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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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Trump’s Immigration Policy Sidelines Foreign Doctors Amid Shortage
Physicians from 39 countries are being pushed out of U.S. hospitals as a policy blocks their ability to work.
By Miriam Jordan, April 4, 2026
Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.
Faysal Alghoula, a 38-year-old pulmonologist from Libya who treats patients in an underserved area, could lose his ability to work in the U.S. because of a Trump immigration policy. Austin Anthony for The New York Times
One Nigerian doctor performed knee and hip replacement surgeries at a New York teaching hospital. A Venezuelan physician treated people with diabetes and hypertension in rural Texas. A U.S.-trained ophthalmologist from Iran can no longer perform eye surgeries in Arkansas.
All three physicians have been forced to stop seeing patients after they were pushed out of their jobs because of a Trump administration policy that took effect in January and froze visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries as well as people with Palestinian Authority travel documents.
The fallout of the move, which stemmed from a December travel ban, is expected to be most pronounced in rural areas that have long had a dearth of doctors, and in communities with large populations of older Americans coping with chronic conditions. The disruption comes amid a broader immigration crackdown as the Trump administration has detained undocumented people, reduced refugee admissions and tightened visa scrutiny, among other measures.
“This was a big swipe at immigration without regard for particular categories of immigrants, like physicians, who are desperately needed,” said Andrew Wizner, a lawyer who represents medical institutions that hire foreign doctors.
In response to questions, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement that decisions on cases involving immigrants from “high-risk countries” had been placed on hold “to ensure they are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
The U.S. currently faces a shortage of about 65,000 physicians, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. That deficit is expected to balloon over the next decade as Americans live longer and more physicians retire.
Foreign doctors currently comprise 25 percent of all doctors practicing in the country, and many have become citizens.
The Times reviewed a list of more than 100 physicians affected by the new policy, including doctors already on administrative leave and others who could be forced out when their work permits and visas expire.The list was created by the doctors themselves. Some agreed to be interviewed on the condition they not be identified, citing fear of retribution.
The Nigerian surgeon, who was performing knee and hip operations at a New York hospital as part of a fellowship, was pulled off the job in February after the government failed to renew his work permit.
The doctor, who has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles, has been offered a position at a university hospital in an underserved area starting July 1. That job treating patients and teaching residents is now in jeopardy.
The office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand contacted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to expedite the doctor’s case but was told he was ineligible because he is from a country subject to the processing freeze. Colleagues and hospital leaders said his removal harmed patient care, lowered morale and strained an already short-staffed team.
“We’ve doing this for decades, and there has always been a pathway forward for foreign physicians,” said Mr. Wizner. “Now it’s just a dead end for those affected by this adjudication pause.”
The affected doctors come from countries included in the ban, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, and are unable to work because they had immigration cases pending when the policy was announced.
Hundreds of foreign physicians affected by the pause have formed an informal professional network to exchange information. About 200 attended a recent online presentation by Curtis Morrison, a lawyer who has filed 13 lawsuits in federal court to compel the government to process the applications of particular individuals .
In a Feb. 27 letter to the secretaries of Homeland Security and State, chief executive of the American Medical Association, John Whyte, called for an exemption from the policy for physicians, citing national interest and harm to patients.
“It is important to support and expand pathways for these physicians to be able to enter and remain in the U.S. to care for our U.S. patients,” wrote Dr. Whyte, who noted that 900 patients were left without adequate care in a rural area after a physician was removed.
Ezequiel Veliz, a family physician from Venezuela who was named resident of the year in 2025 at UT Health, Rio Grande Valley, has been unable to work for months.
“I am stuck in processing purgatory,” said Dr. Veliz, 32. “The saddest part is that my patients are being affected.”
In a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, his former supervisor, Jose Cano, said that, “Dr. Veliz delivers outstanding, compassionate care to the patients of the Rio Grande Valley.”
Dr. Veliz’s patients adhered to treatment plans and consistently attended appointments, said Dr. Cano, who added that Dr. Veliz had served on the committee reviewing resident applicants and was among 20 young doctors chosen for a state leadership program.
American medical schools do not produce enough doctors. For residency positions starting this July, there were 41,000 residency positions available, according to official data, but only 32,000 applicants from U.S. medical schools.
Some 7,000 foreign doctors were selected to fill the gap, after rigorous exams and background checks. Once they complete training, many take jobs in federally designated underserved areas.
More than 60 percent of the foreign physicians practice primary care, including family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics, fields that Americans often shun because of punishing workloads and lower pay compared to other specialties
“International medical graduates fulfill a critical need for our country,” said Dr. Rebecca Andrews, chair of the Board of Regents for the American College of Physicians, which represents internists, primary care doctors who treat adults.
“Bottlenecking the influx of these physicians will leave our health care system in a tenuous state,” said Dr. Andrews.
At Family Health Centers of Southwest Florida, which provide primary care to about 100,000 patients annually, half of the physicians are foreign born, including some from banned countries, said David Koester, vice president of the network.
“We would be hamstrung if they were not able to work or we were not able to recruit new ones,” he said. “A lot of these patients would overrun ERs and place a burden on hospitals.”
Physicians from the banned countries whose visas will expire soon are bracing for what is to come.
Among them is Kasra Moein, an Iranian physician on a small team conducting National Institutes of Health-funded research on heart disease and aging at the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Andrew Gardner, who leads the study, said Dr. Moein has made significant contributions to the project.
Another doctor, Faysal Alghoula, of Libya, provides care to 960 patients, including military veterans, at two hospitals in rural Indiana.
He arrived in the U.S. in 2016. After rising to chief resident at Creighton University’s hospital in Nebraska, he went on to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he completed three years of training in pulmonology and critical care.
In Indiana, Dr. Alghoula assesses patients referred to him from across the region with suspicious spots on their lungs and determines the appropriate treatment, surgery, chemotherapy or monitoring. In the ICU, he cares for patients on ventilators and suffering from heart failure.
But his O-1 visa, which is issued to people with extraordinary ability, will expire on Sept. 6. Although he has a green card application pending, he will have to stop working when the visa lapses. He has sued to compel the government to act.
“My life is suspended,” said Dr. Alghoula, a father of two U.S.-born girls, 3 and 4. “Should I renew my lease or not? Should I take a job in another country or not?”
He has received offers from Canada, but said that he preferred to stay in a place where there is a physician shortage.
“I’ve been screened and heavily vetted,” he said. “Now they say I’m high risk because I was born in Libya.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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2) Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying
A record number of student loan borrowers are in delinquency and default. Some are making the drastic decision to leave the country and abandon their loans.
By Laura O’Connor, April 4, 2026
Amanda Lynn Tully, 37, moved to Prague and defaulted on her student loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years. Milan Bures for The New York Times
Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.
So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.
“I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable,” Ms. Tully, 37, said.
Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.
More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number — 7.7 million — have defaulted on their loans, according to recently released data from the Education Department.
For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting. In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator, as well as having a higher quality of life, even on a lower salary, outside the United States. Many who fled abroad, including Ms. Tully, said they had no plans of ever returning.
Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown, but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit. Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue, have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to “resist the temptation to stop making payments.” Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet, raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.
Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.
“The payments weren’t even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating,” Ms. Tully said.
Stanley Tate, a Baltimore lawyer specializing in student debt, warns against this approach. “Federal student loans are contractual debts,” he said, meaning the obligation to repay does not go away, regardless of citizenship or residency. Moreover, the foreign earned income exclusion often allows federal student loan borrowers who live abroad and earn less than $130,000 (for the 2025 tax year) to pay $0 per month under an income-driven repayment plan, he said, recommending this path over defaulting.
But affordable payments haven’t stopped borrowers on such plans from defaulting — abroad or at home.
Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success, or TICAS, has seen borrowers in a situation similar to Ms. Tully’s, with seemingly manageable payments, default because of a combination of low earnings and a sense of hopelessness.
“The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable,” she said. “It’s not necessarily ‘I can’t afford it.’ It’s sometimes ‘It feels like I had no other choice but to go to college and I had to take out loans to go, and now I’m going to be stuck with this,’ which can define people’s lives in a way that feels very unfair and harmful.”
In 2016, Eric Cooper graduated from a state school in Georgia with a degree in logistics. He received good grades and found a job as a logistics manager earning $52,000 a year almost immediately. But he had $80,000 of student debt, most of it consisting of parent PLUS loans through his mother.
“I did what everyone says to do — go to college, sign up for the loans,” said Mr. Cooper, now 31. “My concern when I was 18 was that it was a lot of money, but everyone tells you that you’ll get a good job and pay it back, no problem.”
Mr. Cooper’s payments were over $600 a month, and he was living paycheck to paycheck. He considered his options and planned to default not long after graduating, realizing his debt would take decades to pay off.
“I thought about it one day and was like, ‘Am I really going to be doing this until I’m 50 or 60?’”
His primary concern was the parent PLUS loan. “If I left and didn’t pay it, they would be forced to,” he said of his family. After working for three years and making timely payments, he refinanced the loan into his name with a private lender. Within months, he moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when it was secured.
