“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrive to confront protesters outside the Delaney Hall detention facility on June 11, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
(Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images)
Those arrested in the recent surge include a 56-year-old Catholic nun from Nigeria.
Ordered by the Trump White House to aggressively increase arrest rates, federal immigration officials have reportedly detained more than 10,000 people in just the last five days, intensifying fear in communities across the United States.
The New York Times, which was first to report the new detention figures late Wednesday, noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were “told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.” The agency, flush with cash following President Donald Trump’s signing of a reconciliation package containing another $70 billion for immigration enforcement, has been instructed to assign 80% of its officers to “arrest operations,” according to the Times.
The Trump administration claims to be targeting the “worst of the worst,” but available data shows that the percentage of people arrested by ICE despite having no criminal convictions has tended to rise during the agency’s mass detention efforts. On Sunday, ICE briefly detained a 56-year-old nun from Nigeria as she walked to church in McAllen, Texas.
“The geniuses at ICE just arrested a Catholic nun, who practices as a nurse, as she was walking to church,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote in response to Sister Leticia Ugboaja’s detention. “Our Republican colleagues think they need even more money. Had enough?”
The Times reported that immigration attorneys across the US “have been on alert” as ICE arrests surge, though much more quietly than earlier blitzes in Minneapolis—where federal immigration agents killed two US citizens—and other major cities, where groups of armed and masked officers roamed the streets and menaced neighborhoods.
“Cindy Blandon, an immigration attorney in Miami, said that one of her clients, a Nicaraguan father of two children, had an immigration court hearing set for 2027, but was arrested by ICE on Monday during a routine check-in,” the Times reported. “And in Utah, Ysabel Lonazco, an immigration attorney, has noticed an uptick as well… One of her clients, Arturo, a 48-year-old Mexican man, was arrested in Salt Lake City on his way to a soccer game on Sunday, according to his wife, Veronica. She said the arrest had shattered their family.”
ICE also appears to be ignoring a federal judge’s order last week curtailing arrests at immigration courthouses. According to The Intercept:
On Thursday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an Ecuadorian man at a court at 26 Federal Plaza and a man from the Dominican Republic at another court at 290 Broadway, both in Lower Manhattan. The arrests continued on Monday, when ICE agents detained a third man, originally from Guatemala, at 290 Broadway.
In legal filings challenging the detentions of the men taken Thursday, advocates with the nonprofit Make the Road New York accused ICE of not only violating their clients’ right to due process, but also of brazenly flouting a federal court order.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, told The Intercept that “we’re witnessing ICE, yet again, operate in a lawless and rogue fashion and not following court orders.”
“We’re supposedly a nation under the rule of law, and our judicial branch has said that this agency must stop engaging in this lawless behavior, and they continue to do so,” said Awawdeh.
ICE is currently headed by Acting Director David Venturella, a former private prison executive. A record number of people have died in ICE custody under the second Trump administration.
Last week, Trump announced that he intends to nominate former Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer to lead ICE in a permanent capacity.
Marcos Charles, the head of ICE’s deportation wing, cheered the recent arrest surge in an email to agency personnel earlier this week. On Saturday, ICE officers arrested 2,400 people.
“I want to personally thank each of you for your extraordinary efforts this past weekend,” Charles wrote, according to the Times. “Through your dedication, professionalism, and unwavering commitment to our mission, enforcement and removal operations achieved remarkable operational results.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Demonstrators showing support for people accused of conspiring to commit terrorism at the Prairieland immigration detention center last summer gathered outside of the Eldon B. Mahon United States Courthouse in Fort Worth on March 13, 2026. (Kevin Krause / The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images)
When Savanna Batten heard her sentence read aloud in the federal courthouse of Fort Worth, Texas, she wasn’t all that surprised. For most people, half a century in prison for attending a protest might feel like an unexpected gut punch. But Savanna, one of the 22 Prairieland defendants, understood that hers had been no ordinary trial.
