By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

May Day, May 1st, has long been a day of protest, and this year is no exception. Protests are happening across the country, against President Donald Trump and his attack on the social safety net, on immigrants, on people of color and the LGBTQ community, and more.

On May 1st, 1971, massive protests against the Vietnam war engulfed Washington, DC. Most participants were organized into affinity groups – small groups of trusted friends and associates considered more difficult for authorities to infiltrate and disrupt. One of those affinity groups included MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn, and Pentagon consultant and former Marine officer Daniel Ellsberg. An estimated 12,000 people were arrested during the protests on that May Day and the days that followed.

Six weeks later, the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, the US government’s secret history of its involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg was the whistleblower who leaked the classified papers, and that act of courage would change not only his life, but the trajectory of the war.

On April 30th, 1975, fifty years ago, the last of the US military and embassy officials fled Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, as North Vietnamese tanks rolled in. The war was officially over.

We interviewed Dan Ellsberg many times over the years on the Democracy Now! news hour. Our final interview with him was just weeks before he died. It aired, coincidentally, on May Day, 2023. He had just received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and, at 92, knew his time was short. Referring to the late 1960s, when he worked as a RAND consultant to the Pentagon and began secretly photocopying the Pentagon Papers, Dan Ellsberg recalled,

“The people I was working with in the government felt — everyone I could think of felt the war was hopeless, essentially. It was hopelessly stalemated, and there was no coming out. ‘Stalemate’ was taboo the year I came back from Vietnam with hepatitis, in 1967, after two years there. Lyndon Johnson had said, ‘No official is to use the word or hint at the word stalemate.’ And yet, that’s where it was. So, the war continued.”

Six weeks before Chomsky, Ellsberg and Zinn protested on May Day, 1971, Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam. As Saigon fell, Viet, then four years old, fled with his family to the United States. They were sent to a military camp in Pennsylvania with other refugees, then eventually settled in California. Viet Thanh Nguyen is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at the University of Southern California, USC. Now on tour for his new book, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other,” he joined us on Democracy Now!, reflecting on the Vietnam war and the long history of mistakes committed there by the United States:

“The mistakes American presidents have made started with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, refusing to listen to the appeal of a very young Ho Chi Minh in Paris, who had come to ask for American recognition of the Vietnamese quest for independence. From that mistake, we’ve had a series of mistakes over the past century, mostly revolving around the fact that the United States did not recognize Vietnamese self-determination. The US meddled in Vietnamese affairs, sided with the French in terms of their colonization, took over the French efforts after the French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh in 1954.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen continued, “If the United States had not interfered, I think the outcome in the long term would have been pretty much exactly the same, with Vietnam turning into a capitalist economy, which it pretty much is now, and the United States relying on Vietnam as an ally against China. The difference would have been that …at least 3 million Vietnamese people wouldn’t have died, and hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen concluded, “In 1975 the majority of Americans did not want to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia…Fast-forward 50 years, I would say that the majority of Americans, if they thought about Southeast Asian Americans in the United States, probably generally have pretty positive images of people like us, because of our food and our ethnic enclaves and the like. And meanwhile, there are now new people to be afraid of. And this is an old cycle in American history.”

President Trump marked his 100th day in office this week, demonizing immigrants, defying court orders and wielding executive power with little restraint. Meanwhile, on May Day, over 1,000 separate protest events were planned from Bethel, Alaska to Madawaksa, Maine, and across the Atlantic in London and Paris.

This is not the first time a homegrown authoritarian has threatened the United States. The question now is whether the power of the people can rise to this moment.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

President Donald Trump hates the press perhaps as much as he loves it. Since his 2015 embrace of electoral politics, though, his lifelong craving for headlines has been at odds with adversarial journalism that holds him to account. Thus, he attacks the press as the “enemy of the people,” insults journalists and even incites violence against them. Now, in his second term, his attacks have multiplied, not only on news outlets that report his abuses of power, but on the very existence of a free press.

Trump gave one of his more frightening speeches on March 14th, before a large crowd at the Department of Justice. While the DOJ is supposed to be independent, Trump’s rambling speech was essentially a roadmap to the assembled federal prosecutors and FBI agents gathered, directing them to launch his campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies, including the press.

“I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me are political arms of the Democrat party. In my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” Trump said.

While Trump may have never read the First Amendment to the US Constitution, you can be sure that most of his audience that day had. The First Amendment reads in part, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Indeed, journalism is one of the only professions explicitly protected by the Constitution.

