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      Canada and EU sign defense pact amid strained US relations and global instability

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      Canada has signed a wide-ranging defence pact with the EU, as Donald Trump and global instability prompt traditional US allies to deepen their alliances.Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, on Monday joined European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and head of the European Council, António Costa, in Brussels, where they signed a security and defence partnership, pledged more support for Ukraine, as well as joint work on issues from the climate crisis to artificial intelligence.At a cordial press conference, Carney described Canada as “the most European of the non-European countries” that “looks first to the European Union to build a better world”.Costa spoke in kind: “The European Union and Canada are among the closest allies in the transatlantic space. We see the world through the same lens. We stand for the same values.”Not mentioned was another leader in the transatlantic space: Donald Trump, whose disrespect for old allies appears to have galvanised what was an already healthy EU-Canada relationship.The US president is expected at the two-day Nato summit in the Hague starting on Tuesday, when members of the transatlantic alliance are called to pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defence.Carney, a veteran central banker turned politician, won a stunning victory in April pledging that Canada would not become the 51st US state, a proposal often floated by Trump.He said he had a mandate “to diversify and strengthen our international partnerships” and find new means of co-operation and co-ordination. The summit took place, Carney told reporters, “we might say in a hinge moment of history, a world that is more dangerous and divided, a time where the rules-based international global order is under threat”.The EU-Canada security and defence partnership opens the door to increased Canadian participation in the EU’s fledgling €150bn defence fund, known as Safe. Von der Leyen said the defence partnership meant working on joint capabilities, interoperability and joint procurement, referencing air defence. “The access of Canada to our joint procurement in the European Union, the door is open,” she said.The security pact is a Canadian version of the agreement the EU signed with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, last month. The bloc already had similar arrangements with six other countries including Norway and Japan, but this is the first with any country in the Americas. The defence pact includes joint work on cyber, maritime and space security, arms control and support for Ukraine.Countries that have a defence and security pact with the EU can take part in joint procurement of weapons funded by the €150bn (£128bn, $173bn) Safe programme, although must negotiate a further technical agreement. Von der Leyen pledged both sides would “swiftly launch talks” on Canadian access to the joint procurement scheme.Carney said the agreement with the EU would help Canada “deliver on our new capabilities more rapidly and more effectively”. Canada has been one of the laggards of the Nato alliance: in 2024 it spent just 1.37% of GDP on defence, well below the 2% set in 2014.The two sides have a €125bn trading relationship, underpinned by the Ceta pact signed in 2016 that abolished 98% of tariffs. The agreement, however, has yet to be ratified by national parliaments in 10 EU member states, including Belgium, France, Italy and Poland, meaning elements of the deal have yet to enter into force.In advance of the meeting Carney and his wife, Diana Fox, Carney visited Schoonselhof military cemetery in Antwerp, where 348 Canadians are buried, “brave young soldiers who ventured across the Atlantic to defend the freedom of Europe”, Carney wrote on social media.The Carneys were accompanied by Belgium’s prime minister, formerly a long-serving Antwerp mayor, Bart De Wever, where they were given a tour of the ceremony and laid wreaths on behalf of Belgium and Canada. The last post was played by one of De Wever’s sons, according to local paper Het Nieuwsblad. More

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      US supreme court clears way for Trump to deport migrants to countries not their own

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      The US supreme court cleared the way on Monday for Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show harms they could face, handing him another victory in his aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.The justices lifted a judicial order that required the government to give migrants set for deportation to so-called “third countries” a “meaningful opportunity” to tell officials they are at risk of torture at their new destination, while a legal challenge plays out.Boston-based US district judge Brian Murphy had issued the order on 18 April.The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented from the decision.After the Department of Homeland Security moved in February to step up rapid deportations to third countries, immigrant rights groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of migrants seeking to prevent their removal to such places without notice and a chance to assert the harms they could face.Murphy on 21 May found that the administration had violated his order mandating further procedures in trying to send a group of migrants to politically unstable South Sudan, a country that the U state department has warned against any travel “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”.The judge’s intervention prompted the US government to keep the migrants at a military base in Djibouti, although US officials later said one of the deportees, a man from Myanmar, would instead be deported to his home country. Of the other passengers who were on the flight, one is South Sudanese, while the others are from Cuba, Mexico, Laos and Vietnam.Reuters also reported by that officials had been