This time around, Trump is preparing another ban that could go into effect in days. Advocates warned Tuesday that it will sweep up not just Muslims living abroad, but also immigrants living in the U.S. that hold what Trump deems “hostile attitudes” toward the country.

The forthcoming travel ban would become the latest of Trump’s draconian anti-immigration policies, many of which rehash the same themes about national security and public safety.

“The travel ban that is going to be coming out is going to serve as another basis for the targeting of activists.”

Trump issued a January 20 executive order that used the language about “hostile attitudes” to target immigrants for deportation. The phrase has been echoed in remarks from U.S. officials justifying the arrest over the weekend of the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil, said Yasmine Taeb, the legislative and political director for the Muslim advocacy group MPower Change.

“All of these policies are interconnected,” she said, “and the travel ban that is going to be coming out is going to serve as another basis for the targeting of activists advocating for Palestinian human rights.”

Targeting “Hostile” Residents

The White House has yet to formally release details of the latest travel ban, but Trump has repeatedly said he will reissue his eight-year-old policy, which was discarded by President Joe Biden when he came into office in 2021.

The new ban could add Afghanistan and Pakistan to the list of countries whose citizens were banned from entering the U.S. during Trump’s first term, which included Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, according to a report from Reuters. Trump expanded the list to include four additional African countries in 2020.

From the start, Trump’s first travel ban faced challenges in court. This time around, the Trump administration has been trying to preempt lawsuits. In his January 20 executive order, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to prepare a report on countries with “deficient” vetting information, a move intended to help the new ban withstand legal scrutiny.

The executive order that would form the basis of a forthcoming travel ban doesn’t stop at targeting people who live abroad. It says that the U.S. must ensure foreign nationals living here “do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

Trump followed up that first executive order with another one on January 30 that more narrowly focused on pro-Palestinian protesters.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said in a statement announcing the order.

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At a press conference Tuesday, civil liberties and immigration advocates said they worried the vague language about “hostile attitudes” will set up a dragnet for people living legally in the U.S. on visas or holding lawful permanent residence, also known as green card status.

Khalil, the Columbia graduate who as a student had been involved in protests, was a green card holder. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents reportedly said at the time of his arrest that his permanent residence was being revoked.

Advocates said the new Muslim ban could undermine the very values the Trump administration says it wants to reinforce with its immigration crackdown.

“This travel ban that the administration is planning to bring back will undermine our national security, undermine our economy, undermine fundamental values of our nation like free speech, and force American families and communities like ours to live in fear,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council. “To live with an assumption that the government is always watching, and if we don’t stay within the very partisan lines defined by the current administration, we and our friends and our loved ones could be kicked out of this country.”

Barring Afghan Refugees

In addition to targeting free speech on Gaza, news reports suggest the newest travel ban could add Afghanistan and Pakistan to the list of countries whose nationals are barred from coming to America.

That would have devastating repercussions for the tens of thousands of Afghan refugees at risk if they are forced to return to their home country, in many cases because they aided the U.S. in its long war against the Taliban, advocates said Tuesday.

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“This makes the Trump administration and the U.S. government a willing accomplice of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This decision will ensure that folks are killed, detained, surveilled and extrajudicially executed in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan,” said Arash Azizzada, the co-director of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow.

Over 200,000 Afghans are living in the U.S. as refugees and another 40,000 still hope to move to the country, NPR reported in January. The travel ban could bar the latter from entering the country and force the former to live in fear of violating the vague ban on “hostile attitudes,” Azizzada said.

The White House declined to comment on which countries will be included in the travel ban. An administration spokesperson said, “No decisions regarding possible travel bans have been made, and anyone claiming otherwise does not know what they are talking about.”

The post Trump’s New Muslim Ban Poised to Sweep Up Immigrants Already in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

The armed agents with tactical vests arrived first. They were joined by District police officers and a truck brimming with the sorts of mopeds and scooters used by delivery drivers. Soon, the driver’s moped — representing another livelihood of a person at the bottom of Silicon Valley’s pecking order — was added to the pile.

Residents pleading for the driver’s release were ignored. As the police van drove away, one resident shouted at the driver, “Fuck you!” The officer lowered his window and spat in the resident’s direction.

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Scenes like this have become common in a city under siege by President Donald Trump’s administration, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and a federalized police force. The delivery drivers are only the latest targets of Trump’s attempt to turn the city into a test run for deploying troops and federal agents to cities that oppose his administration.

The delivery drivers’ whizzing motorcycles, mopeds, and electric bicycles filled city streets just a few weeks before, but now advocates say they’ve become a top ICE target.

Hard numbers about the crackdown are hard to come by. In a statement, the police department linked the arrests of delivery drivers to an operation that dates back to last year — without acknowledging ICE’s new role. The targeting of delivery drivers appears to be widespread, however, and has led to a dramatic decline in the number of visible delivery drivers on the streets.

In stark contrast to Trump’s first term, when the major ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft both came out against the government’s Muslim ban, the big players in the food-delivery space have been quiet about the administration’s attack on their workforce.

Advocates for immigrants and low-wage workers said the companies owe it to their drivers to speak out.

“I would hope that every employer in the District is not only finding ways to protect their staff, but they are also speaking out and speaking to their elected folks about how unhappy they are,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which represents people facing deportation in the D.C. area. “Profit cannot be paramount over people.”

A “Lazy” Tactic

Lukens’s nonprofit has already seen an increase in newly arrested clients, including those who worked as delivery drivers before the federal takeover of D.C.’s police force began August 11.

Videos bear that out. Across D.C., residents have posted videos of police swooping in to arrest delivery drivers. In one scene captured by bystanders on video, a delivery driver emerging from a coffee shop was tackled to the ground and pummeled by masked ICE agents.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Metro police attempted to tie the recent videos of violent arrests involving ICE to a monthslong operation.

“In response to community complaints about unsafe scooter driving behavior, the Metropolitan Police Department began conducting scooter enforcement in 2024,” the department said. “Since Operation Ride Right started, we have impounded approximately 1,249 scooters, made 139 arrests, and issued 1,258 Notice of Infractions.”

The operation predated the Trump administration and what the statement left out was ICE’s new, heavy-handed role. The agency has specifically been partnering with the city’s police officers to check drivers’ immigration status, the Washington Post reported last week.

ICE has zeroed in on delivery drivers, Lukens believes, because they are easy prey.

“It’s very clear ICE is targeting delivery drivers because they’re outdoors, which makes it easier to do warrantless arrests. It’s a population that ICE is aware is very immigrant-heavy. And frankly, it’s easy for ICE to go after them,” Lukens said. “It is, to me, a very lazy way for ICE to operate.”

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In Washington, many delivery drivers are recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants, putting them even more in harm’s way because ICE is fast-tracking deportations for people who have not been in the U.S. for long.

“Given the government’s racial profiling, and profiling of people from Venezuela and Central America as potential gang members,” Lukens said, “that is also problematic.”

The Sound of Silence

The street corners where drivers once gathered to await new orders have emptied out since the joint police–ICE crackdown began.

As authorities round up their work force, the big players in the world of Silicon Valley-developed delivery apps have largely remained silent. Three of the biggest — Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash — did not respond to requests for comment.

That silence disappointed but did not surprise Katie Wells, the co-author of a book about the rise of Uber.

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The app companies have long relied on exploiting low-wage workers, Wells said. A core premise of the apps’ business models is that their workers are independent contractors, not direct employees. Even before the crackdown, delivery drivers faced the physical risk of accidents on the road and the economic risk of account deactivations with little support from the companies.

“The violence, the stress of getting there on time, and the indignities of being deactivated without a single human to call for help — it makes the jobs very difficult,” said Wells, who is the director of research at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank that opposes excessive corporate power.

Organizing efforts have made slow progress given the fragmented nature of the workforce, with the exception of groups such as Los Deliveristas Unidos in New York City. The app companies have deployed armies of lobbyists to fight back against attempts to regulate the industry through minimum pay guarantees or pay transparency rules.

In many cases, immigrant delivery drivers rent time on the apps from people who are legally authorized to work in the U.S., according to Sergio Avedian, a rideshare driver, industry consultant, and senior contributor at the Rideshare Guy.

The people whose names are on the account sometimes fail to turn over the agreed-upon split of the earnings to the drivers, according to Avedian.

For years, the app industry has relied on undocumented workers to meet the demand for its always-on, nearly-instant delivery services, Avedian said. But it has made few efforts to ensure that they are being treated well.

“Capital doesn’t care about fairness,” Avedian said. “But as far as these immigrants, my heart goes out to them. They get screwed every possible way.”

The post ICE Targets App Delivery Drivers — and the Tech Giants They Work for Stay Silent appeared first on The Intercept.

Remittances like these are a typical part of the financial lives of immigrant families. But since Kordia, 32, was arrested in March by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration has pointed to these wire transfers as evidence that she potentially supports Hamas, in a bid to keep her at an ICE detention center in Texas.

“It was quite upsetting to hear the government claim that any transfer of money to Palestine and/or Palestinians was inherently suspicious,” Kordia’s mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, wrote in another affidavit.

Kordia’s arrest came days after immigration agents grabbed Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in New York City. In error-riddled statements and social media blasts, the Department of Homeland Security emphasized Kordia’s participation in a pro-Palestine protest a year earlier, near Columbia.

Unlike Khalil and other high-profile activists targeted for deportation, however, Kordia remains in custody despite findings from two different judges — one in immigration court, one in federal district court — that she should be released. She’s lost significant weight while in the Prairieland Detention Facility, near Dallas–Fort Worth, which has roaches, broken showers, and barely any halal food suitable for a practicing Muslim, Kordia alleged in a habeas petition.

To keep her at Prairieland, government attorneys tried to paint Kordia as a potential Hamas supporter and thus a danger if released on bond. In immigration court, they pointed to wire transfers Kordia sent to Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East over the years, without any evidence that these funds were for anything other than fuel, water, or medical expenses for her family members.

“She didn’t always have a lot of money to send, but she sent whatever she could,” wrote one of Kordia’s cousins, who lives in Florida, in another affidavit.

It took weeks for Kordia’s legal team to track down family members who received remittances as far back as 2017. Some were still in Gaza and the West Bank, while others had evacuated to Egypt and Dubai.

“In 2022, during one of the aggressions in Gaza, my building was destroyed and we needed money to rebuild,” wrote Kordia’s aunt, who ran a hair salon out of her home in Gaza before fleeing to Cairo. “My sister was in great need after that incident, so I asked Leqaa for her assistance in sending money,” Kordia’s mother explained.

After Kordia’s attorneys submitted these sworn statements, ICE attorneys switched arguments, and they barely addressed her wire transfers at a hearing in late August, according to Sarah Sherman-Stokes, one of Kordia’s attorneys.

“In the blink of an eye, it became a non-issue,” Sherman-Stokes, a professor at Boston University’s immigrants’ rights clinic, told The Intercept. “Because it was such a charade from the beginning.”

From the start, the Trump administration’s case against Kordia has been slippery and ever-changing.

“What we’re seeing is that the Department [of Homeland Security] is throwing whatever they can at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The sole formal claim against Kordia in immigration court is that she overstayed her student visa, which she let expire in 2022 on the mistaken belief that her mother’s family visa petition gave Kordia lawful status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved this petition in May 2021, according to court filings, which Kordia thought meant she was close to getting a green card.

But soon after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of ICE, devoted considerable resources to investigating Kordia for purported “national security violations,” according to court records.

Starting in early March, agents from HSI’s Newark office put a trace on Kordia’s WhatsApp account, interviewed her family and friends in Paterson, and even got a four-page report from the New York City Police Department about her arrest at a protest in April 2024, along with dozens of other people.

Since the charges were quickly dropped, Kordia’s arrest report was supposed to be sealed, and New York laws prohibit NYPD from assisting federal agencies with civil immigration enforcement. The city’s Department of Investigation told The Intercept that its inquiry about NYPD’s sharing of records with HSI is ongoing, and a public report should be issued by the end of the year.

HSI also subpoenaed Kordia’s records from Western Union and MoneyGram, which showed Kordia sent money abroad as recently as February 2025.

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Once in ICE custody, it was Kordia’s legal burden to prove to an immigration judge that she should be released on bond. At a hearing in April, ICE attorneys pointed to her protest arrest and remittances to argue that she was a danger to the community and potentially a Hamas supporter.

“They first tried to argue that exercising her free speech rights by attending a protest somehow made her a danger to U.S. security,” Sherman-Stokes explained, and when that didn’t work, “they moved on to suggesting that she was sending nefarious money transactions to people in the Middle East.”

From the start, the immigration judge didn’t buy it.

“In the absence of evidence of any connection to terrorist organizations, the Court cannot find that [Kordia] is supporting a terrorist organization by sending money to a family member in Palestine,” wrote Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas in an April ruling that ordered Kordia released on a $20,000 bond.

ICE attorneys appealed that order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which, like immigration courts, sits within the Department of Justice rather than the federal judiciary, and Kordia remained at Prairieland.

While the BIA deliberated, a magistrate judge in federal court found in late June that Kordia’s due process rights were likely violated by her ongoing detention and recommended that she be released. But a district court judge ordered the magistrate judge to hear additional argument from the government.

In early August, the BIA remanded the bond order back to the immigration judge for “more complete findings of fact” about Kordia’s money transfers.