In his drive towards authoritarianism, Trump isn’t going to be deterred by 250 years of constitutional precedent.

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, laid out specifics around Trump’s attack on the press, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“They might go after the nonprofit tax-exempt status of much of the progressive media…Public broadcasting broadcasts on frequencies that are allocated by the FCC. The FCC could say, ‘hey, actually, we need those frequencies for national security purposes, and public radio stations you don’t get to broadcast over the air anymore…You already have a kind of anticipatory capitulation appeasement on the part of big corporate owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times, and sometimes the New York Times feels like it’s pulling its punches. Because when a billionaire owns a media property, – I hate the word – they have their other business interests to look out for, Shari Redstone being a classic example.”

Redstone is the heiress behind the multinational Paramount Global media empire, which owns a slew of media companies including CBS, Paramount, the CW and BET television networks, Comedy Central and more. Redstone has been trying to engineer a merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, run by founder and CEO David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person and co-founder of software giant Oracle.

Redstone stands to reap billions from the merger, which still has to pass regulatory hurdles at the Federal Communications Commission.

This might explain why Redstone, as reported by Semafor, “kept tabs on ‘60 Minutes’ segments on Trump.” CBS’ storied investigative TV news magazine was sued by Trump, claiming the show engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior” in its edit of an October interview with his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Redstone is reportedly seeking a settlement in what was widely considered to be a frivolous lawsuit, to advance the merger.

Amidst rumors of a CBS settlement with Trump, long-time ‘60 Minutes’ executive producer Bill Owens resigned. In a memo obtained by the New York Times, Owens wrote, “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ’60 Minutes,′ right for the audience.”

Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa knows something about attacks on the press. The founder of the Rappler news website in The Philippines suffered countless legal attacks and threats of arrest and violence under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

“The biggest lesson we learned is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks,” Ressa said on Democracy Now! “I’m a traditional journalist in the old sense of the word, and I didn’t want to be an activist. But when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism. In our case, I said, we hold the line. This is the line where the Constitution gives us our rights.”

Respected journalist Maria Ressa remains free, while former President Duterte is now imprisoned in The Hague, awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

A free press is a bulwark against authoritarianism. Trump knows this, which is why we all need to support and defend independent journalism, while we still can.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

April 15th is tax day in the United States, when most of us – the wealthiest excepted – pay our share of taxes to fund the government. This includes three key pillars of the social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These three, like almost every federal government department, are being gutted by President Trump and his main funder, a man often called “the co-president,” billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

For generations, politicians couldn’t touch Social Security. The immensely popular program was the “Third Rail” of politics, that electrified rail that powers subway lines, potentially fatal if touched. Now, as Trump approaches his 100th day of his second term, it appears that even Social Security is being targeted.

April 15th, in addition to being Tax Day, was also the Hands Off Social Security National Day of Action, convened by the advocacy organization Social Security Works. Participants organized rallies across the nation with signs like “Protect, Defend, Expand Social Security” and “Social Security Works, Billionaires Don’t!” These protests are part of the rapidly growing grassroots movement to block the Trump/Musk attack on government and against draconian deportations.

“Donald Trump has a problem,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, said on the Democracy Now! news hour, before heading off to a protest. “He ran around the country, flooding the swing states, saying he would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, but in his first term he proposed cuts to those programs every single year, which didn’t go through. [Now] He’s claiming that there’s enormous amount of fraud, which is a lie — there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud — so when he cuts your benefits, he’ll be saying he’s cutting fraud, he’s not cutting the benefits that you have earned.”

This strategy was most clearly expressed by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, another billionaire, who said in a recent interview, “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.” Obviously, there are very few mothers-in-law of billionaires among Social Security’s beneficiaries.

According to Social Security Works, around half of all seniors rely on Social Security for most of their income, while 25% of seniors rely on it for virtually all of their income. The average annual payout to these seniors is just $20,000.

“It’s really hard to imagine what their endgame is, other than destroying our Social Security system,” Social Security Works’ Altman added. “There are over 70 million Americans who receive monthly benefits that they have earned. [S]eniors, people with disabilities. It’s the nation’s largest children’s program. Many of them have mobility issues.”

In an explosive exposé, The New York Times recently reported that 6,300 immigrants who had legally received Social Security numbers had been transferred to the agency’s “death master file,” to declare these living, working, tax-paying people as dead. The Times report, “the goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits,” to encourage them to “self-deport.”

