June 21, 2025 (info@sfpublicpress.org)
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through San Francisco Saturday from Dolores Park to Civic Center Plaza for a No Kings protest organized to oppose the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement actions and crackdowns on protesters under the guise of restoring law and order.
Described by organizers as a “day of defiance,” the San Francisco event was one of more than 2,000 coordinated protests nationwide.
June 21, 2025 (info@sfpublicpress.org)
In a shifting legal landscape and while Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents have sought out and arrested immigrants at mandatory check-ins, experts urge immigrants to seek legal consultations and create safety plans tailored to their individual circumstances, even before they come in contact with immigration agents.
The Public Press has compiled advice from extensive interviews with four immigration attorneys and advocates, and from several workshops and press conferences discussing immigrant rights.
Experts weigh in on how to get an immigration lawyer, what documents to carry, and what to consider when approached by immigration agents.
June 21, 2025 (SFist.com)
By Adrienne Fong
Am not back posting on a regular basis.
RESOURCES:
STAY UPDATED WITH BAY RESISTANCE and get plugged to actions you can support, text “Resist” to 888-850-0928
GI HOTLINE (877) 477-4497
– Share this number to relatives, friends and people who are serving in the armed services.
See list of Calendar of Events on Palestine from AROC: https://www.araborganizing.org/events/
If your post is about Palestine you can also list your action on the AROC calendar
There are events listed on Indybay that might be of interest to you(many listings in the South, North & East Bays and beyond the bay area)
Please post your actions on Indybay: https://www.indybay.org/calendar/?page_id=12
Bay Area Progressive Action Calendar
ATW Bay Area / NorCal — Action Together West
ARTCLES
Ritter’s Rant 009: Where’s the Beef? – Real Scott Ritter
President Trump just sent the most sophisticated weapons in the US arsenal to bomb three empty sites in Iran. Why?
See Petition # 1 & See Event # 4
From Aljazeera – Trump’s speech is sickening
See Petition # 1 & See Event # 4
F. Trump Advisor Admits: War on Iran Targets China – June 20, 2025
https://popularresistance.org/trump-advisor-admits-war-on-iran-targets-china/
G. ‘Thousand Ship Flotilla’ announced to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza – June 20, 2025
‘Thousand Ship Flotilla’ announced to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza – Middle East Monitor
Trump can keep control of National Guard in LA, court rules
Veterans urge troops to refuse immigration protest orders | cbs8.com
J. Tell Congress, No War on Iran! – June 18, 2025
https://blackagendareport.com/tell-congress-no-war-iran
– From Black Agenda Report
https://freedomflotilla.org/2025/06/16/three-head-home/
L. Video: Pro-Palestinian marches in cities around the world – June 16, 2025
M. European Dockworkers Are Refusing to Load Weapons for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza – June 15, 2025
European Dockworkers Are Refusing to Load Weapons for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza | Truthout
N. For Trump’s Birthday Military Parade, Veterans: ‘Military Off Our Streets’ – June 14, 2025
For Trump’s Birthday Military Parade, Veterans: ‘Military Off Our Streets’ – PopularResistance.Org
O. Palestinian Activists Came To Speak At California Synagogue-But Face Deportation At the Airport – June 12, 2025
Palestinian Activists Face Deportation Upon Landing in San Francisco
European Dockworkers Refuse to Load Weapons Aimed at Palestine | Labor Notes
4 PETITIONS:
1. Tell Congress: No War in Iran
SIGN: Tell Congress: No War in Iran | Win Without War
2. Stop Trump and Palantir’s mass data collection power grab!
SIGN: Stop Trump and Palantir’s mass data collection power grab! | Demand Progress
SIGN: Don’t let Trump strip power from federal judges | Demand Progress
SIGN: Oppose AI giveaway to Google, Microsoft and Musk’s xAI! | Demand Progress
EVENTS / ACTIONS
Sunday, June 22 – Wednesday, June 25
Sunday, June 22
National day of protest June 18 — NO war on Iran!
From ANSWER Coalition
– SF is Event # 4
Chevron gas station at:
3675 Geary Blvd. (@ Aguello)
SF
MUNI # 38 & 33
Palestine’s boycott, divest and sanction movement has called for a boycott of chevron gas stations worldwide until chevron cancels its contracts with israel and stops profiting from genocide. Join us in picketing at this chevron station in san francisco! Please show your solidarity and bring signs, palestinian flags and/or keffiyehs.