“We knew this was going to happen,” said Amber Lowrey, Savanna’s older sister. “This is a political case, and Texas is sending a message: If you show up to a protest at an ICE facility, expect to go to jail for decades.”
The Nation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Last Tuesday, eight Prairieland defendants, all of whom have been incarcerated since July, received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years in prison. Most of the defendants had done nothing more than show up to a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in rural north Texas, on July 4 of last year.
One defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, was not present at the protest but was sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of anarchist zines.
“A bunch of people went to a noise demonstration that they saw on a Signal group chat, and now they are facing 50 years in prison,” said Xavier T. de Janon, director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild. “That should scare and outrage anyone going to any kind of protest in this country.”
The sentences, which read like Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts, are bizarre and wildly disproportionate. They come months after the conclusion of a three-week federal jury trial in March, which found all nine defendants guilty of “providing material support for terrorism” in a case understood as the Trump administration’s first significant victory over left-wing activism.
The 11 people who showed up to Prairieland on Independence Day, after seeing a flyer in a citywide Signal chat, intended to “lift the spirits of the detainees with a fun fireworks display and go home,” according to one defendant. Some protesters brought a cooler full of fireworks. Others came armed, anticipating counterprotesters. (In Texas, it’s very legal to bring firearms to a protest.) Some protesters shot off red, pink, and green fireworks and then cleaned up the debris. Others disabled a security camera, slashed a van’s tires, and spray-painted anti-ICE messages on a cop car. After about half an hour, the protest dispersed.
When local police officer Lieutenant Thomas Gross arrived on the scene, called by a Prairieland warden, most protesters had headed home. Yet the officer still pulled his gun, aiming at the back of a fleeing straggler, prompting another protester named Benjamin Song to fire eight rounds of suppressive fire. Lieutenant Gross was grazed in the shoulder and, after a brief stint at the hospital, fully recovered.
The federal government argued during trial that Song had fired directly at Gross. Song’s lawyer, however, claimed that the bullet—which shows evidence of impact with a hard surface—was a ricochet and that Song’s actions likely saved the lives of the other protesters. Song’s support team goes even further and, pointing to recently released camera footage, claims that the ricochet was from Gross’s own shot and that Song shot into the ground 60 feet away from Gross.
“I never want to see anyone get hurt,” said Song in a statement released after their sentencing. “I never want to see good people, standing up for what they believe in, gunned down in the street. What we all saw happen to Renee Good and Alex Pretti is my worst nightmare.”
In March, Song was convicted of attempted murder and, on Tuesday, sentenced to 100 years in prison.
The trial was littered with irregularities, from a dubiously dismissed jury pool to a prohibition on self-defense arguments to the barrage of irrelevant evidence presented by the prosecutors. “Every single facet of this proceeding was corrupt,” said Lydia Koza, wife of defendant Autumn Hill.
To inflict the maximum sentences possible, US District Judge Reed O’Conner added a “terrorism enhancement”—the most severe federal sentencing guideline available—to each count of conviction. In another rare move, Judge O’Conner mandated that each sentence be served consecutively instead of concurrently, extending each prison term by decades.
During sentencing, Judge O’Conner called each defendant “violent” and an “extremist,” despite the fact that “there’s no indication that any of these people have ever been violent in their lives,” according to Lowrey. O’Conner underscored the need for long prison time as a means of deterrence to others who share similar political beliefs.
“It has been a politicized prosecution from the get-go,” said de Janon. “These sentences are obscene, they are shocking, but at the same time, I don’t feel surprised.”
The sentences of the Prairieland defendants are longer than any of those received by Capital rioters on January 6.
“When you look at this case next to the Capitol rioters,” said de Janon, “it’s clear that these are political prosecutions with political outcomes.”
According to de Janon, north Texas now boasts a political apparatus envisioned and created by Project 2025, a conservative political initiative proposed by the Heritage Foundation. Citing Trump-appointed judges, Trump-appointed Department of Justice officials, and Trump-appointed FBI investigators, de Janon highlights the steps taken to ensure that judicial rulings like this one could advance the government’s authoritarian agenda.
