By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

In 1516, a 7-acre section of Venice, Italy was designated as the area where Jews would be required to live. As it was located where a copper foundry had been, it was called by the word for ‘foundry’ in the Venetian dialect, “geto.” The practice of forcibly concentrating Jews into such “ghettos” grew, reaching a brutal, murderous climax under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 40s. The Nazis built hundreds of ghettos in cities they occupied, creating a system of oppression that, for most Jews, led to death on the street, or deportation to death camps like Treblinka.

The Warsaw ghetto was the most notorious Nazi ghetto. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, and within a year had constructed the walled ghetto. Close to half a million Jews were imprisoned there. Those who attempted to escape were shot on sight. Germany immediately restricted food and medicine, leading to starvation and disease.

Images of the desperation were actually filmed by Nazi propagandists. Four reels of silent film footage were found in East Germany years after the war. It appears in the 2010 documentary, “A Film Unfinished.” The footage juxtaposes fabricated scenes of wealthy Warsaw Jews enjoying comfortable lives while outside people dressed in rags beg and others collect the dead from the street. The propaganda film was never completed, hence the documentary’s title, but the images of suffering provide a rare look at the inhumanity of the Nazi ghetto.

That was 1942. Now, in 2025, there is another embattled enclave where people of one ethnicity are imprisoned, dying of starvation and disease, shot on sight if they try to escape. This is Gaza, a manufactured hell on Earth that can only be described as a ghetto.

This comparison is not new. Two months after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 surprise attack on Israel, The New Yorker published an essay by M. Gessen, titled, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” In it, Gessen makes the comparison between Jewish ghettos under the Nazis and conditions in Gaza. Explaining the point on the Democracy Now! news hour at the time, Gessen said,

“The similarities are so substantial that they can actually inform our understanding. What’s happening now is that the ghetto is being liquidated.

That’s important to say, not just because it’s important to describe things in the best possible way that we can, but because, again, in the name of ‘never again,’ we have to ask if this is like a ghetto. If what we’re witnessing now in this indiscriminate killing, in an onslaught that has displaced almost all the people of Gaza, that has made them homeless, if that is substantially similar to what we saw in some places during the Holocaust, then what is the world going to do about it? What is the world going to do in the name of ‘never again?’”

Israeli-American scholar Omer Bartov, Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told Democracy Now! of the increasing consensus among academics that Israel’s attack on Gaza amounts to genocide. He described Israel’s plan to build a “humanitarian city” to house 600,000 Palestinians there as

“a sort of combination of ghetto and concentration camp, that would be built on the ruins of Rafah…this is extraordinary. The state of Israel publicly is speaking about the creation of a vast concentration camp whose goal is removal of the population.”

Well over 100 Palestinians in Gaza have starved to death, and counting. Michael Fakhri, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said on Democracy Now!,

“This is the fastest famine we’ve seen, the fastest starvation campaign we’ve seen in modern history.”

The UN’s aid distribution has been essentially shut down, replaced with the shadowy US and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Palestinians swarm the inadequate sites seeking food; over 1,000 have been killed there so far, fired upon by the Israeli military and US mercenaries.

Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s emergency food security lead in Gaza, appeared on Democracy Now!, having himself lost over 30 pounds during Israel’s war on Gaza.

“This is happening in front of all the world,” he said. “All the world is watching this heartbreaking, without taking concrete action.”

The Warsaw Ghetto’s Jews launched an uprising, temporarily halting the death camp deportations. By mid-1943, the uprising had been crushed, the remaining ghetto residents killed. Monuments to the ghetto and the uprising dot Warsaw now.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu want all Palestinians removed from Gaza, in what would be a criminal act of mass ethnic cleansing. Trump wants the US to own Gaza, and build what he calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

There are more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza ghetto, now more than ever in need of food, aid, solidarity and action from us all.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

July 16 marked the 80th anniversary of the first atomic bomb explosion, at what the bomb’s creator, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, called the Trinity Site in New Mexico. The harsh desert terrain had been known for centuries by the name given by the Spanish conquistadors, the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death. The Trinity test was followed by the first and to date only wartime uses of atomic weapons, when the U.S. dropped bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6th and 9th, respectively. Over 210,000 people were killed in the blasts, almost all of them civilians.

Years later, Oppenheimer reflected on Trinity during an interview with NBC News:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, although there have been close calls. Just last month, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine. In his first term, President Donald Trump suggested a nuclear attack on North Korea when he threatened the nuclear-armed country with “fire and fury.”