Mr. Cooper defaulted on his loans in 2019, changing his email and phone number, never alerting debtors to his new address.
“I think there were a few letters sent to my parents, but after the first year, I just never heard anything from anyone,” he said.
For Enrique Zúñiga, debt wasn’t on his mind when he began his studies. He received a full scholarship to Princeton and was grateful to avoid having student debt — until he received a $16,000 tax bill.
Mr. Zúñiga, 25, comes from a working-class family in Tiltil, Chile. In his final year of high school, EducationUSA, a State Department initiative to recruit international students to the United States, came to his class and handed him pamphlets for Princeton, where he applied to study chemistry and later switched to majoring in Spanish and Portuguese.
Mr. Zúñiga was living in university accommodations while dishwashing part time, with his scholarship covering both his tuition and his living expenses. But Mr. Zúñiga didn’t realize that all funding exceeding his academic costs represented “nonqualified” funding, meaning that it was taxable.
Princeton states on its website that most nonacademic funding (including for international students) is taxable, but Mr. Zúñiga did not recall being told this. When he received his first tax bill from the university at the beginning of his second year of studies, he panicked.
“I walked into the financial aid office, and I told them: ‘I don’t have this money, so what do I do? I need to enroll in my classes,’” he recalled. Princeton offered him a private loan to cover the tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga had hoped to stay in the United States after graduating and find a good job with his Ivy League degree. With these plans in mind, he took on additional private loans to cover his tax bills until graduation.
TICAS has advocated for all scholarship funding to be nontaxable to prevent students from taking on tax-related debts. However, Ms. Zampini said she had never seen a situation like Mr. Zúñiga’s, where the university provided loans to cover the taxes. The student newspaper has also published an opinion article highlighting the issue.
In July 2022, Mr. Zúñiga graduated with $16,736 in loans to Princeton. He received letters and emails demanding payment almost immediately. After months of unemployment and couch-surfing, Mr. Zúñiga found work as a legal assistant and interpreter at a legal charity in Philadelphia, but he was still unable to afford payments.
By November 2023, Mr. Zúñiga had paid back less than $1,500, and loan servicers began demanding he make more payments. He was then was offered a job in Shanghai as a college admissions counselor.
“I thought to myself: ‘Well, they can’t enforce any judgments against my debts. I might as well go,’” he said. Before moving to China, he tried to negotiate with the loan servicers, but he said they were unwilling to budge.
Even in Shanghai, a Chinese loan recovery organization began contacting Mr. Zúñiga almost daily throughout 2024, urging him to pay his debt to Princeton.
“I was depressed,” he said, describing a cycle of receiving daily phone calls and blocking numbers. Today, Mr. Zúñiga still receives emails about his debt, which has grown to $28,196.13, but he has no plans to pay it back.
Besides the emails, debt plays virtually no role in Mr. Zúñiga’s life in Shanghai. Ms. Tully and Mr. Cooper also lead seemingly debt-free lives. They largely rely on local jobs and freelance work, still living comfortably despite earning far less than their American peers. Both have visited the United States without encountering issues and said they rarely thought about their debt.
Ms. Zampini said she was concerned about the narrative that defaulted borrowers living abroad were “gaming the system,” or being such a small minority of borrowers that their experiences shouldn’t motivate policy change.
“This is one piece of the bigger puzzle of how borrowers are managing,” she said. “The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system.”
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3) Trump Escalates Threat to Hit Iranian Power Plants After U.S. Rescues Downed Airman
President Trump used an expletive-laden social media post to taunt Iranian leaders, saying that the United States would attack if they did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
By Aaron Boxerman, Greg Jaffe, Helene CooperYan Zhuang and Eric Schmitt, April 5, 2026
Tehran—An anti-U.S. billboard depicting planes captured in a net on Sunday.
President Trump on Sunday escalated his threats to bomb Iranian power plants within the next two days and taunted the country’s leaders in an expletive-laden social media post.
Mr. Trump, seemingly emboldened by the successful U.S. rescue of an American airman in Iran over the weekend, issued a new ultimatum to Iran to end its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, a major Persian Gulf waterway for the transport of oil and gas, by Apr. 6.
If Iran’s government did not, he said, U.S. forces would target the country’s energy infrastructure, which supplies power for millions of civilians.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. The president has previously postponed his deadline to attack twice and the Omani foreign ministry said on Sunday that officials had discussed how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with Iranian counterparts without reaching a definitive agreement.
“Praise be to Allah,” Mr. Trump added, before signing off in all caps.
Iran has threatened to retaliate by intensifying its attacks on critical infrastructure in Israel and Arab states that are allied with the United States. An escalation could further derail the lives of civilians throughout the region and add to worries about the global economy, which has been rattled by soaring energy prices since the start of the war.
Over the past two days, the U.S. military has been in a race with Iranian armed forces to find the missing airman after an F-15E jet was shot down over Iran on Friday, in the first known instance of a U.S. combat aircraft since the start of the war.
The plane’s pilot was quickly rescued. But a second officer was stranded in Iran and injured in the incident. American commandoes found the airman deep inside Iranian territory under the cover of darkness.
There were no U.S. casualties among the rescue team, Mr. Trump said on Sunday. The rescued officer had “sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” Mr. Trump added.
The incident underscored Iran’s ability to fight back despite weeks of attacks on its military arsenal. Another U.S. aircraft, an A-10 Warthog attack plane, crashed near the Strait of Hormuz at about the same time, and the lone pilot was rescued, two U.S. officials said. The Iranian military said its air defense systems had hit an A-10. The U.S. officials did not say what caused the plane to go down.
On Sunday, Israel and a number of Gulf countries reported attempted drone and missile strikes by Iran. Kuwaiti officials said Iranian drones significantly damaged two power and water desalination plants, and sparked a fire at the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s oil complex.
U.S. officials had sought an offramp to the war with Iran by passing messages through Pakistani mediators. But Iranian officials have publicly dismissed the U.S. demands, which would have restrained Iran’s missile and nuclear programs.
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4) Stephen Miller Is Still Pursuing His Immigration Agenda, but More Quietly
The architect of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign wants “a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.” The chaos in Minneapolis has not pushed him off that course.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Christopher Flavelle, Emily Cochrane and Glenn Thrush, April 5, 2026
Stephen Miller’s directive helped set in motion the increasingly aggressive raids on the streets of American cities that culminated in the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
It was May 2025, a few months into the second Trump administration, and Stephen Miller, the right-wing populist powering the White House crackdown on immigration, was clearly frustrated.
President Trump had talked about arresting “the worst of the worst” of undocumented immigrants — the rapists, killers and other criminals he had emphasized during the previous year’s campaign. Mr. Miller, however, had long pushed for removing anyone who had entered the country illegally.
So when Mr. Miller arrived one day last spring at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for an update from agency leaders, an official raised a question on many agents’ minds: Who exactly should they be going after?
Mr. Miller was unequivocal, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting. Agents should not limit themselves to dangerous criminals. Instead, they should stop people with the lowest level of reasonable suspicion, and detain anyone in the country illegally, with warrantless arrests. His message was clear: Push the limits.
Eight months later, Mr. Miller did something startling — he backpedaled.
His demands had helped set in motion militarized operations on the streets of Democratic-run cities, intensified by immigration agents killing two U.S. citizens protesting in Minneapolis. After initially denouncing one of the slain protesters, an intensive care nurse, as a would-be assassin, Mr. Miller offered a rare concession that immigration authorities might have made a mistake.
Now, Mr. Miller, 40, one of the most influential presidential advisers in recent memory and an unabashed champion of Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigrant crackdown, is at a crossroads. He faces questions about how aggressively he can continue to drive the deportation campaign, and how much appetite his party and the country have for tactics that proved successful in helping to boost arrests of immigrants but reignited a polarizing debate over what it means to be American.
The administration has toned down its immigration strategy. Federal agents have drawn down from the streets of major cities, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary who had become the face of the policy, is out. Mr. Miller even pulled back his public appearances for a time.
But there is little sense inside the administration that Mr. Miller has lost his standing with Mr. Trump.
Far from acknowledging defeat, Mr. Miller appears to have simply adjusted his strategy in an effort to minimize political fallout. He has remained steadfast in his view that the administration should act to reverse an openness to migration that he has called “the single largest experiment on a society, on a civilization, that has ever been conducted in human history.”
This account of Mr. Miller’s role in the White House and his influence over one of the more far-reaching deportation crackdowns in recent decades is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, local representatives and people who work with Mr. Miller or have knowledge of internal administration deliberations.
Mr. Miller, who holds the dual titles of deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, continues to preside over regular calls with national security and immigration officials. He is pushing for new ways to squeeze the lives of undocumented immigrants and those with legal protections, such as making it harder to get public housing or other benefits, officials said. He has targeted those with refugee status, particularly Somalis, a group he has long derided.
He is also putting the finishing touches on a rule to block green cards for immigrants who might need public assistance, according to White House officials. The policy faced legal pushback during Mr. Trump’s first term and was lifted under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Miller is focused on crafting the rule to survive in court.