“It is a testament to the entrenched nature of anti-Palestinian sentiment that the mere fact of sending remittances to family abroad was enough for DHS and the immigration appeals body to aver that Leqaa was supposedly a threat,” said Naz Ahmad, co-director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project at CUNY law school, which also represents Kordia.

The BIA’s remand order set off the quest to track down Kordia’s family members for affidavits swearing they had not used any of her money to support Hamas.

“Not only do we have to contact them to prove they are who say they are, and that they received money for a medical procedure or because their house was bombed during the Israeli military campaign,” said Sherman-Stokes. They also had to ask each one a “horrible question,” she said: “Can you prove to me that you’re not a terrorist?”

Kordia’s brother, a tailor in Ramallah in the West Bank, wrote in an affidavit that the money she sent helped him open his shop in 2021, where he sells curtains. Other transfers helped cover rent, gas, electricity, and hospital bills for Kordia’s niece.

A cousin, who now lives in Dubai, wrote that a February 2025 transfer helped pay for a medical procedure. Three other cousins in Gaza and Cairo attested that Kordia’s transfers helped cover living expenses and medical bills.

“To further insist that Leqaa justify every single penny sent to a family member overseas, at a time when some of the same are living through a genocide, only underscored the pernicious nature of the government’s empty allegations,” said Ahmad.

In her own affidavit, Kordia wrote that, since 2023, she’s lost “nearly 175 family members — almost an entire generation — to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

In late August, the immigration judge again found that Kordia’s remittances were not grounds to keep her at Prairieland.

“The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the money was sent to [Kordia’s] extended family members who were in desperate need of financial assistance,” wrote Naselow-Nahas.

Again, Naselow-Nahas ordered Kordia’s release on a $20,000 bond, and again, the Trump administration appealed to the BIA. Now, ICE attorneys argue she’s a flight risk because she consulted with an attorney before surrendering in March.

“Adding insult to injury, the government abandoned its ‘dangerousness’ claim based on the remittances and swiftly pivoted to a flimsy ‘flight risk’ argument to prolong Leqaa’s confinement punitively,” said Sadaf Hasan, an attorney at Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit that represents her. “These tactics reflect the dehumanizing and racist imperatives of the administration to weaponize immigration laws to punish Palestinian identity and the growing movement for Palestinian advocacy.”

Sherman-Stokes said that, based on more than a decade working in deportation defense, it’s not unusual for the government to make spurious arguments or offer little evidence.

“What’s uncommon here is the government’s unwillingness to admit defeat,” she said. “They have so little evidence, yet they continue to appeal and appeal and appeal in the face of an immigration judge finding not once but twice that she should be released,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The government’s targeting of Palestinian people or Muslim immigrants is also hardly new. From the post-9/11 “Muslim registry” to the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” Middle Eastern immigrants have faced additional scrutiny for decades.

“But it certainly seems to have escalated,” said Sherman-Stokes, who called the government’s arguments about Kordia’s money transfers “vague and spurious claims that are really grounded in racism and xenophobia.”

Sherman-Stokes said it was also unusual for Kordia to be held in detention indefinitely based just on her overstayed visa, without any criminal conviction.

“She exercised her First Amendment rights along with thousands of other people,” Sherman-Stokes said. “This is someone we should welcome into the country, not demonize.”

Kordia’s habeas petition for release is currently pending in federal court, and on Tuesday she filed a brief urging her immediate release despite the government’s “procedural gamesmanship.” Briefs are due to the BIA next week, and Kordia’s next hearing in immigration court is scheduled for October 23.

After more than six months in Prairieland, Kordia is eager to be back with her family in New Jersey. Before moving to the U.S., she and her mother were apart for nearly two decades, since Kordia stayed with her father in the West Bank after her parents divorced. On top of working multiple jobs and collecting money for family abroad, Kordia helped look after her half-brother, Omar, who has autism, and helped her mother, who has limited mobility and other health issues, with errands and cleaning.

“Against my will, I was separated from my mother for nearly twenty years,” Kordia wrote. “Being separated from her again is unbearable.”

The post She Sent Money to Family in Gaza. ICE Claimed It’s Evidence She Supports Hamas. appeared first on The Intercept.

“If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

“This bill is very concerning because it’s the beginning of a process of criminalizing something that is very normal for many people, which is traveling to Iran,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

Along with a flurry of other sanctions bills targeting Iran, the bill calling for the travel restrictions passed the U.S. House last week. The bill is now slated to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Introduced last fall, the No Paydays for Hostage-Takers Act languished until tensions between Iran and Israel escalated into a series of reciprocal attacks earlier this month.

Among other provisions, the bill seeks to bar U.S. passport holders from traveling to Iran by rendering their passports invalid for such travel. Though the prohibition would need to be enacted by the State Department, the legislative proposal effectively encourages the move and, as with other sanctions against Iran, waiving the authority to enact the ban could incur political costs.

If Donald Trump wins a second White House term, a distinct possibility according to polls, the invocation of the travel ban would be likely. In his first term, Trump imposed the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the U.S. for Iranians, among other nationalities, and has promised to reimpose it if elected again.

The idea of banning travel to Iran on American passports was raised last September by former Trump State Department official Elliott Abrams, a right-wing hawk with a controversial history that includes covering up a Central American massacre and involvement in the Iran–Contra scandal.

In practice, many Iranian Americans tend to travel to Iran on Iranian passports, but Americans of Iranian extraction who do not hold Islamic Republic travel documents would be unable to travel there under the ban. The measure is viewed as a potential signal of deeper isolation for the Iranian people and severing of people-to-people ties between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and North Korea?

The bill, originally proposed last October by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., was promoted as a measure to restrict the Iranian government’s ability to take U.S. citizens hostage as bargaining chips for bilateral negotiations. Some dual-nationals have been arrested in Iran in the past amid tensions between the two countries.

Yet hundreds of thousands of dual-nationals are believed to travel regularly to Iran from across the West. Measures barring their ability to do so would represent an unprecedented step, making it difficult or impossible for people with ties in both countries to visit family or maintain personal and professional connections.

Invalidating U.S. passports for travel to Iran would put it on par with North Korea, which had a similar ban put in place in 2017 — during Trump’s first term — when an American citizen died after 17 months of detention there.

Despite being heavily sanctioned over foreign policy and human rights issues, Iran still has relations with much of the international community and large number of Iranians live throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

“North Korea and Iran are very different countries.”

“North Korea is really the model for this policy, as it is the only country where there is such a strict prohibition for travel on the books,” said Costello. “But North Korea and Iran are very different countries. The level of isolation of North Korea is far greater, and it doesn’t have the same diaspora that Iran does.”

This week, a delegation from North Korea traveled to Iran, with reported hopes of breaking North Korea’s total diplomatic isolation as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine forge new geopolitics.

Costello said that NIAC is still hoping that the Senate will not approve the bill when it comes to its consideration. Still, the implications of it coming under consideration, alongside Trump’s promises to revive his “Muslim ban” policy, bode poorly for the future of U.S.–Iran relations.

“You are talking,” he said, “about a policy that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.”

The post House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away From Americans appeared first on The Intercept.

The shift represents a stark contrast with the hostile relations between Republicans and Muslims over the past two decades, as well as the integration of many younger Muslim Americans into progressive politics. The GOP’s outreach, reported on recently by Semafor and other outlets, also comes at a moment when the current Republican presidential frontrunner is tripling down on the most directly anti-Muslim government policy in U.S. history: the so-called Muslim ban.

At a campaign speech in Iowa last Friday, former President Donald Trump promised that he would bring back the controversial policy. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said.

The notion of a ban was first introduced by Trump early in his 2016 presidential campaign, when it was marketed explicitly as a prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States. After Trump was elected, he instated a ban targeting travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, prompting chaos in airports and inside the government. Later, the Trump administration began referring to the policy more antiseptically as a “travel ban,” modifying it to include restrictions on some non-Muslim countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Yet in his speech in Iowa last weekend, Trump made very clear that the target of his policy would be Muslims, conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism. “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told the audience to applause.

Trump’s statements highlight an awkward contradiction. On one hand, some Muslim Americans, bound by a shared commitment to conservative social values, are enjoying a period of warm relations with the Republican Party and conservative activists who share their opposition to LGBTQ+ education in schools. At the same time, the wildly popular leading Republican presidential candidate — and the center of gravity in the party — is publicly vowing to revive a policy aimed at curtailing the presence of Muslims in the U.S. entirely.

“This will be a challenging moment for the Muslim community, but I do believe that the issue of LGBT education in schools will become a wedge issue,” said Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a progressive human rights organization. “On a state and local level, many conservative Muslim voters will likely vote for candidates who are anti-LGBT, which will mean mostly Republicans, while on a national level, the same people may choose to vote for a Democrat.”

In one sign of warming relations between Muslims and the Republican Party, major Islamic civil rights organizations have spoken out in support of the recent GOP-supported protests aimed at letting parents opt their children out of LGBTQ+ readings in schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been among the most vocal, collecting hundreds of signatures to demand that parents be allowed to remove their children from gender- and sex-based courses.

CAIR has been a favorite target of the Republican Party and conservative activists over the past two decades, with the group being labeled as a front for terrorism and Islamic extremism. On this issue, however, they find themselves aligned, even applauded, by erstwhile foes.

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR said its positions reflect an agnosticism toward the partisan divide in American politics.

“CAIR defends the rights of Americans to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “We decide our policy position based on principle, not party.”

The initial ban resulted in chaos at American airports, as people from targeted countries whose documents were otherwise valid found themselves abruptly detained by U.S. border security. In some cases, people with permission to enter the U.S. wound up stranded abroad without recourse, with some even dying or taking their own lives after being trapped in immigration limbo by the measure.

The cruelties and absurdities brought by the ban also impacted many people living in the U.S. who found themselves separated from loved ones. In one infamous case, the Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old Yemeni American boy dying of a terminal illness was forced to fight a legal battle to come and see him in the hospital after being denied entry to the U.S. because of the ban. She was later granted a waiver to the rule, arriving in the U.S. just days before her son died in the hospital.

The Supreme Court shot down two versions of the “Muslim ban” as unconstitutional, before finally upholding the measure in a 5-4 decision handed down in 2018.

After taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order lifting the ban entirely. The precedent, however, remains.

Trump has made reviving the measure a notable part of his reelection campaign, reportedly telling his advisers in May that he would bring back an expanded version of the infamous travel restriction — a policy that he called “beautiful.”

Trump’s renewed vow to ban Muslims from the U.S. comes at a time when some Muslim Americans have begun to gravitate back to the Republican Party. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans tended to vote as a majority for Republicans, by some accounting providing the crucial swing vote that tilted Florida for George W. Bush in 2000.

Many Muslim Americans who found themselves transformed into punching bags for Republican politicians in later years came to rue their decision to support the GOP. Trump’s initial proposal of the “Muslim ban,” which was met with enthusiastic approval by his base, was only the capstone of a long, ugly falling out between Muslims and Republicans.

With tensions around terrorism and U.S. wars in the Middle East ebbing, some conservative Muslims seem to be turning back to the party.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promotion of a new and improved “Muslim ban” will sour the halting rapprochement between these two groups. Muslim Americans have transformed into solidly Democratic voters in recent decades, with several Muslim members of Congress taking up highly visible roles in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Even during the period when Trump had imposed the ban, however, some exit polls in the 2020 election showed as many as 35 percent of Muslim voters supporting the candidate who had made the legal exclusion of their coreligionists from the country a highlight of his presidency.

Muslim voters who choose to buck Trump’s GOP might find little reprieve in his chief rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a member of U.S. Congress, sponsored a bill that sought to ban refugees to the U.S. from a number of Muslim-majority countries where the U.S. had conducted military operations. In recent months, DeSantis has also pushed measures through state legislatures banning foreigners from owning certain properties or even enrolling in public universities to people from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These bans provide a window into how lists of targeted nationalities could be used to deprive individuals of rights well beyond travel in the future.

Trump’s remarks in Iowa suggested that he might impose other restrictions for Muslim immigrations, making remarks aimed at radical terrorists in the same breath as those about farm ownership. “We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers,” Trump said. “We don’t want people blowing up our cities, and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

As for LGBTQ+ issues in the Muslim community, Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values said that her community needed to spend more time coming to grips with the specifics of the materials that are becoming an increasingly bitter culture war flashpoint.

“We should be taking those books and educational materials that people have issues with and sitting down on both sides to decipher what the problem is and how we can resolve this. In many cases, people are not even sure what’s in the books in question, and this approach of simply shouting at one another doesn’t help,” said Zonneveld, who recently wrote a piece for the website Religion News Service about the controversy. “One thing to emphasize, however, on principle, is that LGBT people are human beings created by God, just like you and I, and they should not be discriminated against, end of story.”

The post Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024 appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday afternoon, the official White House X account posted a video showing men in Seattle shackled by the wrists and ankles about to be boarded onto a plane for deportation.

The 40-second clip’s soundtrack is sparse, with no dialog or music — just the sounds of the plane engine and the jangle of handcuffs and chains first laid out by an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then attached to the immigrants, whose faces are not filmed.

The White House gave the video a macabre caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling some people experience in response to certain stimuli, often sound. There are millions of social media videos dedicated to the genre.

For the Trump administration, that pleasure is derived from the sounds of human bondage and racist exclusion.

To me, the sound was a clarion call: the thundering of a fascist machine that demands people of conscience stand up to gum up its works, that the clink of those chains should be silenced with blockages and blockades.