Social Security was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 90 years ago, on August 14th, 1935. The program was championed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in US history. The sweeping law provided not only Social Security’s pension for seniors, but also unemployment insurance, when unemployment amidst the Great Depression was over 20%, as well as financial assistance to mothers and children in need, to the blind, and to those with disabilities.

Frances Perkins was a consummately savvy politician and a brilliant public communicator. In a January, 1935 op-ed in the New York Times, she wrote,

“It is only beginning to be recognized in the United States that social insurance is a fundamental part of another great forward step in that liberation of humanity which began with the Renaissance…the world-wide move toward social security marks another great step along the road of that development we call civilization.”

Republican politicians know that to promote the elimination or even the privatization of Social Security is political suicide. Instead, the DOGE plan seems to be to render it dysfunctional, by shuttering field offices, massively reducing its workforce, thus abandoning the most vulnerable among us, who have the least political influence. This is what Trump and Musk clearly intend. The urgent work now is to stop them.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

In March, 2023, Donald Trump addressed CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, “In 2016 I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Since taking office, Trump has kept up his promise to unleash retribution, like his promised mass deportations and his constant demonization of immigrants.

Take, for example, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who left El Salvador at the age of 16. His mother ran a successful food business, and a local gang had extorted the family and threatened to kill him. He fled to the US, and settled in Maryland, working as a day laborer. In 2019, during Trump’s first term as president, Abrego Garcia was arrested and accused without evidence of being an MS-13 gang member. In an immigration hearing held by Trump’s own Justice Department, Abrego Garcia was cleared of gang membership and granted asylum due to the threats he faced back in El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia was released with a work permit. He resumed his life in Maryland with his US citizen wife and their three children. He was working as a union sheet metal apprentice when, this past March 12th, he was again arrested by ICE with no warrant. He was taken to Baltimore, then, he told his wife over the phone, he thought he was in Louisiana. The last time he was able to contact anyone was March 15th, when he called his wife from Texas, and told her he was being sent to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Kilmar Abrego Garcia hasn’t been heard from since.

His family is suing for his release. Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland questioned a career DOJ immigration attorney, Erez Reuveni, about Abrego Garcia’s detention in CECOT.

“Why is he [in CECOT] of all places,” the judge asked.

Mr. Reuveni: “I don’t know. That information has not been given to me.”

The Trump administration, after transferring Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, now says it can’t return him.

“Very practically, why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego Garcia back,” Judge Xinis asked.

Attorney Erez Reuveni replied, “Your Honor, I will say, for the Court’s awareness, that when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question. I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”

Following that candid exchange, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney who now serves as US Deputy Attorney General, suspended Reuveni from his career position as a top DOJ immigration lawyer.

Judge Xinis ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia home, but the Trump administration claims it cannot – even though they are paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison immigrants. A federal appeals court agreed with Xinis. The Trump administration brought the case before the US Supreme Court, which promptly ordered the US to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and grant him due process.

“What’s different about this case is that we brought it to their attention, we filed a lawsuit, and there was just, essentially, no response whatsoever,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The posture of the administration has been, ‘Yeah, we made a mistake. No, we’re not going to do anything whatsoever to fix it, and, no, court can order us to fix it.’ That’s really what’s remarkable.”

There are hundreds more who have been removed to CECOT, all of them accused without evidence by Trump and his subordinates of being dangerous gang members. An estimated 90% of them have no criminal records. Most of them were rounded up and shipped to El Salvador under the authority claimed by Trump using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that has only been used a handful of times in US history, most recently during WWII.

International students at universities across the nation are also being targeted, having their visas revoked if suspected of engaging in Palestine solidarity protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that any student that creates a “ruckus” while in the US will have their visa revoked. So far, an estimated 300 students have been stripped of their visas. Several have been arrested.

“What is Trump doing?” Constitutional law scholar and Georgetown professor David Cole asked on Democracy Now! “He’s targeting the most vulnerable, immigrants, dissidents, transgender folks, people of color. But he’s also seeking to neutralize any place where there might be opposition, the checks and balances, so removing heads of agencies, removing inspectors general, targeting the press and punishing them if they disagree, targeting law firms and punishing them if they disagree, and now also targeting universities and punishing them in totally unlawful ways.”