Historians generally agree that the closest we’ve come to nuclear war was the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The U.S. had placed nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy, threatening the Soviets, who responded by deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade on Cuba, engaging in a high stakes military confrontation with the Soviet Union that could have rapidly escalated into nuclear war. In the end, diplomacy worked, and the missiles were removed from Cuba and from Italy and Turkey.

Months after the crisis, 22-year-old musician Bob Dylan released an album that included the song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which resonated with his audience who heard a metaphorical connection between “hard rain” and the omnipresent risk of lethal nuclear fallout.

More than 60 years later, on this 80th anniversary of the Trinity blast, the song took center stage at a remarkable gathering in Chicago. The Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War was organized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to address “the high and seemingly rising prospect of nuclear war.” About 20 Nobel laureates and 60 leading nuclear experts convened for three days to provide policy recommendations and actions for leaders and the public to take to reduce the risk of nuclear annihilation.

The conference ended with a performance of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain” by the Kronos Quartet and The Hard Rain Collective, a group of musicians assembled by Kronos that included Ringo Starr, Iggy Pop, Allison Russell, Willie Nelson, Laurie Anderson, and dozens more.

Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour on July 16, the Trinity test anniversary, David Harrington, violinist, and founder and artistic director of the Kronos Quartet, explained,

“If music and musicians can step up and project those kinds of concerns about all of our futures, then music is doing its job. What we need to do as musicians is listen. When I listen to what’s happening in the world, it’s terrifying, and I want my musical community to do something about it. This is our first step.”

Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, was one of the conference organizers and appeared with Harrington on Democracy Now! Holz said,

“Trinity was sort of the birth of a new age, the age of nuclear weapons, and we’re still in that age. The threats that people recognize, that Oppenheimer’s quote captures, they’re still with us. We now have thousands of these weapons. They’re on high alert. They can go off at any moment. Within an hour, civilization could end. That’s still where we are now.”

The Nobel assembly released a declaration on the Trinity anniversary this week that included a “call on scientists, academics, civil society, and communities of faith to help create the necessary pressure on global leaders to implement nuclear risk reduction measures.”

A new arms race is heating up. President Trump plans a technically impossible “Golden Dome” missile defense system over the U.S. Meanwhile, by joining Israel in its attack on Iran, Trump has encouraged Iran to pursue its own nuclear deterrent.

What Oppenheimer and the secret, U.S. government’s Manhattan Project unleashed in 1945, only a mass, organized peace movement can contain.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The Guadalupe River in Texas gets its name, according to one popular etymology, from the Arabic phrase, “wādī al-lubb,” meaning “hidden river.” In the early hours of July 4th, though, the river was anything but hidden. Intense rains caused a flash flood in the middle of the night, transforming the typically quiet river into raging torrent, rising more than 30 feet over its normal level. As the flood waters cascaded out of the Texas Hill Country, it left a path of death and destruction in its wake. As this goes to press, there are 120 confirmed deaths, and over 150 people still missing.

One of the first population centers to be devastated was Camp Mystic, a storied institution founded in 1926 that hosted generations of girls from Texas’ elite families. There were reportedly upwards of 750 campers, counselors and staff present when the floodwaters crashed into the camp sometime after 3 am. Cabins for the youngest campers, the eight year-olds, were closest to the river. Older campers stayed on slightly higher ground. When a wall of water 30 feet high crashes down, elevation matters. Many of the campers who died were the youngest, torn from their bunks, dragged downriver in the darkness.

The flood next hit the towns of Hunt and Ingram before reaching Kerrville, destroying homes, RV parks, trees, bridges, cars and anything else in its path. As dawn broke on the 4th of July, rescue teams began reaching impacted areas. Hundreds of people were rescued from the floodwaters, but no survivors have been found since last Friday, July 4th. Thousands of people have been scouring the debris left in the flood’s wake, searching for the bodies of victims.

While rescue and recovery activities proceeded, efforts to understand how this disaster happened have begun.

The core of early warning for floods like this are the weather forecasting professionals at the National Weather Service, a department within NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. President Trump has gutted NOAA since taking office last January. Despite the job cuts, the NWS was able to alert local officials about likely flooding. Kerr County’s top elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, admitted, “We do not have a warning system.”

Climate science has long acknowledged individual extreme weather events can’t be directly attributed to global heating, but that the worsening climate definitely causes more intense storms and droughts and causes them more frequently. The devastating flooding of the Guadalupe River is a case in point. The region had been in drought recently, which hardens the ground, intensifying the runoff from rainstorms.

