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      ‘Deterrence is boring’: the US troops at sharp end of Trump’s border crackdown

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      Inside an armored vehicle, an army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the US-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.The man lowers himself toward US soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a US Customs and Border Protection SUV races toward the wall – warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.The sighting on Tuesday was one of only two for the army infantry unit patrolling this sector of the southern border, where an emergency declaration by Donald Trump has thrust the military into a central role in deterring migrant crossings at US ports of entry.“Deterrence is actually boring,” said 24-year-old Sgt Ana Harker-Molina, giving voice to the tedium felt by some fellow soldiers over the sporadic sightings. Still, she said she takes pride in the work, knowing that troops discourage crossings by their mere presence.“Just if we’re sitting here watching the border, it’s helping our country,” said Harker-Molina, an immigrant herself who came from Panama at age 12 and became a US citizen two years ago while serving in the army.View image in fullscreenUS troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military – even as the number of attempted illegal crossings has plummeted and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 border patrol agents, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses.The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona’s Huachuca mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border.Until now, border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of the border were designated militarized zones, empowering US troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on army, air force or navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time.The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with border patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings – and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain.View image in fullscreen“We don’t have a [labor] union, there’s no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,” said Maj Gen Scott Naumann of the army. “I can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time; we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting” course.At Nogales, army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear – helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest – with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the US.Naumann’s command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters, and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction.Naumann said the focus is on stopping “got-aways” who evade authorities to disappear into the US in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona.Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low.View image in fullscreenNaumann says the falloff in illegal entries is the “elephant in the room” as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels – including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations.He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather.“We’ve got to keep going after it; we’re having some successes, we are trending positively,” he said of the mission with no fixed end date.The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations.“It’s all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this – to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,” said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired army judge advocate officer. “It’s both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.”View image in fullscreenThe militarized zones at the border sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on US soil.“It’s in that gray area. It may be a violation – it may not be. The military’s always had the authority to arrest people and detain them on military bases,” said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former air force judge.Michael Fisher, a security consultant and former chief of the border patrol from 2010 to 2016, calls the military expansion at the border a “force multiplier” as border patrol agents increasingly turn up far from the border.“The military allows border patrol to be able to flex into other areas where they typically would not be able to do so,” he said.At daybreak on Wednesday in Arizona, Spc Luisangel Nito scanned a valley with an infrared scope that highlights body heat, spotting three people as they crossed illegally into the US, in preparation for the border patrol to apprehend them. Nito’s unit also has equipment that can ground small drones used by smugglers to plot entry routes.View image in fullscreenNito is the US-born son of Mexican immigrants who entered the country in the 1990s through the same valleys he now patrols.“They crossed right here,” he said. “They told me to just be careful because back when they crossed they said it was dangerous.”Nito’s parents returned to Mexico in 2008 amid the financial crisis, but the soldier saw brighter opportunities in the US, returned and enlisted. He expressed no reservations about his role in detaining undocumented immigrants.“Obviously it’s a job, right, and then I signed up for it and I’m going to do it,” he said. More

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      Ghislaine Maxwell interviewed again by deputy US attorney general