What we need now is not to follow Democratic Party officials — who have long since advocated harsher border rule and shown a willingness to serve Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Instead, we have to to follow the lead of grassroots and front-line immigrant organizers who have been doing the work of opposing far-right nationalism long before this moment of renewed Trumpian reaction.

A Fascist Troll Is Still Fascism

When the White House’s video posted, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, offered his own comment: “Haha wow,” alongside two emojis: a troll and a medal.

The White House account was of course trolling — it reposted Musk’s comment too — and provoking outraged responses like this are part of their goal. There’s no contradiction, though, in an act being trollish and unambiguously serious in its fascist intent and effect.

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This is the puerile style of Trumpian fascism: a snickering lexicon of resentment shaped by online far-right culture wars, applied to the violent operations of racist law and border enforcement. The post doesn’t work as a “troll” if it doesn’t produce outrage, sure, but it also doesn’t work as a troll if it doesn’t produce pleasure for Trump’s base — pleasure at fascist domination.

There’s nothing particularly new about the concoction of fascist violence and irony either. The ghost-sheet costumes and ridiculous titles chosen by the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan were to hide members’ identities, but were also purposely absurd in an effort to distract from their violent intentions.

There was, of course, no costume that could disguise the Klan’s terrors, just as no meme-culture references can distract from Trump and Musk’s white supremacist extremism.

The White House’s post makes no attempt, even, to suggest that the anonymous men in chains have committed some sort of heinous acts. All we learn of them is that they fall into the vast category of state-determined “illegal aliens” and are therefore deserving of banishment and humiliation.

The shackles themselves — the video’s audio and visual focus — recall the most shameful episodes of this country’s unbroken history of racist oppression, from slave auctions to chain gangs.

The Ineffective Opposition

Centrist liberals may be horrified by the cruelty on display, but it was an Obama-era move to expand mass deportations under the rubric of removing only “criminals” — a category devoid of moral sense in a country that routinely criminalizes homelessness, poverty, and Blackness, but enables rape, extreme exploitation, and genocide.

The Biden administration and the Harris campaign bear great responsibility, too, for further normalizing the right-wing anti-immigrant agenda.

These Democratic leaders who are helping Trump carry out his nationalist program might want to reflect on the White House “ASMR” post — this is what they are aiding. They might consider, too, that this short clip captures just a slither of the far-reaching cruelty of the deportation machine — from the extremities of the extraordinary rendition of migrants on Guantánamo Bay, to the quotidian terror faced by millions of people who fear separation from their loved ones and lives.

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They are, however, unlikely to do so. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, for instance, told a press conference last month that she welcomed ICE going after “people who committed crimes, serious offenders, and those are exactly the people we want removed from the state of New York.” And dozens of Democrats helped pass the Laken Riley Act, which allows for the indefinite ICE detention of undocumented immigrants charged, but not even convicted, of crimes including petty theft.

“I want to be clear, there has always been ICE raids in the state of New York, even in the past, and this is not a new dynamic,” Hochul said. And while ICE was only founded in 2003, it’s true that a decadeslong bipartisan consensus has permitted attacks on immigrants to be the norm, paving the way for Trump’s nationalist excesses.

It is hoping too much to imagine a significant enough number of Democrats will reckon with their own complicity in creating the conditions for this moment. Displays of unambiguous fascist feeling from the White House, however, should at least give pause to those who have expressed willingness to further aid this authoritarian project.

What Needs to Be Done

Since I hold little hope for a robust antifascist response from Democratic leaders, the need for grassroots responses is clear. In cities and neighborhoods around the country, rapid-response networks to respond to ICE raids are proliferating, as are “know your rights” trainings. These are the crucial antidote, if not to the whole machinery, at least to minimizing its ill effects as much as possible.

The blockages and blockades of ICE’s heavy-handed actions need to grow. We need to support the churches and other local institutions that have committed to their role as sanctuary spaces; we need to refuse ICE’s unwarranted entry into our workplaces, schools, and residences; we need worker and union organizing that upholds the legacy of working-class, pro-immigrant resistance; and we need targeted direct action protest.

There are clear examples to follow: When Never Again Action and the Cosecha Movement briefly shut down ICE headquarters in Washington during Trump’s first term; when protesters swarmed New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2017 against the Muslim ban, and cab drivers refused to drop passengers there; when the immigrant rebels of the gilets noirs occupied a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.”

It all takes courage — in some cases, more courage and even risk than others. There are examples, if not in what to do, in the kind of fortitude it takes to get in the way of fascism. Take Willem Van Spronsen, a 69-year-old activist who in 2019 was shot dead by police when he attempted to incinerate a fleet of empty ICE vehicles outside a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. “I have an unshakable abhorrence for injustice,” he wrote in a short manifesto. “That is what brings me here.”

Van Spronsen’s solitary, self-sacrificial course of action is not what I’m advocating for here. We need collective direct action, pushing in many directions, against the gears of the necro-political deportation machine, to render individual extreme action unnecessary. It is Van Spronsen’s antifascist commitment that we should carry forward.

We must remember that it is Trump, Musk, and their Republican allies who delight in human suffering; Van Spronsen could not abide it. We need to all find our own ways, together, to demonstrate our unshakeable abhorrence for injustice.

The post Trump and Musk Delight in the Sounds of Human Suffering With Sick “ASMR” Immigrant Video appeared first on The Intercept.

This time eight years ago, I was in Washington to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump. I had no plans to attend the vast Women’s March scheduled for the following day; this was no time, I thought, for a defanged liberal feminism, for kitschy pink accoutrements and pussy puns.

I was there to take part in J20 — January 20 — the antifascist black bloc protest. We aimed to inaugurate Trump’s presidency with disruptive antagonism in the streets. Non-specific calls to “shut it down” carried a renewed sense of urgency then, in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory and the threat of ascendant fascist rule.

Shut it down, we did not. The protest wrought minor property damage, primarily against bank and chain-store windows.

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Hours before Trump was sworn in, delivering his sinister vision of “American carnage” on the inaugural stage, our march was overwhelmed by riot police. Over 200 protesters were detained and most arrestees went on to face felony charges carrying a potential decade-plus in prison — charges that were eventually dropped, but only after 18 agonizing months for the defendants.

Extreme prosecutorial overreach against left-wing, anti-racist protesters remained a constant under Trump’s first presidency, and under President Joe Biden too. 

I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of are there either.

Eight years later, the start of a second Trump term augurs an authoritarianism more studied and honed. I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of, who convened en masse in the city for J20 in 2017, are there. There is no plan for a giant carnival of #resistance, à la the Women’s March, either.

While the severe cold, which has forced Trump’s ceremony inside, could be blamed, the weather did not stymie mass protest plans – no plans anything close to the scale of 2017 were made.

D.C. authorities have said that there are no known threats to the inauguration, and permitted protests are predicted to be far smaller this time around. The entirety of the D.C. police force will nonetheless be on duty, joined by a reported 4,000 cops from other areas and 7,800 National Guard troops.

I won’t foreclose surprise — Luigi Mangione reminds us not to — but it’s likely that, even indoors, the inauguration will be a dreadful, expensive spectacle, drenched in fascist rhetoric and aesthetics, performed without disruption or notable protest.

The quiet is not necessarily a bad thing. There is little point in going to Washington today to register opposition to Trump’s return. Trumpism never left. No one in the halls of power in Washington is listening. And, above all, the terrain on which we fight Trumpist rule is the rough ground of everyday life. It’s where we’re already standing.

Democrats’ Empty Rhetoric

The absence of significant counter-demonstrations could be seen to signal a fatalism or acquiescence on behalf of Trump’s opponents — and, for liberal centrists and conservative “never Trumpers,” it may well be.

For left-wing movements, however, back-footed as we might be, skipping inauguration protests this year evinces a sober reckoning with the limits of certain tactics in certain moments, and, at best, a keener focus on where energies will be needed for the struggles ahead.

The last eight years, but particularly the second half of Biden’s presidency, proved what many on the left had feared: Liberal Democrats’ antifascist rhetoric was hollow.

The outraged voices of the #resistance to Trump 1.0 have spent the last years pushing Trump-worthy anti-immigration policies, throwing trans people under the bus, backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, fear-mongering over crime rates, and pouring funds into police budgets rather than meeting people’s needs.

Democrats licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist.

They licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist. Whether Democrats’ rightward appeals were ill-conceived electoral strategies or signs of ideological alignment with Trump is irrelevant; the violent political work done is the same either way. 

Democratic Party subservience to Trump’s second-term agenda started early, with 48 House Democrats voting alongside Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act last week.

The bill would allow immigration officials to indefinitely detain and potentially deport unauthorized immigrants accused — not even convicted — of minor crimes like shoplifting. And it would let the most Trumpist forces in American politics choose who to deport.

The Front-Line Work

At this point, it is hardly news that we cannot rely on centrist liberals to form an antifascist front. I say this with no joy: Democratic mayors and governors, from New York to Atlanta, have all but signaled that they will offer no institutional protections for communities most vulnerable to Trump’s violent agenda. The left is small and disarticulated. The challenges we face are enormous and growing. 

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We find ourselves in a grimly defensive position. The task is urgent to build resilient communities, including rapid-response networks to defend neighbors and colleagues from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, or ensuring the wide circulation and accessibility of abortion pills and hormones.

Front-line communities have been doing this work — and long before Trump’s initial rise to power too.

Lest anyone forget, the pre-Trump years were no panacea for abortion access, immigrant rights, or health care, especially gender-affirming health care. Fossil fuel capitalism, austerity, brutal inequalities, and worker exploitation, racist policing, and the carceral state — these were the conditions of disaffection in which the far-right could thrive.

Now, if Trump delivers even a fragment of the authoritarian promises he has made, all these violences will intensify, as will the penalties for fighting them. Things can just get worse. It is a sign of seriousness that many organizers are focusing on community building and various defense strategies, rather than spectacular protests.

Learning as We Go

The time to be in the streets, or for other disruptive public actions, has hardly passed.

The enormous George Floyd uprisings of 2020 were not a mistake or a failure by virtue of facing repression and backlash. They were a potent, necessary articulation of a liberation politics fighting to be realized. The same can be said for the extraordinary student-led movement for Palestinian freedom, which has faced bipartisan demonization, and which will need to continue long after any Gaza ceasefire.

These are long, embattled struggles, with protests only featuring as the most visible facet.

Such visibility is not negligible; we will need to find each other in the streets and intersections again. Actions like the mass swarms at airports against Trump’s “Muslim ban” should have also continued against Biden’s harsh border rule, and will be far more crucial going forward than any counter-inauguration protest spectacle.

The 2017 Women’s March was a lie, even if its organizers and attendees were acting in earnest. It suggested a united liberal-to-left feminist, antifascist front that simply did not exist. Mainstream Democrats have made that all too clear.

J20, meanwhile, was a miscalculation; we did not have the capacity to interfere meaningfully with the inauguration and its huge policing apparatus. Militant protest is always risky, but risks should be as well calculated as possible. A relative quiet today for Trump’s inauguration in D.C. is, I hope, a sign of learning. 

The post I Protested Trump’s First Inauguration. But I’m Not Marching Against Him Today. appeared first on The Intercept.

“President Joe Biden is pulling from former President Donald Trump’s immigration playbook,” CNN reported on Tuesday. The occasion was Biden’s announcement this week of a draconian executive order to temporarily shut down asylum requests at the U.S.–Mexico border and introduce other drastic restrictions on the basic right to asylum.

CNN was not alone. Numerous commentators, particularly critics of Biden’s plan, noted that the decision to halt the asylum process reflects an extremity of border authoritarianism worthy of Trump. “This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban,” the American Civil Liberties Union said on X, vowing to go to court.

There’s much truth to it. Biden’s border policies have been no less than Trumpian. This is especially true of his use of executive authority to harden border rule, as Trump had done with his 2017 Muslim ban and his own extremist asylum restrictions in 2018.

Yet Biden’s new asylum restrictions, the details of which were announced on Tuesday, are neither an aberration from his administration’s border policies, nor are they a shift away from decades-long Democratic Party standards, since at least the Clinton era.

This is not to underplay the extremity of Biden’s new plan. Under Biden’s executive order, the administration will halt asylum requests at the border once the average number of daily encounters has reached 2,500 between legal ports of entry, which has been consistently the case since Biden took office in 2021. Requests will be reopened two weeks after the daily average falls under 1,500 for seven consecutive days. The restrictions went into effect last night.

The order has some exemptions in place for unaccompanied minors, for those with acute medical emergencies, for “severe” trafficking victims, and for people who have already made appointments on the Customs and Border Protection app, a burdensome process that can take many months.

Those who can immediately show “reasonable probability” of imminent and extreme threat to life or safety, such as grave persecution, rape, kidnapping, torture, or murder are exempt — although the Department of Homeland Security noted that the plan demands a “new, substantially higher standard” that there is a “reasonable probability.” This standard is higher even than under Trump’s harsh 2018 asylum ban.

Migrants who are expelled under the order will receive a minimum five-year bar on reentry to the U.S. and potentially be criminally prosecuted.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., summed it up well: “This will be one of the most restrictive border policies in modern history.”

Bipartisan Border Fascism

While it is true that Biden is bending to Republican pressure over the so-called border crisis — quite literally relying on Trump-era legislation — border fascism has for decades been a bipartisan commitment.

The convergence between conservative and far-right border politics, with the far right consistently winning the day, can in part be blamed on spineless realpolitik: A February Gallup poll found that 28 percent of Americans believed immigration to be the most important problem facing the U.S.

