats and their partners were granted a $4 billion deal to rebuild the decrepit airport into a Middle Eastern hub, and another $7 billion contract to build four natural gas-powered electric plants. They negotiated a third deal to work with U.S.-based Chevron to develop offshore natural gas drilling sites in the Mediterranean off the coast of Syria.
Thomas J. Barrack Jr., the president’s special envoy to Syria, has cheered along the Khayyat brothers, joining with them for each of these announcements, making it clear that the Trump administration supported the projects.
Ramez Al-Khayyat has also been buying up historic homes in Damascus’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its status as one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, with plans to create a tourist destination.
Up the Syrian coast, Mohamad Al-Khayyat was working on his plan for the cruise ship terminal and resort where the Trump-branded golf course would be included, a project that would be built on land controlled by the Syrian government.
But there was a problem with each of these deals. They all hinged on getting the U.S. sanctions permanently repealed.
That is because international banks and other investors would not commit the capital needed to finance these efforts unless they could be assured that once the sanctions passed under the 2019 Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act were repealed they could not be “snapped back” into place.
Named after a Syrian photographer who documented torture in Mr. al-Assad’s prisons, the act was not only severely restrictive on the country and its trading partners. It also mandated sanctions on those profiting off the Syrian conflict by engaging in reconstruction activities.
“We were all waiting for this minute for the sanctions to be lifted permanently, and it’s a great thing for Syria,” Ramez Al-Khayyat said.
Golf Course Diplomacy
The wooing of Congress began in the spring.
Free flights to Syria were being offered to some members of Congress.
Repealing the sanctions was broadly supported by Syrian American groups and some lawmakers. They argued the move would boost Syria’s recovery by encouraging more foreign investment now that Mr. al-Assad was gone.
A chunk of the heavy lifting in Washington was done by a Syrian American businessman, Tarek Naemo, a lifelong friend of Mohamad Al-Khayyat who acknowledged in an interview that he was working on the proposed Trump golf course project.
Mr. Naemo, who is based in Florida and runs an investment firm that he said had done deals with partners including the Qatari Investment Authority, began with his wife to court at least a dozen members of Congress, starting with Speaker Mike Johnson.
The access was facilitated by a series of campaign contributions, records show, by Mr. Naemo, his wife and others who were championing the cause.
Mr. Wilson, the South Carolina Republican, was a particular target. Mr. Naemo became a social partner for the lawmaker, joining with him to shoot skeet, catching up with him at the Omni Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Va., and attending a Kennedy Center performance of “Les Misérables” with him and other Trump allies. (Mr. Trump also attended.)
By June 2025, Mr. Wilson had introduced legislation calling for the complete repeal of the Caesar Act sanctions.
The Biggest Obstacle
As this frenzy of lobbying moved ahead, there remained a major roadblock.
It was not, in fact, Mr. Trump. He was already sold.
In May, Mr. Trump temporarily lifted the sanctions after a meeting in Riyadh with Mr. al-Sharaa and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi ruling crown prince, who urged Mr. Trump to do so. The Saudis also want to be involved in the rebuilding of Syria.
But Syria, and investors like the Khayyats, still needed an act by Congress to make it permanent. And that is when they ran into a House lawmaker who emerged as the biggest obstacle.
Representative Brian Mast, Republican of Florida and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, remained concerned that revoking all the sanctions against Syria could leave ethnic and religious minorities there vulnerable to continued persecution and slaughter.
The standoff came to a head on Nov. 9, the night before Mr. Trump was scheduled for a meeting with Mr. al-Sharaa — the first Syrian head of state visit to the White House since the country gained independence from France in 1946.
At the St. Regis Hotel, three blocks from the White House, Mr. Mast and other members of Congress, including Mr. Wilson, joined Mr. al-Sharaa for a private dinner.
It was an odd moment, recalled Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, one of the attendees. After all, Mr. al-Sharaa was a former member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, directly targeting U.S. troops in Mosul two decades ago. Now he was asking for help.
Mr. Mast, a U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in 2010 while serving as a bomb disposal technician in Afghanistan, was unsure if he could trust Mr. al-Sharaa, asking him at the dinner: “We are no longer enemies?” Mr. al-Sharaa responded that he wanted to “liberate” his nation from the past, Mr. Mast recalled at a House hearing in February.
No mention was made of the tie-ins to Trump family deals, Mr. Blumenthal said.
Mohamad Al-Khayyat and Mr. Naemo had returned to Washington, and were there at the hotel that night with a group of investors they were hoping would provide financing for their resort with the proposed Trump golf course.