For more info:
https://uscpr.org/campaigns/boycott-chevron/
Info: SF Boycott Chevron Picket : Indybay
In Person:
Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco
1187 Franklin St.
SF
ZOOM: https://zoom.us/j/94481419412?pwd=yJ9AcaSLWgfW1n3754H3tVbeNki2Nk.1
University of San Francisco students will speak on U.S. government accountability to uphold the Constitution relating to both immigration enforcement and our civil liberties. They will explain how anti-immigrant forces intentionally create panic and fear, and will present a Know Your Rights description. Legal options will be explained; and they will share ways ordinary citizens can support immigrants during this time of growing immigration instability. The latest court rulings will also be discussed, and what they portend for the future of our democracy.
Camila Carrera is USF School of Law graduate, and since 2018, has worked at various immigration firms and recently has been involved in complex immigration cases. Mirna Champ is a 3rd year law student at USF, already working directly with immigrants navigating defensive and affirmative asylum, termination cases and other humanitarian relief cases.
Info: Students Speak Out! Immigration & Liberation American Law & Disorder : Indybay
4. Sunday, 2:00pm, EMERGENCY PROTEST: Stop the War on Iran
Meet at:
Embarcadero Plaza
SF
Trump’s unprovoked bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities is an outright war crime. It violates the UN Charter, international law, and the U.S. Constitution. It threatens to set into motion a regional or even global war with massive casualties, nuclear radiation, and catastrophic consequences.
The people of the United States and the world reject this new war of aggression. This is the critical moment to say NO to yet another war to “remake” the Middle East and steal the region’s vast natural resources.
Trump lied during the campaign when he said he was going to end the “forever wars” and bring about peace. He and Netanyahu have repeatedly lied about an Iranian nuclear weapons program. He is no different from George W. Bush who lied about “weapons of mass destruction” to initiate the catastrophic war in Iraq.
Join us in the street tomorrow, Sunday, June 22 at 2pm as we demand an immediate end to US and Israeli attacks on Iran and its sovereignty. The people of the United States want more funding for health care, education and infrastructure. Instead, Trump and his war hawks are launching a new war that puts the world at risk, will cause the bloodshed of Iranians (and ultimately Americans) and only benefits the military-industrial complex.
Don’t live in the Bay Area? Find a protest near you at: ANSWERCOALITION.ORG
Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLL54HERZoK/
5. Sunday, 3:00pm (PT); 6:00pm (ET), In Solidarity With All Refugees/Displaced Persons In Haiti, The Caribbean, Palestine, The Americas, Africa
Zoom Meeting ID: 853 2484 0427 Password: 194785
Presenters:
Dr. Ramzy Baround, Palestine Historian Activist
Pierre Labossiere – Haiti Action Committee
James Finies – Bonaire Human Rights Organization
John Mussington – Barbuda Land Rights & Resources Committee
Special guest: Prof. Hilbourne Watson – Barbados
Moderator: YaYa Marin Coleman – Belize
Info: https://haitisolidarity.net/join-us-june-22nd-un-world-refugee-day-2025/
Tuesday, June 24
Travis Air Force Base,
Fairfield, CA
Main Gate: Air Base Parkway & Parker Rd.
(Turn left at Parker Road, park in lot past Chevron Station)
June 24: A nonviolent HUMAN BLOCKADE is planned at Travis during early morning commute, as we pledge to put our bodies between the weapons and the children and people of Gaza.
Register to get on the Gaza Freedom Bus by June 20:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/DRfhuuShJYa1owofb3VVxCHxKQU98t7GqMIhEPvEesw/
(Leaves MacArthur BART station at 5:30am)
Offer a carpool or join one here:
https://www.groupcarpool.com/t/wx80mt
Shamefully, Travis Air Force Base, the largest U.S. Air Force transport base in the country, sends weapons to Israel AND is aiding in mass deportation flights. It is also being considered for an ICE Detention Center. Our coalition pledges to continue our ongoing protests and Human Blockades at Travis until these illegal activities stop and Travis is no longer complicit in genocide.
Supported by 30 sponsors and endorsers. We invite other organizations to join our campaign.
Legal Observers and Security monitors to participate.
Risking arrest is optional, and many support roles are needed.
For more information: http://www.PeoplesArmsEmbargo.org
Info: People’s Arms Embargo: NO WEAPONS FOR GENOCIDE : Indybay
CounterPulse
80 Turk St.
SF
Space is ADA accessible, and masks will be required.
Join trans/queer organizers from three movements who took bold actions to save lives.
In 1989 “Stop AIDS Now Or Else” blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in response to the genocidal inaction of the US government.
In 2016, the Black queer collective black.seed shut down the Bay Bridge because cops would not (and still won’t) stop killing Black people.
In solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli genocide, in 2024 organizers again blocked the bridge and are now facing state repression for their necessary action.
As fascism continues to spread across the globe, what strategies are needed now?
