Palestinians mourn for a three-month-old baby named Tim El Khavaja, who lived in a tent in the Shati Camp lost his life due to cold weather conditions in northern Gaza Strip, Gaza on December 12, 2025. The body of the baby was brought to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for funeral arrangements.
(Photo by Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The abuses by the Israeli government and military are “a stain on the conscience of humanity, requiring the UK and France to act.”
While critics of the French and British governments say they are doing too little to confront the crimes and human rights violations of Israel against the Palestinian people, about 100 former diplomats of the two nations penned an open letter published over the weekend agreeing that much stronger actions must be taken to end the atrocities taking place in both the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank.
Published in Le Monde on Saturday, the joint op-ed by the former UK and French ambassadors and foreign diplomats argues that because their two nations “played a decisive role in the shaping of the Middle East,” it is incumbent upon them to “make common cause over the region’s fundamental faultline: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians”—a dynamic grossly lacking as Palestinians are starved and bombed in Gaza, with their rights endlessly under assault in the West Bank.
In Gaza, two million Palestinians are kettled into 30% of their devastated land, hungry, lacking medicine and housing. Over 1,200 Palestinians have been killed since the so-called “ceasefire” of October 2025. In East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, Palestinian house demolitions and rampant settler violence—with the connivance of the Israeli army and police—amount to ethnic cleansing. Palestine is being erased before our eyes.
This policy of occupation and destruction extends to Lebanon—where many villages have been razed—and Syria. It is a stain on the conscience of humanity, requiring the UK and France to act.
While human rights groups have steadfastly demanded accountability for Israel—including tougher sanctions, suspension of trade agreements, a halt to weapons transfers, and enforcement of rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and proceedings at the International Criminal Court—for its ongoing criminal behavior against the Palestinians, European governments, the United States, and other Western allies have resisted such calls.
While noting that much can be done to help Palestine become “a fully functioning democratic nation,” the letter from the former diplomats makes a call for seven specific actions designed to end Israeli impunity and bring the government back into compliance with international law. The policy recommendations directed at the UK and French governments are:
Suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement and the UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement for breach of human rights provisions;
Suspend arms transfers to and from Israel and all bilateral military cooperation;
Insist on unrestricted aid access to Gaza, led by UNRWA, other UN agencies and international NGOs, with consequences for non-compliance; access too for journalists, diplomats and parliamentarians;
Ban all trade with settlements, including goods, investment, insurance and other financial services;
Warn potential bidders for the red-line “E1” area [east of Jerusalem, in the occupied territories] or other settlement financing/construction that their interests in and with our countries will suffer;
Make it an offense for our citizens to buy property on stolen Palestinian land and remove charitable status from “charities” funding settlements.
Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Iran, Qatar and Yemen and one of the letter’s signatories, said the language they used was not invented by the diplomats themselves.
“The words are not our own,” Hopton explained to Al Jazeera. “They are taken from the international legal bodies, the UN, those who have been observing from a neutral position and with expertise.”
What’s key to understand, said Peter Millett, a former British ambassador to Libya who also signed the letter, is that what the signatories are asking for “is action, not words.”
Foreign ministers of the France and Britia “over the last few months and years have issued statements of criticism, of condemnation and so forth,” Millett told Al-Jazeera, “but as the letter makes clear, this is the time now where we need to see action on trade, action on settlements, more support for aid to go into Gaza, and the ending of the arms trade.”
At the heart of the letter is the idea that world leaders, whether in Europe or elsewhere, must now act aggressively to bring the suffering of the Palestinians to an end and bring Israel’s violations and abuses to a halt.
“These proposals reflect our shared values—international law and equal rights—which are in our interest,” the letter concludes. “Where there is no law, none of us is safe.”
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LONDON, ENGLAND – JANUARY 28: Mark Ruffalo attends the “Crime 101” UK gala screening at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on January 28, 2026 in London, England.
Photo by Simon Ackerman/Getty Images
“Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues,” said the Avengers actor and social justice activist, “not step back or concede.”
Mark Ruffalo, the actor known worldwide for both his role as the Incredible Hulk in the Avengers movie franchise as well as his work as a dedicated humanitarian and voice for social justice, did not back down Saturday after his criticism of the pending merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. was cast as antisemitic by executives at Paramount, largely owned by billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son, David.
While Ruffalo has been outspoken in his opposition to the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal for months—warning like many other critics that further consolidation by such media behemoths will hurt consumers, squeeze workers in the entertainment industry, minimize the range of viewpoints and creativity available, and further entrench right-wing control of the nation’s media system—what apparently sparked the accusation against him was the recent sharing of a years-old video clip of Paramount board member Safra Catz discussing “really profoundly scary technologies” that Oracle, which offers software and database services and the company upon which Larry Ellison built his vast wealth, provided to the Israeli military over recent years.