After the bipartisan dinner with lawmakers, a second late-night meeting with Mr. Mast and Mr. al-Sharaa was hastily arranged that included Mr. Al-Khayyat and Mr. Naemo, participants in the meeting said.
By the end of the conversations that night, Mr. Mast had shifted his stance. He was prepared to support the sanctions repeal without a provision allowing them to be quickly reinstated.
He explained his revised view later that month when speaking from the House floor. “We are giving Syria a chance to chart a post-Assad future,” he said.
Aides to Mr. Mast said the tie-ins to the Trump family were not a factor in his decision.
Before leaving Washington, Mr. Al-Khayyat and Mr. Naemo presented the “foundation stone” for the proposed Trump golf course to Mr. Wilson and Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana. The framed stone, emblazoned with the words Trump International Golf Club, Syria, signified what Mr. Al-Khayyat called “an emblem of future American economical opportunities in Syria.”
The sanctions repeal was inserted into the must-pass piece of legislation that authorizes nearly $1 trillion in annual Pentagon spending, two pages inside a 1,260-page law.
Trump signed it on Dec. 18, 2025, almost exactly a year after the fall of Mr. al-Assad.
Deals Playing Out
Convoys of Russian troops routinely travel the local highway along the coast of northern Syria, on their way to a nearby air force base that Russia still controls. Not far away, there is a toppled statue of the former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad. One of the sculpture’s arms was broken off, and its giant face was planted in the mud.
Off the highway, at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea near the port city of Latakia, families grow cabbage, eggplants, grape leaves and other crops in one of Syria’s most fertile spots.
This is the site of the hoped-for Trump golf course.
It sits in the region the Assad family comes from, and many locals, including Bashar al-Assad and several of his relatives, are members of a religious minority known as Alawites. The Assad association explains in part why hundreds of area residents were massacred by bands of vigilantes last year in the weeks after his government fell.
There is little hard information here about the status of the planned resort that could feature the Trump family name.
But there are rumors among the local farmers, like Sinan Younis, 42, and his brothers, who have worked this land for decades even though they do not own the property. Farming supplies the only income for two dozen of their family members.
“What about us?” Mr. Younis wondered, as he and members of his family briefly paused from their task of planting eggplant seedlings one recent afternoon. “How could they take all this, for a reason like that? Why our land, the land that we live from?”
These questions only add to the tensions, as the family still lives in fear that there could be another wave of violence targeting them and fellow Alawites. The eggplant harvest last year had to wait because Mr. Younis said he had to use his farm truck to collect dead bodies of neighbors killed in the attacks.
Back in Washington, some members of Congress, including Mr. Mast, remain worried that Syria has not lived up to expectations after the sanctions were lifted.
“I don’t believe that any of us thought transitions from the dictator Bashar al-Assad to now Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa would be without incident,” Mr. Mast said in February at a House hearing examining recent progress in Syria. “But we’ve already seen too many incidents, in my opinion — too many incidents of sectarian violence against religious and ethnic minorities.”
But the leverage the United States had — the power to snap back the sanctions — is now gone, and getting Congress to reimpose them would be politically complicated.
Foreign money from investors like the Khayyats, meanwhile, continues to pour into Syria.
It is on display at the Damascus airport, where even as a war is now being waged elsewhere across the Middle East, a fleet of earth-moving machines are busy ripping apart what remains of a 1960s-era airport terminal for the Khayyats’ project.
In addition, Mohamad Al-Khayyat recently secured a license to serve as the exclusive importer of brands made by the American consumer products giant SC Johnson, such as Ziploc bags, Raid bug spray and Glade air fresheners, which could not be directly sold in Syria until the sanctions were repealed.
Separately, in Albania, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s mammoth seaside project is also moving apace.
At first the Khayyats were simply going to serve as a construction firm on the resort. But over the last year — when the sanctions lobbying was taking place — the negotiations have shifted, executives involved in the deal said. Mr. Kushner and the Khayyats have decided to become partners in the project.
Ivanka Trump traveled there in January to meet with Ramez Al-Khayyat for a gathering with architects and other executives to discuss potential designs. Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, showed up.
“We are investing in the holding in order to make sure that there is sufficient capital,” Ramez Al-Khayyat said. “So it’s a joint venture between the two companies, and actually we are managing it together.”
A spokesman for Mr. Kushner declined to comment.
There is also talk of the Khayyats joining with Mr. Kushner to do real estate projects in Syria, given that the Caesar sanctions are gone.
“He’s a great guy, and we try to do something great together,” Ramez Al-Khayyat said, referring to Mr. Kushner. “We are presenting many opportunities.”
Kitty Bennett and Julie Tate contributed research.
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