“People have been talking about Project 2025 and how we need to be careful. Now it’s 2026 and it’s a reality. It’s happened,” said de Janon. “The federal government has taken over the legal system in this country [and transformed it] into another weapon against the freedom of the people.”
In September, President Trump signed an executive order that designated “antifa”—short for “antifascist”—as a domestic terrorist organization, despite the fact that “antifa” is not an organized group and no legal definition of domestic terrorism exists under US law. Three days later, he issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum calling for a “new law enforcement strategy” to investigate participants in “these criminal and terroristic conspiracies.”
Yet the FBI closed an investigation into “antifa” in Fort Worth in 2018, after concluding that the groups in question posed no threat to national security, according to FOIA records obtained by In These Times.
In many ways, the Prairieland noise demo was similar to the protests that recently rocked Delaney Hall in New Jersey this month. Both protests were meant to show support to ICE detainees, and both were met with police violence, but only one has garnered the support of local Democrats.
The Prairieland protest took place before the ICE invasions of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, which were met with widespread repudiation and resistance.
“The fight against ICE has been happening ever since ICE existed,” said de Janon. “But there’s this amnesia. People weren’t giving the Prairieland defendants the support they needed until [anti-ICE protest] became more mainstream.”
The majority of the defendants are being held in administrative segregation, which is “one tiny whisker short of solitary confinement,” according to Koza. Her wife, defendant Autumn Hill, spends 23 hours in a 10-by-10-foot cell and receives one hour of “rec” time, where she is taken to a slightly larger room with a small skylight.
Hill reports frequent and humiliating strip searches by male guards and inadequate food, including peanut butter despite her having a severe peanut allergy.
“It’s been horrible to sit through my wife being separated from me,” said Koza. “At this point, we’ve spent longer separated by bars and bricks than we have married and free.”
Hill and fellow defendant Meagan Morris, both of whom are trans women, have been deadnamed on indictments and jail records—despite their court-ordered legal name changes—and they are currently being held in a men’s jail.
Johnson County Jail, where the defendants are currently held, has a long history of abusive treatment. A plaintiff in a 2021 lawsuit, filed against Lieutenant Gross, cited the jail’s practice of confining naked inmates in refrigerated suicide cells in order to force the disclosure of information.
Sheriff Adam King, who oversees Johnson County Jail, is being prosecuted for sexual harassment, official oppression, and retaliation of a witness. Two other cases against King alleging sexual harassment are in pretrial.
Given these conditions, the incarcerated defendants need a lot of support. Their families and friends meet weekly to determine the best ways to ensure they receive mail, legal funds, and adequate food (one defendant has Celiac disease).
“When your loved ones are incarcerated, the family does the time with them, too,” said Koza. “It is really just awful. The process is the punishment. They make this intentionally difficult for everyone involved.”
According to Lowrey, the first thing Savanna wants to do when she gets out, after seeing her cats, is to find a prairie and roll around in the grass.
The support committee is calling on the public to write letters of emotional support to the defendants, donate to their commissary and legal funds, and make lots of noise about the case.
“The indifference to the Prairieland defendants was the biggest strength that the government had,” said de Janon. “So the biggest antidote is attention and support.”
Voting taking place in San Diego County during the 2024 Election. Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images
10 Questions to ask now of Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, your senators, your representatives, you legislators, your governors, you secretaries of state and other government officials:
1) If the administration seeks to thwart or delay the mid-term elections, including declaring some sort of emergency, what have you already done to prepare?
2) If Republicans in Congress stand aside and allow the administration to seek to thwart or delay the mid-term elections, what have you already done to meet the challenge?
3) If ICE or other federal authorities attempt to interfere or take positions at polling places, what have you already done to prepare to counter?
4) If federal officials attempt to interfere or disrupt ballot counting, what plans do you have in place to deal with them?