There is a force more powerful than authoritarians: the power of people, organized in solidarity and resistance.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The Trump administration’s nationwide roundup of international students accused of holding opinions it dislikes is picking up speed, sowing fear, separating families and driving people to go underground or out of the country. This targeting appeals to President Trump and his followers as it bolsters three pillars of the MAGA movement: It attacks universities, long reviled as a source of liberal power; it fuels the anti-immigrant fervor long promoted by people like Trump advisor Stephen Miller; thirdly, by targeting Palestinian solidarity activists on campus, it amplifies the false narrative that criticizing the state of Israel is antisemitic (even though many of the protesters are Jewish) enabling the attacks on academia while providing cover for Israel’s resumed ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

History teaches us that standing by silently as others are disappeared is a failed strategy, as the next person grabbed off the street by masked agents of the state may be you.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student until last December, was the first arrested, on March 8. He was a legal permanent resident of the United States, with a green card (now revoked). His wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen who is about to give birth to their first child. Eight months pregnant, she filmed her husband’s arrest as she spoke to his lawyer on the phone. She tried to learn the identities of the arresting plainclothes agents as they dragged Mahmoud into an unmarked car.

Mahmoud joined in the Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University last spring, and was accepted by both the protesters and administration as a negotiator. He thus had a prominent public role in the first major protest encampment against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which sparked similar encampments nationwide. This is very likely why he was targeted for deportation. He has been held in an ICE jail in Jena, Louisiana, since March 9. A federal judge has blocked his deportation while his legal team fights for his release.

Days after his arrest, President Donald Trump threatened on his social media site, “This is the first arrest of many to come.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressing the press on March 27, claimed that at least 300 student visas had been revoked.

Names of those targeted have been surfacing day by day.

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia graduate student, left for Canada after her visa was revoked and agents came to her door. She wrote in an open letter, “With the rapidly escalating situation, the criminalization of free speech, and imminent travel bans, what has happened to me can happen to you. … We must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions.”

Momodou Taal, a graduate student at Cornell University and a citizen of both the U.K. and The Gambia, left the U.S. rather than risk deportation or imprisonment. Before leaving, he appeared on the Democracy Now! news hour, saying from an undisclosed location, “What we’re seeing now isn’t just a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech … but we’re seeing that any criticism of the state of Israel, any criticism of the United States government or Trump’s administration, you can be liable for deportation.”

Those targeted include Columbia students Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the Occupied West Bank, and Yunseo Chung, a South Korean native and green card holder, who has been in the U.S. since she was 7 years old. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical doctor, was deported to Lebanon. Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University has been locked up by ICE, not for his activism, but likely because his wife, a U.S. citizen and thus not deportable, is an activist.

In one of the most disturbing incidents, Tufts University Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the street outside Boston by half a dozen masked ICE agents as she was walking to iftar with friends, to break the daily fast during Ramadan. The abduction, caught on a neighbor’s doorbell camera, was a chilling demonstration of the brutal tactics being used against this vulnerable population. The day after her arrest, over 1,000 people turned out to protest near Tufts, demanding her release.

Back at Columbia University, protests continue. On Wednesday, about a dozen Jewish students chained themselves to two campus gates. Aharon Dardik, an Israeli American student, speaking to Democracy Now!, explained why:

“We, as Jewish students … said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was amongst the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try to deport him.”

Among the signs they held was one that read, “First, they came for Mahmoud,” a reference to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous saying from Nazi Germany that ends, “and I said nothing … then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces.”

These words, written by 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, were posted online by friends after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 24th.

That same day, Hossam posted on Instagram that Mohammed Mansour, a reporter for Palestine Today TV, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. An hour later, Hossam himself was killed. He and Mohammed Mansour are just the latest of over 200 journalists and media workers killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel began its assault on October 7, 2023.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a journalist with Drop Site News who has reported from Gaza, now edits and translates Drop Site’s correspondents there, as Israel has blocked foreign reporters from entering. Sharif recently returned from London, where his latest Gaza documentary for Al Jazeera English, The Night Won’t End, won the Royal Television Society Award. The documentary, which relied on Gaza-based Palestinian videographers, also won the coveted Overseas Press Club Award here in the U.S.

Sharif was in the process of editing a piece from Hossam Shabat when he learned of his death.

“We have to be very clear: Hossam was deliberately killed,” Sharif said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “He was assassinated by the Israeli military. The Israeli military has openly admitted to this. They called him a terrorist, and they said, ‘Don’t let the press vest fool you.’”