The disaster occurred on the same day, July 4th, that President Trump signed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” the budget reconciliation bill.

“You started with the Texas floods. We know that the climate crisis kills,” award-winning investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz said on the Democracy Now! news hour, commenting on the impact of the new budget law. “We also know that we have remedies: cut fossil fuels, transition to localized renewable energy and support frontline communities. Those programs have essentially been erased, to the best extent that they could, in this tax bill to remove tax incentives that would help us support solar and wind energy manufacturing. Tax breaks for consumers, producers, those were entirely stripped away to cut out that financial support for the solar and wind transition. Tax breaks, billions of them, to the fossil fuel industry. And remember, this bill extends all of those tax cuts from 2017, which had already brought billions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry, and just gives them new benefits.”

Trump’s attack on climate action will intensify the global climate catastrophe, accelerating fossil fuel drilling and burning, essentially guaranteeing more deadly extreme weather events will happen in the future.

Texas is especially susceptible to climate impacts. On the day before the Guadalupe flood, The Texas Observer, one of the state’s most respected investigative news outlets, published a piece by MIT management professor emeritus Henry D. Jacoby, headlined, “Trump’s DOGE Cuts Are a Texas-Sized Disaster.” In it, Jacoby writes, “Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out, and crucial information about future risks is being destroyed or degraded. Meanwhile, state leaders stand by while denying the seriousness of climate change as a driver of these events—and the threat this poses to the state economy.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, while ignoring the role the worsening climate catastrophe is playing in the disaster that just hit Kerrville, he understands politics. To that end, he just summoned the Texas legislature back for a special session. Leading the agenda are action items to address the state’s failure to prepare for the Guadalupe flood.

But, top of the agenda for Texas and the entire country should be the worsening climate catastrophe. Ignore that, and more severe and unpredictable weather events will only become more routine…and more deadly.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Independence Day occurs as this imperfect union, publicly declared on July 4, 1776, faces an existential threat. President Donald Trump daily amasses more authoritarian control, unchecked by the Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. Mass arrests and deportations of immigrants accelerate, sweeping up alongside them many legal residents and even U.S. citizens. Trump is now considering “denaturalizing” citizens, stripping people of their citizenship to deport them if they don’t behave according to his whims. In this ongoing cascade of disturbing and often illegal actions, Trump’s ability to shock seems boundless.

This week he toured a new tent prison being hastily built in the Everglades by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier. They dub the gulag “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Outside the White House Wednesday morning, as Trump set out for Florida, Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy asked him, “With Alligator Alcatraz, is the idea that if some illegal immigrant escapes, they just get eaten by an alligator or snake?”

Trump responded, smiling, “You know, snakes are fast. But alligators, we’re gonna teach them [ICE prisoners] how to run away from an alligator, OK? If they escape prison, how to run away: Don’t run in a straight line, run like this,” Trump said, moving his hand in a zigzag path. “And you know what? Your chances go up about one percent. Not a good day!”

Trump continued:

“You have a lot of bodyguards, you have a lot of cops, that are in the form of alligators. You don’t have to pay them so much.”

Trump’s tent prison photo-op was another racist display of anti-immigrant hatred and inhumanity, mocking the marginalized for the cameras and his loyal base.

Florida is building the prison on the grounds of an unused airstrip. DeSantis, speaking at a “roundtable” hosted by the White House on the prison grounds, boasted that the site was ideal for the mass deportation of immigrants: “You drive them 2,000 feet to the runway, and then they’re gone. It’s a one-stop shop.”

Meanwhile, protesters picketed outside, representing environmentalists, immigrants rights activists, and the land’s original stewards, the indigenous Miccosukee and Seminole tribes.

One careful observer of this atrocious new Everglades concentration camp is Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. He said on the Democracy Now! news hour,

“‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ it’s a public relations name. Alcatraz was a prison for people who had been convicted of crimes and were serving their sentence. But immigration detention is not for people serving criminal sentences. The people held in detention often have no criminal record, or they have minor, lower misdemeanors…The Trump administration loves to say that it’s only going after the worst of the worst, but when they sent hundreds of people to Guantánamo Bay, fully a third of them had no criminal convictions at all. We’ve seen with their deportation of people to CECOT in El Salvador to be imprisoned without trial, that hundreds of those people were likely innocent of any claimed gang ties and had no criminal records at all. So, this is not Alcatraz. It’s a detention camp that ICE is using to hold immigrants, many of whom will likely have no criminal record.”