considering sending migrants to Libya, another politically unstable country, despite previous US condemnation of Libya’s harsh treatment of detainees. Murphy clarified that any removals without offering a chance to object would violate his order.As part of its pattern of assailing various judges who have taken actions to impede Trump policies challenged as unlawful, the White House in a statement called Murphy “a far-left activist judge”.The administration, in its 27 May emergency filing to the supreme court, said that all the South Sudan-destined migrants had committed “heinous crimes” in the United States including murder, arson and armed robbery.The dispute is the latest of many cases involving legal challenges to various Trump policies including immigration to have already reached the nation’s highest judicial body since he returned to office in January.The supreme court in May let Trump end humanitarian programs for hundreds of thousands of migrants to live and work in the United States temporarily. The justices, however, in April faulted the administration’s treatment of some targeted migrants as inadequate under US constitution’s due process protections.Due process generally requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions.In March, the administration issued guidance providing that if a third country has given credible diplomatic assurance that it will not persecute or torture migrants, individuals may be deported there “without the need for further procedures.”Without such assurance, if the migrant expresses fear of removal to that country, US authorities would assess the likelihood of persecution or torture, possibly referring the person to an immigration court, according to the guidance.Murphy found that the administration’s policy of “executing third-country removals without providing notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims” likely violates due process requirements under the constitution.Murphy said that the supreme court, Congress, “common sense” and “basic decency” all require migrants to be given adequate due process. The Boston-based 1st US circuit court of appeals on 16 May declined to put Murphy’s decision on hold.In his order concerning the flight to South Sudan, Murphy also clarified that non-citizens must be given at least 10 days to raise a claim that they fear for their safety.The administration told the supreme court that its third-country policy already complied with due process and is critical for removing migrants who commit crimes because their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back. More

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      Socialist Zohran Mamdani could be New York’s next mayor. This is what the western left could learn from him | Owen Jones

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      The Zohran Mamdani phenomenon should not be happening, if received wisdom is a reliable predictor of events. He’s the 33-year-old Muslim leftist and Queens assemblyman running for the New York mayoralty with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the vitriolic campaign against him suggests his momentum has caused panic in gilded circles. His chief opponent for the Democratic nomination, Andrew Cuomo, could not scream party establishment more loudly: he’s New York state’s former governor – just like his father was – and a former cabinet secretary. He married into that classic Democratic royalty, the Kennedys; his endorsements include the former president Bill Clinton; and billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg are pouring millions into his Super Pac.In another age, someone like Mamdani would have been a no-hoper. What changed was the 2016 presidential campaign of the long-marginalised socialist senator Bernie Sanders, which re-energised the US left. But Donald Trump’s recent victory on a more extreme platform led to predictions of a general rightwing lurch in US politics, with progressive positions scapegoated for the Democratic loss (even though Kamala Harris ran on a squarely corporate, “centrist” ticket). I was scheduled to interview Mamdani on the night of the US presidential election, but his campaign asked to postpone as results started to come in suggesting a Trump victory was likely. Presumably, they wanted to reassess strategy in the coming US political winter.But just a few months later, Mamdani is surging, and his campaign offers lessons for the western left in an age of chronic economic insecurity, rising far-right authoritarianism, war and genocide. The primary election vote is tomorrow, but a poll released during crucial early voting shows Mamdani overtaking Cuomo in “ranked choice” voting: it’s within the margin of error, but five months ago the insurgent candidate was polling only 1% support. In only a month, Mamdani has leapt from 22% to 32%, particularly powered by a 2:1 lead among the under-50s.Yes, the millennial has been helped by Cuomo’s chronic liabilities – the former governor resigned in disgrace after an investigation by the state attorney general found that he had sexually harrassed several women – but rival candidates with bigger profiles and more political experience could have gained from that instead. The New York Times pleaded with readers not to rank Mamdani in the preferential voting system, rich New Yorkers are threatening to flee the city if he wins, he’s been attacked for inexperience, and smeared over his championing of Palestinian rights. “Zohran Mamdani is a public menace,” screeches rightwing magazine the National Review.So what’s the universal lessons for the western left? Three Ms are key: messaging, medium and movement. Grace Mausser is the co-chair of New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). When I suggested that Mamdani’s campaign would surely originally have been driven by revitalising the left, rather than the prospect of an actual election victory, she disagrees.