Sharif shared the 2022 George Polk Award for the documentary The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, about Israel’s killing of the renowned Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist in the occupied West Bank, on May 11, 2022. The Polk award is named after a U.S. journalist summarily executed while reporting on the Greek civil war in 1948. Violence against journalists is not new. In the case of Polk and Abu Akleh, as with so many others, journalists are killed by U.S.-backed and armed regimes. Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza, however, has taken this violence to a new, unprecedented scale.

“Israel has a long history of killing journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, with impunity,” Sharif Abdel Kouddous continued. “Hossam and five other journalists in October were placed on, essentially, a hit list by the Israeli military.”

Hossam received numerous death threats via phone and text. A reporter asked him if he would continue reporting. Hossam replied:

“There are massacres and bombings, so we must continue covering and spreading the truth. The Israeli occupation is determined to chase down journalists to prevent the exposure of their crimes.”

Hossam’s final article, posted posthumously at Drop Site News, provided a graphic depiction of Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza after abandoning the short-lived ceasefire. He wrote:

“As the bombs rained down, the wails of neighbors announced the first moments of the resumption of Israel’s military campaign. Beit Hanoun was plunged into panic and terror. Cries of distress rose amid the screech of the shells in a scene that reflected the magnitude of the disaster engulfing the city. This was only the beginning. The massacre of entire families quickly followed.”

In his self-written epitaph, Hossam Shabat wrote, “For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavement, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”

Now he has joined Gaza’s dead, over 50,000 killed by the Israeli military since October 2023. That number is widely believed to be a vast undercount, as many bodies remain beneath the rubble.

Most of what we know of the ongoing suffering in Gaza comes from Palestinian journalists who remain alive. Among them is 22-year-old Abubaker Abed. After Hossam’s death, he spoke on Democracy Now! from Deir al Balah, in Gaza, where he has been diagnosed with malnutrition, his whole body aching:

“We are facing death in every single direction, from starvation, from the relentless bombardments and from the conditions that we are living under. It’s a very horrific situation…as long as the world allows Israel to do so, this will not stop. We need more people to come out in the streets, to close the roads and to go on global strikes to make sure that this can be lifted, that this blockade and this aggression can be stopped.”

Expressions of solidarity with Palestinians in the U.S., under President Donald Trump’s administration, are being met with intimidation, arrests, and, for foreign students, threats of deportation.

The targeting of dissenters, like the targeting of journalists, as well as the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine, must end.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Jeanette Vizguerra understands all too well the injustice inherent in the US immigration system. Last Monday she was arrested outside her workplace in Colorado by ICE agents who were reportedly “laughing in her face” as they took her to the Aurora ICE jail run by the for-profit GEO Group. As this goes to print, she remains locked up, facing deportation.

For almost 30 years Jeanette Vizguerra has built a life in this country, becoming a well-known organizer and activist for immigrant rights and other social justice causes. Her arrest signals a clear trend targeting activists as part of President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign.

Jeanette and her husband and six year-old daughter fled Mexico in 1997 after he was threatened with murder at gunpoint. They settled in Colorado. There she worked as an SEIU labor organizer, volunteered with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and founded the activist organizations Dreamer’s Mothers in Action-Colorado, Abolish ICE Denver, and Sanctuary4All. She did all this while working numerous jobs and giving birth to and raising three more children, all born in the US.

In 2009 she successfully fought deportation following a routine traffic stop. Then, in 2017, during the first Trump administration, she was targeted for deportation, and took sanctuary in a Unitarian church in Denver, living there with her three young children. She received a stay of removal, but then, upon its expiration in 2019, returned to sanctuary. She received additional deportation stays during the Biden administration, but those have expired, leaving her vulnerable to Trump’s deportation crusade.

At a rally on Tuesday, as high winds drove a mix of freezing rain and snow into the crowd of close to 100 supporters rallying outside the walls of the GEO ICE jail in Aurora, Colorado, Jeanette managed to address the crowd by phone from inside. Her daughter Luna held the phone up to a microphone:

“I’m hopeful I’m going to be able to leave here and continue my fight and for others, because inside here there are many injustices. There are a lot of women whose cases are not being reviewed, and I’m going to try to help them, even being here in detention.”

To those who know Jeanette, it comes as no surprise that she was actively organizing inside the prison walls.

