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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Civil libertarians knew this would happen. We should have listened in 2001

Civil libertarians knew this would happen. We should have listened in 2001

Radley Balko writes: Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act. The vote was 357-66 in the House, and 98-1 in the Senate. Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wis.), the chamber’s lone dissenter, said later that many of his colleagues hadn’t bothered to read it. The law granted sweeping powers to the federal government. It gave agents new authority to use secret search warrants on Americans and made it easier to monitor them around…

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Senior UK rabbis come out in support of sanctions on Israeli settlements

Senior UK rabbis come out in support of sanctions on Israeli settlements

The Guardian reports: Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end. The intervention comes after the UK’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of mainstream Orthodox Jews in the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, described UK sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a “dark day for British Jews” and warned they could embolden people who “use hatred as a weapon…

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West Bank settler violence is being facilitated by the Israeli government

West Bank settler violence is being facilitated by the Israeli government

Mairav Zonszein writes: Of all the fronts on which Israel is exerting force, the West Bank is where the Jewish state is the most invested, exerts the most control and has received the least American pushback. It is also where over half a million Israeli citizens live among some three million Palestinians who are under military occupation without citizenship. President Trump has not put any brakes on Israeli settlement expansion, creeping annexation, military raids, demolitions of Palestinian homes or settler…

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A political operative on the verge of self-deportation

A political operative on the verge of self-deportation

Jesús Rodríguez writes: One recent Sunday in August, Daysi González addressed a crowd of about seventy people in a sterile conference room in New York’s financial district. The people who were gathered at tables around her, eating buffet tacos and sipping cans of Coke Zero, were first- and second-generation Americans getting ready to run for office or to work on political campaigns. Some looked younger than thirty and were dressed casually, while others already looked the part of the candidate,…

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Haitians deported from the U.S. are left broke and stranded

Haitians deported from the U.S. are left broke and stranded

The New York Times reports: Dozens of deportees are arriving in the Haitian city of Cap Haitien weekly as the Trump administration pushes to remove Haitians who lack legal immigration status in the United States, and some are now marooned in an unfamiliar place. More than 80 people were returned last week, often with only the U.S. government-issued sweatpants and T-shirts, and with immigration court documents stuffed in their pockets. Many returned broke, saying their valuables had disappeared during the…

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Gloria Steinem’s revolution is unfinished

Gloria Steinem’s revolution is unfinished

Nikki McCann Ramirez writes: Gloria Steinem never held elected office. She never ran for one, never seemed particularly interested in pursuing power inside the governing systems she strove so hard to change. Steinem was, over the course of her lifelong activism, a beacon of the manner in which Americans can shape their nation for the better, without ever having to put their name on a ballot. Steinem died on Monday at the age of 92, after nearly seven decades as…

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Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

The Guardian reports: Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime. Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out…

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These generals fought to defend Israel. Now they see ‘Jewish terrorism’ as the greatest threat

These generals fought to defend Israel. Now they see ‘Jewish terrorism’ as the greatest threat

The New York Times reports: Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven spent his life fighting for Israel. He survived the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when his platoon was nearly wiped out, then went on to command a division in the West Bank and lead Israel’s ground forces in the 2006 war against Hezbollah. But in recent months, he has returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, touring the territory with retired generals and former Israeli officials like himself. He has walked through the…

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Democrats will force Senate vote on Israel’s human rights practices

Democrats will force Senate vote on Israel’s human rights practices

The New York Times reports: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, on Thursday plans to introduce a resolution that would order the Trump administration to provide Congress with a detailed accounting of Israel’s human rights practices in the West Bank, laying the groundwork to force a vote on the matter in coming weeks. The measure, the latest bid by Democrats in Congress to challenge the policies and actions of Israel’s government, invokes a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act…

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U.S. issues sanctions against UK-based direct action group Palestine Action

U.S. issues sanctions against UK-based direct action group Palestine Action

The Guardian reports: The US ⁠has ​issued sanctions against ⁠the UK-based direct action organisation Palestine ⁠Action, describing it as a “transnational terror group”. The US Department of the Treasury labelled Palestine Action a specially designated global terrorist on Wednesday, which allows the US to freeze the assets of foreign individuals and entities. Palestine Action became the first direct action group to be proscribed under the UK’s Terrorism Act in July last year, placing it alongside the likes of Islamic State…

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Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Technofascism: This Palantir billionaire’s passion project is criminalizing homelessness

Mother Jones reports: Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration. Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment. “We’ve made it easier to civilly commit those who are mentally ill and…

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Ankle monitors leave Haitians in Ohio feeling shaken and shackled

Ankle monitors leave Haitians in Ohio feeling shaken and shackled

The New York Times reports: Before dawn on Wednesday, Jonas Julien waited in the darkness of his Springfield, Ohio, home for his ride to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office about an hour away. The 35-year-old Haitian immigrant had completed another grueling 12-hour shift at 3:30 a.m. After a quick bite and shower, he had stretched on the couch to avoid waking his wife and their 2-month-old daughter. But sleep never came. “I don’t know what awaits me, and I…

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ICE, Iran quietly worked together on deporting Iranians to Iran, emails show

ICE, Iran quietly worked together on deporting Iranians to Iran, emails show

CBS News reports: U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport Iranians in late 2025 and early 2026, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between the U.S. and Iranian governments despite tensions mounting between them. Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials, which were obtained by the National Iranian American Council and made public Tuesday, offer the most transparent play-by-play yet of how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be…

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Trump threatens law suit against think tank over report he doesn’t like

Trump threatens law suit against think tank over report he doesn’t like

The New York Times reports: President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime. The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for…

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American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

American Stasi: DHS undercover surveillance operations had agents infiltrate protest meetings

Greg Sargent writes: It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary…

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Israel’s security minister Ben-Gvir advocates killing ‘30 to 40’ people in Gaza nightly

Israel’s security minister Ben-Gvir advocates killing ‘30 to 40’ people in Gaza nightly

The Associated Press reports: An extremist Israeli lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition publicly advocated for killing “30 to 40” people in Gaza each night, comments that surfaced Sunday and were quickly shared by Palestinian media. Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made the statement while speaking to a former Gaza-held hostage, Rom Braslavski, on Braslavski’s podcast. The two were discussing Israel’s recovery from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when Ben-Gvir criticized Israel’s recent drawdown of strikes…

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