Better for a presidential campaign, the logic goes, to lean into the pernicious, anti-migrant crisis narrative.

It matters little that public sentiment might be affected by years of right-wing fearmongering, to which the Democratic establishment has readily acquiesced, alongside punishing austerity budgets that leave citizens fearful of stretched resources. Democrats and Republicans are fighting to the bottom on immigration — a fight that vocal white nationalist Republicans will always win.

This is not, however, merely a case of self-identifying centrist Democrats following the evermore fascistic Republican line.

“I think it’s so important to understand how immigration enforcement has been a pillar of the Democratic party’s governance for three decades,” activist and scholar of border imperialism Harsha Walia told Intercepted podcast in February 2021, when it was already becoming clear that Biden’s tenure would hardly see the undoing of the border regime.

Walia noted that it was under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — not only Trump — that “an entire immigration enforcement apparatus” was established to increase criminalization, detention, deportation, and militarization. It was, Walia said, “the very bipartisan agenda of detaining and deporting and terrorizing migrant communities.”

These structures, she added, were built up and normalized in the Clinton years.

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In 1994, at the very same time that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Army Corps of Engineers began to fence the U.S.–Mexico border. The neoliberal trade deal further immiserated Mexico’s poorest, producing displacement and migration; the U.S militarized the border in preparation. Clinton’s 1996 immigration laws significantly expanded the United States’ ability to detain and deport migrants with even minor criminal convictions.

And Obama relied on the pernicious, racist, classist narrative of only targeting “dangerous” criminal migrants. Rightly dubbed the “deporter-in-chief,” Obama deported some 3 million people.

Differences of Rhetoric, Not Substance

This is a Democratic legacy: hardened borders, the criminalization of migration, the willingness to condemn thousands of people to death through deterrence. This is the necropolitical management of migrants fleeing political and economic turmoil often as the result of decades of ruinous U.S. interventions in Central America.

While Trump set the bar of anti-immigrant politics at a subterranean low and promises an agenda of unvarnished fascism should he be reelected, the brutal and increasingly eliminationist exclusion of migrants is a bipartisan project.

Biden’s executive order is itself no shift from his only policy record. A war on immigrants is the norm under this administration, from the expedited expulsion of thousands of Haitians in 2021; to his blanket policy in early 2023 to immediately eject asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico without having previously applied for asylum in a third country; to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s increased use of solitary confinement for thousands of detained migrants.

The idea of Democrats as the pro-immigrant party nonetheless persists as a convenient myth on both sides of the aisle. Democrats condemn the intolerable cruelty of Republican nativism, and Republicans, meanwhile, decry Democrats as open-border radicals, regardless of the anti-immigrant continuities between the two party’s policies. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s family separation policy, predictably slammed Biden’s authoritarian executive order as somehow “pro-invasion, pro-illegal migration executive order.”

The difference is more one of rhetoric than substance. “I’ll never refer to immigrants as poisoning the blood of a country,” Biden said on Tuesday. But policies that swiftly reject, eject, cage, and punish desperate migrants attempting to find safety and stability in one of the world’s wealthiest nations send the same nationalist message.

Democrats couch their border logics in the neoliberal language of management and order, rather than explicitly racist “America First” slogans. The maintenance of the border — a racist tool that serves capital and divides labor — has the same disastrous, deadly effects no matter what rhetoric justifies it.

As the American Civil Liberties Union noted of Biden’s executive order, it “will severely restrict people’s legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk.”

The post Joe Biden’s Cruel Border Shutdown Follows in Clinton and Obama’s Footsteps Too appeared first on The Intercept.

The leadership of the Democratic Party deserves significant blame for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. While there were multiple factors at play, it must be acknowledged that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their enablers engaged in vast levels of political malpractice despite countless warnings from many key voices and constituencies. 

Multiple governments worldwide, regardless of ideology, have suffered at the polls this year, suggesting that Harris faced an uphill battle no matter what. But that fight was made even more difficult by the simple reality that Biden and Harris spent a solid year alienating core constituencies of the Democratic Party, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and failing to assign clear blame for the individuals and interest groups responsible for the economic woes of the working class.

If we want a Democratic Party that can produce different outcomes, we will need to hold the current party accountable for its failures. That means matching our demands for change with the force and pressure of real accountability. The Democratic leadership must itself be targeted with campaigns that highlight the principles of electoral success while punishing those responsible for the party’s continued defeats. I’m building a campaign to do exactly that, and here’s how I think we can win.

Clean Up the Party Now

Democrats are in disarray, with many different voices and communities picking through the wreckage of 2024 to decide what can be learned and what should be done next. This is the time to name our adversaries and assert our demands. If we want to build a Democratic Party that has any shot of winning elections and advancing the human condition, we must model the very posture of aggressive accountability that we want future Democratic presidential candidates to adopt.

There are plenty of potential targets for accountability. We can directly challenge the culture of the Democratic Party right now by turning the looming internal elections for a new Democratic National Committee chair into a public battle for our core values. Leaning into 2026, the elections for the House and Senate can be leveraged to call out Democratic incumbents who continue to serve as vehicles for corporate interests. Pro-Israel hawks like Rep. Ritchie Torres should be directly challenged in both the 2026 primaries and general election. 

Looking to 2028, leading Democratic contenders for the presidential race should be held accountable now for their failings. One such example is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. When Uber launched its successful war against California state-mandated benefits for drivers, Newsom stayed neutral. He should be called out for this silence. Another important target is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also being talked up as a presidential contender. Shapiro’s record of support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is well documented, and a grassroots campaign to oppose him as president should begin now.

Even Biden’s eventual groundbreaking ceremony for his future presidential library should be made into a target for principled criticisms and protests. Biden destroyed the Democrats’ prospects in 2024 by supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and arrogantly refusing to drop out of the presidential race until it was too late to hold a real primary. By making an example out of Biden himself, we can “punch up” into the highest levels of the party and build our power to hold the party accountable.

Name the Enemy: Corporate Elites

When it comes to the fundamental unfairness of the U.S. economy, Democrats often speak in soft surrogate terms: cutting taxes on the middle class, forgiving student loans, increasing funding for college, etc. But Democrats’ core silence on corporate greed has allowed Trump to step into the vacuum with a very different explanation of who is to blame. Trump’s false explanations often focus on racial resentments, culture conflict, or issues related to gender and sexuality. But blaming undocumented immigrants, DEI, “critical race theory,” or transgender equality will not address the fundamental unfairness of an economy in which workers are squeezed under the diktat of economic elites.

The American working class has long been undermined by those who represent the interests of concentrated wealth. America’s corporate elites block unions, outsource U.S. jobs, cut benefits, and squeeze as much profit as they can out of America’s workers. But Democratic presidential candidates rarely run campaigns that bluntly name and shame these elites for the damage that they do to working-class lives. The simple reason why is that many state- and national-level Democrats depend on these same financial elites for the cash that fuels politicians’ expensive campaigns.

As president, Biden brought into his administration a range of people and policies from the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, which resulted in policies and actions that have been pro-union, anti-inflation, and anti-monopoly. But unlike Sanders and Warren, Biden has done a very poor job of using his bully pulpit to bluntly name and blame the individuals and interest groups who are often most responsible for working-class woes. Biden had some of the right policies, but for reasons that likely included age-related fatigue and ideological predisposition, he got the politics wrong.

When Democrats create a “blame vacuum” for why working-class voters are suffering, other political opportunists are more than happy to step in. Thanks to the seduction of Trump, the white working class had already largely abandoned the Democratic Party. Now nonwhite working-class voters are starting to do the same. To reverse these trends, Democrats must start assigning blame accurately for the high prices, long workdays, and stagnant wages that harm so many workers in our country. 

Kick Out the Sellouts

Not only is the senior leadership of the Democratic Party unwilling to accurately name the enemy, but in many cases, the Democratic Party is actually run and advised by the same corporate elites who benefit from the exploitation of the American working class. The current chair of the DNC is Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for Walmart, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, the coal industry, and many other corporate interests. 

Another toxic example of the pervasive corporate control of the Democratic Party is Tony West, the brother-in-law of Kamala Harris. In 2024, West took a leave of absence from his role as senior vice president and chief legal officer for Uber to advise Harris on her presidential campaign. During West’s time at Uber, the company waged an all-out war against working-class interests by using a California ballot proposition to successfully gut state-mandated benefits for overworked and underpaid Uber drivers. And before West came to Uber, he served as general counsel at PepsiCo, a company that has profited heavily from price inflation.

It has been widely reported that West advised Harris to embrace wealthy corporate elites instead of blaming them for America’s economic woes. This disastrous advice led Harris to cater to high-net-worth interests and muddle her message. This may have helped Harris attract the $1.6 billion in contributions that backed her campaign, but her lack of a clear message on the economy left her with millions fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. She failed to energize the Democratic Party base, including working-class voters, and she lost her campaign. 

Say Goodbye to Bill, Hillary, and Barack

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all have a long history of undermining progressive and populist movements in the Democratic Party. All three should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead, they are still showered with deference and reverence by many.

Obama and the Clintons should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In different ways, all three have aligned with the very corporate and financial elites who should be named as our political enemies. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, the job-destroying free-trade agreement that was opposed by labor unions. Hillary Clinton served on the board of Walmart and voted for Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Obama avoided naming and shaming the Wall Street elites most responsible for the recession that brought him into power. And while in power, Obama bailed out financial institutions instead of focusing on working people. 

Once out of office, these three senior Democratic Party voices have continued to undermine the possibility of a successful Democratic Party that can mobilize its base and appeal to the working class. In 2020, Obama intervened behind the scenes to block Sanders’s campaign for president and put the aging, arrogant, and politically inept Biden in the Oval Office, an intervention that essentially set the stage for Trump’s return to power. Obama also wrote the script for bragging about America’s increased oil and gas production, a posture that both Biden and Harris would later adopt as they, too, alienated climate voters. And this year, the Clintons and Obama all gaslit the Democratic voters most concerned about Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hillary Clinton heaped scorn upon Gaza activists, Bill Clinton personally justified Israel’s slaughter, and Obama tried to defend Biden by implying that Trump’s Muslim ban would be worse.

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Ultimately, the former leaders of the Democratic Party are given far too much credit for their political successes. It is worth remembering that every Democrat who has been successfully elected president in the last 50 years came into office with the benefit of a massive disaster that undermined the Republican incumbent. Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 thanks to a recession. Obama defeated the successor to George W. Bush, John McCain, thanks to another recession. And Biden defeated Trump with the help of the 2020 global pandemic. Even Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Ford’s unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon.

Expel the Pro-Israel Lobby

As Israel accelerates its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Democratic Party support for Israel’s military will continue to splinter and break apart the Democratic base. It will take time to more deeply investigate the question of why as many as 10 or 11 million of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t show up to support Kamala Harris in 2024. But it is likely that some percentage of those voters were deeply anguished by Biden and Harris’s full-fledged support for U.S. military funding for Israel. Despite the misrepresentation of mainstream media, this anguish is not limited to Arab and Muslim voters, nor is it limited to voters in Michigan.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel campaign and advocacy organizations all care little about the prospects of the Democratic Party. They are single-issue organizations that are happy to reward or defeat any elected official who stands with or against them. By keeping a home for single-issue pro-Israel networks in the Democratic Party, the party hollows itself out by allowing those same networks to push out prominent progressive and populist legislators, along with the voters who back them. 

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One ugly result of this is the emergence of an extraordinarily hollow form of representational politics. While anti-worker Black voices like Harrison and West take on informal and formal leadership roles in the party, populist and progressive Black members of Congress like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are targeted for defeat by the very pro-Israel networks who back Biden and Harris. Even the supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J-Street contributed to Bowman’s defeat.

Embrace the Permanent Battle

Until Citizens United is overturned and public financing is embraced, the Democratic Party will face a perpetual tension between populist aspirations and the interests of corporate wealth. And even if major reforms were somehow implemented, they would pose such a threat to the interests of concentrated wealth that there would be a well-funded backlash. 

This means that advocates for a more effective Democratic Party should embrace a permanent battle for the soul of the party. The Democratic Party needs a permanent watchdog community that is armed with sweeping campaigns for reform in order to combat the party’s perpetual slouch toward the interests of concentrated wealth. If you agree, consider joining me by signing on to this platform.

Many networks both inside and outside the Democratic Party are well-poised to help lead calls for reform. Disgruntled Democrats, climate voters, progressives, opponents of Israel’s genocide, and even Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America members can all help push the Democratic Party away from its corporate moorings and pro-Israel litmus tests. 

Beyond 2024

Without strong and sustained public pressure, the Democratic Party is likely to remain trapped in its culture of defeat. We shouldn’t expect any real changes from the current stewards of a broken political party. If we want a Democratic Party that wins elections and advances the public interest, we will have to start fighting for it. That fight needs to begin now.

The post Take Out the Trash: A Proposal to Clean Up the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

With little or no justification, the Trump administration is revoking the visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation, according to attorneys representing international scholars who have filed new lawsuits against the Trump administration. 

In some cases, the government has gone after students with minor infractions or misdemeanors on their record, or, for others, no criminal history at all.

Several immigration attorneys have also told The Intercept that the bulk of their clients are from Muslim-majority countries or other countries in Asia and Africa. And new lawsuits filed in California also allege the government’s deportation attempts appear to be targeting students who are “African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian.