“The reason why they might be targeting Jeanette, she’s long been a leader,” Jennifer Piper of AFSC said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “She was among the first in the country to make her deportation case public in 2009 and really exposed the cruelty of our deportation machine, which is vast in the United States. No matter who the administration was, Jeanette has always stood and will continue to stand for justice and for dignity for all people.”

Piper says there’s increasing fear among immigrants of the Trump administration “disappearing” people.

Margaret Cargioli, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, speaking on Democracy Now!, described the case of an LGBTQ asylum seeker from Venezuela. Only after he failed to arrive at an immigration hearing on Monday did she learn that he had been sent by ICE to El Salvador’s notorious supermax “Terrorism Detention Center,” or CECOT. Watchdog groups in El Salvador report at least 350 people have died in prisons there since 2022, and torture is reportedly common inside CECOT.

“We are seriously concerned for his well-being, his safety….There was no order of deportation. There was no order of removal. He was sent there unlawfully. He still has a pending immigration court hearing. It’s coming up very soon. And he has a right to seek asylum. What happened here is extremely unusual and concerning.”

The Trump administration has invoked the more than two century old 1798 Alien Enemies Act, last used during WWII, to send over 130 Venezuelans alleged to be members of the “Tren de Aragua” gang, without evidence, to CECOT.

Trump is using the extreme right-wing government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as a brutal detention contractor. As with many of Trump’s executive actions, this is being challenged in court. Trump’s open defiance of Judge James Boasberg’s court order halting use of the 1798 law to round up migrants is pushing the United States into a constitutional crisis.

The detentions, deportations and disappearances are stoking fear in the immigrant community, which is certainly one of its main objectives.

One who remains undaunted is Jeanette Vizguerra.

“Over her entire case, her entire fight…her struggle and her leadership, her community have made the impossible possible,” the AFSC’s Jennifer Piper said.

Jeanette Vizguerra should be an example to citizens and non-citizens alike.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Words matter. When wielded maliciously by the powerful, words can harm, even kill. That’s why Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self’s words chairing a recent House subcommittee hearing deserve special condemnation. Near the hearing’s end, Self recognized the committee’s newest, most junior member, Delaware Democratic Congressmember Sarah McBride, the first transgender person elected to Congress. Self purposefully misgendered her:

Self: “I now recognize the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”

“Thank you, Madam Chair,” McBride replied, misgendering him, without missing a beat.

Self was immediately challenged by Massachusetts Democrat Bill Keating: “Mr. Chairman – could you repeat your introduction again, please?”

Self: “Yes — we have set the standard on the floor of the House, and I’m simply” —

Keating: “What is that standard, Mr. Chairman? Would you repeat what you just said when you introduced a duly-elected representative from the United States of America, please?”

Self: “I will. The representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”

“Mr. Chairman, you are out of order,” Keating said, incensed, asking, “Mr. Chairman, have you no decency?” Keating added, “You will not continue with me unless you introduce a duly elected representative the right way.”

Self quickly adjourned the hearing. His attempt to demean McBride was the latest abuse heaped on her since her November election win, flowing from President Trump’s constant incitement of anti-trans hatred to rally his MAGA base. Since Trump’s inauguration, he’s issued at least eight executive orders and memoranda targeting trans people.

Back in July 2023, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour early in her Congressional campaign, Sarah McBride anticipated the hostility she’d face if elected:

“Let the pettiness of these far-right-wing politicians contrast with our focus on progress. Let their cruelty contrast with our compassion. Let the diversity of our humanity be more fully seen in the halls of Congress and to help reinforce that trans people are part of the rich fabric of America, that we have something to offer, that we are talented, thoughtful, effective legislators.”

Laws targeting transgender people are being debated in statehouses nationwide. The latest data from Trans Legislation Tracker lists 738 bills in the 2025 pipeline, federally and in every state except Vermont. Of these, 22 have become law, 39 have failed, and 677 are still under consideration. The number of such bills being introduced has shot up exponentially in recent years. McBride explained this surge on Democracy Now!:

“Ultimately, these laws that seek to restrict access to medically necessary healthcare for transgender people, the laws we’re seeing censoring topics in schools, are all part of a cruel and concerted agenda that is meant to distract from the fact that Republicans have absolutely no policy agenda to address the needs of workers and families in this country. This is part of an ongoing strategy that the far-right wing has attempted to utilize throughout generations, which is to seek to divide and conquer. And trans people are their new target.”