5) If federal officials attempt to seize ballots or ballot boxes, what measures have you already taken to protect them?
6) If federal, state or local officials challenge vote counts, what measures have you taken to insure their validity?
7) If armed, violent mobs attempt to disrupt or interfere with any part of the election process, what plans do you have in place to deal with them?
8) If Republicans in Congress refuse to accept election results, what have you done to prepare?
9) If the President refuses to accept the election results and attempts to bar the new Congress from convening, what are you plans to proceed?
10) If the President orders the military or other armed federal agencies to arrest members of Congress or bar them from taking office, what are your plans to protect the legislative branch?
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice
David CrookDavid Crook is co-founder of DCReport. David invented, launched and edited “The Wall Street Journal Sunday” — the largest- circulation business print publication in U.S. history. He tweets at @davidcrooknyc. You can write him at dcrook@dcreport.org.View all posts
The day after Zohran Mamdani won election as the mayor of New York, I started getting texts that had about the same message: How come New York gets Mamdani and AOC, and we get Daniel Lurie and Scott Wiener?
Well, we might not have Scott Wiener in Congress. The race with Sup. Connie Chan is close. But a lot of the local news media, including most recently the SF Standard, are asking: Why are the socialists winning in New York, but not in supposedly progressive San Francisco?
Gabriel Greschler has some valid observations: New York is much bigger and more economically diverse. When you get priced out of Manhattan be gentrification you can move to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. Here, you have to leave town; you don’t vote here any more.
Three tech booms have driven tens of thousands of working-class people out of San Francisco. As longtime political observer and activist Calvin Welch likes to say, “who lives here, votes here.”
Also, California has this rotten top-two primary system. If the Democratic Party primary chose the party’s candidate, then Jane Kim, not Wiener, would be in the state Senate; she beat him in June, 2016.
And big money has a bigger impact in a smaller market.
In New York, data shows, college educated voters tend to support socialism. In San Francisco, thanks to (conservative) city leaders thinking for 30 years that a tech-based economy was San Francisco’s future, a lot of young, educated residents support getting really rich off a tech IPO.
All of that is true, but let’s take a moment to look at something else that happened this week. A democratic socialist organizer, Anya Worley Ziegman, and a labor and community-based People’s Budget Coalition, forced the mayor to back down from $28.5 million worth of budget cuts to critical services.
She did it with massive mobilizations, bringing together the city’s biggest labor unions, neighborhood groups, LGBTG+ groups, and community-based nonprofits. She won the support of Chan—and made it impossible for the other supes to stand with the mayor’s cuts.
I don’t know how this translates into electoral victories in the fall, or if it does. But as Welch has told me many times, “it’s good to know you’ve got it on the ground.”
48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.
Upon the former House Speaker’s retirement from Congress, Nancy Pelosi and the University of California, Berkeley, will establish the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy, a nonpartisan organization “dedicated to strengthening American democracy.” What do you think?
“May it last long and never yield to younger, newer institutes.”Ruth Wodehouse, Ham Glazer
“If it’s named after a woman, it’s already partisan.”Erik Rostai, Unemployed
“And the best part is, she’s doing it anonymously.”Tyler Seabrooke, Text Aligner
The misleading panic attack on the part of the right and the center in the face of the Democratic left’s recent electoral victoriesIn the past week, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won nine out of the ten state and federal primaries contested in New York, including upsets in two congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats chose socialist Chris Rabb as the party’s candidate for the state’s Third Congressional District. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George will almost certainly become the next mayor of Washington, D.C. In Colorado, DSA-backed Melat Kiros won the primary for the First Congressional District, unseating 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette.
These and other gains have led to borderline hysterical commentaries from the center and right, many of them self-interested, all of them misleading.
According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, “Traditional Democrats are now facing a hostile takeover from the socialist left, and so far few are willing to put up a fight.” This is false. Corporate Democrats are fighting, with millions of dollars in super PAC ads; they’re just losing. They have only money. Democratic socialists have committed activists as ground troops.