While the Instagram post Ruffalo shared has expired, the clip of Catz has been circulating on time for quite some time, seen as evidence of the close and well-documented ties that Oracle has had with the Israeli military:
“We have some really profoundly scary technology at Oracle, and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the effort.”
A recently resurfaced video of former Oracle CEO Safra Catz has sparked outrage after she boasted about providing advanced technology to the Israeli army pic.twitter.com/r3gJWx9sTu
In Ruffalo’s post, in which he reportedly warned that the Ellisons were “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world,” he also made reference to the genocide in Gaza being carried out by the Israeli military as well as the apartheid under which Palestinians live in the Occupied West Bank.
“This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary.”
Noting Catz’s comments in the video about Oracle, Ruffalo said, “This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.” And the “really profoundly scary technologies” that Catz mentioned, he continued, “will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
In apparent reaction to Ruffalo’s post, which Variety characterized as the actor going “scorched earth on Paramount-Warner Bros. merger,” a spokesperson for Paramount issued a statement on Saturday saying that the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind—and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”
The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.
This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for serious national security review, and regulators still haven’t given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn’t move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.
Commentators on social media also came to Ruffalo’s defense, calling Paramount’s accusations nothing more than a smear against well-founded criticisms of Oracle’s business model, the crimes of the Israeli government, and warnings about what powerful, right-wing billionaires like the Ellisons could do with what could become one of the largest media corporations on the planet.
“Despicable to call Ruffalo antisemitic,” said John Abrams, an entertainment editor. “Hi, I’m Jewish. I will be the one to tell you when something is antisemitic, you dishonest clowns. It is not antisemitic to decry Israel’s crimes. In fact, it is our moral obligation—as Jews, and as human beings.”
Journalist Mehdi Hassan called the accusations “truly cynical, shameless, and dangerous.”
“The Israel crybully lobby will try, as they always do,” wrote author and media critic Adam Johnson, “to make an example out of Ruffalo because he had the temerity and integrity to note the Ellisons’ open advocacy and financial support for a military every major human rights group on earth had determined committed genocide.”
“My unsolicited advice,” Johnson continued. “Don’t give these cynical assholes an inch. Don’t accept their ‘antisemitism’ shrieking as good faith.”
Noting that “Ellison put out a press release EXPLICITLY BOASTING about how his Paramount purchase would be good for Israel and his financial support for the IDF,” Johnson argued that somebody “cannot do this THEN CRY ANTISEMITISM when they are held responsible for the actions of the state and military they support.”
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US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) speaks during a news conference at the US Capitol Building on July 13, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
The only valid reason for such a meeting, said one critic, would be for the House Minority Leader to tell the president’s son-in-law that he’ll be subpoenaed by “for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House.”
Persistent calls among progressive critics and Democratic voters that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should step aside from their leadership roles ticked up again on Sunday after it was reported that Jeffries met secretly in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, the far-right son-in-law of President Donald Trump, who has also served as a top White House advisor and envoy.
The New York Timesreported Sunday that the two men “met privately in recent weeks” in order to discuss “potential areas of common ground” if the Democrats regain control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms.
The rare engagement was held in a private space in New York City, offered up by a mutual friend of the two men, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting and a third who was briefed on it. They and others were granted anonymity to discuss a meeting about which they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Through aides, neither man would comment on the session, which was described by one person with knowledge of it as a broad conversation on a range of topics. Still, its timing underscored that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House, and trying to foster as much of a working relationship as possible before any change.
News of the meeting, later confirmed by other news outlets but which Kushner and Jeffries neither confirmed nor denied, landed poorly for progressive critics who make the case that Jeffries’ political leanings and leadership tendencies are a roadblock to the kind of transformational change wanted by a majority faction of the Democratic Party and also needed to defeat Trump and his fascist allies once and for all.
“Jeffries and Schumer have to go if Democrats are even going to gain any ground,” said David W. Pippy, a former school administrator and local union president, in response to the reporting. “They need fighters, not secret meetings.”
Last Sunday, Jeffries went on a weekend news show and said he does not supportMedicare for All legislation in the House, despite poll after poll showing Democratic voters overwhelmingly support it.
“The lack of political talent in New York is astounding,” Gabe McKinley, an actor and director based in New York City, declared in a social media post. “Jeffries and Schumer are bad at their jobs.”