Organized by Sad Francisco, Gay Shame, The HALA Collective
Info: Stop Genocide Now….. Or Else : Indybay
Wednesday, June 25
8. Wednesday,9:00am – 10:00am(PT); 12Noon – 1:00pm (ET), rom #Guantánamo to CECOT: Abuses by the US Government In the Name of “National Security”
RSVP: Webinar Registration – Zoom
This event will be held with remote simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish and American Sign Language interpretation.
To commemorate the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, join a webinar hosted by Amnesty International.
Over the last two-plus decades the US government has jumped through legal loopholes to arbitrarily and indefinitely detain men in the Guantánamo Bay military prison under the guise of “national security.” Under the Trump administration, the US government has expanded its abuses using the same justification, entering into controversial agreements with El Salvador to detain unlawfully expelled individuals—people seeking safety and migrants accused of being gang members—at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a mega-prison known for its harsh conditions and human rights abuses.
Both prisons are defined by indefinite detention without trial, lack of due process, torture or other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment, lack of transparency and oversight, and the US’ use of extraterritorial detention. Guantánamo remains a symbol of the US’ “War on Terror” and CECOT as a showcase of so called “tough-on-crime” policies where the US sends people seeking safety and migrants who are considered “enemy aliens” – and both are places where human rights violations thrive.
Host: Amnesty International
Virtual event:
RSVP: https://events.propublica.org/immigration-enforcement
Panel discussion on how the U.S. government’s aggressive immigration crackdown is reshaping the lives of migrants.
Join ProPublica reporters for an in-depth discussion about their recently published investigations into the Trump administration’s moves to ramp up deportations. Together, these stories reveal how immigration enforcement is quietly being embedded into everyday institutions, raising urgent questions about transparency, accountability and the future of immigration policy in America.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, tasked with protecting unaccompanied immigrant children, has shifted toward enforcement by sharing sponsor information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leading to the arrests of such guardians and the prolonged detentions of children, as well as family separations. This transformation has turned a protective agency into an enforcement arm, placing minors and mixed-status families at new risk, often without public knowledge or accountability.
Meanwhile, ICE officials tout an unprecedented expansion of the 287(g) Program, which allows state and local police to enter federal agreements to act as deportation officers. Government watchdogs have warned that such agreements lack oversight, while advocates allege they come at a high cost to communities.
The panel also examines how private companies and logistics networks have enabled enforcement to scale rapidly and invisibly. We’ll share insights into the hidden world of deportation flights, where civilian flight attendants report unsafe, traumatic conditions as migrants are moved with little oversight. We’ll also discuss how a privately held company has made billions running tent detention facilities to hold immigrants entering the U.S. at the border. The session also covers how individuals — many without criminal convictions — have been swept up in this system and deported to dangerous conditions abroad, including prisons in El Salvador.
During this virtual event, reporters will trace these threads across systems of care, policing, privatization and international detention, revealing how enforcement has become more expansive. Submit your question for our panelists below when you RSVP.
Info: The Aggressive Crackdown by ICE: Inside Growing Architecture of Immigration Enforcement : Indybay
Forbes Breaking News Jun 21, 2025 During his “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was informed that President Trump had launched strikes on Iran. Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more: https://account.forbes.com/membership…
Forbes Breaking News Jun 21, 2025 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) holds a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more: https://account.forbes.com/membership…
― Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Published Jun 18, 2025 (Newsweek.com)
Senate Republicans Who Might Vote Against Trump’s Tax Bill
By Jasmine Laws, US News Reporter
Newsweek Is A Trust Project MemberFOLLOW
The largest single sale of national public land in modern history could be carried out as part of President Donald Trump‘s budget bill to help pay for his sweeping tax cuts.
However, a professor who is an expert on climate policy questioned the efficacy of the proposals, telling Newsweek that “selling off public lands will not reduce federal spending to any significant degree.”
Newsweek has contacted the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service via email for comment.
The Senate committee said that a lot of the land owned by BLM and USFS cannot be used for housing, and so by opening up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction, they intend to solve the “housing crisis.”
However, the nonprofit land conversation organization The Wilderness Society argued the opposite—that research suggests “very little of the land managed by the BLM and USFS is actually suitable for housing.”
It warned that much of the public land eligible for sale in the bill include “local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.”
The organization said the measure “trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.”
The measure, which was included in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s version of the tax-and-spending legislation released last week, aims to generate revenue for tax cuts by auctioning off public lands in 11 Western states.
READ MORE Donald Trump
The legislation mandates that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) sell more than 2 million acres over the next five years, with a total of 258 million acres now legally available for potential sale.
The proposal mandates the nomination of tracts within 30 days, then every 60 days until the multi-million-acre goal is met, all without hearings, debate or public input.
The plan is also part of a broader move to generate around $29 billion through a combination of expanded oil, gas, coal and geothermal lease sales, as well as new timber sales.