Florida Attorney General Uthmeier, a staunch Trump supporter who first touted the propagandistic name, is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise on his campaign website.

Florida has more than alligators, pythons, and elected officials thrilled by cruel and unusual punishment; it is also where five of this year’s 13 reported ICE detention deaths have occurred. The Republican budget bill promises a gusher of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to supercharge the immigrant detention and deportation industry, ensuring the construction of many more ICE jails and tent prison complexes, thus guaranteeing more deaths in detention.

As the grim Everglades prison construction continues, Americans across the country celebrate the nation’s birthday. Most who celebrate the Declaration of Independence have never read the short document. If they were to read it, one line should stand out as especially relevant, given Trump’s thirst for power and the willingness of so many to cede it to him:

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The Declaration of Independence is an imperfect document, referring, for example, to the Indigenous people of this continent as “savages,” and failing to reject, or even to mention, the institution of slavery. Indeed, roughly one-third of its 55 signers were enslavers themselves. But the Declaration is clear in its rejection of kings, tyrants and arbitrary power.

“No Kings” protests against Trump’s unprecedented power grab continue to grow. Millions took to the streets on his birthday last month. The next major mobilization is planned for July 17.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

With each passing day, the violence wielded by ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, grows more intense and widespread. One grotesquely emblematic example of this was the recent violent arrest of 48-year-old Narciso Barranco in Santa Ana, California. Narciso, a hardworking immigrant laborer who came from Mexico over thirty years ago, is the father of three US Marines. While landscaping outside an IHOP restaurant on June 21st, he was assaulted by at least seven armed, masked men, who tackled him and repeatedly punched him in the head. They handcuffed him and shoved him into an unmarked SUV. The plainclothes agents wore face masks, bullet-proof vests and military-grade helmets. Some of the vests read, “Police–US Border Patrol” on the back, but to anyone confronted by these gangs, no identifying marks, names, or badges were visible.

One of Narciso’s sons, Alejandro Barranco, a US Marine Corps veteran, was able to visit his father in jail. Narciso was still wearing the same work clothes that were bloodied in the assault.

“He looked beat up, he looked rough, he looked defeated, he was sad,” Alejandro said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Anybody would be scared if they see these guys come up to them, masked, not in uniform, guns out.”

City of Santa Ana councilmember Jonathan Hernandez, also on Democracy Now!, added, “We are watching violence unfold, racial profiling increase in cities like Santa Ana, where 41% of our residents are migrants, 70% are of Latino descent…agents come into our community, and they’re refusing to identify themselves, they don’t have judicial warrants and these ICE raids are an example of the government’s overreach.”

In mid-June, President Trump briefly paused immigration raids on farms, hotels and restaurants, ostensibly to ensure these key industries that have supported him in the past continue to do so. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote.

Soon after, he reversed himself. The short pause revealed a fundamental truth about undocumented immigrants: the US economy doesn’t function without them. Nevertheless, urged on by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, ICE, Homeland Security and Border agents are snatching and deporting the very workers on whom our economy depends.

There are some sectors of the economy that are thriving amidst the mass deportations. GEO Group, the private prison corporation, has seen its stock rise by over 50% since Trump’s election. Palantir, the tech and AI firm co-founded by Trump backer, billionaire Peter Thiel, has seen its stock rise over 500% in the past year. It was recently reported that Palantir is building tools to allow near real-time tracking of immigrants in the US. The Program on Government Oversight, POGO, reported that Stephen Miller’s financial disclosure reveals he owns up to $250,000 in Palantir stock.

Meanwhile, the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court has handed Trump a deportation-related victory. Several immigrants sued the government to stop or reverse deportations to Guatemala, South Sudan and Libya. A federal judge in Massachusetts issued an injunction against these so-called “third party nation removals.” This week, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices overturned that injunction, without comment. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that the Trump administration’s “flagrantly unlawful conduct,” backed by the Supreme Court, is “exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

Resistance is active, growing and making a difference. Grassroots pressure and legal battles have won the release of international students targeted for their solidarity with Palestinians, among them Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and the first such student arrested and threatened with deportation, Mahmoud Khalil.

Likewise, grassroots, legal and Congressional pressure forced the Trump administration to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. The Maryland father received asylum during Trump’s first term, in 2019, based on credible threats from an El Salvador gang. Then, this past March 12th, he was snatched from a parking lot and sent, against a court order, to El Salvador.