“When we started, we knew the path to victory was narrow,” she conceded. But, she emphasised: “We don’t run races for purely moral reasons or to make a point like the Green party in the US which has failed in their project.” Indeed, the DSA played a pivotal role in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock defeat of another Democratic luminary, the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus Joe Crowley back in 2018. In turn, Ocasio-Cortez has bolstered Mamdani with her endorsement, underlining how progressive victories feed off one another.“Super-clear messaging” is how Mausser sums up the Mamdani strategy. The early campaign settled on three main messages: “Fast and free buses, freeze the rents, free childcare. That’s so easy to remember. People know it, and it’s said over and over and over again.” Mamdani has other pledges, too – such as launching publicly run grocery stores – but key to his success are core, endlessly repeated commitments focused on a cost of living crisis triggered by a broken economic system.This strategy is essential in combating a “culture war” designed to force leftists into a defensive posture. It doesn’t mean abandoning marginalised minorities – Mamdani has unequivocally committed to transgender rights, for example. It just means emphasising unifying economic messages. Anger is redirected from the disenfranchised to thriving economic elites, whom Mamdani seeks to tax to fulfil his pledges. The campaign has settled, too, on not backing down to bad faith attacks: Mamdani has not given an inch in his pro-Palestinian advocacy.View image in fullscreenThen there’s the medium. What Mausser calls “high-quality video production” has been pivotal. Across the west, the far right has proven adept at using platforms such as TikTok to radicalise supporters, with the left mostly not even playing catch-up. Mamdani’s campaign made slick videos that are witty, sassy and snappy, communicating its messages to wide audiences. “All the conversations after the election [were] about needing a ‘Joe Rogan of the left’, how people aren’t getting their news from traditional media, how they’re getting their news from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid. “And that is exactly the story of Zohran.”When Sanders endorsed Mamdani, he declared how he was “very impressed by the grassroots movement that he has put together”. Mamdani’s campaign has an army of door-knockers, often visiting districts traditionally ignored by Democratic machine politicians. For many of these canvassers, this is their first political experience. Mausser reports: “If you ask them, ‘How did you hear about Zohran?’, it’s like: ‘Oh, I saw his video on Instagram or TikTok.’” The message and the medium raised an army. There’s another factor, too: Mamdani, like Ocasio-Cortez, is charismatic and telegenic. It’s not fashionable to discuss this on a left which prioritises the collective over the individual, but we need compelling communicators who look the part.Mamdani may not win the Democratic nomination. Even if he does, Cuomo will stand as an independent candidate, although the socialist challenger may do this, too. His campaign’s weaknesses reflect those of the wider US left: too little inroads among Black and older voters, as well as those with little online political engagement. But Mamdani’s against-the-odds success underlines why the far-right surge doesn’t have to weaken the left – far from it. Indeed, Mamdani positions himself as best-placed to resist Trump, rather than kowtow to his agenda. When the Republicans won, one of Mamdani’s first viral videos was visiting local districts where Trump enjoyed his biggest swings.Whatever happens, Mamdani shows that the US left lives on after what Shahid calls “a shitty year”: along with Trump’s triumph, there have been dispiriting primary defeats of progressive representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush at the hands of notorious pro-Israel lobbyists Aipac. Mamdani has built a movement in New York, but his campaign has also given a shellshocked western left a gift: a strategy to take on the establishment even in adverse circumstances.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      WhatsApp messaging app banned on all US House of Representatives devices

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      The WhatsApp messaging service has been banned on all US House of Representatives devices, according to a memo sent to House staff on Monday.The notice to all House staff said that the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”The memo, from the chief administrative officer, recommended use of other messaging apps, including Microsoft Corp’s Teams platform, Amazon.com’s Wickr, Signal, Apple’s iMessage, and Facetime.Meta, which owns WhatsApp, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.The Signal app – which like WhatsApp uses end-to-end encrypted messaging – was at the center of a recent controversy in which Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent detailed information about planned attacks on Yemen to at least two private Signal group chats.One of the chats was created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, and included top US security officials as well as, inadvertently, the Atlantic magazine journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. The other Hegseth created himself, including his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people.The Pentagon had previously warned its employees against using Signal due to a technical vulnerability, according NPR, which reported that an “OPSEC special bulletin” seen by its reporters and sent on 18 March said that Russian hacking groups could exploit the vulnerability in Signal to spy on encrypted organizations, potentially targeting “persons of interest”.The Pentagon-wide memo said “third party messaging apps” like Signal are permitted to be used to share unclassified information, but they are not allowed to be used to send “non-public” unclassified information.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      House Democratic veterans back moves to limit Trump’s military authority