According to The Wilderness Society, the total of USFS and BLM land available for sale under the new proposals for the Senate Reconciliation Bill, which are consolidated in the West, are as follows for each state:
Studies show that less than 2 percent of USFS and BLM land is “close enough to population centers to make sense for housing development,” Patrick Parenteau, a professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Newsweek.
“Economists also found that more than half of federal lands within a quarter mile of towns needing more housing and a population of at least 100 people had high wildfire risk,” he added.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said that the proposal is estimated to generate between $5 to $10 billion during the 2025-2034 period.
However, whether this move will have a positive financial impact for the government has been debated by experts.
Parenteau said “selling off public lands will not reduce federal spending to any significant degree.”
“There are lands that have been identified for sale or swaps due to the difficulty of managing them like checkerboard lands, but this legislation is not limited to those lands,” he said. “The goal is to maximize revenue to offset the massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.”
Parenteau added that the mandate also means that ultimately “buyers will have the upper hand.”
“The percentage of acreage being discussed is too small, in my view, to have any real effect on either the agencies’ management budgets or the national debt,” Deborah A. Sivas, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford Law, told Newsweek.
“Most of these lands, especially remote lands managed by BLM, don’t need or receive substantial or intensive management effort by the agencies; instead, they function largely as some of the last remaining ecological habitat for our dwindling wildlife,” she said.
Although, Wendie L. Kellington, a law attorney at Kellington Law Group, told Newsweek that the legislation “should have a positive budgetary impact on federal land maintenance and holding costs, because 5 percent of the proceeds from land sales must go to addressing the federal government’s not insignificant backlog of deferred maintenance on federal BLM and forest lands in the states where the land is sold.”
She added that is expensive to own land and the federal government “has done a relatively poor job of maintaining its lands.”
The sale of public lands as part of Trump’s tax bill has been a divisive measure, and a proposal to sell around 500,000 acres of federal land in Utah and Nevada was struck off the legislation by the House after some Republican lawmakers opposed the move.
A number of Republican representatives launched the bipartisan Public Lands Caucus with the aim of “expanding public access to federal lands, not auctioning them off.”
Patrick Parenteau, a professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Newsweek: “The legislation sets a target of over 3 million acres to be sold by 2030, but over 200 million acres of public lands would be eligible for sale to the highest bidder which is likely to be real estate developers or wealthy individuals looking for property near major attractions like Lake Tahoe or Gates of the Arctic.
“Even though national parks, wilderness, wild and scenic rivers and other protected areas are excluded, the areas eligible for sale include local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.”
He added: “Sales could impact local communities by eliminating access to popular recreation areas for hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, and more, reducing revenues from tourism near gateway communities, imposing more costs for public services like sewage and fire and police protection, increasing air and water pollution depending on what land uses are allowed, and so forth.”
Wendie L. Kellington, a law attorney at Kellington Law Group, told Newsweek: “The impact should be positive in the states and regions where the land is sold because the federal land to be sold can only be used for the development of housing or to address associated community needs.
“The states identified in the bill are ones with disproportionately great housing shortages and affordability challenges. The affected regions will not lose beloved park or conservation lands. Rather, the bill is narrow and expressly prohibits sales of ‘federally protected land” which includes national parks, wild and scenic river areas, national wildlife refuges, national historic sites and many other federally protected sites.
“The bill is an effort at a federal solution to a well-known, stubborn, serious housing shortage problem that no one has been able to solve for the past three decades.”
Deborah A. Sivas, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford Law, told Newsweek: “Most federal public land is remote from infrastructure and communities, which means it has little value as land per se on the private market and is unlikely to raise appreciable revenue. Maybe there are some parcels immediately adjacent to human communities and services, but for the most part, developers will not be interested in lands that do not connect to supporting infrastructure, human amenities, or nearby jobs.”
She added: “Starting in 1976, we largely halted, as a matter of public policy, the very long history of selling or giving away federal lands. And I recently saw yet another poll reaffirming that Americans remain overwhelmingly opposed to the sell-off of public lands, which are considered a national treasure and legacy for future generations.”
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said in its fact sheet on the legislation: “In the West, this means that the federal government is depriving our communities of needed land for housing and inhibiting growth. President Trump recognized the connection between federal land ownership and the housing crisis, which is why he pledged to ‘open up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction.'”
It added: “This proposal allows a fraction of 1 percent of federal land to be used to build houses. In doing so, it will create thousands of jobs, allow millions of Americans to realize the American dream, and reduce the deficit and fund our public lands.”
The committee’s proposals, unveiled June 11 and revised June 14, is still subject to debate and potential amendment as the Senate deliberates over Trump’s tax bill ahead of the self-set deadline of July 4.