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      The deputy US attorney general, Todd Blanche, held a second in-person meeting on Friday with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and longtime associate of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Blanche had confirmed the two met behind closed doors in Tallahassee, Florida, on Thursday, at the federal prosecutor’s office within the federal courthouse in the state capital, and they met again on Friday.Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, on Friday afternoon said Blanche had finished his questioning for the day, NBC News first reported.Markus told reporters as he left the courthouse in downtown Tallahassee: “We started this morning right around 9 o’clock, and went to now lunchtime, and we’re finished after all day, yesterday and today. Ghislaine answered every single question asked of her over the last day and a half. She answered those questions honestly, truthfully, to the best of her ability. She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question.”He added: “They asked about every single, every possible thing you could imagine. Everything.”The justice department has not said whether Blanche intends to question Maxwell further. Markus said he did not know whether the discussions would have any impact on her case. He had previously said Thursday’s meeting was “very productive”.Blanche had announced earlier in the week that he had contacted Maxwell’s lawyers to see if she might have “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims”.Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Tallahassee, after a jury convicted her of sex trafficking in 2021.An uproar continues to engulf Donald Trump and calls have intensified for his administration to release all details of the federal investigation into Epstein, while questions remain about whether Maxwell has any fresh light to shed on her former boyfriend’s crimes.Meanwhile, the US supreme court is due to wade into the controversy and decide whether to hear a bid by Maxwell to overturn her criminal conviction.Epstein killed himself in 2019 in a jail cell in New York while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Trump, dogged by questions about his ties to Epstein, headed to Scotland on Friday for a trip that will mix golf with politics mostly out of public view. Protests await the president in the UK over his extreme agenda while scandal nips at his heels in the US.Further talking to reporters after Friday’s meeting, Markus said: “We don’t know how it’s going to play out. We just know that this was the first opportunity she’s ever been given to answer questions about what happened, and so the truth will come out about what happened with Mr Epstein. And she’s the person who’s answering those questions.”Prosecutors and the judge who oversaw Maxwell’s 2021 trial have said that she made multiple false statements under oath and failed to take responsibility for her actions. She was convicted for sex trafficking and other crimes, and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.“People have questioned her honesty, which I think is just wrong,” Markus said.Asked if Maxwell had received an offer of clemency from the government, Markus said no offer had been made.Although the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, earlier this year had promised to release additional materials related to possible Epstein clients, the justice department reversed course this month and issued a memo concluding there was no basis to continue investigating and there was no evidence of a client list or blackmail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince then, the department has sought permission to unseal grand jury transcripts from its prior investigations into Epstein and Maxwell.On Wednesday, US district judge Robin Rosenberg denied one of those requests.Trump’s name, along with many other high-profile individuals, appeared multiple times on flight logs for Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s, while several media outlets have this month reported previously unpublicized and friendly communications from the US president to the high-profile financier.Meanwhile, the supreme court justices, now on their summer recess, are expected in late September to consider whether to take up the appeal by Maxwell against her conviction in 2021 by a jury in New York for helping Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.Maxwell’s lawyers have told the supreme court that her conviction was invalid because a non-prosecution and plea agreement that federal prosecutors had made with Epstein in Florida in 2007 also shielded his associates and should have barred her criminal prosecution in New York. Her lawyers have a Monday deadline for filing their final written brief in their appeal to the court.Some legal experts see merit in Maxwell’s claim, noting that it touches on an unsettled matter of US law that has divided some of the nation’s regional federal appeals courts.Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, said there was a chance that the supreme court would take up the case, and noted the disagreement among appeals courts. Such a split among circuit courts can be a factor when the nation’s top judicial body considers whether or not to hear a case.“The question of whether a plea agreement from one US attorney’s office binds other federal prosecution as a whole is a serious issue that has split the circuits,” Epner said.While uncommon, “there have been several cases presenting the issue over the years”, Epner added.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest

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      On the morning of 2 May, teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was driving to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach with his mother and two male friends when they were pulled over by the Florida highway patrol.In one swift moment, a traffic stop turned into a violent arrest.A highway patrol officer asked everyone in the van to identify themselves, then called for backup. Officers with US border patrol arrived on the scene.Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”The footage has put fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used by US law enforcement officials as the Trump administration sets ambitious enforcement targets to detain thousands of immigrants every day.“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” said Jack Scarola, an attorney who is advocating on behalf of Laynez-Ambrosio and working with the non-profit Guatemalan-Maya Center, which provided the footage to the Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”Chokeholds, stun guns and laughterThe incident unfolded at roughly 9am, when a highway patrol officer pulled over the company work van, driven by Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother, and discovered that she had a suspended license. Laynez-Ambrosio said he is unsure why the van was pulled over, as his mother was driving below the speed limit.Laynez-Ambrosio hadn’t intended to film the interaction – he already had his phone out to show his mom “a silly TikTok”, he said – but immediately clicked record when it became clear what was happening.View image in fullscreenThe video begins after the van has been pulled over and the border patrol had arrived. A female officer can be heard asking, in Spanish, whether anyone is in the country illegally. One of Laynez-Ambrosio’s friends answers that he is undocumented. “That’s when they said, ‘OK, let’s go,’” Laynez-Ambrosio recalled.Laynez-Ambrosio said things turned aggressive before the group even had a chance to exit the van. One of the officers “put his hand inside the window”, he said, “popped the door open, grabbed my friend by the neck and had him in a chokehold”.Footage appears to show officers then reaching for Laynez-Ambrosio and his other friend as Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard protesting: “You can’t grab me like that.” Multiple officers can be seen pulling the other man from the van and telling him to “put your fucking head down”. The footage captures the sound of a stun gun as Laynez-Ambrosio’s friend cries out in pain and drops to the ground.Laynez-Ambrosio said that his friend was not resisting, and that he didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the officer’s commands. “My friend didn’t do anything before they grabbed him,” he said.View image in fullscreenIn the video, Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard repeatedly telling his friend, in Spanish, to not resist. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew I was going to get out of the situation,” he said. “But I was worried about him. I could speak up for him but not fight back, because I would’ve made the situation worse.”Laynez-Ambrosio can also be heard telling officers: “I was born and raised right here.” Still, he was pushed to the ground and says that an officer aimed a stun gun at him. He was subsequently arrested and held in a cell at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station for six hours.Audio in the video catches the unidentified officers debriefing and appearing to make light of the stun gun use. “You’re funny, bro,” one officer can be overheard saying to another, followed by laughter.Another officer says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”Later in the footage, the officers move on to general celebration – “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” – and talk of the potential bonus they’ll be getting: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.” It is unclear what bonus they are referring to. Donald Trump’s recent spending bill includes billions of additional dollars for Ice that could be spent on recruitment and retention tactics such as bonuses.Laynez-Ambrosio said his two friends were eventually transferred to the Krome detention center in Miami. He believes they were released on bail and are awaiting a court hearing, but said it has been difficult to stay in touch with them.Laynez-Ambrosio’s notice to appear in court confirms that the border patrol arrived on the scene, having been called in by the highway patrol. His other legal representative, Victoria Mesa-Estrada, also confirmed that border patrol officers transported the three men to the border patrol facility.The Florida highway patrol, CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment before publication.‘We are good people’Laynez-Ambrosio was charged with obstruction without violence and sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course. While in detention, he said, police threatened him with charges if he did not delete the video footage from his phone, but he refused.Scarola, his lawyer, said the charges were retaliation for filming the incident. “Kenny was charged with filming [and was] alleged to have interfered with the activities of law enforcement,” he explained. “But there was no intended interference – merely the exercise of a right to record what was happening.”In February, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed an agreement between the state and the Department of Homeland Security allowing Florida highway patrol troopers to be trained and approved by Ice to arrest and detain immigrants. While such agreements have been inked across the US, Florida has the largest concentration of these deals.View image in fullscreenFather Frank O’Loughlin, founder and executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, the advocates for Laynez-Ambrosio, says the incident has further eroded trust between Florida’s immigrant community and the police. “This is a story about the corruption of law enforcement by Maga and the brutality of state and federal troopers – formerly public servants – towards nonviolent people,” he said.Meanwhile, Laynez-Ambrosio is trying to recover from the ordeal, and hopes the footage raises awareness of how immigrants are being treated in the US. “It didn’t need to go down like that. If they knew that my people were undocumented, they could’ve just kindly taken them out of the car and arrested them,” he said. “It hurt me bad to see my friends like that. Because they’re just good people, trying to earn an honest living.”