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      A group of 12 House Democratic military veterans have thrown their weight behind efforts to constrain Donald Trump’s military authority, announcing they will support a War Powers Act resolution in response to the US president’s go ahead for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.The veterans – some of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan – were strongly critical of Trump’s decision to launch what they called “preventive air strikes” without US congressional approval, drawing explicit parallels to the run-up to some of America’s longest recent wars.“Twenty years ago, in their rush to appear strong and tough, politicians – from both parties – failed to ask the hard questions before starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” they wrote in a letter led by Representative Pat Ryan to Trump sent on Monday. “We refuse to make those same mistakes.”Their intervention comes as multiple war powers resolutions are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill, with the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, pushing for a vote as early as this week to rein in the president’s military actions. The veterans did not specify which measure they would support, as competing versions are being drafted by different Democratic factions alongside a bipartisan effort.The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was enacted to limit the US president’s ability to commit armed forces to fight abroad without congressional consent in the form of a vote.Representatives Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, have been championing one bipartisan resolution, while the ranking Democrats on the House foreign affairs, armed services and intelligence committees are preparing an alternative, according to Punchbowl News.Democratic aides described the latter to the outlet as providing cover for members uncomfortable with backing the Massie-Khanna approach, though lawmakers will not be discouraged from supporting both measures.The adamance against the legality of America’s involvement has only intensified since Trump’s Saturday night strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, and the line from centrist to progressive Democrats has been to charge the president with executive overreach.The New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump’s impeachment, describing the attacks as “a grave violation of the constitution and congressional war powers”, while the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, accused the president of misleading Americans and dramatically increasing the risk of war.For the 12 veteran House members, the issue cuts to the heart of their military oath.“We all swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Article 1 Section 8 explicitly requires a vote by Congress to declare war,” they wrote, demanding clear answers about military objectives, estimated costs and potential American casualties before any escalation.The signatories included representatives Gilbert Ray Cisneros Jr, Eugene Simon Vindman, Chris Deluzio, Jimmy Panetta and Ted Lieu.Still, their letter walked a careful line on the broader Middle East conflict, labeling Iran as “evil” and pledging continued support for Israel while warning against the strategic limitations of military action. “While destroying nuclear sites may achieve initial tactical success, it far from guarantees longterm strategic victory,” they argued.The dispute has built on uncomfortable divisions within Trump’s own party, most notably with conservative influencers and independent news media that lean to the right, with Massie and senator Rand Paul emerging as Congress’s most vocal Republican critics of the Iran strikes.But Trump has since escalated his rhetoric, posting on Truth Social about potential “regime change” in Iran and asking: “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”Congressional leaders have also expressed frustration over the administration’s failure to provide adequate consultation before the weekend operation.While Schumer received a call from Trump officials, he was reportedly not told which country would be targeted, and Jeffries “could not be reached until after” the strikes had begun, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. More

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      Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments

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      Shortly before last November’s presidential election, before anyone could envision him defying his “America first” political base and launching a bombing raid on Iran, Donald Trump offered a preview of how and why he would want to deploy the military on US soil.It was, the president said, to deal with “the enemy within”.“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” he said in a Fox News interview that prompted widespread condemnation at the time. “I think it should be very easily handled by … national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Trump did not specify what it was he didn’t want to let happen – only that while he promised to put an end to America’s “forever wars” overseas, he regarded domestic political adversaries, perhaps like the ones who have been protesting in massive numbers in Los Angeles and across the US this month, as a national security threat worthy of a military response.When thousands of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles earlier this month to protest against his administration’s heavy-handed immigration sweeps targeting workers in factories and car washes, he wasted little time making good on what he had promised.The reality of Trump sending thousands of national guard troops and US marines into LA earlier this month has not matched his rhetoric – yet the shock of it may have been dulled by the headlines coming out of the Middle East. The troops have largely kept a low profile, their duties restricted to guarding federal buildings and, at least according to the administration, accompanying immigration enforcement agents and other federal officials as they go about their business.Still, as the dust settles on two weeks of impassioned street protests and occasional vandalism and violence in downtown Los Angeles, the deployment continues to unnerve California’s political leaders, national Democratic party figures worried about who might be next, as well as many ordinary citizens and influential figures within the military itself.