Under enormous legal and grassroots pressure, the federal government finally returned Abrego Garcia to the US. Despite that victory, upon his return the federal government promptly rearrested him, charging him with human trafficking for allegedly driving undocumented immigrants several years ago. He remains in federal custody in Tennessee, and, if released, ICE will likely attempt to deport him.

Meanwhile, Narciso Barranco sits in ICE detention, with his two sons still on active duty in the US Marines not far away, at Fort Pendleton. It is past time to unmask the violent agents targeting people like Narciso, and halt Trump’s racist, xenophobic mass detentions and deportations.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

A terror campaign is sweeping the United States, orchestrated from inside the White House and waged by masked, militarized federal agents. Its primary targets are immigrants. Also included are those in solidarity with immigrants, and, increasingly, elected officials, all from the Democratic Party. This state repression has a dark and disturbing parallel: vigilante violence. Last weekend in Minnesota, a masked gunman posing as a police officer shot and killed a prominent Democratic elected official and her husband, and shot and almost killed another elected official and his wife. While a suspect has been arrested, the question remains: if masked agents come to your door, are they police, ICE, or could they be assassins?

Vance Boelter, 57, an white evangelical Christian preacher and mortuary worker, is accused of murdering Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in the middle of the night on Saturday, June 14th. About 90 minutes earlier, Boelter, dressed as a police officer with a black SUV modified to look like a police car, banged on the front door of state Senator John Hoffman’s home. Boelter allegedly shot Hoffman and his wife Yvette multiple times. He is also accused of seeking two other Minnesota elected officials that night.

While exiting the Hortman home, Boelter was confronted by local police. He retreated back into the house, firing his gun then fleeing out the back door, leaving the couple dead. He abandoned his SUV with its small arsenal of weapons and a notebook that contained a “hit list” of at least 45 elected officials – all Democrats – along with abortion providers and healthcare workers.

These political assassinations took place hours before millions of people across the United States – including in Minneapolis and St. Paul – would gather for the “No Kings” day of protests. The protests were held in response to President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, DC, which he held on his 79th birthday. Boelter had “No Kings” flyers in his car, suggesting he also may have been targeting the protests. By late Sunday, after the largest manhunt in Minnesota history, Boelter had been caught. But in a nation awash with over 300 million guns and with Trump fanning the flames of division, the risk of political violence is extreme.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to promise to deliver “the largest mass deportation in US history.” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, considered the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, has demanded federal officers meet a daily quota of 3,000 arrests.

To meet that goal, ICE and agents from the Dept. of Homeland Security have been sweeping worksites, homes, restaurants, marketplaces and anywhere they think large numbers of undocumented immigrants might gather – also sweeping up citizens and documented residents as well, denying almost everyone their rights to due process.

Elected officials have challenged this lawlessness, and in some cases, been arrested as well. Most recently, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, also a candidate in next week’s Democratic mayoral primary, was in a Manhattan federal building on Tuesday, escorting asylum seekers from immigration court. ICE agents waiting by the elevator attempted to arrest a man, and, when Lander demanded to see a judicial warrant, they violently arrested him too.

Speaking the next morning on the Democracy Now! news hour, Lander said,

“Pam Bondi was very clear, they’re trying to wreak havoc In cities. They say, to liberate Democratic cities from their duly-elected officials. This is part of what authoritarians do: strike fear into immigrant families and communities and try to undermine the rule of law and basic democracy by stoking conflict. Our challenge is to find a way to stand up for the rule of law, for due process, for people’s rights, and to do it in a way that is nonviolent and insistent, demands it, but also doesn’t help them escalate conflict.”

Last week, California Democratic US Senator Alex Padilla entered a press conference in Los Angeles, held by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. He was immediately tackled, handcuffed and detained. Speaking Tuesday on the Senate floor, Padilla emotionally recounted,

“I was forced to the ground, first on my knees and then flat on my chest. I was handcuffed and marched down a hallway … If that is what the administration is willing to do to a United States senator for having the authority to simply ask a question, imagine what they’ll do to any American who dares to speak up.”

President Trump, Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller have proven over and over again that they will go to great lengths to silence their critics, which is all the more reason to speak out.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The die is cast. President Donald Trump has deployed the military against protesters in his drive for authoritarian control. The week started with Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard, deploying 2,000 troops to Los Angeles, to quell growing protests against his attempted mass deportations and against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom. The week ends with Abrams tanks rolling through the streets of Washington, DC in the first military parade in decades, demanded by Trump at a cost to taxpayers estimated as high as $100 million. While the parade officially falls on the US Army’s 250th anniversary, they had not planned on a parade. Trump ordered there be one on June 14th – his 79th birthday.