The Times, citing its sources familiar with the meeting, reported that “the pair discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground.” Kushner also suggested Jeffries connect with Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, whom he reportedly described as the “most serious” person in the president’s inner circle. It wasn’t clear how Jeffries responded.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan responded by saying Sunday was “a good day to re-up my piece from almost exactly a year ago,” in which he explained why Schumer and Jeffries, both of whom represent New York in Congress, are leaders that the party—which has now lost the White House to Trump twice—can no longer afford. In his op-ed, Hasan wrote:
Since Trump was inaugurated for a second time in January, Jeffries and Schumer have demonstrated time and again that they are not built for this particular moment. While Trump seeds the ground for an American dictatorship, these two top Dems pine for bipartisanship. While millions of rank-and-file Democrats across the country say they want leaders who will fight, Jeffries and Schumer fold. While younger Democrats like [NYC City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.NY)] offer energy and charisma, these two lackluster leaders in the House and Senate offer cringe chants and even cringier photo ops.
It is past time for both Jeffries and Schumer to step down and step aside. This fascist moment, this age of Trump, demands outspoken, unrelenting and fearless opposition. Whether you are a Democrat, or simply a democrat, we all deserve better.
On Sunday, Hasan argued that the only valid reason Jeffries should be meeting with Kushner is to “tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House.”
Former Republican strategist Tim Miller, now with The Bulwark, agreed.
A general view of the University of California Berkeley campus including Sather Tower, also known as The Campanile. (Photo by David Madison/Getty Images)
UC Berkeley is at risk of losing funding unless they provide information related to any potential “foreign collaborations” to the Trump administration’s Department of War by the end of August. Cal is one of 30 universities currently subject to this threat.
The demand from the Department of War was issued earlier this week and specifies the need for universities to complete a “comprehensive audit” by the end of the month or risk losing their access to federal funds, per the Chronicle.
The institutions subject to this threat also include UCLA and UC San Diego. This probe marks the latest in a long series of investigations initiated by the Trump administration against some of the nation’s most elite universities.
Citing concern that these colleges are in cahoots with foreign powers and not doing enough to combat anti-semitism, among other allegations, the quantity of investigations levied at these institutions has reached a point where they’ve now begun to repeat themselves.
The Chronicle notes that only last year, the US Department of Education launched a probe concerning alleged incidents of “improper handling of foreign funding” aimed at both Harvard and UC Berkeley.
Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley, has confirmed the campus has received notice of the audit and noted that “so far” no findings of foreign ties related to last year’s Department of Education investigation have been uncovered.
As the Guardian reports, other universities subject to this latest probe include the University of Southern California, Harvard, MIT, Duke, and New York University.
In a statement issued earlier this week, the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael, noted simply that “the Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security.”
This order follows a release last month in which the Pentagon identified 130 foreign universities and research institutions alleged to be engaging in conduct that could put funds for domestic research and development at risk of misappropriation.
The seven demonstrators who were found guilty last month of multiple misdemeanors over their 2024 pro-Palestine protest on the Golden Gate Bridge have been sentenced to 30 days in jail. The sentence includes credit for time served and six months of probation. [Chronicle]
Court papers reveal that the Department of Homeland Security’s covert surveillance of anti-ICE groups is much darker than it first appeared. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.
It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.
We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Timesreported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.
But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.
It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.
What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”
Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”
That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.
“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”
In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”
Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”
In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.
Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.
The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.
Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”
As writer John Ganz hasnoted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.
Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.
Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.
The outpouring of public protest in the face of this invasion apparently helped prompt DHS to launch its massive undercover surveillance operation directed at Americans, on the theory that the protests were being organized by larger, more sinister forces. The government dubbed this “Operation Puppet Master.”
But it’s unclear what all this surreptitious spying is even turning up. The Timesnotes that none of the groups targeted by it have been charged. And while the surveillance supposedly helped produce that aforementioned indictment of a handful of protesters, in reality the spying has swept far, far beyond those targets. The main result has been a discovery process that has now exposed the depth and breadth of the government’s massive spying operation for all to see.
There’s one other big unknown here. The document declaring the opening of Operation Puppet Master contains another vague reference: It says this effort has also been sanctioned under something called “Operation Keyhole.” Yet it’s unclear what this even is. As Kevin Riach, the lawyer, told me: “This suggests there’s some broader surveillance operation underway that we have yet to learn about.”
When I asked DHS what the phrase “Operation Keyhole” describes, the agency declined to comment.
Trump’s mass deportations have become akin to a Forever War. The expansion of ICE has poured tens of billions of dollars into the growth of Trump’s very own paramilitary army. This has included the stockpiling of enormous amounts of heavy military-style tactical equipment and weaponry, furnished by private contractors who resemble war profiteers.