This targeting fuels violence against trans people. While statistics are scattered and incomplete, over the last decade, at least 200 trans people have been murdered in the US, mostly trans women of color.

There are remarkable success stories amidst this deluge of hate. Zooey Zephyr is a trans woman elected to the Montana House of Representatives. Last week, she spoke against one of this session’s 24 anti-trans bills, one targeting “Drag story hours” and other performances:

“Here I am again to rise on another bill targeting the LGBTQ community…at its very core, drag is a beautiful art. Drag has a deep history in this country, [it] led to the police raiding an LGBTQ bar in New York and to the Stonewall riots, one of the most important civil rights moments in my community’s history…My life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here, many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that is not a lascivious display, that is not a fetish, that is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after, not obscene shows somehow getting in front of children…We have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community…please vote No.”

Next, a Republican legislator, also a mother, joined Zephyr in opposition to the bill. Ultimately, 13 Republicans joined the Democrats, defeating the bill.

Several lawsuits have successfully blocked, at least temporarily, some of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders. But while the court battles proceed, the lives of transgender people are still at risk. Now is the time for organizing and unflinching solidarity, so that, facing rising authoritarianism, we don’t end up paraphrasing the anti-Nazi German theologian, Pastor Martin Neimoller, “First they came for trans Americans, but I said nothing…then they came for me.”

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

At his speech before the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Donald Trump told many lies as he bragged, “We are just getting started.” Federal courts are also just getting started, as scores of lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders proceed. Several key decisions have halted or delayed some of Trump’s attempts to demolish much of the U.S. government, aided by his largest campaign donor, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and by Vice President JD Vance, who argues that court orders are optional (they’re not). The Republican-controlled Congress has completely ceded its role in the system of checks and balances, so the fights are taking place at protests in the streets and in Federal courts across the country.

One key sector currently under threat is medical research. The United States has long been regarded as the world’s leader in cutting-edge medical research and innovation. Many of the advances that billions of people rely on around the world come from countless labs in this country. On February 7th, Trump’s stripped-down National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a memo changing the allowed amount for laboratory overhead to 15%, gutting university research. “Overhead” or “indirect costs” cover things like rent and administrative staff, which allow researchers to conduct their life-saving work. Arbitrarily cutting those pre-approved rates sent shockwaves through the research community and provoked several lawsuits. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts overruled the NIH, compelling the original overhead payments to resume, citing the “risk to human life as research and clinical trials are suspended.”

This case will be appealed and will likely end up in the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees – three of them appointed by Trump himself. While he might consider the Supreme Court to be in his pocket, Trump got a surprise on Wednesday, when, in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled on another case – against Trump.

This case, State Department v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), deals with the abrupt freezing of all U.S. foreign aid – described initially as a “90 day pause” – and the attempted dissolving of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. AVAC sued, with the help of Public Citizen Litigation Group. Attorney Nicolas Sansone explained the case on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“After the judge entered this temporary restraining order requiring the executive branch to lift the foreign assistance freeze, the executive took no steps toward compliance, restoring none of the funding, renewing access to no grant money and restarting none of the projects upon which communities worldwide depend. So, after nearly two weeks of noncompliance, the court entered an order requiring the government to take specific steps towards complying.”

White House lawyers asked the Supreme Court to overturn that court order, and, in an unsigned, one-paragraph order supported by the three liberal justices and by Chief Justice John Roberts and Trump-appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the request was denied. The Trump administration must now release about $2 billion in aid, a fraction of the more than $40 billion the agency disburses annually.

Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, wrote a memo obtained by the New York Times, which detailed likely impacts of the foreign aid funding freeze. Among them: up to 18 million cases of malaria, a 30% increase in tuberculosis globally, 28,000 cases of Ebola, and 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year over the next decade. After the memo’s publication, Enrich was placed on administrative leave.

Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the lead plaintiff in the case, speaking on Democracy Now!, described the value of PEPFAR, the U.S.-funded AIDS treatment program for people in Africa living with HIV, launched by President George W. Bush with bipartisan support:

“PEPFAR, over 20 years, has helped to get 20 million people on antiretroviral therapy that saves lives and prevents infections. Millions of people’s lives have been saved…PEPFAR has ensured that people are living and economies are growing. And the United States benefits from that.”