Amidst this, Trump gave what may have been his most ominous speech ever, speaking Tuesday at the US Army’s Fort Bragg. The speech included the usual boasts, lies, insults, threats, endlessly rehashed grievances like the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and so on, along with his usual and disgraceful attack on the press. What stood out at Fort Bragg, though, was his backdrop: several rows of US Army soldiers. That imagery in itself is not particularly noteworthy; every president in recent decades has used troops as political props. What stood out this time was the behavior of the troops.

As Trump lambasted California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the troops booed in support of him. According to Military.com, the troops behind him were vetted for allegiance and appearance. This partisan, political rallying of soldiers signals a dangerous development. If Trump succeeds in bending the armed forces to his will, US democracy, with all its imperfections, will truly be in peril.

“In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles. They’re incompetent,” Trump said at Fort Bragg, as the troops responded with boos.

Trump also ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to ready troops for deployment on US soil, a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of military domestically. By Wednesday, 700 US Marines from Fort Pendleton in California had been deployed to Los Angeles.

In touting his Washington, DC, military parade, Trump threatened, “For those people who want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force…with very heavy force.” Trump didn’t say which police or military entity would be using the force, but thousands of troops are being brought into DC for the parade. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in an explainer, there is a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act that essentially allows presidents to use the District of Columbia National Guard for law enforcement “whenever they choose.”

“He’s inflaming tensions. He’s provoking a situation,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta explained on the Democracy Now! news hour, after filing suit to block Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and the Marines to LA. “Unfortunately, I think he wants conflict. He wants something to erupt so that that provides the basis for him to try to grasp and seize additional power. His throughline and his modus operandi is to just seek more power. That’s why he calls everything that’s not an emergency an emergency. He calls things that aren’t an invasion an invasion. He uses that language very specifically, because those are the triggers to give him more authority.”

Mayor Karen Bass declared a second night of curfew on Wednesday as anti-ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) protests continued there, and spread rapidly around the country.

US Congressmember Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Chicago and the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, also spoke on Democracy Now! against Trump’s tactics:

“What you are seeing is the beginning of fascism, point blank. He is sending the military to the cities that would dare to have dissent and resistance…What he is about is control, suppressing dissent in order to dismantle resistance. The threats of sending these special ICE teams to Chicago, to Seattle and other cities is about making sure that he can dismantle any organizing.”

Any efforts by Trump and his followers to disrupt or dismantle grassroots organizing appear to be failing. While organic protests continue to spring up nationwide, often led by immigrants themselves, Indivisible and other groups declared June 14th “No Kings Day,” and have organized at least 1,800 protests around the country to challenge Trump’s authoritarian power grab.

As the summer heats up and with US democracy increasingly at risk, two fundamental truths must remain front and center: people have a First Amendment right to protest, and US soldiers have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

President Donald Trump issued an extensive travel ban on Wednesday, expanding one of the most controversial policies of his first term, the “Muslim ban.” Back then, Trump’s travel ban was challenged in court but ultimately, in 2018, its third scaled-down version was permitted by the Supreme Court. This followed a White House meeting in which Trump referred to Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries,” according to meeting participants like Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin. Trump also said he would prefer more immigrants from Norway, one of the world’s wealthiest and whitest nations.

Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump, only now surrounded by sycophants eager to enable his whims, and with an even stronger majority on the Supreme Court. Trump’s new travel ban parallels the attempted mass deportations he promised while campaigning. Despite numerous setbacks in the courts and growing public opposition, the deportation program is upending the lives of countless immigrants and their families in a chaotic spree of ICE arrests, indefinite imprisonment – in many cases in violation of court orders – and removal from the US. The White House has already sent deportees to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, and is reportedly negotiating with other countries to form a global gulag of prisons in nations seeking Trump’s favor.

Trump’s new travel ban, which takes effect on June 9th, bars individuals from 12 countries and limits travel from seven more. Complete bans were announced for Afghanistan, Myanmar/Burma, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It restricts travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

About half these countries are in Africa, and about half are majority Muslim. All of them are populated to a vast degree by people of color. The world’s three poorest countries, per capita – Yemen, Burundi, and Afghanistan – are on the list. It’s worth noting that at a 2024 campaign event, Trump mused, “Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries…Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

The ban immediately drew criticism from human rights advocates, and constitutional lawyers and others. Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Democracy Now! news hour,

“It’s significant on its own, but more so in a continuum with a series showcasing, almost day by day or week by week, some new immigration policy that effectuates their sort of evangelical, white supremacist fantasy about this country.”