“The US military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats, not to police American streets or intervene in political disputes at home,” a group of retired four-star generals and admirals and high-profile former Pentagon officials said in a statement, signalling just how far Trump has strayed from precedent.The group, including a former secretary of the army, a former secretary of the navy, and Michael Hayden, a retired air force general who led the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency under presidents of both parties, are part of a lawsuit seeking to reverse the deployment, which they say “puts both service members and civilians at risk of harm and violates longstanding constitutional limits on government power”.Some observers have gone further, seeing a direct link between Trump’s willingness to send troops into American city streets and his decision to involve the United States in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran. “That kind of authoritarian aggression [rarely] stays inside the country’s borders,” Julia Ioffe, a national security expert and founding editor of Puck News, said of the California deployment on 11 June. “Didn’t think I’d be right so soon,” she wrote on Friday, as Trump’s war plans for Iran were ramping up.The Trump administration has vowed to keep the troops in place for at least 60 days, to ensure – as Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, told a House defense appropriations subcommittee – “that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we’re not going anywhere”.The threat of a more muscular military confrontation with “the enemy within” has not gone away, either, though one of the questions remaining is whether the military or the many agencies under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – immigration enforcement, border patrol, FBI – are more likely to take the lead.Two days before the No Kings rallies, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, was in Los Angeles and said the federal government’s goal was not just to maintain order on the streets but “to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”. Seconds after delivering these lines at a news conference, FBI agents under Noem’s authority manhandled and handcuffed Alex Padilla, a California senator who interrupted her to ask a question.Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, has threatened to arrest the governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, if they stand in the way of the immigration sweeps. At least two elected officials, the New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver and New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, have indeed been arrested for alleged interference in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.The military has so far stayed out of these headline-grabbing events, their role largely eclipsed by continuing immigration raids conducted by masked federal agents refusing to disclose their names or badge numbers, but experts and constitutional scholars say their very presence risks destabilizing what is already a volatile and politically charged situation. “The risk of escalation, or of someone making a mistake, is always present and in these situations actually quite high,” said Chris Mirasola, a national security expert at the University of Houston Law Center. “Just the deployment itself is escalatory.”View image in fullscreenIn deciding to take charge of the California national guard, over Newsom’s objections, Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act used by past presidents to help quell civil unrest, most recently during the 1992 LA riots when marines rode alongside southern California police patrols in burning neighborhoods.Rather, he invoked a rarely used power to mobilize the military to “temporarily protect” federal property and personnel. Lyndon Johnson used the same protection power to guarantee the safety of civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in 1965, in defiance of the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon used it in an ill-fated attempt to get the national guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike in 1970. But scholars said they were not aware of it being used any time since.Mirasola said he was a little perplexed, given the vehemence of Trump’s rhetoric about “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, that the president opted for this softer approach. “Maybe he just wanted the theatrics of getting the military on the streets,” Mirasola said. “This is a way of doing that while still preserving some space to continue to escalate.”It was also possible, he suggested, that Trump could not talk his military commanders into taking a more aggressive approach. “The military establishment is extremely allergic to the Insurrection Act,” he said. “It’s one of the few things bred into every single officer.”According to veterans and advocacy groups for service members being deployed to Los Angeles, the military also prides itself on being entirely apolitical and has no appetite to be drawn into a political conflict involving Trump or anyone else. Perhaps for this reason, the national guard and the marines have been barely visible in Los Angeles.At the first big downtown protest, on 8 June, the Los Angeles police moved protesters away from the national guard’s staging area at a federal courthouse complex and parked their patrol cruisers in such a way that the guardsmen could not come out and intervene.Six days later, in the final stages of the No Kings protest, a hard core of protesters briefly faced off against a line of marines stationed on the front steps of the downtown federal building. “Leave LA!” the crowd chanted, prompting the marines to