Warren added:

“PEPFAR…is the most data-driven, the most evidence-based intervention we’ve seen, honestly, in the history of global health…it’s important to note that Secretary of State Rubio, when he was Senator Rubio, was one of PEPFAR’s biggest supporters. So we need to remind people what they said, what they believed, and to stop this willful disregard of congressional authority and of science.”

The case goes back to the district court, where attorney Nicholas Sansone hopes to prevail.

Described here are just two cases, among at least 105 federal lawsuits challenging Trump’s abuse of executive power. In parallel, massive grassroots organizing is happening, mobilizing in defense of federal workers, immigrants, trans rights and more. The opposition to Trump’s second term, to use his own words, is just getting started.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, have unleashed global chaos with mass firings and funding freezes as they attempt to eviscerate the US government. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has revealed significant problems – within its own operations, that is. This week Musk’s DOGE team quietly removed their top five posted cost savings, after journalists found, to put it mildly, major errors, like mistaking $8 billion for $8 million, or claiming $2 billion in savings instead of $18 million.

Meanwhile, one flagrant expense on the federal balance sheet, which should be zeroed out, is staring Musk in the face: the US naval base and prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Shuttering Gitmo would save at least a half-billion dollars per year. These figures are based on dated estimates, and don’t include additional, classified amounts. The estimate still points to enormous waste: $500 million per year to house 15 prisoners, three of whom have been cleared for release. That amounts to over $91,000 per prisoner, per day. In 2022, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported the per person cost to incarcerate stateside was $43,000 per year, or about 0.1% of the cost at Guantánamo.

Clearly, Guantánamo should be closed primarily because it’s been run as a lawless, offshore dark site where countless innocent people have been held without charge for decades, where the government has tortured prisoners, and where presidents from both parties have imprisoned people virtually incommunicado, without due process or constitutional rights.

But when viewed with the cruel, fiscal logic that Elon Musk is now allegedly using to cut the federal bureaucracy, closing Gitmo is a no-brainer.

Except that the Trump administration has decided to jumpstart another of Guantánamo’s dark chapters, as an immigrant detention camp. On January 29th, Trump instructed the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense to “expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to full capacity.”

President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton both used the base to jail migrants. In 1991, Haitians began fleeing the US-backed coup that deposed Haiti’s democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrande Aristide. Between 1991 and 1993, an average of 12,000 Haitian asylum seekers intercepted at sea were held daily at Guantánamo. Three-quarters of them were forcibly repatriated to Haiti, exposing them to violence or retribution.

In January 2002, as the George W. Bush administration was ramping up Guantánamo to hold prisoners in the so-called War on Terror, the late human rights attorney Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, described the conditions he encountered while representing asylum seekers in the early 1990s:

“The place is really a hell hole. It’s not that bad for the servicemen who have set up a McDonald’s and everything else on their part of the base, but where we were, a remote part of the camp, in a desert surrounded by barbed wire with detention facilities, really, in the heat and outside, it’s really unbearable.”

As the 1990s progressed, Guantánamo’s migrant prison population swelled to 45,000, as many Cubans caught at sea attempting to reach Florida were also held there.

CCR and other groups were able to challenge the post-9/11 legal black hole of Guantánamo, ensuring prisoners there accessed their constitutional rights. But Ratner’s description, more than 30 years on, is still accurate.

Guantánamo is now overseen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served there as a military officer from 2004-2005. In 2021, when he was a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, Hegseth commented on Gitmo:

“It’s a prison without a mission…It got mucked up very, very early when left wing lawyers and other protections came in…it could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and execute people we are fighting a war against…[Now] It’s of almost no value. It’s a nursing home.”

Hegseth, while lamenting the lack of summary executions there, was right about one thing: Guantánamo has no value. Except, perhaps, as a dramatic backdrop to Trump’s promised mass deportations. Hundreds of immigrants have already been rounded up, shackled and flown there, only to be then relocated elsewhere. Both Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have flown in for photo ops, no doubt at great taxpayer expense, which should irk Musk’s DOGE team.

CCR, meanwhile, is back in court, challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to restart migrant detentions on Guantánamo.

“For 40 years, dating back to the early 1990s, the United States government has used Guantánamo as a legal dumping ground for its political problems,” CCR Executive Director Vince Warren said on Democracy Now! “We are trying to make good on the failed promise of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to close that terrible facility.”

If Elon Musk is serious about cutting costs, he should take a hard look at Guantánamo Bay.