Many commentators are also alarmed that the success of the economic left is often linked to a critique both of Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and of the excessive influence of AIPAC in domestic policies, often in bed with the corporate right and dark-money PACs. These critiques invariably raise the specter of antisemitism.
The Jewish Insider newsletter warned, “The Colorado results suggest that, far from being contained to a few scattered congressional districts in New York City, the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates is only growing within the Democratic Party, especially within urban population centers.” I have yet to read any such critique which candidly acknowledges that the backlash might have something to do with Israel’s appalling behavior.
Even more nuanced commentaries get it partly wrong. Paul Krugman writes in a recent Substack post: “The fact is that very few Americans—even among politicians who call themselves ‘democratic socialists’—are really socialists. What many, I’d say a majority, of Americans support is what Europeans call social democracy—an ideology that is OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others, but one that advocates policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.”
Since his liberation from the timorously censorial New York Times, Krugman has become an indispensable source of insight on all things economic. But here Krugman is partly off because he doesn’t pay enough attention to the politics.
Social democracy is indeed popular throughout the West. Large majorities of people like universal health care, social retirement programs, good public transit, progressive taxation, and the rest of the “safety net” package. But social democracy is politically weak, and on the defensive, everywhere, because capitalists have too much wealth and power and use their power to destroy the social democratic compromise with capitalism.
That’s why the shrewdest progressives have long understood that social transfers and regulatory strategies are not enough to keep capital contained. You need a good dose of socialist public ownership as well, combined with social movements like trade unions.
Franklin Roosevelt understood this. The original Fannie Mae, The Federal National Mortgage Association, which made home mortgages more plentiful, was a public institution. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a public investment bank. Social Security is not just a government-sponsored and -guaranteed system of retirement. It is frankly socialist. Capitalist financial institutions play no role in it whatsoever.
Krugman writes that socialism seems to be on the rise “because right-wing propagandists continually smear social democratic policies as socialist, trying to make popular, mainstream policy ideas sound extreme.” While the right does try to smear progressives as communists, I don’t think Krugman gets that quite right. As young people personally experience the ravages of American capitalism, socialism is on the rise because it is being transformed from a bad word into a good word. According to Gallup, 66 percent of self-identified Democrats have a positive image of socialism, while only 42 percent feel that way about capitalism. The younger the voter and the further removed from memories of the Cold War, the more approval of socialism increases.
That doesn’t mean socialism is a good word everywhere. In more traditionally conservative areas of the country, such as Georgia or Texas, pocketbook progressives will not call themselves socialists, and the right will try to use the presence of more explicit socialists in the Democratic Party to tar candidates like Jon Ossoff or James Talarico as closet socialists. But ultimately, voter revulsion against the excesses of capitalism and the articulation of compelling alternatives matter more than the label.
The corporate right called FDR every name in the book. He wore the slurs as a badge, and the people knew whose side he was on.
Palestinians mourn an infant who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah on January 9, 2025.
(Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“We could die at any moment. I hope the war stops for us,” said one 14-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza. “I would like to live with love, peace, and an easy life.”
Over 21,500 children—1,022 of them babies—are among the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since it launched the US-backed genocidal war on Gaza 1,000 days ago, including hundreds of minors slain since a one-way ceasefire took effect nine months ago, Gaza’s Government Media Office said Thursday.
In updated figures, the GMO said that at least 73,066 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its war and siege on the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. A separate analysis published in mid-April by UN Women found that at least 38,000 women and girls were killed between October 2023 and December 2025.
The GMO said Thursday that at least 173,514 others—including more than 44,500 children—have been wounded, and 9,500 Palestinians are still missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings in the coastal strip, more than 90% of which has been destroyed and 80% of which is under Israeli control, according to officials.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza by not intervening to stop the killing and maiming of children,” Ahmad Ahendawi, regional director at the charity Save the Children, said Thursday. “As their young, fragile bodies were blown to bits and pieces by bombs and missiles, the world sold those same weapons to the government of Israel [and]… continued trade agreements with the government of Israel.”