Trump promised to seek out rapists and murderers to deport. But, in reality, as plainly stated by his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, considered the architect of the mass deportation policy, it’s really about the numbers, and hardworking immigrants who obey the law will be targeted as well.

The conservative Washington Examiner reported that Miller summoned the heads of 25 ICE and Homeland Security field offices to DC to excoriate them on low deportation numbers. Quoting an anonymous source, the Examiner reported,

“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.”

Miller told Fox News,

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day.”

On the ground, the Trump/Miller deportation spree is tearing apart families, while at the same time, provoking increasing resistance.

“This cannot continue to be how we, as a country, are treating people who are here in search of safety and protection, who are our neighbors, our friends, our church families,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, on Democracy Now! “We are literally destroying lives instead of giving them the opportunity to continue to live their lives here with dignity and compassion.”

On May 30th, 20 armed, masked ICE agents in tactical gear raided a popular San Diego Italian restaurant. The agents handcuffed the entire staff and ultimately arrested four workers. When bystanders attempted to block ICE vehicles from leaving the scene, ICE agents threw flash-bang smoke grenades at the outraged crowd.

Adriana Jasso, an immigration and human rights advocate based in San Diego, has been organizing and educating immigrant communities about their rights and how to protect themselves against ICE raids.

“We understand and have adhered to our historical responsibility to fight back, to resist and to denounce and take the moral imperative,” Jasso told Democracy Now! “This also could be an opportunity for the movement to gain the strength to stand up and face a fascistic, harmful government that has done away with the fundamental human rights and constitutional rights that we as communities deserve.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Six-hundred days on, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is at its darkest point yet,” reads the latest statement by the UN’s Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which coordinates Palestinian aid. Israel has kept Gaza under a near total siege for three months, preventing food, medicine, fuel and clean water from reaching Gaza’s more than two million residents. Deaths from starvation mount as the Israeli military bombs and assaults hospitals, homes and tent camps for the displaced in so-called “safe zones.”

“Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase of this cruel conflict,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on May 23rd. “The entire population of Gaza is facing the risk of famine. Families are being starved and denied the very basics. All with the world watching in real time.”

Israel’s violence is waged on Gaza with bipartisan US support. On the same day that Guterres spoke, Israel bombed the home of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar while she worked at the Nasser Medical Complex’s emergency room. Nine of her ten children were killed. Her husband, also a doctor, and her sole surviving child, 11-year-old Adam, were grievously injured.

Her brother-in-law, Ali al-Najjar, responded to the attack:

“We started pulling out charred bodies. One of the Civil Defense workers was handing me one of the bodies. She [Dr. Alaa al-Najjar], standing next to me, recognized it. She said, ‘This is Reval. Give her to me,’…as if her daughter were still alive. She asked to hold her in her arms…She wanted to embrace her daughter, forgetting that her daughter was burned in front of her eyes. We took those charred children and transferred them to Nasser Hospital. I took the doctor with me. She is now caught between the dead, her only surviving child and her husband, who is between life and death.”

Adam was rushed to Nasser Hospital’s emergency room, where he was treated by Dr. Graeme Groom, an orthopedic surgeon from London volunteering in Gaza.

“It’s difficult for me to describe the horror of what happened to her family, because we were in the operating theater all day, and this little scrap of humanity arrived when we should have finished what we had planned to do. Poor Adam was sent up to us for us to remove his left arm,” Dr. Groome said days later, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour. “People who are very, very close to explosions have what we call a traumatic brain injury. Their brains are scrambled, and their cognitive function may be permanently damaged. We will continue to work on his arm and his other injuries. Time will tell about his brain injury.”

Those Palestinians in Gaza who have miraculously avoided death or injury during Israel’s more than 600-day assault and siege still face catastrophic food shortages, lack of clean water and sanitation, and the crushing physical and psychic trauma of sustained siege, hunger and war.

Al Jazeera reports Israel is targeting community kitchens, with up to 20 of the small but vital facilities destroyed in recent weeks. This further drives the desperate population to limited aid stations set up by a shady, US-based, Israeli-backed organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Hours before GHF began operations this week, its executive director Jake Wood resigned, writing, “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Scahill described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Democracy Now!:

“It was established by people with ties to the CIA and Israeli intelligence, meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. Netanyahu himself said…that he was getting some pressure, even from his most passionate backers in the Republicans in the Senate. He said that they didn’t want the optics of starving Palestinians, that this could hinder the ability of the United States to continue arming and supporting him, and so they wanted to give the veneer of some form of aid.”