It will take days for immigration attorneys to sift through the waves of new cases. In late March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed media reports that at least 300 visas had been revoked in its “Catch and Revoke” program, and said that number would rise daily. Immigration attorneys who spoke with The Intercept on Monday estimate the number of student visa revocations may have risen into the thousands in recent days. 

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At Least 50 Arizona State Students Have Now Had Visas Revoked, Lawyer Says

While the Trump administration’s most-publicized attacks on students have revolved around free speech rights with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of students for protesting or writing opinion journalism, the recent rush of revocations aligns with Trump’s wider, xenophobic campaign against immigrants and immigration.

“It’s a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country,” said Johnny Sinodis, a San Francisco-based immigration attorney who filed a lawsuit on Monday in California against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of a targeted student.

This new string of attacks on international students began over the weekend, ensnaring students at a wide swath of colleges and universities — such as Colorado State University, St. Cloud State University, North Carolina State University, Kent State University, and throughout the University of California system in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Irvine, and San Diego. Many of the ensnared students do not attend universities that have previously been targeted by the Trump administration over allegations of “antisemitism,” such as Columbia, Tufts, or Cornell.

In one such case, Xiaotian Liu, a doctoral candidate studying computer science at Dartmouth College and a Chinese citizen, received an email from school administrators on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security had terminated his student status, according to a new complaint filed Monday in a federal district court in New Hampshire against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons.

To remain within the U.S. to study, international students in the program must maintain their student status through an online database run by DHS called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. Administrators told Liu that the government had terminated his SEVIS account, but the government offered little explanation why. Instead, the government SEVIS database vaguely stated that Liu had been “identified in a criminal records check and/or has had their visa revoked.”

Both explanations were a shock to Liu since he had no criminal history and had been unaware of any change to his student visa, the complaint said. Liu, who has been living in New Hampshire since graduating from Wake Forest University with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees, also had not participated in any protests in the U.S. or elsewhere, the suit said. Without his SEVIS account, Liu can no longer receive his Ph.D. program stipend or work as a research assistant, hurting his ability to earn money. It’s still unclear whether Liu’s F-1 student visa, which allows him to enter the U.S. when traveling, has also been revoked.

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In a declaration filed in court, Liu said he fears being arrested and imprisoned in far-off places throughout the country, mentioning Louisiana, where the government has been transferring many recent student detainees. Attorneys in other cases have stated that such hasty transfers, which occur without notice to counsel, are meant to isolate students from their legal representation and seek favorable rulings from more conservative districts.

“It’s an unconscionable position for him to be in,” said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director at the ACLU of New Hampshire, which is presenting Liu in his case. “All he wants to do is complete his studies in peace — and now he has to live under the fear of being detained by immigration enforcers in the United States.”

Bissonnette said Liu’s case represents “significant escalation” in the Trump administration’s tactics of cracking down on immigrants. The lawsuit called the termination of Liu’s SEVIS account “unlawful” and argued that the government violated his due process rights in revoking Liu’s student status without notice or a proper hearing, which is required by DHS policy. The revocation of an F-1 visa is not grounds to revoke a student’s SEVIS status, the complaint said. The suit asks the court to force the government to provide evidence for the revocation, reinstate his SEVIS account, and prevent the government from detaining Liu.

“He’s never committed a crime, never had an issue, and now to have to live under the fear of having all of that ripped away without reason is just deeply concerning and troubling,” Bissonnette said.

The DHS did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. 

Since the start of the student crackdown with the arrest of Columbia student leader Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian, the Trump administration has appeared to have a special focus on students from Muslim-majority countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. In recent days, the dragnet has appeared to widen to include students from other countries such as India, South Korea, and China, attorneys who are also suing the Trump administration told The Intercept. Others from across the U.S., including an immigration attorney representing international students at Arizona State University, have made similar observations of the apparent targeting of students from Muslim-majority countries. 

In two student cases in southern California — one in the Inland Empire and another in Orange County — the government revoked the F-1 visa and SEVIS accounts in late March and early April, according to two separate lawsuits against DHS filed in tandem on Saturday in federal court in the Central District of California.

Both students are from predominantly Muslim countries, the lawsuits said, and both had not participated in any protests related to Palestine or other political issues. The students are identified only as “Student Doe #1” and “Student Doe #2,” out of fear of possible retaliation from the government. Last month, ICE began to seek the arrest of student activist and Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal after he sued the Trump administration. 

Unlike in the case of Liu, the government provided the two students with a basis for the revocations. DHS accused each student of violating two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act: failure to maintain status and the so-called “adverse foreign policy” provision, court documents said. Failure to maintain status means a student no longer has the ability to remain within the U.S. to finish their studies and may leave them vulnerable for deportation. The adverse foreign policy provision — essentially a claim that the immigrant’s continued residence in the U.S. would harm American foreign policy aims — was also cited in the high-profile immigration cases of Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Badar Khan Suri, who were vocal in the Palestine solidarity movement. Also similar to other known cases, the government did not provide specific evidence to back its claims.

The Inland Empire student had “a minor misdemeanor non-alcohol related driving conviction,” while the Orange County student had “a minor speeding ticket and a misdemeanor alcohol related driving conviction,” court documents said. Even so, attorneys said such minor misdemeanors and infractions that are nonviolent and do not carry a potential sentence of more than one year are not reasonable grounds to revoke a student’s visa or student status under SEVIS.

The lawsuits say the government’s policy “appears to be designed to coerce students, including Plaintiff, into abandoning their studies and ‘self-deporting’ despite not violating their status.” The complaints further allege that the policy may be “primarily targeting African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian students.”

Stacy Tolchin, a Pasadena-based immigration attorney representing the two California students said her firm took on at least 20 new cases in the past week alone, all of which involve students who have seen their visas and SEVIS accounts terminated. The majority of the students she has taken on as clients have been from Muslim-majority and “non-white” countries, she said, adding that she has not seen or heard of cases involving international students from Europe. 

“This is ultimately an attack on academia, on higher institutions — I think it’s race-based,” Tolchin said. 

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Sinodis — who is on Khalil’s legal team and whose firm, Van Der Hout, is preparing to represent four other students — said he has also noticed a specific focus on students from predominantly Muslim countries, or cases in which the student isn’t from a non-Muslim majority country but is Muslim themself. Like Tolchin, he has not seen any cases of students from Europe, or even Australia or South Africa. 

Most of his clients have been from the Middle East, he said, with some from Muslim-majority African countries. He said he and other attorneys have referred to the Trump administration’s attacks as “a shadow travel ban,” a reference to the first Trump administration’s ban on U.S. travel for citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries. The current administration is expected to roll out a similar ban. 

“There seems to be consensus that this is essentially like a shadow travel ban that’s being enforced via the revocation of these student SEVIS accounts and the revocation of the F-1 visas,” Sinodis said. 

His client, who is a former international student also from a predominantly Muslim country, had their SEVIS account terminated in late March without explanation beyond the government claiming they had failed to maintain their legal status and mentioned a criminal background check, according to a new lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco. The student had one previous “low-level” misdemeanor arrest and conviction, which the student had disclosed to DHS when applying for a student visa, Sinodis said, adding that DHS had granted immigration accommodations for them in the past. The student, known in the complaint as “John Doe” due to fear of government retaliation and being blacklisted by “third parties,” had graduated in 2023 and had been authorized to work under the supervision of the Northern California school where they graduated.

“So it’s insane now that ICE is turning around and saying that they can cancel his SEVIS for the same conduct that they’ve known about,” he said. His client’s lawsuit also seeks the return of his SEVIS account and protection from ICE detention or transfer out of his Northern California jurisdiction.

Sinodis said he sees Trump’s broadening attack against students as in line with his “xenophobic” attacks on immigrants across the U.S. Since taking office in January, Trump’s administration has manufactured immigrant crime narratives and defied court orders in his policy of mass arrest and deportation, which has seen hundreds imprisoned in El Salvador without due process. Despite Trump’s defiance, Sinodis said he has been encouraged by a vast network of immigration attorneys coordinating in defense of immigrants in court.

“This is just further evidence that the Trump administration is going to continue trying to find ways to discriminate against immigrants — what we’ve seen in the last two months is, every week or so, there’s a new tactic unveiled,” Sinodis said, “and what’s encouraging is that the immigration bar is really coordinated in fighting back and litigating this unlawful conduct.”

The post Trump Appears to Be Targeting Muslim and “Non-White” Students for Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

Though Netanyahu still faces those allegations, and many more, Jean-Pierre has defended Netanyahu’s bombardment of Gaza in her current role as press secretary for President Joe Biden.

“Netanyahu not only has personal charges levied against him—he’s been indicted on both bribery and fraud charges—but under his leadership of Israel, according to the United Nations, Israel may have committed war crimes in its attacks on Gazan protesters,” Jean-Pierre wrote in a March 2019 column in Newsweek.

“It’s time to call a spade a spade,” she continued. “AIPAC is not progressive. You cannot call yourself a progressive while continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive.”

Jean-Pierre at the time was a spokesperson and senior adviser to the liberal group MoveOn, a former Obama administration official, and a commentator for MSNBC. The column explicitly noted that it represented her personal views, not those of her employer. 

As White House press secretary, Jean-Pierre’s rhetoric has more closely aligned with AIPAC’s than with her own previous assessment. “I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend,” Jean-Pierre said in mid-October, referring to calls by some Democratic lawmakers for a ceasefire. “And we’re gonna continue to be very clear. We believe they’re wrong. We believe they’re repugnant and we believe they’re disgraceful.” (It was not entirely clear what she was referring to as repugnant.)

When recently asked about whether “anti-Israel protesters” were extremists, Jean-Pierre conflated protest against Israel with antisemitism and pivoted to talk about white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying the White House also condemned those neo-Nazis. 

Her tough words were directed instead at AIPAC before Biden was sworn in. “Its severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric has proven just as alarming” as its choice of speakers, Jean-Pierre went on. “The organization has become known for trafficking in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric while lifting up Islamophobic voices and attitudes. As we’ve seen over the course of the Trump administration’s tenure, words can prove just as destructive as laws. Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric doesn’t simply sit in a silo. It interacts with the world, creating and fuming hatred that leads to hateful acts, whether the package is individual hate crimes—or collective—the Muslim ban.”

The war crimes Jean-Pierre referred to relate to the Great March of Return, which began in early 2018, with Gazans gathering each Friday and peacefully marching to the Gaza border. The Israeli army responded by shooting and killing hundreds of unarmed Palestinians and wounding many more. Israeli forces famously began shooting at their legs. 

“The number of wounded has reached colossal proportions,” the AP reported. “The upsurge in violence has left a visible mark on Gaza that will likely remain for decades to come. It is now common to see young men walking through dilapidated streets on crutches. Most have legs bandaged or fitted with a metal frame called a fixator, which uses pins or screws that are inserted into fractured bones to help stabilize them.” The United Nations warned that, on top of maiming the population, Israel had rejected requests by Palestinians to leave Gaza for medical treatment. 

Jean-Pierre herself has been dubbed “anti-Israel” by critics. When she was named to replace Jen Psaki as White House spokesperson, her Newsweek column resurfaced. “Amidst all the celebration of Biden’s new press secretary checking multiple boxes in identity politics,” Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel David Friedman told Haaretz, “the mainstream media forgot to mention that she hates Israel.” The false charge that she “hates Israel” rhymes with Jean-Pierre’s current lumping of protests against Israel with antisemitism. Richard Grenell, the former acting director of National Intelligence under Trump, also said to Haaretz: “Has there ever been a White House spokesperson so hostile to Israel?”

Biden, however, defended her, as did the group Democratic Majority for Israel, which is aligned with AIPAC. “Jill and I have known and respected Karine a long time and she will be a strong voice speaking for me and this administration,” Biden told Haaretz at the time. Outgoing press secretary Psaki had kind words as well. “Karine’s role as Press Secretary will be to speak on behalf of President Biden, who throughout his 50-year career – in the Senate, as Vice President, and as President – has been, and will continue to be, a steadfast supporter of Israel,” she said.

In her Newsweek column, it was AIPAC that Jean-Pierre accused of going soft on antisemitism. 

“AIPAC itself has refused to condemn the repeated and callous anti-Semitic remarks that have come out of the Trump administration,” she wrote. “Steve Bannon, a close ally and former member of the Trump administration, reportedly had his kids removed from school because of ‘the number of Jews that attend’ and that he ‘didn’t want [his children] going to school with Jews.’ These ‘reports’ are according to Bannon’s wife. Time after time, policy after policy, speech after speech. At nearly every opportunity, AIPAC has shown that it is no bastion of progressivism.”

The post Before Joining White House, Karine Jean-Pierre Slammed Netanyahu For Alleged War Crimes Against Gazans appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, Mamdani revoked all executive orders issued by Adams after his federal indictment on September 26, 2024.

“That was a date that marked a moment when many New Yorkers decided politics held nothing for them,” said Mamdani during a Brooklyn press conference on Thursday, alluding to accusations that the Adams administration was tainted by his efforts to cozy up to President Donald Trump to avoid prosecution.

Mamdani’s new executive order revokes the Adams administration’s adoptions of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It also ends an Adams-era ban on city agencies boycotting or divesting from Israel. Mamdani kept the mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism in place.

The Israeli government lashed out at Mamdani over his order, painting it as both antisemitic and anti-Israel.

“On his very first day as @NYCMayor, Mamdani shows his true face: He scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel,” posted the Israel Foreign Ministry on X. “This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.”

Other pro-Israel Mamdani critics posted similar denouncements.