He has pushed Republicans in Congress to resist ICE reforms backed by Democrats, while his team in the White House has helped carry out Mr. Trump’s directive to deploy ICE agents to airports. And Mr. Miller is focused on ramping up deportations of noncitizens to faraway countries, with the hopes of encouraging immigrants still in the United States to leave voluntarily.
In addition to his efforts on the federal level, Mr. Miller has worked with politicians in various Republican states to pass anti-immigrant laws. He raised with Texas lawmakers last month the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children.
White House officials in recent weeks have said that Mr. Miller grew frustrated with Ms. Noem and the attention-grabbing approach to immigration operations endorsed by her and some of her top lieutenants. But there is little to no evidence that Mr. Miller pushed back against the aggressive tactics of agents that prompted bipartisan criticism.
In response to questions sent by The Times for Mr. Miller, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that he remained part of the president’s inner circle.
“Stephen is a trusted and deeply loyal adviser to President Trump and has been critical to the realization of the president’s historic first year in office,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement. “Stephen has demonstrated great effectiveness and exceptional capability in every one of the president’s policy initiatives.”
Mr. Miller has blamed many of the country’s problems on a landmark 1965 law that paved the way for more Hispanic and Asian immigrants, a shift from primarily allowing in Europeans.
Despite decades of data showing that immigrants outperform native-born Americans on major indicators, including crime rates and use of welfare, Mr. Miller contends that those who entered after the 1965 law, as well as their descendants, have largely been unsuccessful.
“If you bring those societies into our country and then give them unlimited free welfare, what do we think’s going to happen?” he told Fox News in December. “We need a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.”
Mr. Miller’s meeting last May at ICE headquarters demonstrated how he has flexed his power, combining stern lectures to immigration enforcement officials with often brash public statements that amplify his directives.
In addition to telling ICE leaders behind closed doors to push the limits, Mr. Miller said on Fox News the same month that “we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day.”
The number was wildly ambitious. In the final year of the Biden administration, ICE had arrested about 300 people per day, according to federal data. After Mr. Trump had returned to the White House, arrests had roughly doubled, to about 600 per day. To meet Mr. Miller’s new target, arrests would need to grow fivefold.
Within weeks, the consequences of that push would become apparent. On the first Friday in June, soon after Mr. Miller dressed down ICE officials, the agency began arresting workers at a warehouse at the edge of Los Angeles’s fashion district. The next day, Mr. Trump ordered 2,000 members of the National Guard to the city.
On social media, the president laid out his strategy, pledging to rein in big cities that he called the “core of the Democrat Power Center.”
The crackdown on blue America had begun.
‘You Are Unleashed’
Mr. Miller’s instructions to ICE underscored his clout, even as he pursued policies that led to debates with some who outranked him.
Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, have debated how wide to “cast the net” on immigration enforcement, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Trump ally who has worked closely with both aides.
Mr. Graham said the two have had “moments of tension, but they work well together.” He said the conversation about immigration enforcement had centered on critical questions of “how far to go, what to do, when to do it” and what methods to use.
At times, Mr. Trump has appeared to rein in Mr. Miller and other immigration officials, particularly when enforcement has threatened business allies.
But the president for the most part has trusted Mr. Miller to pursue his immigration goals.
In September, after a video showed an ICE officer shoving a woman from Ecuador at a New York City immigration courthouse, department officials announced that the officer had been “relieved of his duties.”
The statement by the agency incensed Mr. Miller, according to two people familiar with the matter. The White House contacted Department of Homeland Security leaders and got the officer back to work.
Mr. Miller’s support for aggressive tactics was apparent when the administration announced the creation of a crime-focused task force in Memphis, an effort that would also involve rounding up undocumented immigrants. He joined Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi on a stage there last October, telling a crowd of law enforcement officers to dismantle criminal networks “without apology and without mercy.”
“I see the guns and badges in this room,” Mr. Miller said. “You are unleashed.”
Two Dead in Minneapolis
The turning point for Mr. Miller, and the administration as a whole, came as tensions boiled over in Minneapolis.
Mr. Miller had championed the administration’s focus on that city, particularly its large Somali population, part of which was being investigated for fraud involving federal benefits. He described Somalis as “pirates” who “come here and steal everything we have.”
When protests accelerated after the Jan. 7 fatal shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Good, Mr. Miller was unwavering in his support for federal agents. He wanted agents to arrest people he argued were interfering with enforcement operations, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
Around that time, he discussed with Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act — a step that would allow the federal government to deploy active-duty troops inside the country, according to two administration officials. The act has not been used since 1992. Mr. Trump did not use it.
Soon after federal agents killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who was carrying a handgun for which he had a permit, Mr. Miller wrote on social media that Mr. Pretti was “a domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”
Video soon emerged contradicting that account. At a news conference the day after the shooting, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official known for his cowboy-style aggression, offered a response notably more measured than Miller’s, saying it was too early to draw conclusions.
“That, folks, is why we have something called an investigation,” Mr. Bovino said.
Mr. Miller was confused why Mr. Bovino’s description did not align with his own, according to White House officials, who said Mr. Miller’s comments had been based on information from Border Patrol officials in Minneapolis.
Mr. Miller soon pulled back.
Three days after the shooting, he said in a statement that the White House had given “clear guidance” that federal personnel should create a barrier between protesters and officers making arrests. When Mr. Pretti was shot, federal agents “may not have been following that protocol,” he said.
In the days that followed, the president, concerned about the optics in Minneapolis, tried to soften the tone of his administration. Mr. Bovino was removed from his post overseeing the Minneapolis operation, replaced by Tom Homan, the White House border czar, who had long called for ICE to focus on targeted operations. Two and a half weeks later, on Feb. 12, Mr. Homan said the surge of federal agents to Minneapolis was ending.
Mr. Miller’s television appearances became less frequent, at least for a while. In the 12 months between Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the Pretti shooting, Mr. Miller was interviewed on Fox News an average of every four days. In February, after Mr. Pretti was killed, Mr. Miller went on the network just twice, according to media monitoring services. In March, he resumed his normal pace.
ICE began to shift from militarized street sweeps to a campaign of more targeted — and less visible — arrests. In February, the agency arrested roughly 11 percent fewer people per day than in January, according to internal government figures reviewed by The New York Times. It was the lowest level since last September, a drop driven in part by ICE arresting fewer immigrants without criminal records.
Mr. Miller also began to draw bipartisan criticism. “It’s Stephen Miller that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassment for the president of the United States by acting too quickly, speaking first and thinking later,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, told CNN last month.
Asked to respond to Mr. Tillis’s comments, the White House sent statements from 11 other Republican senators praising Mr. Miller for his work carrying out Mr. Trump’s agenda, including from Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who said that it was “more important now than ever to have fighters around President Trump like Stephen who can get things done.”
Rather than Mr. Miller seeing his power recede, he has moved to apply it in other ways, seeking policies that would pressure undocumented immigrants to leave on their own.
On his recent calls with immigration officials, for example, Mr. Miller has asked for information on how immigrants use credit cards, potentially as part of an effort to crack down on their ability to open accounts and spend money, according to officials with knowledge of the discussions.
Mr. Miller has also pursued changes affecting legal migrants, including refugees. He has continued to push ICE to work with the Justice Department to launch investigations into immigrants who illegally obtain public benefits.And he speaks frequently with Mr. Homan, who he has worked with to develop deportation strategies.
Mr. Miller’s influence has also extended beyond Washington.
In Tennessee, Republican state lawmakers have advanced a legislative package crafted in consultation with Mr. Miller that would harden immigration enforcement. It would require state or local officials to report people who receive services at hospitals, social service agencies and some public schools despite being in the country illegally. Officials who fail to report migrants improperly receiving benefits could face fines or even prison time.
The state’s Republican House speaker, Cameron Sexton, said he had discussed the legislation and other ideas in multiple conversations with Mr. Miller, including at the White House last year. Mr. Sexton described Mr. Miller as “a brilliant guy.”
Similar legislation has been introduced in Oklahoma by the state’s House speaker, Kyle Hilbert, who said in an interview that he had also met with Mr. Miller.
Mr. Miller’s immigration agenda continues to spread across the federal government.
Last month, he appeared with Vice President JD Vance in Washington to mark the start of what they billed as an anti-fraud campaign. Their remarks focused on migrants who illegally obtain public benefits, a theme the administration had hammered to help justify its armed buildup in Minneapolis.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have charged dozens of people in recent years with defrauding safety net programs designed to feed low-income children, treat minors with autism and help people at risk of homelessness. The vast majority of defendants are of Somali origin and several have been accused of using stolen funds to purchase luxury cars, homes and to invest in overseas ventures.
Mr. Miller appeared to seize on those cases to try stoking anger and resentment toward an immigrant community. He invited the audience to imagine a hard-working “native Minnesotan” worried about providing for his family, living next to a Somali refugee who does not work, fraudulently receives government assistance and drives a Mercedes.
“He just went to an office in the state, lied on a piece of paper and got unlimited free money forever, for life,” Mr. Miller said, citing no evidence for such a scenario.
Nicholas Nehamas, Ernesto Londoño and Albert Sun contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Sheelagh McNeill, Teresa Mondría Terol, Duy Nguyen and James O’Toole.