Scahill says that GHF “created what international aid officials have said are concentration camp, or internment camp, like conditions” to distribute paltry food aid. Troops guarding the installations have fired into the crowds, killing and injuring people seeking food.

While Gazans face starvation, President Donald Trump maintains his plan for the US to “own” Gaza, to develop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” NBC reported the Trump administration discussed plans to resettle up to one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, which the White House denies. Regardless of the destination, ethnic cleansing is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, citizens and students around the world continue to defy crackdowns on Palestinian solidarity protests, demanding a just and enduring peace in Israel/Palestine.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Columbia University held graduation this week, with thousands receiving their degrees. Some students were missing, though, casting a pall over the proceedings and provoking protests, evidence of ongoing Palestinian solidarity among Columbia’s students, faculty and staff despite the university’s efforts to crush it.

Mohsen Mahdawi was there. As he ascended the stage, he thrust his arms high, his hands giving peace signs to cheers and a standing ovation from his classmates. Mohsen, a Palestinian-born green card holder, was arrested by masked and hooded ICE agents on April 14th when he appeared for his naturalization interview in Vermont. After two weeks in prison, federal Judge Geoffrey Crawford ordered Mohsen’s release, writing: “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 [and] during the McCarthy period in the 1950s.”

When the Trump administration attempted to deny Mohsen permission to travel to his graduation, Judge Crawford further ruled, “During his time in New York State, Mr. Mahdawi is permitted to move freely and conduct his daily activities normally including, but not limited to, meeting with elected officials, speaking with and being interviewed by members of the press and media, speaking at public events, attending protests.”

Shortly after receiving his diploma, Mohsen described how he felt, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“There is a strong sense of joy that I am able to come to this university all the way from a refugee camp, to survive the war.”

He continued, “There is sadness that my family, my parents, could not leave the West Bank and come and see this moment. Sadness that there are no universities left in Gaza where students can experience such joy, where hope can be harnessed.”

Mohsen is only one of many international students targeted by the Trump administration, solely for expressing solidarity with Palestinians and opposing the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Others include Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University grad student from Turkey who was in the US on a student visa. She was snatched off the street by a group of masked, plainclothes federal agents for co-authoring an op-ed in the Tufts newspaper supporting Palestine. Rumeysa spent six weeks in a Louisiana immigration jail until the same Vermont federal court ordered her release.

Another student abducted by ICE is Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student with a green card who is married to a US citizen. His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, a dentist, was eight months pregnant at the time of his arrest on March 8th. He was briefly held in New Jersey before ICE flew him to Jena, Louisiana, where he remains locked up. He was denied permission to be with his wife when she gave birth to their first child, a son, Deen, on April 21st. On May 22nd, after legal efforts and public outcry, Mahmoud was granted a one-hour contact visit with Noor, and was finally able to hold their newborn son for the first time.

Mahmoud was an organizer of the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment and chief negotiator with the university. He is a Palestinian, born in Syria, holding Algerian citizenship. As with others targeted for removal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims Mahmoud’s continued presence in the US “would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Mahmoud’s supporters held an alternative graduation ceremony for him, at a church near campus, where his wife read a statement written by Mahmoud in prison: “‘I was taken from my family and from you, detained simply for speaking the truth about Palestine. Columbia University, the place where we sought knowledge, justice and truth, chose silence instead of solidarity. It failed me, but you didn’t.’”

Mahmoud Khalil wasn’t completely erased at the official proceedings, however. When Columbia University’s acting President Claire Shipman attempted to address the graduates, they replied with sustained booing, followed by, “Free Mahmoud! Free Mahmoud!”

Israel’s assault on Gaza that inspired the Columbia encampments over 19 months ago continues, as do mass protests around the world. Traditional allies of Israel, like the UK, Canada, France and the European Union, are taking steps to limit trade and other relations, demanding Israel allow food and aid into Gaza.

Mohsen Mahdawi remains committed to peace. Though in the final steps on his path to citizenship, he now must fight deportation. Standing in his cap and gown outside Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he’s been accepted for graduate school, he described his hopes for the future:

“I am coming here to be in the middle of this fire, because I am a peacemaker, because I am a firefighter. I will come here to study international affairs, focusing on diplomacy and security, and focusing on conflict resolution and peacemaking. This is the story of hope, from a refugee camp to Columbia.”