“Mamdani @NYCMayor just UNDID previous executive order which adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” wrote Inna Vernikov, a Republican councilwoman from Brooklyn on X on Thursday night. “IHRA protects from discrimination Jews who believe in self determination and provides clarity on the definition.”

Accusations of antisemitism are nothing new for Mamdani, who made history on Thursday by becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York. Coverage of his campaign, and now his administration, has repeatedly fixated on his relationship with Israel, despite his insistence on focusing on local issues like grocery prices, housing, and transportation.

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Despite those criticisms, many New York civil liberties groups argue Mamdani’s orders are an important step in restoring freedom of speech.

“Mayor Mamdani was right to revoke Mayor Adams’s executive orders that adopted a flawed and far too broad definition of antisemitism, and that prohibited city agencies from boycotting Israel,” wrote New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman, in a statement to The Intercept. “Both orders seem to have been designed to suppress speech Mayor Adams disagrees with, but that is protected by the First Amendment.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been widely criticized for stifling political speech over Israel and manufacturing consent for its treatment of Palestinians by classifying criticism of Israel’s actions and of Zionism as inherently antisemitic.

CAIR-NY, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, lauded the decision to revoke the IHRA definition and the ban on boycotting Israel.

“This unconstitutional, Israel First attack on free speech should have never been issued in the first place,” CAIR-NY executive director Afaf Nasher wrote in a statement. “We applaud Mayor Mamdani for immediately overturning it.”

Aside from the orders themselves, Nina Smith, a Democratic political strategist, said that Mamdani was showing New York voters that he is sticking to his campaign promises.

“Mr. Mamdani campaigned on having a direct and authentic relationship with the people he serves in New York, with New Yorkers,” said Smith. “The Adams administration was marked by controversy and corruption, as was outlined in the indictments. And so, it’s not like he’s doing this out of spite. He’s doing this because he wants to have a clean and authentic relationship with New Yorkers going forward.”

The former mayor was indicted for allegedly taking bribes and soliciting illegal campaign contributions from “wealthy foreign businesspeople” and Turkish officials. The Trump Justice Department later dropped the charges. Adams has denied all wrongdoing.

Multiple prosecutors resigned in protest over the decision to squash the corruption allegations, with one alleging that Adams had been “rewarded” for “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.”

The post Israel Accuses Zohran Mamdani of Antisemitism for Reversing Orders Adams Gave Under Indictment appeared first on The Intercept.

Betar U.S., the American chapter of an international Zionist group of the same name, will dissolve its not-for-profit status in New York and wind down operations in the state following a settlement with James’s office. 

“New York will not tolerate organizations that use fear, violence, and intimidation to silence free expression or target people because of who they are,” James said in a statement. “My office’s investigation uncovered an alarming and illegal pattern of bias-motivated harassment and violence designed to terrorize communities and shut down lawful protest.”

The investigation into Betar by the Office of the Attorney General found that, in addition to violating state civil rights laws barring bias-motivated violence and harassment, the group had never registered with the state-level Charities Bureau.

In an email, a Betar U.S. spokesperson said the group denies all wrongdoing, but did not answer follow-up questions.

The investigation began in March of last year after her office received formal complaints of harassment by the group, James said. If Betar continues its activities, it faces an $80,000 fine and other potential consequences, according to a statement from James’s office.

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“The OAG investigation determined that Betar engaged in a pattern of violence and harassment driven by explicit hostility toward protected groups,” the statement alleged. “The OAG uncovered numerous public and private statements by Betar leadership and members expressing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim animus, including repeated use of slurs and demeaning language.”

The group, which has been accused of links to the far-right Kahanist movement that is banned in Israel, gleefully claimed a role in the arrest last year of pro-Palestine students by immigration officials. Members frequently threatened pro-Palestine demonstrators with violence, including a campaign to send pagers to its opponents in reference to Israel’s 2024 use of rigged devices to assassinate Hezbollah militants — killing nearby civilians — in Lebanon.

At a vigil last year in New York City for Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old girl killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, the group chanted “ICE, ICE, ICE.” Members made a show of documenting people’s faces with the stated goal of using facial-recognition software to identify them and give names to the Department of Homeland Security.

Betar’s methods are so extreme that they have even drawn the ire of fellow Zionists, including the Anti-Defamation League, which included the organization in a list of hate groups, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Correction: January 13, 2026, 5:48 p.m. ET
This story has been corrected to reflect that Betar U.S.’s dissolution was not ordered by Attorney General Letitia James, but came after her office’s investigation. This story has also been updated to include a statement from Betar U.S. received after publication.

The post New York Attorney General Slams Pro-Israel Group Betar U.S. for Biased Harassment of Arabs, Muslims appeared first on The Intercept.

Just 20 days after the insurrection, Martin had another intimate audience with another powerful right-winger: He taught a three-day seminar on constitutional law with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for Regent University Law School in Virginia, where Martin was the dean at the time. 

This link between a Supreme Court justice and such a close legal adviser to Trump’s Big Lie efforts has not been reported previously, and it adds to mounting questions about Alito’s sympathy for Trump heading into the election. 

Despite evidence at the time that Martin was part of the Trump campaign’s legal brain trust and fed Trump radical ideas about the Constitution, Alito taught the three-day seminar with him again in 2022.

Martin and Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story. 

“It was and continues to be a shock to the system knowing that the upper echelons of the legal community used their legal talents to subvert the will of the people,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, “and that Supreme Court justices of all people are friends with these individuals.”  

Martin’s continued access to Alito even after January 6 also illustrates just how little scrutiny Martin ever faced. While other prominent Trump legal advisers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani have faced sanctions for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Martin has never publicly accounted for his role. He’s still a law school dean, now at High Point University, a private university in North Carolina, which also did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about Martin’s relationship with Alito. 

Martin remains active in prestigious legal organizations, including the American Law Institute and American Bar Association committees, where he recently sat on a judicial ethics panel and moderated another about election law. He was at the Republican National Convention in July, and a far-right group recently floated Martin as a potential Supreme Court nominee. 

Crossing Paths

In 2019, after more than 20 years on the North Carolina Supreme Court and four as its chief justice, Martin stepped down and moved into legal education. He took over as dean of Regent Law, which is part of the Christian university founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. In a blog post announcing a new constitutional law center — named after Robertson — Martin wrote that its purpose was to promote originalism and other “first principles in constitutional law,” while “educating and cultivating the next generation of Christian lawyers.”

During Martin’s first year, Regent added Alito as a “Senior Lecturing Fellow,” along with 11 other prominent conservatives such as Ken Starr. Some of these new Regent lecturers had clear connections to Martin, including two fellow retired North Carolina judges and the general counsel of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, who clerked for Martin after law school. 

Arch-conservative Alito was a natural fit to teach at Regent, where another Trump attorney, Jay Sekulow, was already on the faculty.  

In the years before starting at Regent, Alito wrote decisions that chipped away at the Obamacare contraception mandate and weakened public-sector unions. During the Trump administration, Alito joined decisions that favored presidential authority, like the 5-4 ruling affirming the “Muslim ban” despite Trump’s many statements about its discriminatory aims.

More recently, Alito faced calls to recuse from cases related to the January 6 insurrection after it came out that an upside-down American flag — a common “Stop the Steal” symbol — was flying outside his house in January 2021. Alito declined to recuse, largely blaming his wife and a dispute with neighbors for the flag incident. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” he wrote in May 2024 to members of Congress. “I am not.”

Alito also had some history with Regent Law, where he keynoted the school’s 25th anniversary banquet in 2011. But he and Martin had few clear ties before teaching together, beside an advisory board they joined together at Duke Law School in January 2019. 

By his own account, teaching with Alito is one of the pinnacles of Martin’s career. 

Asked recently about the biggest challenges and rewards in moving from the judiciary into legal education, Martin highlighted that he “even was able to co-teach a law course with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito for three years in a row.” (In the same softball interview, Martin dodged questions about January 6, citing “confidentiality.”)

Martin’s online biography for the Federalist Society lists his seminars with Alito among many other achievements and honors. Martin recently added the Alito seminars to his bio on the High Point University website, where he has been law school dean since leaving Regent in 2022. 

Alito and Martin taught the first iteration of their joint seminar — titled “Select Issues in Constitutional Interpretation” — in January 2020 in Washington, D.C. In a photo released by Regent, Alito and Martin stand side by side in a room at the National Center for State Courts.  

The Regent law students huddled around Alito and Martin had to apply to take the course, according to the course schedule.

Nathan Hernandez, a Regent Law alum who was in the 2020 seminar, told The Intercept it was like many law school courses: a long reading list and Socratic questioning. He said Alito and Martin split the teaching along their respective judicial careers, with Alito focusing on the U.S. Constitution and Martin on state constitutional issues.  

Another former Regent student selected for the 2020 seminar, Ryan Heath, who includes it in his online bio, was more effusive.  

“It was a huge blessing to have that opportunity to learn from Justice Alito,” said Heath, who describes himself as “a constitutional expert and talented legal strategist.”  

Since graduating with a Regent degree, Heath founded an “anti-woke” nonprofit to fight mask mandates and other Covid restrictions through what his website calls “Rosa Parks style civil disobedience.” He’s also filed and lost multiple lawsuits to overturn election results in Arizona. 

Earlier this year, Heath was sanctioned by one judge for filing “groundless” litigation that sought to decertify certain elections in 2022. Heath and his clients are appealing that ruling, which ordered them to pay more than $200,000 in fees. 

“I use what I learned every day,” Heath told The Intercept, explaining that the seminar with Alito and Martin improved his constitutional arguments.

Martin’s Busy Year

In between their first and second seminars, Alito and Martin both had packed schedules. In the summer of 2020, Alito dissented loudly against the court’s ruling that it was illegal for employers to discriminate against gay and trans workers. Days after the election, he gave a politically tinged speech to the Federalist Society bemoaning that “the tolerance for opposing views is now in very short supply in many law schools.”

Martin was particularly busy between Trump’s defeat in November 2020 and the insurrection on January 6, The Intercept found. 

Records from the January 6 committee and other sources show Martin helped float a radical theory: that state legislatures had “plenary,” or absolute, authority over the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what their respective state laws or courts might say. This theory is often credited to Eastman. But records show Martin spread it to an influential state legislator, Mark Finchem of Arizona, who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona “fake electors” case and who repeatedly based his own actions on his “plenary” authority as a state legislator.

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Martin helped pitch a lawsuit grounded in the plenary theory to the Supreme Court, which one of the attorneys involved called Martin’s “brainchild.” In coordination with the Trump campaign, Martin and other attorneys recruited Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file the lawsuit directly to the Supreme Court in early December 2020, in a case called Texas v. Pennsylvania.  

The Supreme Court quickly dismissed Paxton’s challenge for lack of standing. And last year, by a 6-3 margin, the Supreme Court rejected an even milder version of the “plenary” theory. (Alito dissented on the grounds that the court should not have ruled on the case at all.)

Paxton, Eastman, and other Trump-aligned attorneys are currently fighting disciplinary charges over unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in their briefs in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case. No misconduct charges have ever been lodged against Martin, however, who had a central role in orchestrating the case but never signed any of the filings and thus is not subject to ethics rules governing lawyers’ conduct in judicial proceedings. 

The Intercept found that Trump so valued Martin’s views that other advisers invoked Martin to boost their own pitches. Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, another North Carolinian who reportedly introduced Martin into Trump’s circle of advisers, tried to pressure the Justice Department to file another baseless lawsuit to the Supreme Court modeled on the failed Texas case. In doing so, they pointed to Martin’s endorsement of the strategy, according to testimony from two DOJ officials to the January 6 committee. 

Days after the insurrection, more than 150 law school deans signed a statement criticizing “some lawyers” — whom the statement did not name — who “challenged the outcome of the election with claims that they did not support with facts or evidence.”

“This betrayed the values of our profession,” read the deans’ statement, which Martin and Regent Law did not sign.

Alito and Martin, Back in Class

By the time their second seminar started on January 26, 2021 — after the infamous upside-down flag was spotted flying outside Alito’s home — the first details about Martin’s contributions to the Big Lie effort were just starting to trickle out. 

A few days after the Capitol attack, the New York Times reported that, in the days leading up to the insurrection, Trump told Mike Pence that, in Martin’s view, the vice president had the constitutional authority to derail the election count. The Times did not cite its source for that claim, which the January 6 committee credited in its final report. Even many of Trump’s other legal advisers rejected this fringe theory. 

Martin has repeatedly declined to say what he and Trump discussed over the phone on January 6, citing “confidentiality” despite also claiming Trump and his campaign never retained him as an attorney.

Regent’s press release about the 2021 seminar does not mention Martin. But a spokesperson for Regent confirmed that Alito and Martin taught the seminar together, with Alito teaching remotely from D.C., and Martin and the students at Regent’s campus in Virginia Beach. Regent did not respond to questions about why this press release omitted Martin’s role in the seminar, when the prior year’s announcement featured him prominently.

Alito likely did not violate any formal ethical rules by teaching with Martin, Fix the Court’s Roth said, since these “do not cover every possible ethical quandary and could not have foreseen a situation where some leading members of the bar tried to topple our democracy.” 

“But to me, there’s also the smell test,” Roth said. “Justice Alito co-teaching with an election denier doesn’t pass it, and I hope the justice is more thoughtful about who he shares a lectern with in the future.”