deploy riot shields and push the protesters away from the building. The Los Angeles police quickly issued a dispersal order, sent in officers on horseback, and fired volleys of teargas to send most of the crowd scattering.Otherwise, the only reported incident has involved a military veteran who inadvertently crossed a line of police tape outside a federal building in west Los Angeles. One of the marines on guard wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him, but he was released shortly after and told reporters he was treated “very fairly”.California has sued the Trump administration over the military deployment and seemed to score an early win in court last week when a district judge said the president had exceeded his authority and needed to return control of the state national guard immediately. An appeals panel has since reversed that ruling, however.Part of California’s problem in arguing its case is that the national guard has been pressed into non-traditional activities with increasing frequency in recent years, undermining the notion of a strict separation between military and civilian activities.Several states, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have drafted the guard into border patrol duties despite severe morale issues among the troops and opposition from the military brass. New Mexico has asked its national guard to work as substitute teachers in understaffed schools. Florida has had them filling in as prison guards, and New York has seconded its guard to police the New York City subway.Supporters of California’s lawsuit argue that none of these scenarios are appropriate. And deploying the national guard for non-military purposes is even more inappropriate, they say, when it happens for an overtly partisan purpose over the objections of the state governor. “The military shouldn’t be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit.“If Americans weren’t aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We’re all on notice.” More

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      Free buses, more housing, taxing the rich: how Zohran Mamdani has gone viral in the New York mayor’s race

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      Zohran Mamdani trailed Andrew Cuomo, the frontrunner to be the next New York City mayor, by 30 points just a few months ago.Now, just ahead of the Democratic primary on Tuesday, the 33-year-old democratic socialist has bridged the gap with Cuomo, a politician so of the establishment that a giant bridge north of New York literally bears his last name.The surge in support for Mamdani, an aspiring rapper turned state politician, with a penchant for turning out snappy social media videos and a track record of progressive, leftwing ideas, has shown his clear ability to win over young voters. It also didn’t hurt when he won the backing of the progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders this month.Mamdani’s rise has lent a new edge to an election that was in danger of becoming a procession for Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after being accused of sexual harassment.For a Democratic party struggling to stand up to Donald Trump and his “make America great again” acolytes, the closely watched election will offer an insight into what rank-and-file Democrats desire: a good old boy promising a steady hand on the tiller, or a fresh outsider who has energized parts of a weary New York electorate with plans to freeze rent and make buses free citywide.Mamdani’s rise has been boosted by a social media following that dwarfs his rivals’.He has almost a million followers across Instagram and TikTok, where he posts funny and self-aware videos selling himself to the public. The clips frequently show him walking through New York, or riding the subway, things that are unlikely to come naturally to the multimillionaire Cuomo.After supporters commented on Mamdani’s frequently exuberant hand gestures in the videos, he posted a clip where he promised to keep his hands in his pockets, removing them twice only to have them slapped down by a man on the street.“This election is in your hands,” a caption read on the video, in which Mamdani urged people to register to vote. The video was left to roll at the end as Mamdani laughed at the shtick.Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani moved to New York City when he was seven years old, and had a long-term interest in politics. Last week, a former classmate shared a video in which she recalled how Mamdani won a “mock presidential election” in 2004. A cricket and soccer player – “he usually played defense or defensive midfield, and would sprint down the field and score”, a former teammate told the Guardian – he was elected to represent an area of Queens in the state assembly in 2021.View image in fullscreenMamdani has bold ideas for what he would do as mayor. In a city with a longstanding affordable housing crisis, he wants to freeze rent increases for people in applicable buildings, and build 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. He says he would eliminate fares on city buses, something which would cost at least $630m but, according to Mamdani, would generate $1.5bn in economic benefits. (New York City has an annual budget of $115.1bn for 2026.) He says he can fund his proposals by increasing the corporate tax rate and bringing in a flat tax on people earning more than a million a year.But Mamdani’s limited political record, more than his proposals, has come under scrutiny as he has flown closer to the sun.There was more than a whiff of jealousy from Mamdani’s opponents during the Democratic debate on 4 June, with even his progressive rivals taking a shot. Jessica Ramos, a state senator – theoretically a more powerful position than Mamdani’s role as state representative – lamented that she had not run for mayor four years earlier, adding: “I thought I needed more experience, but turns out you just need to make good videos.”Ramos’s slight mirrored Cuomo’s persistent refrain that Mamdani lacks the experience to be mayor. As Mamdani has risen in the polls, Cuomo has stepped up the attacks on his rival, painting him as too radical and inexperienced to lead the city in a barrage of TV ads and mailed-out flyers. In one proposed mailer, a pro-Cuomo group appeared to have darkened the skin and beard of Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor, a move Mamdani criticized as “​​blatant Islamophobia”. A spokesperson for the group said the ad had been proposed by a vendor and upon review “it was immediately rejected for production and was subsequently corrected”.For his part, Mamdani has repeatedly sought to tie Cuomo to Trump, pointing out that many of his donors backed Trump in the presidential election.