The repeal of the EPA’s fuel emissions standards also got the axe, because of the ‘Byrd Rule,’ which blocks policy decisions from budget reconciliation.
Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
| By David Dayen June 20, 2025 (The American Prospect prospect.org) |
| Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box. |
| The Senate parliamentarian has been hearing arguments over whether certain provisions can stay in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the first set of decisions preserves several federal banking agencies. The ruling means that these provisions would only be able to return to the bill in one of two ways: either with a 60-vote waiver of the Byrd Rule, or with the chair of the Senate ignoring the parliamentarian and allowing the measures to stay. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has ruled out the latter, but now we’ll get a test of whether he is committed to abiding by this. This decision has once again preserved the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has survived several near-death experiences this year. The Senate Banking Committee attempted to essentially zero out the CFPB by reducing the cap for funds that the Federal Reserve can transfer to the agency to zero percent. That’s a full defunding, and it doesn’t directly impact the overall budget, since it’s a reduction in funds coming from off-budget, via the Federal Reserve. The parliamentarian ruled that this did not have a primary budgetary purpose but was a policy move by Republicans to get rid of a disfavored agency. This isn’t allowed in budget reconciliation. The same ruling was made for the zeroing out of the budget of the Office of Financial Research, which is funded through an assessment on large banks. Under the bill, that assessment money would get swept into the general fund; the parliamentarian saw that as a policy maneuver to kill OFR, a critical agency for market operations as well as for seeing over the horizon on the stability of the financial system. |
| The Banking Committee also tried to eliminate the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which was inaugurated after Enron and other disasters to provide oversight of accounting firms, and fold it into the Securities and Exchange Commission. That also is policy. Congress can of course move to destroy the agencies it created if it wants, but only through regular order, not the special process used for budget reconciliation, which gets around the filibuster. So these measures are out of the bill. “As much as Senate Republicans would prefer to throw out the rule book and advance their families lose and billionaires win agenda, there are rules that must be followed and Democrats are making sure those rules are enforced,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. A couple of other provisions were struck last night. The Banking Committee attempted to reduce pay of Federal Reserve staff to cut $1.4 billion. The Environment and Public Works Committee added a provision that appeared to repeal long-standing emissions standards for vehicles starting in 2027; that was also eliminated. And the Armed Services Committee had a trigger that would reduce appropriations to the Department of Defense if they were late in submitting their spending plans. All of these are gone as well. “We will continue examining every provision in this Great Betrayal of a bill and will scrutinize it to the furthest extent,” Merkley said. |
| We want to hear from you. If you’re a Hill staffer, policymaker, or subject-matter expert with something to say about the Big Beautiful Bill, or if there’s something in the legislation you want us to report about, write us at info(at)prospect.org. |
When the extent of the university’s involvement with slavery was unearthed, a scholar tracking descendants of enslaved workers was suddenly fired
Michela Moscufo Sat 21 Jun 2025 (TheGuardian.com)
Jordan Lloyd had been praying for something big to happen. The 35-year-old screenwriter was quarantining in her apartment in North Hollywood in June 2020. Without any work projects to fill her days, she picked up the novel Roots, by Alex Haley, to reread.
The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s ancestor, who is captured and sold into slavery in the Gambia and then brought to Virginia, where he is forced to labor on a plantation. It was adapted into an Emmy-award winning television series in the 1970s, and while reading it again, Lloyd thought to herself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could make another Roots?”
A few days later, out of the blue, she received an email from an undergraduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The email was short. The woman introduced herself as Carissa Chen, a junior at the college studying history. She was working on an independent research project to find descendants of enslaved people connected to the university. By using historical records and modern genealogy tools, she had found Lloyd.
“I have reason to believe through archival research that you could be the descendant of Tony and Cuba Vassall, two slaves taken from Antigua by a founding member connected to Harvard University,” the email read. “Are you available anytime for a call?”
The note linked to a website containing a family tree that Chen had created, tracing the lineage of people enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr, an Antiguan planter and businessman whose endowment would eventually create Harvard Law School.
Chen hadn’t expected to find any living descendants, she told the Guardian, but through dogged research, she managed to uncover 50 names and found Lloyd through an old website she had made when she had first moved to Los Angeles.
“It all felt too specific to be a scam,” Lloyd recounted, so she agreed to a call that would eventually blow open everything she thought she knew about her family history, linking her with one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions and launching a phase in her life that would be colored with equal parts joy and pain.
Though it contradicts a common perception of colonial New England, enslaved people were brought to work in northern cities in North America as well. In her book New England Bound, the historian Wendy Warren records the remarks of one European traveler who noted in 1687 that “there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [enslaved people]”.