Shortly after the 2021 seminar, another detail about Martin’s involvement in the Big Lie came out: The New York Times reported that he was part of the group that developed the ludicrous Supreme Court briefs that Paxton filed weeks earlier. A small flurry of press coverage focused on Martin, including pointed editorials in North Carolina outlets, but both Martin and Regent refused to answer questions.

A year later, after more reports came out about Martin’s role, he and Alito taught their three-day seminar again. Martin and his students traveled down to Washington, D.C., according to a Regent spokesperson, where the class was again held at the National Center for State Courts.

But Regent’s press release about the January 2022 seminar does not mention Martin, and he does not appear in a photo published online.

In early June 2022, a month after commencement — at which the program boasted both Alito and Martin among the “Christian scholars, political figures, and international heads of state” in residence — Regent announced that Martin was leaving. 

The next day, High Point University announced that Martin was returning to North Carolina to be the founding dean of its new law school. The American Law Institute, one of the country’s most influential legal organizations and which first elected Martin to membership in 2009, issued its own press release about Martin’s move to High Point. Berkeley Law School’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, who had signed the law school deans’ statement after January 6, gave Martin a glowing blurb in his capacity as president of the American Association of Law Schools.   

Martin’s appointment at High Point kicked off another media cycle about unanswered questions surrounding his role advising Trump after the 2020 election. Progressives in North Carolina mounted a brief campaign opposing Martin’s appointment, which featured a billboard that blared “MARK MARTIN BETRAYED OUR CONSTITUTION.”

Like Regent, High Point has consistently deflected questions about Martin’s role advising Trump after the 2020 election. 

“Chief Justice Martin assured HPU that he never has, nor ever will, support a betrayal of the Constitution or an insurrection of any kind,” a university spokesperson said in a statement responding to The Intercept’s findings. This was identical to a statement High Point gave last year after the January 6 committee issued its final report, which mentions Martin only briefly. 

A few months after Martin moved to High Point, Alito’s bio disappeared from the Regent website. According to Alito’s financial disclosures, the school paid Alito $9,000 each year to teach the seminar with Martin. 

More than three years after January 6, Martin plays a prominent role in the legal community, both nationally and in North Carolina. 

He has appeared on the cover of legal magazines and written for an American Bar Association newsletter for judges. In the past year, the ABA hosted him as a panelist on judicial ethics and asked him to moderate a panel about the recent Supreme Court decision that rejected his unhinged “plenary” theory of state legislatures’ power. Martin’s role promoting that theory after the 2020 election didn’t come up.     

Alito, meanwhile, has continued to lurch rightward.

In summer 2022, months after his final seminar with Martin, he wrote the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. This year, after the flags scandal broke and Alito refused to recuse himself from cases related to January 6, he joined the conservative majority in handing Trump extraordinary immunity for his own role in the insurrection. 

As November approaches, it looks likely that the Supreme Court will play a significant role in deciding whether Trump returns to the White House. And out of nine people on the country’s highest bench, one of them decided to teach alongside a lawyer who helped orchestrate the Big Lie’s legal strategy. 

The post The Untold Link Between Justice Alito and Trump’s Election-Denying Efforts appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, which oversees naturalization and immigration, earlier this month proposed requesting social media names from people in the U.S. who apply for asylum, permanent residency, or naturalization, expanding a policy that used to only target people living abroad applying for visas.

The proposal references Trump’s day-one executive order laying the groundwork for a new Muslim travel ban, which also asked federal agencies to identify immigrants in the U.S. who hold “hostile attitudes” toward the government.

“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship.”

The shift would affect an estimated 3.5 million people per year — some of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades.

In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.

“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”

Hoovering Handles

Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”

The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.

The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”

Chilling Effects

The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.

Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.

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Why Trump Is So Desperate to Keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana

“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”

CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.

“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said.

The government is collecting comments on the proposed policy until May 5.

The post Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship appeared first on The Intercept.

If there was any issue that dominated more air time during the Trump administration than immigration, I don’t remember what it was. From The Wall, to the Muslim ban, to the kids in cages, there was universal recognition within the Democratic coalition that Trump’s nativist approach, fueled by the maniacal advisor Stephen Miller, was beyond the pale. 

Trump also fueled a migration crisis, sanctioning Venezuela after a failed coup, relisting Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terror after Obama had moved toward normalization, and otherwise destabilizing countries in the Western Hemisphere – destabilization that then drove people northward. He would then weaponize that migration in the service of tighter crackdowns. 

What little difference a new president makes. Though rhetoric toward migrants is more humane coming from President Biden, the White House is now signaling it is on board for draconian, GOP-backed immigration restrictions and border security efforts.

Putting my pundit hat on, I’ve been saying for more than a year that Democrats have been sending signals that they’d actually quite appreciate if their hand was forced on immigration, and Republicans forced a crackdown. The hoped-for benefits of their support for immigration reform haven’t translated into gains among Hispanic voters – in fact, they’ve lost ground instead – and the chaos at the border is a political headache they’d like to see go away. Republicans, meanwhile, face their own political conflict of interest: reducing the chaotic situation at the border would deprive them of a major political talking point. What do they want more? Their policy to be implemented, or the ability to point fingers at Democrats? Not an easy call. (They’ll probably choose both – take the policy win and still attack Democrats on the border – but you get the point.)

If Democrats do cave on the border, they’re pledging to do so in exchange for more money for the war in Ukraine. Dave Dayen has a good rundown of the latest on the negotiations, the policy, and the politics.

Putting my reporter hat back on, I have a new scoop related to the migration crisis: As one of his final foreign policy acts as president, in January 2021 Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of “State Sponsors of Terror,” reversing the Obama administration’s 2015 determination that the designation was no longer appropriate. 

The incoming Biden administration pledged to Congress it would start the process of overturning Trump’s redesignation, which by statute requires a six-month review process. Yet in a private briefing last week on Capitol Hill, State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress by telling them that the department has not even begun the review process, according to three sources in the room.

(I’ve started going to State Department press briefings, and asked them about this. You can see their response and my unkempt hair here.)

In the briefing, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., inquired as to the status of the review. In order to remove Cuba from the list, statute requires at least a six-month review period. The news that the State Department had not even launched the review came as a surprise to McGovern and others in the room, and meant that the delisting couldn’t occur before mid-2024 at the earliest. McGovern pressed Jacobstein, noting that Congress had previously been assured that a review was underway. Jacobstein, according to sources in the room, said that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding around a different review of sanctions policies that State was undertaking. 

“I don’t think they were prepared to respond to how upset members were,” said one Democrat, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. “They were furious.” 

Vedant Patel, a spokesperson for the State Department, declined to comment on a closed-door meeting in Congress, and additionally declined to directly confirm or deny whether a review was ongoing. “We’re not going to comment on the deliberative process as it relates to the status of any designation,” said Patel. “Any review of Cuba’s status on the SST list — should one ever happen — would be based on the law and criteria established by Congress.”

McGovern, however, had already been told that such a review was ongoing, according to multiple sources who heard directly from McGovern about the State Department’s messaging. 

Biden’s refusal to even review Cuba’s status marks a strong rebuke of one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements, the move toward normalizing relations with Cuba. 

The Trump administration’s rationale for redesignating Cuba as a sponsor of terror relied heavily on the country having hosted representatives from FARC and ELN, two armed guerrilla movements designated by the U.S. as terror groups. But in October 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks. The move by the Trump administration was “an injustice,” he said, and ought to be undone. “It is not us [Colombia] who must correct it, but it does need to be corrected,” added Petro, himself a onetime guerrilla.

“When it comes to Cuba,” Blinken said at the press conference, “and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation.” Blinken’s public claim — “we will continue as necessary to revisit” the designation — coupled with private assurances from the State Department left members of Congress certain that a review was underway. 

Blinken was also asked about Cuba’s status in a hearing in March 2023 and said that Cuba had yet to meet the requirements to be removed from the list. “In both of these instances the Secretary was reiterating what we’ve said previously — should there be rescission of the SST status, it would need to be consistent with specific statutory criteria for rescinding a SST determination,” Patel said.

The terror designation makes it difficult for Cubans to do international business, crushing an already fragile economy. The U.S. hard-line approach to Cuba has coincided with a surge in desperate migration, with Cubans now making up a substantial portion of the migrants arriving at the southern border. Nearly 425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records. Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signaling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies. 

Hopes for a shift on Cuba policy have not just been fueled by the State Department’s misleading pledges about a review, but also by a semi-public moment picked up by a hot mic ahead of the previous State of the Union, in which Biden approached New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the chamber’s leading Cuba hawks, and told him the two needed to chat. “Bob, I gotta talk to you about Cuba,” Biden told him. Menendez has since been indicted as an alleged intelligence asset of Egypt, and there is no indication the two have talked about Cuba.

The post In a Major Snub to Obama, Biden Is Sticking With Trump When It Comes to Cuba Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.

Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.

Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.

A Sikh advocacy group derided the new requirements as “completely unnecessary.”

“Sikhs and other service members of faith already earned their accommodations, under policies and processes established under both the Obama and first Trump Administrations,” the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “If there are accommodations that the Department of Defense feels are not sincere, they could have chosen to pursue those cases with a process that doesn’t force every single soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, and Marine with an accommodation through more paperwork and bureaucracy.”

The Department of War did not respond to a request for comment.

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Hegseth introduced the new guidelines as the military increasingly embraces overt Christianity and Christian nationalism, including an ideological turn on the Air Force Academy’s oversight board and the presentation of the war on Iran as part of “God’s divine plan.”

The changes come months after Hegseth declared war on “beardos” in a combative speech in September.

“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave,” Hegseth said at the time.

In a November letter to Hegseth, four senators — Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — warned that an overly strict grooming standard could force religious service members from the ranks and ultimately harm the military’s primary mission of national security.

“This will happen either by forcing out servicemembers with accommodations earned through carefully following their branch’s established processes or signaling to members of these religious communities that their contributions are not needed in the world’s greatest fighting force,” the senators wrote. “At a time when readiness and retention remain urgent concerns, such a move would be ill-advised.”

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of service members’ rights to observe tenets of faith while in the military, limiting Hegseth’s ability to put in place an outright ban on any facial hair. He has opted instead to tighten the screws on anyone wishing to get an exemption.

Courts have generally required the military to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can demonstrate a compelling operational need.

Under the new rules, anyone applying for an exemption — or facing reevaluation under the new guidelines — must submit a sworn statement affirming their religious beliefs, a statement detailing those beliefs, a statement explaining how the grooming standard would conflict with those beliefs, and supporting evidence backing up their “sincerely held” beliefs. Additionally, anyone applying for an exemption must receive from their unit commander a written assessment of the applicant’s sincerity of belief.

The policy also places commanders in the position of evaluating the sincerity of a service member’s religious beliefs. False statements could expose service members to disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The post Hegseth Makes Troops Prove “Sincerely Held” Faith in Latest Beard Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

“Should I do this?” Jaber asked himself. Then he voted for Donald Trump.

The decision Jaber made as early voting wrapped up in the crucial swing state of Michigan was a microcosm of how Arab and Muslim voters are making up their minds in the final days of the 2024 presidential race.

The economy, inflation, and culture war issues are fueling a shift away from the Democratic Party. The war in Gaza looms larger than anything else, according to conversations with two dozen Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. Many said they were voting for Trump or third parties. Low turnout suggested that others were staying home.

As Jaber put it outside the polling place, “Unfortunately, this time it had to be a single issue: to end the conflict.”

Trump has promised to let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza, and even Arabs and Muslims who voted for him were skeptical that he is really the peace candidate he now claims to be. Still, they said that U.S. policy could hardly get worse after over a year of war that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.

Some voters also gave credit to Trump, who has a long history of racist, Islamophobic policy and comments, for visiting with Arabs and Muslims in person when Kamala Harris appears to be shying away from their communities.

“I’ve Always Been a Democrat”

In conversation after conversation, Muslim and Arab voters said they were casting their ballots for Trump in response to the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza. Other factors in the shift toward Trump include the economy and cultural issues such as the inclusion of transgender children in youth sports.

“I’ve always been a Democrat. It’s my first time being a Republican,” said Nasser Ahmed Al-Shaibi, a 41-year-old who cast his vote in Dearborn on Sunday. “Hopefully they’ll bring peace and stop the genocide in Palestine.”

Jaber, who immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee after spending part of his youth growing up in a Red Cross camp, said he had not forgotten about Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Still, the images of devastation in Gaza brought home painful memories for him.

“We’ve been through it. We see what it’s done to us and our parents and grandparents,” he said. “I voted Democratic on everything else, so hopefully there will be nice checks and balances there.”

Democrats have long held an edge among Arab and Muslim voters, but their lead with those groups ebbed with the onset of the war. A September poll by the Arab American Institute found Trump and Harris in a virtual tie. Arab Americans make up about 4 percent of the population in Michigan, a key demographic in a state that Trump won by just 10,704 votes in 2016.

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“Every Choice Is Loss”: Voters on Their Decision Amid Genocide in Gaza

There are signs that some Arab voters in Michigan may simply be sitting the election out. Three cities with large Arab and Muslim populations had much lower early voting turnouts compared to their neighbors.

Early voting turnout was 25 percent in Dearborn, 26 percent in Dearborn Heights, and 24 percent in Hamtramck, compared to 39 percent in Wayne County as a whole and 44 percent across the state.

With turnout lagging, Harris made a last-minute pitch to Arab and Muslim voters in a speech on the Michigan State University campus on Sunday night. She said the casualties in Gaza and Lebanon have been “devastating.”

“As president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination,” Harris said.