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5) Their Parents Were Taken by ICE. The Children Had to Raise One Another.
Andrea García and her siblings are carrying on in a home reshaped by fear, loss and new responsibility.
By Edgar Sandoval, Photographs by Gabriel V. Cárdenas, Reporting from Donna and Weslaco, Texas, April 5, 2026
“Our lives changed suddenly,” said Andrea García, 22, at center with her younger siblings. “I never thought I would have to wake up early and do everything to help my siblings.”
Before the sun rises, Andrea García is already awake, unsettled by an unusual cold spell and tormented by the memory of immigration agents upending her life.
Andrea, 22, willed herself out of bed. A child-sized statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the living room, a symbol of maternal protection for many Mexican Catholics, stood watch as Andrea set the home in motion.
She had to get her five siblings ready for early Sunday mass. After waking her sister Ana, who shares a bed with her, she nudged her two younger brothers sleeping in a nearby room.
“Levántense. Get up,” Andrea said using Spanglish, the mixture of English and Spanish that is common along the border.
Jorge Orozco, 11, sprang out of bed, his eyes shut tight. He didn’t move again until Andrea returned with an urgent plea, “Ya es hora, it is time.”
Getting everyone up and ready for school had gone faster when their parents were around, Andrea said. “They used to listen to dad more. They are not ready to see me as their parent.”
In January, immigration agents raided the family’s home in a rural section of Donna, Texas, a small border town of about 17,000 people. They arrested Andrea’s parents, Julio Orosco and Lucero Garza, who had been living in the country without authorization for years. Ms. Garza was deported to Mexico; Mr. Orosco is still in custody.
But Andrea and all of her siblings, ages 11 through 22, are all citizens, born in the U.S. And so Andrea, who had been making plans to one day start her own young adult life, to live in her own apartment, and to perhaps find a husband, was instead thrust abruptly into an unlikely and unfamiliar role: matriarch.
In the weeks since, the older siblings have put relationships, careers, and education on hold, substituting as caretakers for their younger brothers and sisters.
Their story illustrates some of the less-seen effects of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, scrambling the lives of American citizens who were raised by undocumented parents who chose to raise their family in the United States despite the risks. Immigration stories like theirs are under increasing scrutiny, as the Supreme Court considers arguments about birthright citizenship, which guarantees that nearly all babies born in the U.S. are citizens.
“We are not going to deny that they crossed illegally, like many people here have done,” Andrea said as her siblings nodded their heads. “They did it for a better life.”
Mr. Orosco and Ms. Garza crossed the border as young adults, and reconnected later, after Ms. Garza had three young children. They fell in love and had three more, and the family made its home in South Texas, where Mr. Orosco worked in construction with his oldest son.
But under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, some border areas are seeing more than 5,300 ICE arrests per month this year. Early on Jan. 9, several agents descended on their home as some of the children slept.
According to interviews with the siblings, and a lawsuit filed by the family, the agents stormed the house and injured some of the children, including a 15-year-old with histiocytosis, a rare disorder that can affect the bones.
Humberto, 21, was leaving for work when he said he first noticed the agents, many of them wearing masks. An exterior home camera captured images of the agents drawing their guns on Humberto and knocking him to the ground. He was detained and released after several hours in detention.
The fallout was swift: Within weeks, Ms. Garza became depressed in custody and decided to sign a self-deportation order. Mr. Orosco, the father, has a court date in the coming weeks. He expects to be deported. The Department of Homeland Security said agents identified themselves and were serving a judicial warrant, and that Humberto initiated physical contact after they entered the property.
Mr. Orosco had previously been removed from the country eight times, according to DHS. A search of public records did not reveal any additional charges for him or Ms. Garza.
Life for their children changed immediately, in big and small ways. Humberto, the second oldest, postponed a pending wedding and took a job in Dallas cutting trees to help support his siblings. Ana García decided not to pursue a degree in law enforcement after the incident and joined her sister Andrea, 22, as a cleaner.
And the three underage children, Juan, 17, Lucero, 15, and Jorge, 11 have become withdrawn and insulated from the rest of the world outside school, unsure who they can trust.
“Our family is not the same,” Andrea said in an interview.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Ana found herself home alone in the house her father built. She tried to make sense of recent events while standing next to an altar decorated with figurines of angels and religious saints. Reminders of her parents are everywhere, on the medicines her father used to take for diabetes and hypertension on top of the refrigerator and letters her mom sent them periodically from detention and now Mexico.
She picked up the latest one and read part of it to herself, “Los amo mis hijos, I love you, my children.”
Her older sister, Andrea, was out running errands and Ana knew it fell on her to make dinner. Until recently, she didn’t have to worry about feeding a family of six.
She grabbed a piece of ground beef from the freezer and laughed, realizing it didn’t fit in the pan. She ran it under water to thaw it and then decided that the heat from the stove would have to do. She added potatoes and seasonings and stepped back to admire her work.
“I hope they like it,” she said. “I watched my mom cook and helped growing up, but it’s not the same. She was the cook of the family.”
Later that afternoon, the children began arriving home. Jorge, the youngest, got off the school bus and sat on the couch. He pet his dog Max, a poodle, without saying a word.
“He used to be more outgoing,” Ana said. Now he’s more reserved.
When Ana nudged him to eat dinner, he shrugged and said he wanted eggs instead. She threw her hands in the air in exasperation, and obliged. The boy ate quietly and stared at a photo of himself adorned with the word “Mom.” It was an old Mother’s Day gift.
Ana was happy he was eating his dinner, but she did not feel much like a mother.
“I feel like I’m still young and not ready for this,” she said of being responsible for growing children. “And he’s still young enough that he needs his mom and dad.”
Her older brother Juan, 17, a high school senior taking college level courses, doesn’t dwell on what happened and instead tries to focus on schoolwork. Like most days, Juan got home from school and hopped in his bed to listen to a science lecture. He hopes to leave Donna one day and move to San Antonio to study law enforcement. “I like state trooper uniforms,” he said.
His sister Ana, who before the raid was also considering a career in law enforcement, told him that she could not in good conscience pursue that field anymore after what she witnessed. “They treated us like we were the worst criminals,” she said to the group, with everyone lowering their heads. “I can’t be part of that.”
Lucero, the 15-year-old, was a self-described daddy’s girl. She bonded with her father over the daily routine of feeding chickens and roosters they kept in the backyard. Now that he’s gone, it is the one activity that makes her feel like he’s still home in some way, she said.
She smiled when the chickens and roosters greeted her the second she poured rice and water on their plates.
“Mi dad siempre lo hacía, my dad used to do it,” Lucero said on this day. “Y como le gustaba a mi dad, me gusta a mi. And since he liked doing it, now I like doing it.”
One night, an exhausted Humberto got home from his job in construction and collapsed on an old couch. He had news for his five siblings. He had recently landed a job in Dallas, more than 500 miles north of the region, cutting trees that would help cover the about $2,400 monthly bills. Andrea and Ana had picked up more cleaning shifts to make ends meet. The siblings nodded their heads and said little.
“I feel bad leaving them behind, but Juan is going to help out more,” Humberto said of his brother.
Two days later, the six siblings attended an early Catholic mass in the nearby town of Weslaco and glanced at each other quietly when the priest encouraged parents and children to volunteer to help make repairs needed at the church.
Andrea let out a bittersweet chuckle. Her father, a religious man who often dragged his children to church events, would have loved to participate.
“We don’t have parents anymore,” she said. “At least not now and maybe never.”
Gabriel V. Cárdenas contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.
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6) ICE Agents Detain Newlywed Spouse of Soldier Training to Deploy
The 22-year-old wife of an Army staff sergeant came to the U.S. as a toddler. She was taken from a military base where the couple planned to live.
By Miriam Jordan, Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent, April 5, 2026
Annie Ramos and Sergeant Blank were engaged on New Year’s Day and married in March. Courtesy of Matthew Blank
A U.S. Army staff sergeant and his wife arrived at his base in Louisiana last week, expecting to begin their life together as newlyweds.
The couple checked in at the visitor center, identification in hand, ready to complete the steps that would allow her to move into his home on the base.
Within hours, that plan had unraveled.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the base and detained his wife, an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the U.S. as a toddler. By nightfall, she was in a detention facility with hundreds of women facing deportation as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The detention came just days after Annie Ramos, 22, a college student with no criminal record, and Matthew Blank, 23, celebrated their marriage with family and friends. Sergeant Blank, who enlisted more than five years ago, is assigned to a brigade at Fort Polk, La. that is set to begin training at the end of the month for deployment.
“Our plan was to drive over, bring her to the office to get her military ID and activate her military spouse benefits,” such as health and life insurance, he said. “She was going to move in after the Easter weekend. Instead, she got ripped away from me.”
When U.S. citizens marry undocumented immigrants, their spouses become eligible for legal permanent residency through marriage, and they can apply for citizenship three years after receiving their green card.
Even those with a prior deportation order, often issued when they were children, are not typically detained and are able to adjust their immigration status, experts said.
Before they were married, Ms. Ramos and Sergeant Blank had hired a lawyer to begin that process.