Early in the war, UNICEF called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
Classified Israel Defense Forces (IDF) data leaked last August suggested that 5 in 6 Palestinians, or 83%, killed during the war’s first 19 months were civilians. Experts attribute the high civilian death toll to Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in target selection, its dropping of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many of them supplied by the US—in densely populated urban zones, and relaxed rules of engagement allowing for an unlimited number of noncombatant casualties in airstrikes targeting a single Hamas operative, no matter how low-ranking.
Last month, a United Nations commission of inquiry found that 30% of those killed by Israel in Gaza have been minors, and that “the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.”
IDF troops have admitted to witnessing alleged war crimes, including indiscriminate murder of women and children. Doctors and other international volunteers who worked in Gaza’s besieged hospitals during the genocide have reported the apparently deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, including children shot in the head and chest by Israeli snipers.
Palestinian survivors and witnesses have also accused IDF troops of summarily executing women and children.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza.”
The new GMO figures note 460 deaths from malnutrition—164 of them children—and 28 Palestinians, mostly children, who perished from hypothermia in camps housing many of the approximately 2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.
According to figures published last month by UNICEF, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including at least 265 children, have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect. UNICEF called the purported truce a “cruel and deadly illusion.”
All this in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack in which approximately 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed—some by so-called “friendly fire” and under the fratricidal Hannibal Directive—and 251 others abducted.
In the aftermath of the deadliest attack on Israel in its 75-year history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation—exhorted Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose total extermination—“man and woman, infant and suckling”—was commanded by the Abrahamic deity figure God.
Numerous Israeli leaders made similarly genocidal statements, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who asserted that there are no innocent people in Gaza, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who is also wanted by the ICC for ordering the “complete siege” of Gaza blamed for fueling deadly famine and disease—and the influential far-right politician Moshe Feiglin.
“Every child in Gaza is the enemy,” Feiglin said last year. “We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there.”
According to the new GMO figures, 39,022 families in Gaza have suffered Israeli massacres, with more than 2,700 families entirely wiped out and another 6,020 left with only a single surviving member. More than 58,800 children have been orphaned, including 2,700 who lost both parents, while 26,370 women are now widows.
In 2024, Save the Children published a report detailing how Israel’s onslaught has caused the “complete psychological destruction” of Gazan children. A subsequent study found that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believed that their deaths were imminent—and nearly half of them said they wanted to die.
“We could die at any moment. I hope the war stops for us,” a 14-year-old girl identified as Amani told Save the Children in a report published Thursday.
“I hope the war stops so that I can continue my education in Gaza and live my rights as a human like any girl in other countries,” she added. “I would like to live with love, peace, and an easy life.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
The jury in the trial of seven protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in April 2024 returned to deliberations Monday and on Thursday morning they reportedly told the judge they remain deadlocked on two counts.
Disagreement on the jury in the trial of the so-called Golden Gate Seven may go back quite a while. The jurors began deliberating three weeks ago and had been let out on an extended break, returning to deliberations Monday, and after three full days of deliberation they told the judge they can not get to a verdict on two counts, as the Chronicle reports.
The seven were charged with both felony and misdemeanor crimes, including conspiracy and false imprisonment, and the jury is reportedly deadlocked on one count of felony conspiracy and one count of trespassing.
Per the Chronicle, Superior Court Judge Teresa Caffese instructed the jury to return to deliberations Thursday morning, and after an hour, they came back saying they remained deadlocked. It’s now unclear where things stand.