The Trump Train

Sensing an opportunity in the final weeks of the race, Trump has repeatedly parlayed with Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan. He dropped by an Arab-owned halal cafe in Dearborn on Friday, toured a new campaign office in Hamtramck last month, and invited an imam on-stage to address the crowd at a rally in a Detroit suburb.

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The message from Trump’s campaign, while lacking in details, is simple: He is the peace candidate, Harris is not.

Adam Hussein, a 26-year-old Hamtramck resident who had previously voted for Democrats, said he was well aware of Trump’s history of Islamophobia but senses the former president to be evolving.

“That stuff did hurt, but at this time we have to choose between the genocide of Biden or Trump,” Hussein said. “He got to know us more now, who we are.”

Trump’s visits drew scathing criticism from some voters who said they weren’t fooled by his late-breaking friendliness toward Muslims, however.

“Next rally, he will say ‘Allahu Akbar,’” joked Ribhi Karajah, a 28-year-old PalestinianAmerican.

Still, Karajah said, the trips to Dearborn and Hamtramck could pay dividends. Harris has been nowhere to be seen.

“She doesn’t have the courage to come here, Kamala. Trump has the courage to come here,” Karajah said.

Vince Allen, a 60-year-old, non-Muslim construction worker who spent Saturday canvassing for Harris before casting his vote in Hamtramck, rolled his eyes at Trump’s recent visit to the small city.

“He’s just using them, just like he uses everybody else. Trump’s all about Trump,” Allen said.

The Stein Factor

Trump was not the only option for Arab and Muslim voters hoping to send a message. A slice of voters said they were casting protest ballots for Jill Stein, who musters low single-digit support in nationwide polls.

Her support appears to be stronger among Muslims. She had the vote of 42 percent of Muslims versus Harris’s 41 percent in a late October poll of Muslim voters commissioned by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Stein has positioned herself as the “anti-genocide” candidate in the race and is actively courting the Muslim vote with visits to mosques.

“We need someone to stand up against the injustice that’s happening at the hands of our tax dollars,” said one Stein voter, 31-year-old Fay Mheisen.

Others did not choose Stein but found other ways of voting their conscience.

Mazen Hammoud, a 29-year-old consultant whose politically involved family has supported Democrats, said he gets daily updates from relatives in Lebanon about whether they have survived the latest Israeli bombing.

Stein is a “grifter,” Hammoud said. He cast a write-in vote instead.

“I like everything they do domestically, for the most part,” Hammoud said of the Democratic Party. “But I can’t overlook genocide. That’s the big thing for me.”

Some Harris Support

Some of the Detroit area’s most prominent Democratic Arab elected officials, including Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, have declined to endorse Harris.

Still, Harris has drawn the endorsement of mainstream Muslim groups such as Emgage Action and from some leaders of the Uncommitted movement, which sought during the presidential primary to pressure Biden to shift his position on the war.

Harris claimed the allegiance of a handful of the voters interviewed over the weekend. Some said they were disgusted by the administration’s handling of the war, but they didn’t believe Trump would be any better on the issue, so they chose Harris because she is better on domestic policies.

Osamah Alasadi, a 43-year-old immigrant from Iraq, said he saw the signs of a would-be dictator in Trump.

“He’s just Saddam Hussein, but he’s blond,” said Alasadi. “Both sides, they’re going to support Israel.”

Correction: November 5, 2024, 10:30 a.m. ET

An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of Mazen Hammoud. It has been updated.

The post Arab and Muslim Voters in Michigan: “I Can’t Overlook Genocide” appeared first on The Intercept.

As the U.S. and its allies airlifted people out of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, they helped set up what were supposed to be temporary processing sites in third countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kosovo. Two years later, thousands of Afghans are in effective detention at those sites, which are largely closed off to visitors, according to human rights lawyers, amid deteriorating conditions and with no updates about their refugee, humanitarian parole, or other pending applications for entry to the U.S.

“It’s extremely concerning that people have just been waiting in limbo for two years now, and it is extremely difficult to receive further information, because there is a denial of access to visitors,” Sadaf Doost, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, told The Intercept. “That creates a situation where much of the information that we’re relying on depends on those who are able to provide a sneak peek of what’s going on in the camps.”

CCR and Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit, sued the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security on August 30 over the agencies’ failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act laws. Earlier this year, the groups had filed public records requests with each agency seeking to establish the exact number of Afghans awaiting resettlement to the U.S., as well as the terms of their confinement and the exact role played by the U.S. government in running the sites where they are being held. According to the lawsuit, the Departments of State and Homeland Security did not respond to the records requests at all. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, agreed to release some of the records but has so far failed to do so.

The lawsuit also raises humanitarian and human rights concerns at three of the processing sites: Camp Liya, in Kosovo, which is inside a U.S. Army base; Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, which is on a former U.S. Army base; and Humanitarian City, in the UAE, which U.S. officials say is “solely” controlled by the Emirati government, though State Department representatives reportedly visit the camp twice a week.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on pending litigation, while a spokesperson for the State Department did not answer questions about the lawsuit or the status of Afghans awaiting resettlement at processing sites abroad. The Pentagon did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait.”

Advocates say that the Biden administration has a responsibility to provide an accounting of the conditions facing the Afghan evacuees — and the status of their applications — rather than forcing the public to rely on information that is leaked out of the camps in a piecemeal way. “There’s just no information as to how much longer these Afghan civilians have to wait,” Doost said. “And there’s no oversight, really, because of the lack of information.”

Mursel Sabir, a co-founder of the community organization Afghans Empowered, works with several groups supporting Afghan refugees that have also been trying to get information about the camps — and are frustrated with the lack of transparency by the U.S. government.

“They’ve been very quick to move on from the situation in Afghanistan,” she told The Intercept. As for the Afghans who are stuck at the processing sites, she said, “they’re at the hands and mercy of United States government and Western powers essentially, that are trying to pick who is loyal and who is worthy of coming to this country.”

“Like A Prison”

According to the lawsuit, family members, counsel, and media have been largely denied access to the camps, making it harder for advocates to assess conditions there. Recent human rights and media reports, however, indicate a growing humanitarian crisis, with evacuees facing human rights abuses including rape, medical neglect, and the denial of food and water. 

Human Rights Watch warned in a report published in March that at least 2,400 people had been held “in cramped, miserable conditions” for more than 15 months at “Emirates Humanitarian City,” a temporary site in Abu Dhabi. People who had been held at the camp described constraints on their freedom of movement, lack of access to refugee status determination processes, and inadequate education services for children. They also denounced overcrowding, decay of infrastructure, insect infestation, and deteriorating mental health conditions for many of those held there, according to the report.

One interviewee described the refugee facility as “exactly like a prison.”

At Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, some evacuees have attempted suicide and staged hunger strikes, according to reporting in Middle East Eye. Kosovo’s Camp Liya has earned the nickname “little Guantánamo” because individuals held within its confines were told that if they left the premises their humanitarian parole applications would be disqualified, according to the lawsuit. “They are constructively confined in the camps,” Doost said.

It’s unclear what responsibility the U.S. government bears at each site, and the advocates have requested records concerning the agreements made between U.S. officials and the host governments.

The U.S. government is responsible for the delay in processing the evacuees’ resettlement, with homeland security officials effectively stonewalling the applications of many of those held in confinement abroad. More than 1.6 million people have left Afghanistan in the last two years, with U.S. officials coordinating the evacuation of some 124,000, including former officials, human rights advocates, and scores of individuals who had worked for the U.S. government and military.

A year after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security division charged with reviewing applications, had processed only 8,000 of the 66,000 humanitarian parole applications it had received from Afghan citizens, according to an investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. It had approved only 123. Other resettlement avenues, including a special visa category known as SIV for Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. government and military, have also been marred by uncertainty and delays.

The DHS spokesperson did not address questions about Afghans stuck abroad as they await resolution of their immigration applications. With regards to Afghans who have already arrived in the U.S., the spokesperson said that USCIS had approved 9,000 of the 24,000 SIV applications as well as 5,000 of 19,000 asylum applications.

Chris Godshall-Bennett, a staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, told The Intercept that while the U.S. government has failed to address most of the questions raised by advocates, the treatment of Afghan evacuees and lack of transparency about it are in line with other U.S. policies targeting predominantly Muslim populations, including the no-fly list and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

“It is unsurprising, unfortunately, that a predominantly Muslim population ends up trapped in these sort of never-ending, unclear processing cycles, where nobody’s giving them any information,” he said.

The groups behind the lawsuit hope that it will force the U.S. to be transparent not only about the conditions at the sites, but also the steps the government is taking to process the Afghans’ applications for resettlement. “This information is desperately needed to facilitate a bigger conversation about how the U.S. government is treating these people, and what we owe to the Afghan people that have been displaced by what is at the end of the day our own actions.”

The post The Biden Administration Is Keeping Thousands of Afghans in Limbo Abroad appeared first on The Intercept.

Ghanim, a Democrat who mounted an unsuccessful primary challenge to a pro-Israel member of Congress earlier this year, said he swiftly turned team Trump down. “I definitely declined,” Ghanim said.

“I definitely declined.”

Still, the strange turn of events that left him receiving a call from Trump’s team crystallized his sense that the Harris campaign is botching its outreach to Arab and Muslim voters. (The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) As insincere as Trump’s recent overtures to Muslims may be, Ghanim thinks they could work.

“Even our presence there is not welcome, at the same time Trump is reaching out and going to take pictures with the imams,” Ghanim said.

The incident involving Ghanim was a dramatic illustration of the high stakes and high emotions for Arab and Muslim voters in the final days of the presidential election. Both campaigns are courting the demographic. 

In 2020, Arab and Muslim voters helped Joe Biden win Michigan, but many have soured on him thanks to his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. If Harris loses the crucial swing state, some observers say, it may be due to missed opportunities and missteps like the one involving Ghanim.

Observers of Michigan politics say there have not been many visible signs of outreach to the Arab and Muslim communities.

“I know that the Harris campaign has tried to mend some fences,” said David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University in Michigan. “But it has never been enough to get them — at least as it seems to me as an outsider — back on board in the absence of a policy change in terms of U.S. support of Israel.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on its interactions with Ghanim or its outreach to the Arab and Muslim community in Michigan. Elsewhere, it has described pursuing a strategy of outreach via social media ads and small gatherings.

Unwilling to put daylight between herself and Biden on Gaza, the vice president appears to be losing ground with Arab voters to Trump, according to an Arab American Institute poll.

No Explanation

Ghanim, who was born in Egypt, has been vocal about his opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, calling his primary foe, Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., a “poster child” for the pro-Israel lobby.

“Our tax dollars, which we entrust to our representatives to use for building our economy, investing in educating our kids, and making our healthcare accessible and affordable, are being used to burn kids alive in Gaza,” he wrote on X in May.

Still, Ghanim said his goal was nothing more than to watch and listen when he went to see Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan, on October 24. The event featured war hawk co-headliner Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative who has been vociferous about her disgust for student protesters.

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Ghanim said he had been invited to the event, was neatly attired, and had no intention of making a demonstration. After clearing security and sitting down, he was looking at his phone when a woman staffing the event asked him to follow her. 

He thought he was being reseated elsewhere when he realized he was being shown the door.

A police officer was waiting for him with a message, Ghanim said: “They want you out, so either you walk out, or I put you in the back of my car.”

Ghanim tried to get an answer from the woman who had shown him the door. “She said the conversation has ended … so I left,” Ghanim recalled.

Ghanim posted on social media about his experience with a video titled “No Muslims allowed at the Harris Rally in Michigan.”

The Harris campaign soon reached out to him personally and sent out a public statement that it “regrets” what happened. Ghanim was welcome at future events, the campaign said.

Despite the outreach from the Harris campaign, Ghanim said he has never received an explanation for what happened at the venue. That has left him with a lingering suspicion.

“I think they kicked me out because of what I represent,” he said. “What I represent as a Muslim leader trying to bring the voice of Arabs and Muslims to the Democratic Party.”

Trump and the Imams

Ghanim said the contrast between the Harris campaign’s interactions with him, and Trump’s strategy in Michigan, could not be greater.

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Despite his long history of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab invective, including the ban on travel from Muslim countries that he tried to implement as president, Trump has been on an outreach tour in recent days, sensing an opportunity among the tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan outraged with the administration’s support for Israel.

Trump has taken a permissive stance on Israel’s war on Gaza — “Let Israel finish the job,” he said — but he has seized on Harris’s decision to spend some of her final days on the campaign trail with Cheney to paint the vice president as the true warmonger.

“The father killed more Arabs than any human being on earth,” Trump said in Traverse City, Michigan, referring to Dick Cheney, who as vice president was an architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Trump also recently visited Hamtramck, the Michigan city with an all-Muslim city council and a Yemeni-born mayor who endorsed the former president.

Ghanim said he is not convinced by Trump’s recent olive branches to the Muslim community, given his long history.

“I don’t think we can put genuine and politics in the same sentence,” he said. “What we can say is it’s a good move at a perfect time.”

“It’s a good move at a perfect time.”

Ghanim believes that some Arab and Muslim voters may be swayed by Trump’s transactionalism, telling themselves, “‘If you give him votes, he will give you benefits. And that is how we are going to work with Trump.’”

Ghanim said he believes many Arab and Muslim voters are waiting for Harris to give them a sign.

“I think she has to break away from Biden’s policies, advisers,” he said, “and show that she is really a leader that people would like to go out of their way to vote for.”

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