“I knew she didn’t have status,” he said. “We were doing everything the right way.”
Or so they thought.
Ms. Ramos had been ordered deported in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old, after her family failed to appear at a hearing in immigration court, a circumstance that was “very common, “ according to Margaret Stock, who wrote a book called “Immigration Law and the Military.”
“Prior to the Trump administration creating a mass deportation policy, somebody like her would not have been detained,’’ said Ms. Stock, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who practices immigration law and who has handled many similar cases.
She said the military would typically have allowed Ms. Ramos to get her military ID and told the couple to file their immigration papers.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that Ms. Ramos had been arrested “after she attempted to enter a military base.”
“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
The U.S. Army did not immediately comment.
Ms. Ramos and Sergeant Blank’s story began early last year. The couple connected through a dating app, then met in person and their romance blossomed. They were engaged on New Year’s Day.
In late March, about 60 guests gathered to celebrate their wedding in Houston, where Ms. Ramos was raised. A mariachi band played as the guests shared a meal of fried chicken, Spanish rice and mashed potatoes.
Sergeant Blank’s mother Jen Rickling, said in an interview that her daughter-in-law was “absolutely a darling, and we adore her” and listed her qualities.
Ms. Ramos is a devout Christian who teaches Sunday school to children at her church, Ms. Rickling said. She was in her high school’s marching band. And she was a few months from finishing a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry.
On April 2, the couple and Sergeant Blank’s parents drove from Houston to the base, arriving early for a 2 p.m. appointment. As instructed, the couple checked in at the visitor center, where they presented Ms. Ramos’s birth certificate, Honduran passport, their marriage license and Sergeant Blank’s military ID.
They never made it to the benefits office.
According to Sergeant Blank and his mother, an attendant scrutinized the documents and asked if Ms. Ramos had a visa or a green card. She did not, they explained, noting that their lawyer had prepared a green card application that would be filed any day.
The attendant made a flurry of calls.
“They told us, ‘We’ll figure it out,’ ’’ recalled Sergeant Blank.
He said that he and his wife were respectful and he kept his composure despite thinking that the officials were “dragging it out.” Tears began to stream down his wife’s face.
A supervisor was called, followed by an officer from the base’s criminal investigation division, who said he would contact Homeland Security and ICE.
After the call, Sergeant Blank said, the officer told them Ms. Ramos would be detained. The family broke down in tears.
Ms. Ramos was separated from them, placed in handcuffs and driven away in a military police vehicle. Sergeant Blank said he and his parents followed in their truck to another building, where she was unshackled and placed in what “looked like an interrogation room.”
Three ICE agents arrived. They first encountered Ms. Rickling and her husband in the lobby.
“They told us that they didn’t have a choice, they said they had to take Annie,” recalled Ms. Rickling. She said they apologized.
“I begged them not to take her,” Ms. Rickling said. “They said the higher-ups made them do it.”
The agents entered the room, offered the couple the same explanation, again shackled Ms. Ramos and took her away.
Their lawyer has asked ICE to release Ms. Ramos on her own recognizance while a motion is prepared to reopen the old deportation order, which would block her removal.
Ms. Stock, the expert on immigration and the military, said ICE could deport Ms. Ramos at any moment.
“It’s fundamentally harmful to national security to be doing this to members of the military, particularly while there is a war going on,” Ms. Stock said. “This is a major crisis for this soldier. His mind can’t be on the job.”
Gaby Pacheco, president of TheDream.US, submitted a letter of support for Ms. Ramos, whose education is being funded by the organization, which provides scholarships to undocumented immigrant youth.
Ms. Ramos had applied in 2020 for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, a program that shields from deportation undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children. Her application was never processed by the Trump administration because the program was halted for new applicants.
“I grew up here like any American,” Ms. Ramos said during a call from the detention center in Basile, La.
“This is all I know,” she said. “My husband and family are here.”
Sergeant Blank said: “We are going to fight with everything I have. She is going to move in with me. We will start a family.”
Sergeant Blank, who has been previously deployed to the Middle East and Europe, said that his chain of command has been supportive as he works to resolve the situation.
“I am going to be with her and serve my country,” he said
On Saturday, he and his mother traveled to the detention center in Basile, La. with the completed form to apply for Ms. Ramos’s green card. It only needed her signature.
Guards barred them from bringing anything inside.
Georgia Gee contributed research.
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7) Newly Obtained Video of Minneapolis Shooting Undermines ICE Account
Prosecutors did not watch video of the nonfatal shooting until weeks after charging the wounded man, an official said.
By Ernesto Londoño, Mitch Smith, Haley Willis and Robin Stein, April 6, 2026
From left, Indriany Mendoza-Camacho, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, Valentina Tiapa and Alfredo A. Aljorna in their kitchen in Minneapolis. Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
Almost immediately after an immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis this winter, the federal government cast the injured man as an attempted murderer and the agent as the victim of a brutal beating.
That version of events began unraveling when prosecutors dropped felony charges against the injured man, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna, who had fled from immigration agents.
Yet video footage of the shooting, newly obtained by The New York Times, raises questions about why it took weeks for the government’s case to fall apart.
The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.
The federal government had access to that video within hours of the shooting on Jan. 14, the Minneapolis police chief said. Yet prosecutors did not watch the footage, an official said, until nearly three weeks after they filed charges against the two men.
“Bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a recent interview, shortly after he watched the video for the first time.
The shooting was a rare instance in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration ultimately acknowledged a serious lapse. The agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, said after the charges were dropped that two agents had appeared to have lied under oath about the events, adding that they had been placed on leave and could end up facing criminal charges.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer written questions about the video, including whether it reviewed the footage before describing the incident publicly. The video, which The Times obtained after filing an open records request, was recorded on a city-owned camera at a nearby intersection.
The shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis came during the height of the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota.
From December to February, those agents made thousands of arrests, clashed with residents, shot three people and engaged in conduct that alarmed federal judges. The administration said the crackdown was necessary in part because of policies that limit state and local cooperation with immigration enforcement.
In the hours after Mr. Sosa-Celis was shot, protesters responded with fury. Some ransacked the vehicles of federal agents and threw fireworks at officers. The scene became so tense that investigators left before they had finished collecting evidence.
Still, Mr. Sosa-Celis’s case received far less attention than the two other shootings, which left American citizens dead at the hands of federal agents. In those killings, of Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, video footage also undermined the federal government’s version of events.
‘They Are Coming’
Valentina Tiapa told a 911 dispatcher that her partner, Mr. Aljorna, was being chased on Interstate 94 by ICE. He had called and said he was trying to make it home.
“They are coming,” Ms. Tiapa told a dispatcher through an interpreter, as she pleaded for the Minneapolis police to intervene. “They are just five minutes away.”
For weeks, as ICE agents swarmed Minnesota, two Venezuelan couples had hunkered down inside a duplex with faded white paint on the North Side of Minneapolis. They kept the blinds drawn, rarely venturing outside in daylight.
The couples, Mr. Aljorna and Ms. Tiapa, and Mr. Sosa-Celis and Indriany Mendoza-Camacho, did not have legal status in the United States.
“I kept thinking, ‘What if they catch us?’” Mr. Sosa-Celis said.
But the $950 rent payment for their shared two-bedroom unit was still due each month, and there was no end in sight to the ICE deployment. So Mr. Aljorna, 26, and Mr. Sosa-Celis, 25, kept going out in the evenings, when it seemed safer, to work as food delivery drivers.
The two men had grown up in the same small town in Venezuela, where they were acquaintances. They came to the United States separately during the Biden administration and made their way to Minnesota.
In Minneapolis, the two men reconnected and started dating their partners. Ms. Tiapa and Ms. Mendoza-Camacho, both 19, were also from Venezuela and said they had crossed the border as minors during the Biden years. Ms. Mendoza-Camacho came to the United States with an infant from a prior relationship. Ms. Tiapa gave birth to a boy in the United States in the summer of 2024.
It was a modest existence, bouncing between jobs and struggling to pay debts. Yet it was an improvement, they said, over what they had fled. When Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis were granted temporary protected status in 2024, they found a measure of stability with the ability to work legally.
But Mr. Trump’s administration revoked that status for Venezuelans last year, and the couples’ future in the United States felt more tenuous once again.
“Trump had said he was going to launch the biggest deportation crackdown in history, and we were left thinking we needed to hide,” Mr. Sosa-Celis said.
Around dinnertime on Jan. 14, two ICE agents were checking license plate numbers when they ran the tag on the Ford Focus that Mr. Aljorna was driving. The agents found that it was registered to another man, who they believed was in the country illegally.
The agents described being led on a chase for 15 to 20 minutes, saying that Mr. Aljorna “recklessly zigzagged through traffic.” Inside the Ford, Mr. Aljorna had called Ms. Tiapa, telling her that the agents appeared to be trying to provoke a collision.
Minutes later, Mr. Aljorna steered the Ford into a snowbank at the end of the block and took off running toward the duplex, the video obtained by The Times shows.
Mr. Sosa-Celis, who had been standing outside the home holding a snow shovel, tossed the shovel aside, the video shows. An ICE agent is seen chasing Mr. Aljorna on foot.