As the country’s oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard’s history is inextricable from the history of transatlantic slavery. The enslaved labored in campus buildings, university presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage, and the school’s wealth grew through a circle of donors intimately connected to the plantation system in the Caribbean, the American south and the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Harvard began, informally, to research its relationship to slavery as early as 2007, when the history professor Sven Beckert started leading undergraduate research seminars such as the one Chen took. In 2016, then Harvard president Drew Faust acknowledged the university was “directly complicit” in slavery and, in 2022, the university released an official report, Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which detailed its history over more than a hundred pages.
Harvard is not the only academic institution with this burden. Currently more than 100 universities across the world are investigating their ties to slavery, the vast majority of which are in the US. A small subset of the universities researching their ties to slavery – approximately five – have committed to conducting genealogical research and identifying living descendants. Religious denominations such as the Episcopal church and the Evangelical Lutheran church and more than a dozen cities and four states have also begun researching their legacies of slavery. The California state reparations taskforce published a 1,000-page report two years ago, and state legislators have been developing – and passing – reparations-related initiatives.
The Guardian, founded in 1821 in Manchester, England, began its own process in 2020, when its sole owner, the Scott Trust, commissioned independent academic researchers to uncover its links to transatlantic slavery. It revealed that the newspaper’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and nine out of 11 of his financial backers had direct ties, mainly through Manchester’s cotton industry. In 2023, the Scott Trust apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and committed to a 10-year restorative justice program, with millions earmarked for descendant communities. That year, the Guardian also launched an ongoing series called Cotton Capital, which explores the legacies of slavery globally.
The 2022 Harvard report included a list of recommendations by the presidential committee: develop educational partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, create a public memorial, and – perhaps most contentiously – identify living descendants of people enslaved by university staff, leaders and faculty. The announcement was accompanied by a $100m endowment for “implementation”.
The person the university tapped to lead the descendant research is a man named Richard Cellini, who has a kind of mythological status in the world of institutional accountability and slavery research. By his own admission, his skill lies primarily in selecting talented researchers, and “keeping them happy”. The university, it seemed, was fully committed to beginning a process of discovery and atonement, putting resources and brainpower behind a project that could set the tone for institutions around the country, and the world. If successful, Harvard could demonstrate that truth-telling and reconciliation are possible on a large scale, that an institutional culture around silence and historical revisionism can be overturned, and that light can shine into even the deepest cracks. But that would ultimately not be the case. Not yet, at least.
When I visited Cellini in the archives of the Harvard Business School in mid-February, he was bent over a 19th-century ledger book, trained on a set of records with a magnifying glass. He is a trained attorney and tech entrepreneur, and though jovial and quick to joke, he becomes stoic when speaking about his research.
In 2015, he started an independent project at Georgetown University in Washington DC to locate the descendants of 272 enslaved people sold by Jesuit leaders in the mid-1800s to raise money for the university. Cellini said he was driven by a sense of moral outrage upon learning about the sale, as well as a curiosity to see what he could find. Along with 10 other researchers, they would eventually locate more than 10,000 direct descendants. Cellini’s effort, called the Georgetown Memory Project, remains independent although the university has given preferential consideration during the admissions process to descendants and created a “reconciliation fund’ for their benefit.
In the winter of 2022, before the Harvard report was made public, Cellini said he was approached by the former president of the school, Larry Bacow, and a dean, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who asked him if he could do the same thing for Harvard.
When he started the research, Harvard had already identified the names of 70 people that had been enslaved with ties to the university. Over the course of the past three years, working alongside American Ancestors, the country’s pre-eminent genealogical institute, Cellini and his researchers have identified more than 900 people that had been enslaved by university affiliates (faculty, staff and people in leadership positions) and nearly 500 of their direct living descendants.
It wasn’t long after the work began to pick up steam that Cellini started running into trouble.
In March 2023, he said he was asked to meet with the project’s executive director, Roeshana Moore-Evans, and the Harvard staff member overseeing the initiative, the public health professor and vice-provost for special projects, Sara Bleich.
These informal meetings were held in a boardroom in the student center, a tall glass building overlooking the gates of Harvard Yard. It was here and during extended phone calls that Cellini claims he was told repeatedly by Bleich “not to find too many descendants”.
“At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” he said.
Cellini told Bleich that was “ludicrous”, he said. Was he supposed to falsify the evidence, to destroy it, to ignore it? “I asked for guidance, and the answer was that she didn’t know,” he said, “but we shouldn’t report too many descendants.”
Bleich denies this. “The university never issued a directive to him to limit the number of direct descendants that could be identified through the work,” she told the Guardian during a phone interview. Moore-Evans declined to comment on the meetings.
In the process of trying to get additional funding for the project, arguing that the amount of work had increased tenfold because of all the additional names that were being uncovered, Cellini met with the finance director for the president’s office, Patricia Harrington, this past fall.