Update: As ABC 7 reports, jurors convicted the seven protesters on three misdemeanor counts: false imprisonment, obstruction of a thoroughfare, and unlawful assembly. Defendants Conrad de Jesus, Rocky Chau, Sarah Ferrell, River Allen, Em Tillotson, and Bhavika Anandpura, who all chained themselves across the roadway, received guilty verdicts on all three counts. Sara Cantor, who described herself as a police liaison, was convicted on those three counts as well as on one count of refusal to disperse.
Judge Caffese declared a mistrial on the remaining two counts, with the jury deadlocked 11-1 for not guilty on the trespassing count, and 10-2 for guilty on the felony conspiracy charge — which could have come with sentences of up to 15 years.
A total of 26 protesters took part in the Tax Day “Stop the World for Gaza” demonstration on April 15, 2024, with part of the group forming a human chain and employing the “sleeping dragon” technique — in which their arms were linked inside of plastic tubes, making it more difficult for law enforcement to cut them apart without injury.
A judge dismissed most of the charges against the group, originally known as the GG26 or Golden Gate 26, in November 2024, tossing about 75% of the charges that were mostly misdemeanors.
After charges were reduced and ultimately dismissed for 18 of the group, another with a felony charge saw the charge dismissed for lack of evidence, and the remaining seven went to trial in May. Protesters and supporters were reportedly gathered at the court to hear a potential verdict this week.
The New York Times last month covered the trial, noting that the prosecution of the protesters was indicative of the city’s centrist tack of recent years — when in past decades, in liberal San Francisco, it would have been unthinkable to so aggressively prosecute people peacefully protesting for a cause.
But from the beginning, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has emphasized the widespread impacts that the protest had, halting traffic in both directions on the bridge for four hours, causing children to have to “defecate in bags” and causing drivers to dehydrate in the cars with little or no water.
One woman, Novato resident Regina Schneider, testified at the trial explaining that the protest caused her to miss an important oncology appointment in SF.
She told the Times, “A lot of us are horrified by things that are happening in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, all around the world. You do not adversely impact the lives of thousands of people to make your point.”
Pope Leo XIV, center, speaks with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, right, and theologian Anna Rowlands on May 25 during the presentation of his first encyclical.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
On the morning of May 25, Pope Leo XIV released “Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” his sweeping first encyclical.
By 5 a.m., Dr. Mark Shiffman, a professor of philosophy at Saint Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park and the founding director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics, was already awake and reading it.
In San Francisco, he wasn’t alone. I’ve spent the last month in conversation about this document and the questions swirling around it — most notably, what AI means for our humanity.
What I’ve found is a faith community that was already deep in this discussion before the encyclical landed — and a city with a particular reason to take it seriously.
San Francisco has always been a city of believers. It was built around missions, shaped by parishes, its hills dotted with steeples. It attracted the optimistic toting nothing more than gold pans and hope.
Eventually, tech became the dominant faith, with its own missionaries and orthodoxies — and its own conviction that this time, we’ve found the thing that will save us.
Now the actual Catholic Church has something to say about that — and people here are listening differently than they might anywhere else.
Eleven of the country’s top 20 AI companies are headquartered in The City. The people building this technology drop their kids off at our preschools, drive our streets, fill our pews. When the Pope speaks about AI, San Francisco is the room where it’s happening.
“This is a unifying issue where we have this responsibility to speak out because we are talking about the nature of humanity,” said Michael Pappas, the executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council.
What’s striking, when talking to faith leaders across traditions, is how long they’ve already been having this conversation.
Rabbi Sarah Parris of Congregation Emanu-El preached about AI at High Holidays three years ago. Her commute to temple along Stanyan, regularly snarled by Cruise vehicles navigating their training routes, had become its own philosophical provocation. What does it mean to share a road with something that drives “perfectly,” yet somehow wrong?
Now she’s planning a full conference at Emanu-El in January: sessions on AI and Jewish ethics, AI and medicine, and AI and online antisemitism, with space built in for congregants who work in tech to actually talk to each other.
“No single person can answer these ethical questions,” Parris told me. “It is only by being in conversation and in community, with the right ethical text in front of you, that progress can be made.”