The video was taken from about half a block away from Mr. Aljorna’s duplex, and it shows a view of the street. That video footage, filmed by a city security camera mounted on a traffic signal pole, was recorded shortly before 7 p.m. Some of what it shows is hard to make out.
Mr. Aljorna was a few feet from his front door, the video shows, when he slipped and fell, giving the agent time to catch up with him.
After Mr. Aljorna landed on the ground, a struggle took place near his front porch. The silhouettes of all three men can be seen in the scrum, though it is difficult to discern exactly what each of them did.
The struggle lasted for about 12 seconds, the footage shows. The second agent who had been involved in the car chase pulled up to the duplex moments after the physical confrontation ended.
Key points remain unclear from the video. After Mr. Sosa-Celis and Mr. Aljorna are no longer visible in the video, a long, thin shape can be seen at one point, swinging from the direction of the porch; it is not clear from the video what the object is or whether it hit the agent. At another point, the agent is seen standing with his arms extended toward the duplex and his feet squared in an apparent firing posture. But the video has no audio, and it is uncertain exactly when the agent fired a single shot, striking Mr. Sosa-Celis in the leg.
The footage conflicts in several ways with the encounter initially described by federal officials, who said the ICE agent fired his weapon after three residents attacked him with a shovel and broom for several minutes.
A shovel was tossed aside before the struggle began, and only Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis could be seen in the video, along with the agent.
In a court filing, a lawyer for Mr. Aljorna said that his client had thrown a broom in the direction of the ICE agent, but that the broom did not strike the agent. Lawyers for the two men said that the agent had beaten Mr. Aljorna, and that Mr. Sosa-Celis was shot through the closed front door just after he went inside.
The bullet that hit Mr. Sosa-Celis’s upper leg ended up lodged inside the house, near a playpen used by a child in the downstairs unit, according to court records and photos shared with The Times. The bullet also left a hole in the front door. Mr. Sosa-Celis was not seriously hurt.
Just after the shooting that night, ICE officials used tear gas to force the couples to leave the house. The adults were taken into custody. The two children went to stay with family members.
A Troubled Investigation
Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis were described in a federal news release as “violent criminal illegal aliens.” They were accused by Kristi Noem, the former secretary of homeland security, of committing “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.” And, just two days after the shooting, Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis were charged in a criminal complaint with assaulting or impeding an officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Minneapolis was a tinderbox in those days, and federal prosecutors felt urgency to file charges and provide a speedy public account of the shooting, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
But prosecutors did not watch the video before they filed those charges, the official said, instead relying on the ICE agent’s statement and an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit describing the footage.
Almost three weeks would pass before a prosecutor would watch the video of the encounter, the Justice Department official said. The U.S. attorney’s office moved to dismiss the case days before a deadline to secure a grand jury indictment. When the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota asked to dismiss the case, he alluded to the footage and called it “newly discovered evidence.”
As the federal prosecution of Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis was coming together, state investigators were also examining whether the ICE agent acted lawfully when he opened fire. But the Minnesota investigators were stymied by limited federal cooperation, including an unwillingness to provide information as basic as the agent’s name.
Law enforcement officers are allowed to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or someone else.
Officials with the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis office declined to speak in detail about the shooting, but said in a statement that agents are trained to provide truthful information to judges and to “immediately provide exculpatory information to prosecutors once identified.”
Chief Brian O’Hara of the Minneapolis police said the footage cast significant doubt on the federal government’s accounts.
“There is a snow shovel there, but it doesn’t appear it ever gets used as a weapon,” he said. “There is no bludgeoning or anything.”
After reviewing the video and other evidence, Chief O’Hara said that “it sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away.”
‘Trading One Hell for Another’
For weeks after the shooting, Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis remained in jail in Minnesota. Their partners were sent to an immigration detention center outside El Paso, where they described crying through sleepless nights in a tent as rainwater seeped through.
While she was detained, Ms. Tiapa learned that her son, who was being cared for by relatives, had suffered second- and third-degree burns from scalding soup in an accident back in Minnesota. He needed surgery.
All four adults sought their release from detention and were eventually ordered by judges to be returned home to Minneapolis while they fight the government’s efforts to deport them.
In a recent interview at the duplex, Mr. Aljorna expressed complicated views about swapping what he left in Venezuela — “there’s no food, no earnings, the power gets cut, water gets cut” — for what he experienced in the United States.
“It was like trading one hell for another,” he said.
Still, he and the others hope to remain. They still think they can build more prosperous lives in the United States.
In 2000, Congress created a visa category for victims of crime who are in the country unlawfully if they assist law enforcement officials. The aim was to lower crime by encouraging victims to cooperate with the authorities without fearing deportation.
The lawyers representing Mr. Aljorna, who has been ordered deported by an immigration judge, and Mr. Sosa-Celis say they hope their clients and their partners will be eligible based on their cooperation now with state and federal investigations into the conduct of the ICE agents. So far, no charges have been filed against the agents.
Because the names of the agents have not been released, it was not possible to seek comment from them.
“It would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Aljorna said of the possibility of a visa.
If he gets legal status, Mr. Sosa-Celis said, he imagines one day running a painting business. Mr. Aljorna, who has a knack for fixing cars, would like to own a body shop. The women said they could see themselves opening a salon.
Ainara Tiefenthäler and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting, and Ainara Tiefenthäler and Alexander Cardia contributed video editing.
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8) Trump Threatens Jail if Journalists Protect Certain Iran Sources
The president indicated he would ask an unnamed media outlet to reveal the sources behind its coverage of Iran’s successful strike on a U.S. fighter jet, and of its crew.
By Erik Wemple, April 6, 2026
President Trump at a news conference in Washington on Monday. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
President Trump vowed on Monday to pursue a “leaker” involved in disclosing details about the downing of a U.S. fighter jet in Iran late last week and indicated that the government would take action against an unnamed media outlet that disseminated the information.
Mr. Trump was speaking at a news conference on the rescue of two crew members who ejected from the cockpit of an F-15E Strike Eagle that Iran shot down on Friday. Though the pilot was rescued quickly, the weapons systems officer could not be located right away, prompting a two-day scramble to find him before enemy forces did.
Mr. Trump said the reporting had put the at-large airman and others in danger. The administration, he added, was “looking very hard to find that leaker.” Efforts to unmask the source of the information, he continued, would include approaching the news outlet that had published it.
“We’re going to go to the media company that released it,” Mr. Trump said, “and we’re going to say, ‘National security — give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who, and you know who, we’re talking about.”
The White House did not respond to a question asking which news outlet Mr. Trump was referring to, saying only that an investigation was underway. Several news outlets reported on Friday on the downing of the fighter jet and the rescue efforts, including the Israeli outlet N12, Axios, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Reuters.
The threat to jail a reporter over the common journalistic practice of protecting a source is yet another escalation in Mr. Trump’s long-running campaign against U.S. news outlets. In recent years, he has sued major news companies and supported a threat by Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to pull broadcasting licenses from outlets over their coverage of the war in Iran. Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly curtailed media access at the Pentagon.
Presidents have historically invoked national security concerns to restrict information. President Richard M. Nixon famously sued news outlets to try to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the Department of Justice under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama subpoenaed a Times reporter, James Risen, to testify about his confidential sources for his 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2017, Mr. Trump urged James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, to jail journalists who published classified information.
Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said he was unaware of another example when a president issued a threat like the one leveled by Mr. Trump on Monday.
“During times of armed conflict in a democracy,” Mr. Rottman said in a statement, “it is essential that the press be able to gather and report information in the public interest and thus provide an independent check on the official government narrative.”
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9) Trump Issues Grave Threats as Hormuz Deadline Draws Closer
President Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. Eastern, as the U.S. attacked Iran’s main oil export hub.
By Tyler Pager, Julian E. Barnes, Ronen Bergman and Ravi Mattu, April 7, 2026
Rescue worker in Iran.
President Trump threatened to wipe out a “whole civilization,” and the United States hit military targets on Iran’s main oil export hub, as he ramped up pressure on Tehran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz or potentially face a wave of strikes on critical infrastructure in the coming hours.
The United States and Israel stepped up their attacks to force Iran to open the strait, a key oil shipping route, and agree to a cease-fire deal, according to U.S. and Israeli officials with knowledge of the operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Mr. Trump issued his grave warning in a post on social media on Tuesday as a new round of attacks was launched across the Middle East. The U.S. struck Kharg Island, the export hub, Israel and Iran launched fresh attacks and Israel’s military warned Iranians to avoid traveling by train. The increasingly incendiary threats and the intense fighting reinforced the fragile state of diplomacy, with no public signs of a diplomatic breakthrough to end the war.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the American president wrote, adding that he hoped “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen” to avoid the attacks. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
Mr. Trump has set a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time for Iran to end its effective blockade of the strait, saying on Monday that otherwise every bridge in the country would be “decimated,” and every power plant would be “out of business.” Striking civilian infrastructure could amount to a war crime under international law. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the Iranian military, has said that Iran would retaliate “crushingly and extensively” if its civilian infrastructure were attacked.