Harrington wouldn’t give him a clear answer about his funding request, telling him, “Unfortunately you keep finding more slaves,” he said, and that “every new person is a source of guilt and shame for Harvard”. A spokesperson for the university said: “Any assertion that Patricia Harrington disparaged the work of the Legacy of Slavery Initiative, including descendant research, is false.” Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
The early days of discovery were a golden time for Lloyd and her immediate family. Together with Lloyd’s father, Dennis, and Chen, they would meet over Zoom and swap stories. Her dad was sharing parts of family history that Lloyd had never heard before: about his soft-spoken mother and his dad, who owned a flower shop in a neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown.
“People will open up to a stranger in a way that’s more honest and unfiltered, wanting to be thorough in a way that you would never with your family,” Lloyd said. Chen, in turn, detailed the findings of her research to the Lloyds and they began to fill in their histories, tracing connections to the colonial period and height of the “triangular trade”.
Lloyd’s ancestor seven generations back, Cuba Vassall, was three years old when she was forcibly moved from Antigua to a suburb of Boston along with her family by Isaac Royall Jr, in 1737. The Royalls were the largest slave-owning family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, owning nearly 70 enslaved people who labored on a 500-acre plantation just north of Boston, as well as controlling more than 100 people on their plantation in Antigua.
Before long, Lloyd’s ancestors were transferred to another wealthy Cambridge family, the Vassalls, for whom they labored in an elaborate Georgian mansion currently known as the Longfellow House, near the campus of the then growing Harvard University.
The Vassalls owned plantations in Jamaica where more than a thousand people were enslaved. John Vassall was a Harvard graduate, along with his brother Lewis, who once paid for a portion of his tuition with a large barrel of sugar, one of the most lucrative commodities produced by enslaved people. Cuba’s original enslaver, Isaac Royall Jr, didn’t have any direct ties to Harvard while he was living, but he endowed a professorship in his will, likely to ensure his legacy would live on as a member of the colonial elite. The seal of Harvard Law School was the Royall family crest until 2016, when students protested to demand its replacement. The Royall professorship was retired in 2022.
At the Longfellow House, Cuba met and married a man named Tony, originally from Jamaica, who was also enslaved by the Vassalls. They had six children, including Lloyd’s ancestor Darby. During the American revolutionary war, the royalist Vassalls fled and the house was occupied by George Washington, who used it as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. According to one anecdote, Washington asked then six-year-old Darby to work for him, who replied he wouldn’t work without wages.
After the war, Tony and Cuba petitioned the state to stay in a small dwelling on the property, where they cultivated a piece of land for farming. They had both spent 60 years of their life in slavery, Tony wrote in the 1781 letter, and “though deprived of what makes them now happy beyond expression yet they have ever lived a life of honesty and have been faithful in their master’s service”.skip past newsletter promotion
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He appealed to the court’s sense of morality, writing: “They shall not be denied the sweets of freedom the remainder of their days by being reduced to the painful necessity of begging for bread.” His petition to stay in the house was refused, but Tony was given an annual pension, one of the earliest examples of a formerly enslaved person receiving compensation.
Tony’s son Darby went on to become an important figure in the burgeoning free Black community of Boston. He was an activist throughout his life, supporting the abolitionist movement, becoming a founding member of the African Society of Boston and adding his name to a state petition to protect Black people against the Fugitive Slave Act, along with his daughter and son-in-law.
At the end of his life, Darby chose to be buried in the Vassall family tomb underneath Christ Church in Cambridge, which Lloyd and her family went to visit last June. The tomb is in the basement, in a low-ceilinged crypt locked behind heavy black metal doors, and a couple inches of a curved brick structure, peeking above the granite dust floor, is the only indication. A dried flower arrangement that Lloyd left is still there, a tidy pile of lavender, white chrysanthemum and clover.
Making these connections and being able to visit her ancestor’s grave brought Lloyd a deep sense of “internal certainty and peace and comfort and groundedness”, she said. “I would want that for everyone whose family is somehow affiliated.” Yet the joy and excitement comes with a “deep sadness”.
“Why hasn’t this been resolved?” she wondered aloud during an interview phone call. “Why did no one in my family know?”
Lloyd’s only contact from the administration, she said, was an “icy” interaction with Brown-Nagin during a group call, and she has heard nothing since. “Naively, I was expecting them to be very welcoming and excited to facilitate discussion,” she said. “I was hoping they would be warmer, more open to reconcile the long history.” The university says it has not begun the outreach process.
Since the initiative was announced, the university has given out more than $4m in grants to local organizations and built out partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, such as the Du Bois Scholars Program.