“Oligarchy is on the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is the candidate of a billionaire class that is suffocating our democracy and forcing the working class out of our city,” Mamdani’s campaign said in an email to supporters on Tuesday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a more pointed critique of his opponent, Mamdani said on the debate stage: “I have never had to resign in disgrace. I have never cut Medicaid, I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA, I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment, I have never sued for their gynecological records, and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr Cuomo.”The New York Democratic primary will use ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to select multiple candidates, which Mamdani hopes could boost his chances. Last week, he announced he was “cross-endorsing” with Brad Lander, a fellow progressive who on Tuesday was arrested by Ice agents while visiting an immigration court.The winner of the primary is not guaranteed to become the 111th mayor of New York, but it is highly likely in a city where registered Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans. The incumbent, Eric Adams, who won the 2021 election as a Democrat but is running this year as an independent candidate, is deeply unpopular in the city. Last year, Adams was charged with taking bribes and accepting foreign campaign contributions. The charges were dropped in April after the Trump administration intervened.While popular with young people and the left of the party, Mamdani has lagged behind Cuomo among Black and Latino voters – though a recent poll showed Mamdani gaining support from both.The Cuomo campaign and its backers have also raised the issue of Mamdani’s criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. He has said the country is committing genocide, a characterization that Cuomo, a fiercely pro-Israel Democrat who has courted the city’s large Jewish population, has sought to exploit. In a recent post on X, Cuomo all but accused Mamdani of fomenting antisemitism. Mamdani says he has built a coalition including Jewish New Yorkers, and would form a department to investigate hate crimes.In an election where Cuomo’s strategy has been to largely avoid the press and the public, the energy has been with Mamdani.A rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman and a fellow democratic socialist, drew thousands of people to a music venue in Manhattan in mid-June, and Mamdani’s appearances at hip music venues across the city have drawn enthusiastic crowds.“For the longest time, mayoral candidates have been kind of the same type of guy. Either they’re like legacy New York politics people, or businessmen that kind of pivoted through,” said Tomas Carlson, a 23-year-old Mamdani supporter.“This is the first time in a while where I saw a candidate that had new ideas. And I think the Democratic party in general, we need a sort of fresh breath of air.” More

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      ‘I’m scared to death to leave my house’: immigrants are disappearing from the streets – can US cities survive?

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      At Hector’s Mariscos restaurant in the heavily Latino and immigrant city of Santa Ana, California, sales of Mexican seafood have slid. Seven tables would normally be full, but diners sit at only two this Tuesday afternoon.“I haven’t seen it like this since Covid,” manager Lorena Marin said in Spanish as cumbia music played on loudspeakers. A US citizen, Marin even texted customers she was friendly with, encouraging them to come in.“No, I’m staying home,” a customer texted back. “It’s really screwed up out there with all of those immigration agents.”Increasing immigrant arrests in California have begun to gut-punch the economy and wallets of immigrant families and beyond. In some cases, immigrants with legal status and even US citizens have been swept into Donald Trump’s dragnet.The 2004 fantasy film A Day Without a Mexican – chronicling what would happen to California if Mexican immigrants disappeared – is fast becoming a reality, weeks without Mexicans and many other immigrants. The implications are stark for many, both economically and personally.“We are now seeing a very significant shift toward enforcement at labor sites where people are working,’ said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Not a focus on people with criminal records, but a focus on people who are deeply integrated in the American economy.”In California, immigrant workers comprise bigger shares of certain industries than they do for the nation overall. Here, the foreign-born make up 62% of agriculture labor and 42% of construction workers, according to the American Immigration Council. About 85% of sewing machine operators in garment factories are foreign-born. Fully 40% of entrepreneurs are foreign-born.Nationally, about a quarter of workers are foreign-born in agriculture and construction, according to the American Immigration Council. More than half of drywall hangers, plasterers and stucco masons are foreign-born. And in science, technology, engineering and math – the so-called Stem fields – nearly a quarter of workers are foreign-born, said the council.The current enforcement trend, Selee said, will “lead to a strategy that will have big economic implications if they continue to go after people who are active in the labor force rather than those who have criminal records”.In both California and across an ageing nation, about half of the foreign-born are naturalized US citizens – a crucial defense in immigration raids and arrests.View image in fullscreenSelee said the current strategy was launched when “the Trump administration realized they weren’t getting large numbers by following traditional approaches to pursuing people who are priority targets for deportation”.Now the threat and chilling effect from immigration raids can be felt in disparate communities from Dallas to El Paso to rural Wisconsin – among migrants and, in some cases, the employers who hire them.In the small town of Waumandee in Wisconsin, dairy farmer John Rosenow said he can’t find US citizens who can withstand the rigors of dairy work.