Some Iranians were bracing for the possibility of more strikes, while others were responding to the American threats with a mix of indifference, defiance, and bewilderment. “I think Trump is under a lot of pressure and that he has lost his mind,” said Lili, a Tehran resident who asked not to use her full name out of concern for repercussions for speaking to foreign media. She and her family were not planning to flee the city, she added, because there was nowhere to go.
The spate of strikes on Tuesday added to the anxiety and uncertainty, with the Israeli military saying it had launched airstrikes on Iranian government infrastructure. At least three people were killed and three others were injured when a strike hit a railway bridge in the central city of Kashan, Iranian state media reported. Iranian media outlets also reported attacks on bridges in other parts of the country.
Iran targeted energy facilities in Persian Gulf countries allied with the United States. Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry said that debris from an intercepted missile had fallen near energy facilities in the east and that the damage was being assessed. The United Arab Emirates’ defense ministry said missiles and drones had been fired from Iran.
Negotiations between Iran and the United States have been mediated by Pakistan and other regional allies, which have proposed a 45-day cease-fire. On Monday, Iran delivered a separate 10-point plan to end the war to the United States and Israel through Pakistan, according to Iranian state media, but it appeared unlikely to resolve major differences between the warring parties ahead of Mr. Trump’s deadline.
Mr. Trump said the plan was a “significant step” but that it was “not good enough,” and Iran rejected any proposal for a truce.
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10) Iranians Voice Shock and Defiance in Face of Trump’s Latest Deadline
President Trump has threatened devastating attacks if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Some Iranians questioned what had happened to American values.
By Erika Solomon and Sanam Mahoozi, April 7, 2026
A destroyed building in Sharif University, Tehran, on Tuesday. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
With President Trump’s deadline to unleash mass destruction on Iran just hours away on Tuesday, Iranians faced the threats with a mix of indifference, defiance, and bewilderment.
Mr. Trump has vowed to level power and desalination plants, oil installations and bridges if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping route, by 8 p.m. Eastern time.
“The first thing that came to my mind is that I think Trump is under a lot of pressure, and that he has lost his mind,” said Lili, who works in the arts scene in the Iranian capital, Tehran. She asked not to use her full name out of fear of repercussions for speaking to foreign media.
Mr. Trump renewed his threats against Iran’s civilian infrastructure at a White House news conference on Monday, in which he hailed the American forces’ rescue of two U.S. airmen whose jet was shot down over Iran on Friday.
“The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” he warned.
Lili said she and her family had made no contingency plans at all, and they were not planning to flee Tehran. They were not stocking up on goods or bracing to hole up at home.
“We need to continue with our lives,” she said, adding there was no apparent haven to flee to: Attacking infrastructure meant almost anywhere could become a target.
Legal experts have argued that striking civilian infrastructure could be considered a war crime under international law.
Iran, apparently as emboldened by its shooting down of U.S. aircraft as Mr. Trump appears to be by the daring rescue of the airmen, put forward its own proposals and demands on Monday to end the war.
Mr. Trump called this a “significant step,” but one that was “not good enough” to change his announced deadline.
Mohsen Borhani, a law professor at Tehran University, said that as he read through Mr. Trump’s threats toward those the American president had called the “crazy bastards” running Iran, his first thought was of the founding fathers. In particular, he thought of the writings of Thomas Jefferson, “and the values that America was supposed to lead by,” he said.
“I also thought about the global order established after World War II, centered around the United Nations and shaped under Roosevelt’s leadership,” he said, referring to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “And I wondered, how it is possible for a U.S. president to undermine and discredit all American values and 250 years of human legacy?”
Mr. Borhani, a well-known political commentator in Iran, said the Trump administration was still operating under a “false assumption” that enough military pressure could force Iran’s authoritarian clerical rulers to surrender.
“Based on my understanding of Iranian society and governance," he said, “I can state clearly that even several nuclear bombs would not achieve such an outcome.”
Lili, the Tehran resident, said that as someone who long opposed her government and sympathized with the nationwide demonstrations that sought to topple it just months ago, Mr. Trump’s threats have shifted her feelings toward the United States and Israel.
Both countries’ leaders have repeatedly voiced support for Iran’s opposition and encouraged Iranians to use the war to rise against their leaders. But their warplanes are now bombing not just military sites, she said, but critical industrial facilities, universities, and schools.
“So now, we are supporting Iran and whatever government is running it,” she said.
Other Iranians made direct appeals to Americans to stop their president, arguing that whatever Mr. Trump unleashed on Iran would ripple across the globe and potentially lead to blowback against U.S. citizens.
Pedram Soltani, a prominent Iranian businessman, used his social media page to make such an appeal.
“Your president has now placed not only Iran, but also America and the entire world at a tremendous risk,” he wrote on X.
The bombardment Mr. Trump has vowed would cause a “humanitarian catastrophe,” he said. Should Iran retaliate against infrastructure in Gulf countries, as is widely expected, he said the damage to oil and other essential industries would send prices skyrocketing.
“The United States will become one of the most hated countries in the world, seen as responsible for these disasters,” he wrote. “That resentment will inevitably affect your own security and daily lives.”
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11) Israel’s New Death Penalty Law Is a Warning
By Talia Sasson, April 7, 2026
Ms. Sasson is a former senior official in Israel’s State Attorney’s Office and former president of the New Israel Fund. She wrote from Tel Aviv.
The prickly pear cactus, a widely recognized symbol in Palestinian culture, representing steadfastness and the ability to survive prolonged hardship while remaining rooted to the land, even in harsh conditions. Valerio Muscella
The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, last week passed a law allowing the hanging of Palestinians convicted of killings during militant attacks, using language that effectively exempts Jewish perpetrators of nationalistic violence. This legislation is both unconstitutional and discriminatory. Beyond its fundamental immorality, the law is part of a larger, accelerating effort to systematically end once and for all the possibility of a Palestinian state. That effort includes the uncontrolled surge in violence by settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and a strategic restructuring of the West Bank’s administration intended to make it easier for settlers and the state to seize Palestinian land.
An alliance of settlers and far-right politicians is the primary engine behind this radical transformation. While polls show that most Israelis support it, the legislation was pushed through by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ensure the survival of his governing coalition by indulging the vengeance narrative that serves as the cornerstone of the political goals of the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a key partner in the coalition.
Its passage comes on the heels of a sharp escalation in near-daily acts of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank over the past year. Settlers have raided Palestinian villages, setting fire to homes and vehicles, harming livestock and uprooting trees. In February and March alone, settlers reportedly killed eight Palestinians.
Settlers continue to establish illegal outposts within Area A — territory that under the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s is designated for full Palestinian civil and security control. According to data from the United Nations, 36,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the West Bank last year, 3,500 of them forced out directly by settler violence. This trend intensified in the first three months of 2026, with 1,697 Palestinians already displaced.
Historically, Israeli soldiers have been reluctant to enforce the law when Jewish settlers commit crimes, often viewing such actions as an unwanted entanglement in political disputes over the fate of the West Bank. This reluctance has evolved into radicalization among troops since Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government took office in late 2022 — and that radicalization has sharply accelerated since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. In several documented instances, soldiers have even reportedly participated in crimes against Palestinians. Conversely, in some cases where soldiers have attempted to curb settlers’ illegal behavior, they have found themselves the targets of settler attacks.
Last month, a CNN crew arrived in the village of Tayasir in the northern Jordan Valley to report on an attack by settlers and the establishment of an illegal outpost. While documenting the scene, the journalists were assaulted and detained by Israeli soldiers for two hours at gunpoint. During the detention, soldiers were captured on camera echoing settler ideology, defending the outposts and speaking of acting out of revenge. The military labeled the matter a “grave ethical incident” and took the highly unusual step of suspending the operations of the entire battalion, mainly composed of former members of the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda unit. The battalion’s commanders were reprimanded, and one soldier was ejected from the military.
Such isolated disciplinary measures fail to address a systemic, untreated malaise within the military’s ranks and the systemic discrimination against Palestinians that is embedded in law enforcement. The Israel Police rarely conducts thorough investigations into settler violence, and such cases almost never result in indictments. While the Shin Bet, the domestic security service, can issue administrative restraining orders against extremists and carry out administrative detentions of them, Defense Minister Israel Katz has moved to stop the use of such measures against Jewish settlers, although the vast majority of detainees were Palestinian. This policy only serves to embolden Jewish extremist activity in the territories.
While building a governing coalition, Mr. Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich agreed that Mr. Smotrich would take an additional role, within the Defense Ministry, to effectively administer the West Bank. Mr. Smotrich has called for one state under Israeli control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Since taking office, he has focused on expanding settlements, notably through the establishment of dozens of Israeli “agricultural farms” across the West Bank. These illegal outposts are intended to eventually become legal settlements under Israeli law. (The United Nation’s top court has deemed all settlements to be illegal under international law, which Israel disputes.)
In February, the government approved measures meant to significantly ease land acquisition for Jewish residents in the West Bank and to open the formal land registration process for the first time since 1967, making it easier to expand settlements and more difficult for Palestinians to claim ancestral property. Moreover, planning and administrative power over land use, historically held by Palestinian municipalities under the Oslo Accords, and including the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, were transferred to Israeli authorities.