“This is by far the hardest job that I’ve had,” Bleich, who oversees the Harvard Legacy of Slavery initiative, said. “We are very serious about this, and we are very sincere.”
In late January, as he was pulling his car into the parking lot of Harvard Business School, prepared to begin another day of research in the university archives, Cellini received a call from an HR person that said him and his team were fired, effective immediately.
He was never given an explanation, he said, and a university spokesperson told the Guardian “we cannot comment on personnel matters”. The genealogy research, the university announced after Cellini’s firing, would be continued through an “expanded partnership” with American Ancestors, the genealogy non-profit that had already been working closely with Cellini’s team.
“They’re the world’s best genealogists,” Cellini said. Based on his team’s research in the Harvard archives identifying school leaders, faculty or staff who owned enslaved people and the names of the people they enslaved, American Ancestors would then search “downstream”, as Cellini put it, for living descendants. In this new agreement, the organization has taken over all aspects of the research.
The initiative received its first public blow last spring, when two university professors on the committee to create a memorial stepped down, saying in an open letter the university had attempted to “dilute and delay” their efforts to reach out to descendants. The committee was formed in 2023, based on one of the recommendations of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report to “honor enslaved people through memorialization”. In a statement made to the student newspaper, a spokesperson for the university said it “take[s] seriously the co-chairs’ concerns about the importance of community involvement and of taking steps that will enable Harvard to deeply engage with descendant communities”.
A couple weeks later, the executive director of the initiative, Moore-Evans, stepped down, after reporting conflicts with the university administration to HR. She told the Guardian that she left for “personal reasons”.
Cellini suspects the reason he was fired is simple: “We found too many slaves.” The university was afraid that identifying descendants would bankrupt the university and so each name that his team identified was “expensive”, he said. The work that he oversaw is “just the tip of the iceberg”, he added, estimating that the numbers of living descendants could be about 10,000 people.
Cellini had just come back from Antigua a couple days prior, where his team had visited the site of the Royall plantation as well as four other plantations with ties to the university. They also found a hundred additional names of enslaved people with ties to the university in public archives, he said.
Cellini and his team met with the prime minister and governor general of Antigua, who had expressed interest in working with the university to explore this connection. Cellini said he detailed his meetings with the politicians to the university, but those requests were never answered and he was fired shortly after.
The Antiguan ambassador to the US, Sir Ronald Sanders, wrote a letter to the university after learning that Cellini was fired, writing that the decision was made “without consultation or notification”. The country wants “real engagement and meaningful action that befits the benefits that Harvard derived”, he wrote.
“We would not expect a cash payment from Harvard,” a spokesperson added. “However, so well-endowed a university with expertise in a number of areas can be helpful to our country.” The cabinet discussed the possibility of Harvard funding ancestry research to identify descendants of Antiguans that were brought to colonial Massachusetts, and seeking the university’s assistance in public health matters to address the high rates of chronic illness on the islands. A spokesperson for Harvard said a letter had been sent in response, but refused to elaborate. The spokesperson for Antigua said, “I have not seen a response,” and could not confirm if a response had been received.
The Royall plantation, which likely stretched across 200 acres down to Port Royal Bay, enslaved more than 100 people. Only the ruins of the sugar windmill remain, on private property.
The stone structure stands a hundred feet tall on a grassy field bordering some woods. Here, enslaved people lived and worked on a plantation, feeding sugar cane into metal rollers through a dangerous and physically exhausting process to make syrup.
“It’s pretty visceral,” Cellini said about visiting the site. “This is where lives were spent and exhausted and consumed for the production of sugarcane, for the wealth of the British empire.”
Ever since being contacted by Chen, Lloyd has felt the weight of her family history and a sense of responsibility. Her ancestors repeatedly petitioned for their freedom, for their rights and their humanity. Darby and his sister Flora had both been separated from their family by their enslavers as young children. Tony Vassall bought his daughter’s freedom, and when his enslaver died by injuries sustained at the battle of Bunker Hill, six-year-old Darby walked 10 miles home to his family. The family had been staunch abolitionists and activists, suffered through bondage, and fought for their freedom. Lloyd struggles with where that leaves her.
“I just don’t know where to begin,” Lloyd said. She considers taking to social media, calling the administration and making demands. Should she protest? She doesn’t know. Lloyd’s sister, who declined to be interviewed for this article, went to Antigua and Lloyd said she’s also interested in going. “I would go anywhere to talk to anyone at this point,” she said. “Except Harvard, because there’s no one I really trust there right now.”
“I feel like I’m still close to the explosion,” she said. “My ears are still ringing.”
This article was amended on 21 June 2025. John Vassall was a Harvard graduate, not John Edward Taylor, as the story originally said.
(Contributed by Gwyllm LLwydd)