“Fact of the matter is if you want to eat or drink milk you are going to need immigrant workers,” he said.“Yes, we want to get rid of the people who are bad actors,” Rosenow said. “But the people I know, people who are working in the dairy farms, are just hard-working people, getting things done, doing jobs Americans don’t want to do.”In California’s San Joaquin valley, rancher and melon-grower Joe Del Bosque has heard reports of US agents chasing workers in the strawberry fields south of his operation.The San Joaquin valley, known as the food basket of the world, is heavily dependent upon foreign-born workers, especially at harvest time, Del Bosque said. He currently has 100 people working for him and that number will double as the harvest picks up in the coming weeks.“They’re going to disrupt the harvest and food chain. This will hurt the American consumer,” Del Bosque said. “These people are hard workers. They come to work, especially if they have families here or in Mexico.”In a surprise pivot late last week, Trump said there would be an easing of the crackdown in agriculture and the hospitality industries. The New York Times first reported that new guidance from a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official called for a “hold on worksite enforcement investigations/operations” in the agriculture sector and restaurants and hotels. The Ice guidance, issued in an email, also said agents were not to make arrests of “noncriminal collaterals”, a key point for those who note that many detained immigrants have had no criminal record. However, the Department of Homeland Security told staff it was reversing that guidance on Monday.Some business leaders and immigrants remain scared and confused.View image in fullscreenRaids, or the threat of them, are also taking an emotional toll on families and generating protests in Chicago, Seattle, Spokane, New York, San Antonio, Dallas and elsewhere. Bigger protests are expected in days to come.In El Paso, protesters flipped the White House script that undocumented immigrants were “criminals”. They waved mostly US flags and shouted “No justice, no peace. Shame on Ice.”Among the protesters was Alejandra, a US citizen and a junior at the University of Texas at El Paso. She asked for partial anonymity for fear of reprisal against her mixed-status family.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe said she took to this border city’s streets to honor the sacrifice of her grandparents who migrated from Ciudad Juárez. “All it takes is for you to look at who took that first step to bring you the life you have currently,” Alejandra said.In the Dallas area, a Guatemalan worker said he had been absent from construction sites for days.“There’s too much fear, too much to risk,” said Gustavo, 34, requesting his surname be withheld because he is undocumented. “I fear tomorrow, tonight. I may be deported, and who loses? My family back in Guatemala.”Tough immigration enforcement has been the top-polling issue for Trump. But favor may be slipping. A poll released this week by Quinnipiac University showed Trump had a 43% approval rating on immigration and a 54% disapproval rating. That poll was conducted between 5 and 9 June – after several days of protests.Meantime, back in Santa Ana, a city of about 316,000 in southern California, shop owner Alexa Vargas said foot traffic had slowed around her store, Vibes Boutique, with sales plummeting about 30% in recent days.On a recent day, the shop’s jeans and glitzy T-shirts remained un-browsed. Metered parking spots on the usually busy street sat empty. A fruit and snow cone vendor whom Vargas usually frequents had been missing for days.“It shouldn’t be this dead right now,” Vargas, 26, said on a Tuesday afternoon. “People are too scared to go out. Even if you’re a citizen but you look a certain way. Some people don’t want to risk it.”Reyna, a restaurant cook, told her boss she didn’t feel safe going to work after she heard about the immigration detentions at Home Depot stores in the city.The 40-year-old, who is in the US without legal status, said she fears becoming an Ice target. Current immigration laws and policies don’t provide a way to obtain legal status even though she’s been living in the US for more than 20 years.“I need to work but, honestly, I’m scared to death to leave my house,” she said.For now her life is on hold, Reyna said.She canceled a party for her son’s high school graduation. She no longer drives her younger children to summer school. She even stopped attending behavioral therapy sessions for her seven-year-old autistic son.Reyna said she can’t sleep. She suffers headaches every day.Early on Tuesday, she said, immigration agents in an unmarked vehicle swept up her husband’s 20-year-old nephew, who is a Mexican national without legal status. The scene unreeled across from her home.Her autistic son, a US-born citizen, has begged her to allow him to play on the front yard swing set.“No, honey. We can’t go outside,” Reyna told him.“Why?” he asked.“The police are taking people away,” she explained. “They are taking away people who were not born here.”This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual non-profit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the US-Mexico border. More