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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Rep. Ro Khanna says ‘IDF is lying’ about his detention by settlers and soldiers

Rep. Ro Khanna says ‘IDF is lying’ about his detention by settlers and soldiers

The Guardian reports: Ro Khanna accused the Israeli government and military of “lying” on Sunday about the US congressman’s detention by armed settlers and Israeli soldiers during a recent visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Khanna – a California Democrat – had posted video evidence on social media of Israeli settlers and soldiers blocking the path of his convoy on Wednesday in the South Hebron hills, near the village of Zanuta, where Israelis have driven Palestinians from their homes in…

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Six-hour polygraphs, forced reassignments: Inside Homeland Security’s campaign of fear

Six-hour polygraphs, forced reassignments: Inside Homeland Security’s campaign of fear

The Guardian reports: Federal officials tasked with implementing the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” program faced an extraordinary campaign of intimidation inside the Department of Homeland Security during the final months of Kristi Noem’s tenure and the arrival of her successor, a Guardian investigation found. Over the past four months, the Guardian spoke with more than three dozen current and former Department of Homeland Security officials who described a climate of fear driven by Trump loyalists in senior positions, who sidelined…

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Trump triggers vitriolic attacks targeting kindergartners in Minnesota

Trump triggers vitriolic attacks targeting kindergartners in Minnesota

The Washington Post reports: Hateful emails and phone calls targeted a Minnesota school serving Somali families after President Donald Trump shared a video of its kindergartners on Truth Social this week, an episode that many Somali Americans see as an escalation of a sustained campaign of political and rhetorical attacks during Trump’s second term, community leaders said. On Wednesday, Trump reposted a video from a kindergarten graduation ceremony at Gateway STEM Academy, a K-8 charter school in St. Paul. In…

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The ecology of dispossession in the West Bank

The ecology of dispossession in the West Bank

Diana Kruzman writes: In late April of last year, Israeli officials left three notices informing Bassem Mansour, a farmer from the Palestinian community of Deir Istiya in the northern West Bank, that three of his citrus tree plots were violating the boundaries of Wadi Qana, a protected nature reserve. The notices ordered Mansour to remove the saplings immediately, or he would be subject to “arrest, prosecution, and penalties.” Mansour, like many other Palestinian farmers in the area, was forced to…

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ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They want you to be apathetic. Don’t be

ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They want you to be apathetic. Don’t be

Will Bunch writes: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up at 5 a.m. Tuesday and started his day like almost every other one for the last 35 years since he came to Houston from Mexico and built his own American dream brick by brick — sending his three sons to top universities on the foundation he’d constructed through years of backbreaking labor. His wife also got up to make him a hearty meal before he put on his work boots, fired up…

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He lived here for 35 years. Put three kids in college. ICE killed him

He lived here for 35 years. Put three kids in college. ICE killed him

Adrian Carrasquillo writes: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo came to the United States thirty-five years ago—a few years too late to benefit from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, popularly known as the “Reagan amnesty.” He worked in construction. By the 2000s, he was a small business owner who provided jobs and work for other men. They would drive to the North Houston suburbs and build houses. His dream was to build his own home for his family one day—a…

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Five words that changed America

Five words that changed America

Jamelle Bouie writes: There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of…

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The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

Nicholas Kristof writes: Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine. “Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week. I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said…

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Who were the ‘Midway Blitz’ Border Patrol agents in Chicago? Most were veteran immigration officers

Who were the ‘Midway Blitz’ Border Patrol agents in Chicago? Most were veteran immigration officers

Block Club Chicago reports: About 300 Border Patrol agents were among the federal officers who made a torrent of arrests, deployed tear gas nearly 50 times, tased and assaulted residents and shot two people — one fatally — during Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area last year. That all happened even though those Border Patrol agents had extensive experience and training, many in crowd control and deescalation, a Block Club Chicago investigation found. They averaged more than a decade…

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Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’

Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Israelis from the country’s security, political and cultural elite have threatened legal action against their government over support for Jewish terrorism and an “ideology of ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank, according to a leaked letter. Two former prime ministers, former heads of all the Israeli security services, former judges, a Nobel laureate and the country’s most revered living novelist were among the signatories to a “final warning” over violence against Palestinians. They demanded…

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Samuel Alito wrote one of the cruelest opinions in recent memory

Samuel Alito wrote one of the cruelest opinions in recent memory

Alexis Romero writes: On Thursday, the Supreme Court blessed the Trump administration’s efforts to kick hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians out of the United States. This was one of three unspeakably wrong opinions released on the same day, all by a 6–3 ideological divide, and all written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito’s opinion pulls off a nearly unfathomable one-two punch of white racial apology: simultaneously backing all of the Trump administration’s claims of crime and filth across Black…

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Supreme Court decision penalizes immigrants who followed the law but white South Africans are welcomed

Supreme Court decision penalizes immigrants who followed the law but white South Africans are welcomed

Elora Mukherjee writes: On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration sweeping power to remove the legal right to live in America for Haitians and Syrians who are here under a program known as Temporary Protected Status. For more than three decades, T.P.S. enabled highly vetted immigrants from countries ravaged by war or natural disaster to remain in America. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano granted Haitians the right to apply for T.P.S. after a devastating earthquake….

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Supreme Court conservatives accused of advancing ‘white-supremacist agenda’

Supreme Court conservatives accused of advancing ‘white-supremacist agenda’

The Guardian reports: Lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups on Thursday sharply denounced two US supreme court rulings that allowed the Trump administration to strip certain immigration protections and fundamentally reshape the asylum system. Dozens of groups, advocates and members of Congress called the court’s decisions “disastrous” and “cruel”, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the rulings. “Today, Trump’s loyalists in the supreme court have joined forces with him to deny immigrants’ internationally recognized human rights and…

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New DOJ memo, pushed by Stephen Miller, questions decades of protections for people with disabilities

New DOJ memo, pushed by Stephen Miller, questions decades of protections for people with disabilities

  HuffPost reports: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was a driving force behind the Justice Department’s recent memo giving states authority to institutionalize people with disabilities rather than fund community-based care, according to an exclusive report from Bloomberg Law. Miller was reportedly instrumental to the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s Thursday opinion that said states may disregard decades of Supreme Court precedent that shields people with disabilities from being forcibly institutionalized. Instead, courts had been encouraged to…

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Ehud Olmert: Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the West Bank

Ehud Olmert: Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the West Bank

Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, writes: The fight against Jewish terrorism in the West Bank must advance to the next stage and be waged with greater determination. The daily terrorism that is managed, directed, encouraged and supported by the Israeli government can no longer be tolerated. What is happening across the West Bank today is not the work of “70 kids … from broken homes,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once tried to claim, disingenuously. Nor are these the…

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Israel’s former defence minister compares settler ideology to Nazism

Israel’s former defence minister compares settler ideology to Nazism

Middle East Eye reports: Israel’s former defence minister has compared settler ideology to Nazism, and accused authorities of failing to investigate Israelis responsible for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank. In a wide-ranging interview with the Israeli news site Ynet on Sunday, Moshe Ya’alon said that factions within the religious Zionist movement, which is closely aligned with Israeli settlers, hold a “Jewish supremacy ideology”. “What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it’s Mein Kampf in reverse….

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