And so, just as we saw under George W. Bush’s Forever Wars, we’re witnessing the growth of a massive public-private bureaucracy that’s metastasizing in unnerving new directions. It now appears to entail extensive domestic surveillance operations as well. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of it all. As always seems to happen with Forever Wars, we may never even learn all that much about many of the darkest atrocities perpetrated in its name.
Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimedbook An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.
Elected officials across the country are fighting the federal government’s mass deportation campaign with new laws and funding. But some states are welcoming the shock troops.
Graphic by The American Prospect. Sources: Neil Constantine/NurPhoto via AP Photo; Erin Hooley/AP Photo.
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MANHATTAN – Standing with Attorney General Letitia James, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and a phalanx of local elected and community leaders last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put the Trump administration and their collaborators on notice that the state would not stand for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents snatching residents and abusing children.
Hochul announced $7.25 million in new legal aid funding for the 1,400 unaccompanied immigrant children across New York, 251 of whom are in detention. That money comes on top of the $16.9 million New York City’s latest budget allocated for the same purpose, and its $30 million increase to overall immigration legal services, which now total $150 million.
She reminded law enforcement officials that they had until August 25 to end their 287(g) collaboration deals with ICE, said failing to do so would result in legal action, and name-checked Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, whose agreement with the agency is among the most extreme in the country. Hochul banned 287(g) agreements—deals that deputize local law enforcement agencies to conduct federal immigration enforcement—earlier this year under the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act. Five law enforcement agencies have refused to respond to James’s demand that agencies obey Hochul and send her their plan to exit the arrangements. On the contrary, more local police departments are signing the deals, while at the same time stockpiling more small arms, as the Prospectreported last month.
“My message is I expect [Blakeman] and everybody else in this state to follow the laws of New York and there are consequences if you do not,” she said and told the room of reporters she expected the media to call out his mischaracterization that her ban on 287(g) agreements means permission for crimes. “Someone like that will intentionally misrepresent, which is a nice way of saying ‘lie’ about what we’re actually talking about.”
“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate.”California state assemblymember Matt Haney
Apart from the police departments planning to operate illegal agreements, New York’s new laws and funding put it on one side of a new American divide. There are states that are actively fighting President Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign. And there are ones that welcome it.
Multiple states are in the first category: Since Trump retook the White House, lawmakers in that group have increased not only their anti-ICE laws but “their ambition in exercising local power,” as the National Immigration Law Center put it last month. According to its tally, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington have all enacted new legislation to fight ICE during Trump’s second term, including limiting collaboration between local cops and immigration enforcement, banning immigration officers from hiding their identities or going to sensitive locations, and protecting residents’ data.
States on the other side believe it is both moral and financially responsible to use local resources to help federal agents terrorize immigrants. Florida is on that side. The state holds more 287(g) agreements than any other; all 67 counties have 287(g) agreements as of last year and the “vast majority” of immigration enforcement is conducted by the local and state cops those agreements have deputized, according to the ACLU. That includes the Florida Highway Patrol, whose officers are detaining immigrants on highways and city streets during routine traffic stops. Earlier this summer, the state’s Board of Immigration Enforcement gave the Walton County Sheriff’s Office $9 million in grants for serving as an ICE holding facility.
Florida also requires by law that local police departments comply with ICE detainer requests. Under such a request, also called ICE holds or immigration detainers, the agency asks local law enforcement to keep in custody someone they would otherwise release so that agents can more easily deport them. There’s no nationwide law requiring cops to cooperate, but like Florida, officials in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have all passed laws forcing law enforcement to do so, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s State Court Report.
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Alabama is another state doing the federal officials’ work for them. Alabama’s Department of Corrections and six local police departments are among the agencies in that state to ink new 287(g) agreements as of the end of last month.
IN NEW YORK, HOCHUL ARGUED against allowing a federal agency that’s already better funded than most militaries in the world to soak up even more money by engrossing the funding of local law enforcement. Alongside her, Mamdani repeated information about immigration support services, including the Immigration Legal Support Hotline, whose number he read out: 1-800-354-0365.
States on New York’s side are likewise putting more money into legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children after Trump refused to renew a contract for a coalition of aid organizations nationwide, then assigned the job to disgraced anti-sex-trafficking organization Our Rescue for $244 million, though it has no experience doing that work, as the Prospectreported.
Next door in New Jersey, Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced earlier this summer a $12 million increase in funding for the Detention Deportation Defense Initiative, raising the total to more than $20 million, and established the Rapid Legal Response Initiative to increase the state’s ability to file habeas corpus petitions to protect people from ICE moving them out of the state.