Compounding this crisis are the conflict in Gaza, which has fueled deep-seated animosity toward Palestinians in Israel, and the new war with Iran, which has pushed the heightened volatility and violence in the West Bank to the periphery of public discourse. Under the cover of regional escalation, the fire in the territories burns quietly, out of sight.
And yet, amid all this, a new chorus of voices is emerging within the Israeli public — both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel — that rejects the atrocities occurring in the West Bank. Through petitions and the media, these citizens are calling on the government and security forces to act immediately to halt these acts of terror. They demand that law enforcement take a decisive stand against shameful deeds being carried out in their name, and have condemned the new death penalty law as racist, unconstitutional and immoral.
As the number of Israelis protesting these actions grows, so too does the likelihood that the government will move to halt the atrocities. Ultimately, no factor remains more consequential to Israel’s trajectory than the Trump administration, which could still use its leverage over Mr. Netanyahu to push him to de-escalate the situation in the West Bank. I believe that once the Israeli government resolves to do so, it possesses the power to bring an end to most of this violence.
Talia Sasson is a former senior official in Israel’s State Attorney’s Office and a former president of the New Israel Fund. She wrote a landmark government report on illegal West Bank outposts under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government.
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12) Texas Considers Required Reading List for Schools, Which Includes the Bible
Education officials are planning an overhaul to English and social studies in the nation’s largest Republican led state.
By Sarah Mervosh, April 7, 2026
A proposed book list in Texas includes readings from the Bible, such as the definition of love from First Corinthians and the story of David and Goliath. Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman, via Getty Images
Texas education officials are considering sweeping changes to English and social studies instruction that would put readings from the Bible on a new state-required reading list for millions of public school students.
The changes would also bring a U.S. and Texas centric lens to history, with less emphasis on world history, a shift some historians and progressive groups have opposed.
The Texas State Board of Education, an elected board with a 10-to-5 Republican majority, is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to consider the proposals, including the hotly debated required reading lists for each grade level.
One draft of the list, proposed by the Texas Education Agency, includes widely recognized classics such as “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle for kindergartners, “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle for seventh graders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for eighth graders.
But it also includes passages from the Bible in middle and high school, such as the story of David and Goliath from the Old Testament and a meditation on love from First Corinthians.
The list includes select texts from Black historical figures like Langston Hughes and Frederick Douglass, but has relatively few Hispanic and Black authors, a move that has drawn criticism from Democratic members of the state board.
“There is a mass lack of representation,” said Marisa Pérez-Díaz, a Democratic member who represents San Antonio and part of South Texas. She noted that Hispanic and Black students make up a majority of public school children in the state.
The board will also consider a second proposal, from a board member, which requires fewer books overall and includes texts from the Bible starting in elementary school.
In social studies, the board is considering a chronological version of history, with an emphasis on U.S. and Texas history in most grades.
Progressive groups and mainstream historians have criticized the proposal as promoting a vision of American exceptionalism, with a focus on Christianity’s influence, while leaving little room for world history or the contributions of other religions.
“Do we want the next generation of Texas students competing in a global economy never having really learned very much about China?” said Brendan Gillis, the director of teaching and learning for the American Historical Association, a national group representing historians, which has been critical of the proposal.
Texas is home to 5.4 million public school students, about 11 percent of the total U.S. public school population.
The proposals in Texas are part of a broader push by Republicans, including President Trump, to embrace the role of Christianity in America’s founding and promote a sense of patriotism. The Trump administration has pumped more than $150 million into history and civics education ahead of the 250th anniversary of American independence this July.
Several states, including Texas, have sought to hang the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. And lessons about the Bible are already included in an optional English curriculum in Texas.
Supporters say that the latest proposals would give Texas students something more akin to a classical education, an approach that focuses on the roots of western thought and culture and teaches classic works of literature, including the Bible as a cultural touchstone.
The approach has grown popular with conservatives, who say that it gives students an important foundation, and that recent efforts to include diversity should be rooted in academics, not inclusion for inclusion’s sake.
“Islam and Buddhism didn’t found the west,” said Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, who supports the changes.
She said that while some world history and instruction about other religions is needed, Judeo-Christian values were central to America’s story and culture.
“To not know the story of the good Samaritan, for example, you’re really going to miss on not just important lessons, but rich cultural and historical significance as an American,” she said.
Many Americans appear to support a balance in history instruction. In 2022, more than 75 percent of Republicans and Democrats alike said they supported teaching about patriotism and the founding fathers, as well as critical thinking and the contribution of women and people of color.
The debate over the required reading list comes as U.S. reading scores have been on a yearslong decline and many schools have moved away from teaching whole books from beginning to end, something the list’s supporters aim to change.
The state board is expected to take a preliminary vote on the book and social studies proposals later this week, with a final vote expected in June.
Any new requirements would not go until effect until 2030.
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13) Our Vacations. Our Food. Our Mortgages. The Iran War Will Change Everything.
By Bill Saporito and David Stubbs, April 7, 2026
Mr. Saporito is a senior staff editor in Opinion. Dr. Stubbs is the chief investment strategist at AlphaCore Wealth Advisory.
When will the conflict with Iran end? President Trump’s timeline, like his military strategy, is ephemeral. But its knock-on effects are already here. This war is, in all likelihood, impacting your life — and will continue to for most of this year.
Let’s start with your summer vacation planning. The airlines are responding to high jet fuel prices by raising fares while trimming their schedules — United has already announced a 5 percent flight cut. That means fewer seats will be available at peak travel season and flight crews will work fewer hours.
Heading to or from a city such as Presque Isle, Maine, or Butte, Mont., that is served exclusively by regional airlines? Those flights will be the first to be canceled, Mike Boyd, an airline industry consultant, has pointed out. Carriers can’t run the small, 50-seat jets that serve those markets profitably when jet fuel has more than doubled to more than $4 gallon.
The value carriers that serve popular destinations such as Orlando and Las Vegas could be particularly hard hit. Florida-based Spirit Airlines, known for its yellow jets and unbundled fare structure, just emerged from its second bankruptcy; Frontier, its Western counterpart, delayed orders for new planes and canceled some leases on its current fleet to concentrate on filling the planes it has. And all this is on top of the airport chaos created by bad weather (hello, climate change), air traffic controller shortages and Transportation Security Administration staffing issues.
Road trippers won’t have it much better. For recreational vehicle owners or renters, a trip to national parks such as Zion or Great Smoky Mountains — already suffering from DOGE budget cuts — will get more challenging with R.V.s that average six to 15 miles per gallon in mileage. Motor boaters could be up a creek, too.
Expect to pay even more for food, also. Prices for meat, wheat, coffee and sugar are rising because the planting, harvesting, processing, storage and transportation of food is energy intensive. Farmers are struggling to get the fertilizers they’ve ordered from the Middle East. The price of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, one of the most used, is up more than 20 percent this year. Farmers can buy potash-based fertilizers from Canada — but those are subject to a 10 percent tariff. The other big supplier? Russia.
If the current fertilizer disruption interrupts planting season, which is already underway in many parts of the world, food prices will rise in the back half of the year.
And that’s not all.
In developed countries like ours, persistently high inflation increases the risk that the Fed and other central banks will feel compelled to raise interest rates. That lifts the price of borrowing money across the economy: not just credit card and auto loans, but also mortgage rates.
Although conventional wisdom says that central banks should look beyond an energy price shock and not change their rates, their capacity to remain steadfast is limited. Still contending with their pandemic-era inflation, Europe’s central banks may soon have to consider raising rates to protect their inflation-fighting credentials — another economic brake when we hardly need one.
At a time when rising oil prices are pressuring family budgets, E.U. governments may be forced to cut their spending. Interest rates on government bonds have risen sharply in Britain and France since the start of the war, meaning these nations will have to spend more to cover debt payments, leaving less money for price relief for the public.
The great build-out of the artificial intelligence infrastructure — which has been pumping billions into our economy — is also in jeopardy. Helium is a vital component in semiconductor production, and one-third of the world’s supply is produced in Qatar, which has been targeted by Iranian strikes. Without a reliable supply, the semiconductor manufacturers that make chips won’t be able to meet demand. So, too, is the level of financing for these projects, tied to a retrenching private credit sector and perhaps a pullback by sovereign funds in the Middle East that must now spend to repair war damage.
Most of America’s problems, and they are not insignificant, still pale in comparison with what’s happening in the rest of the world. Developing nations are in a particularly dangerous bind. The United Nations reckons that more than 670 million people were living with hunger in 2024 and, across 68 countries in which the U.N. World Food Program is active, 318 million people are projected to face acute hunger this year.
This is all assuming that everything in Iran remains as is. Things could get a lot worse in a hurry if the Houthis in Yemen decide to block the Strait of Bab al-Mandab at the mouth of the Red Sea, where ships must pass after transiting the Suez Canal. That is likely when $100 a barrel oil becomes $200 a barrel.
The worst-case scenario is impossible to predict, of course, but what’s becoming more certain is that if disruption from the Iran conflict is still significant on the day America celebrates its 250th birthday, the bill for the party is going to be enormous.
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