That’s what the encyclical clarified, even for those already engaged. Shiffman described it as giving people a map. Before “Magnifica Humanitas,” graduate students wanting to explore the implications of AI on warfare couldn’t find their footing.
“Now people know: Of I want to address this question, I’m either agreeing with this or disagreeing with this, or pushing it forward,” he said.
In honor of the country’s 250th anniversary, The City will launch fireworks from the Golden Gate Bridge, host block parties and stage a two-day jazz festival
Taking place across two art museums, “Limitless” will bring guest speakers to The City for engaging conversations
That guidance from the Vatican is welcomed by teachers having to adapt quickly to how AI is shaping young minds. Sharon McCarthy Allen, the principal at St. Stephen School, described AI as a blessing and a curse.
“We have to be sure that we are upholding the dignity of each human being, specifically when it comes to our children and educating them,” she said. “AI is not going to help them with critical-thinking skills. We don’t want AI to take away their creativity.”
Not everyone in the pews is on board with that framing. At a tech industry party in the weeks after the encyclical’s release, I found myself in conversation with a practicing Catholic who works in AI, someone whose faith and professional life sit in direct proximity to everything the Pope was writing about.
His read: Leo got it wrong. AI, he told me emphatically, is going to solve everything. Suffering itself would become optional.
I asked whether he’d read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” He had not.
It felt like a parable of the moment — the gap between the people building this technology and the centuries of moral philosophy that exist specifically to ask what we lose when we eliminate struggle, imperfection and the friction of being human.
That question is exactly what Shiffman and his colleagues are trained for, and what Parris explored in her 2023 sermon, drawing on Jewish tradition’s insight that imperfection isn’t a bug in the human design, it’s a feature.
“There is value in the learning, growing, and changing that we all do each day,” she said during the sermon.
At the Vatican ceremony, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah made a striking admission: that AI labs, including his own, operate inside incentives that sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.
“No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing — and I believe many of us do — we will always be influenced by those incentives,” he said.
He invited external moral pressure — voices the market can’t bend.
San Francisco’s faith communities are volunteering for exactly that. Sometimes this city ships things before they’re fully baked. The implications of AI, however, might be too consequential to accommodate that startup worldview.
“The question isn’t about what AI takes away from humanity by doing it better than we do,” Parris said in 2023. “The question is about how we can continue to be who we are alongside AI.”
Fourth-generation San Franciscan Ali Wunderman is an award-winning travel, food and culture writer. She lives in Nob Hill with her two rescue dogs and can often be found at John’s Grill enjoying a dirty martini.
Help Outreach Working Group lift the fog of corporate media. Donate to help us maintain this website and distribute literature on the street.
Seven Days in D.C. (June 28 – July 4) Seven Days in D.C. About Schedule Support Donate Volunteer Merch Auction Washington, D.C. June 28 – July 4, 2026 View the ScheduleTicketsDonateVolunteer A Week of Democracy in Action From June 28 through July 4, organizers from across the country will gather... 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 →
“San Francisco Mime Troupe” Live Summer Musical in the Park (2026) SFMT The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe returns for its 2026 season with free and lively performances in park settings around the Bay Area. San Francisco Mime Troupe | 2026 Free political theater & music in parks around the Bay Area Various dates:... Continue reading →
Seven Days in D.C. (June 28 – July 4) Seven Days in D.C. About Schedule Support Donate Volunteer Merch Auction Washington, D.C. June 28 – July 4, 2026 View the ScheduleTicketsDonateVolunteer A Week of Democracy in Action From June 28 through July 4, organizers from across the country will gather... 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 →
“San Francisco Mime Troupe” Live Summer Musical in the Park (2026) SFMT The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe returns for its 2026 season with free and lively performances in park settings around the Bay Area. San Francisco Mime Troupe | 2026 Free political theater & music in parks around the Bay Area Various dates:... 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 →
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 →
By 
Robert Kuttner