New Jersey is home to the ICE detention camp Delaney Hall, run by GEO Group, where at least three people have died since December. Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-NJ) and other members of the state delegation are also working to track the true number of deaths inside, after ICE changed its policy in June to only report the deaths of people in detention custody. Doing so allows them to transfer custody of immigrants shortly before they die from catastrophic medical emergencies. They did so recently to 29-year-old Prisciliano Trejo Ricano, who died from leukemia shortly after ICE released him from Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, and Jose Chajon-Raxon, who died shortly after ICE released him from Delaney Hall. Mejia told the Prospect that she and other state electeds are working with families and local aid and faith organizations to keep track of who else is injured and at risk inside the camp.
Some states are coming at the problem in new ways, trying strategies that haven’t yet been attempted. Across the country in California, for example, a pair of proposed state laws would impose stiff new taxes on CoreCivic, GEO Group, and any other corporate detention profiteers. Under Assembly Bill 1633, such corporations would be subject to a new Private Detention Facility Tax of 50 percent of gross receipts and send the money into a new Due Process for All Fund to pay for legal aid and other immigration services. And under Assembly Bill 2465, the companies would be disqualified from receiving state benefits, such as grants and tax credits.
“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate,” Democratic California state assemblymember Matt Haney said Friday at a press conference outside Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump retook the White House.
“If private detention companies insist on making incarceration their business, California should make accountability, transparency part of the cost of doing business,” he said, adding, “If they look at this tax and say it’s too much for us to operate in California, well then bye.”
Speaking to the Prospect ahead of the press conference, California assemblymember Liz Ortega said that the laws aren’t going to shut down the detention camps, but they are going to put a price on collaborating with Trump’s terror campaign. Corporate profit-seeking is what’s driving the torturous conditions in Adelanto, where people inside are reporting squalid conditions, including “worm-like creatures” in the drinking water, and medical neglect, such as journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias’s untreated gunshot wound, which after 300 days inside has caused his arm to turn purple.
“We’ve been told over and over by the federal government that this is their domain and therefore states can’t do anything legally, so this is a different approach,” Ortega said, who added that her ask of other state lawmakers is to find ways to fight back, too.
“We can’t just work on this issue when we see this news,” she said. “This is something we have to continue to work on until this administration recognizes that what they’re doing is terrible, it’s unprecedented and it’s wrong.”
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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish
Robert Reich and Inequality Media Premiered Aug 13, 2026 In early 2026, a team of filmmakers, including former Sec. of Labor Robert Reich, wondered what it would be like to invite 30- and 80-year-olds to gather in conversation about America. The idea was to visit six states in six months, convening a wide variety of mostly strangers to play a simple game:
Pull up a chair
Ask each other questions
Take the time to listen
THE WORK IN PROGRESS captures candid discussions about America’s ever-evolving democracy, identity, definitions of community, and where we go from here — alongside portraits of Americans at work. Watch the trailer for THE WORK IN PROGRESS, in theaters September 4. And make sure to sign up for updates about the film, including where it’s playing, future live watchalongs, and how to order the deck of conversation cards used in the movie: https://www.theworkinprogressfilm.com/
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We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
September PAC Meeting *We will be voting on November Election endorsement recommendations for state propositions!* Date: Tuesday, 8 September, 2026 (second Tuesday of month) Time: 7-9 PM *NEW* In-person Location: Women’s Building (3543 18th St), Audre Lorde Room Remote: Via Zoom Link Here
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
The San Francisco Democratic Party presents The San Francisco Democratic Party 2026 Gala Thursday, September 10th 6:00 – 10:00 PM Bimbo’s 365 Club 1025 Columbus Ave San Francisco, CA 94133 TICKETS https://www.sfdems.org/gala2026
Public Banking Coalition monthly meetings Next call: Nov 11 Excitement is building for public banking and once a month, PBI hosts an hour-long Public Banking Coalition online meeting to share the excitement and successes. Find out the latest updates on the advances being made all across the country from local advocates themselves... Continue reading →
Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
This Sunday’s Town Hall: Announcing This Week’s Progressive Town Hall: Every Sunday at 4pm ET/1pm PT RSVP HERE Join PDA activists online from across the country to discuss the importance of progressives reclaiming the American story from the MAGA right, an issue of heightened importance as we’re now within one... Continue reading →
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
There are less than 9 weeks until the critical November election, and what we do between now and then will shape the future of our health care. We started Nurses for Democracy to fight back against fascism and protect our democracy, but also to elect candidates in key races who are committed... Continue reading →
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