      The Guardian is granting anonymity to Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother and the men arrested in the footage to protect their privacy More

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      One day inside the deportation machine at a federal immigration court in New York

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      A brother is torn from his sister. A father arrives for his immigration hearing with his family, only to find that they will be leaving without him. A woman, seemingly relieved after emerging from her hearing, finds that her life is about to change when she is apprehended by federal officials waiting just outside the door.These are just some of the moments that happened on a single day in the Jacob K Javits federal building at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan.Courthouse detentions have been one of many flashpoints in the Trump administration’s expanding crackdown on immigration, as federal authorities seek to arrest 3,000 people a day. There have been reports of arrests at courthouses across the country, from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Chicago, turning routine hearings into scenes fraught with anxiety and fear. A recently filed class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration seeks to bar the practice of courthouse arrests.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenImmigration court presents an especially precarious situation. Not showing up for a hearing can have serious consequences, but as the Guardian observed in the hallways outside courtrooms in New York, showing up also has serious consequences. Even though some people had been granted follow-up hearings, they were detained by federal officials in the hallway and rushed to a stairwell for holding elsewhere in the building. On 18 June, representatives Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman attempted to conduct oversight on the building’s 10th floor, where people have been held, sometimes for days at a time, but were rebuffed by federal officials. Recently released footage shows the harsh conditions faced by people held on the 10th floor.What follows is a visual timeline of a single day inside the halls of the Jacob K Javits federal building, where some people found their lives forever changed.8.57am – A family walks towards a courtroom past masked federal agents. Only the father has a hearing, and his family would not be allowed to enter the room with him. They would have to wait elsewhere.View image in fullscreen9.51am – A federal agent checks a stack of documents containing identifying information for people slated for detention.View image in fullscreen10.11am – Federal agents load a detained man into an elevator.View image in fullscreen10.17am – Federal agents wait.View image in fullscreen10.30am – Federal agents lead a detained man to a stairwell.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen11.25am – The New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, left, escorts a man to the elevator after his hearing. Lander has made regular appearances at the federal building to observe cases and help people leave the building. He was arrested on 17 June as he was attempting to help escort someone out. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”, though video evidence of the encounter debunks that allegation. He was subsequently released the same day.View image in fullscreen11.45am – After successfully escorting a man to the elevator, Lander then returns to a courtroom to observe another case. At 11.45am, he stands in the doorway and announces to federal agents that a man named Carlos has been granted a follow-up hearing in 2029. He asks the assembled agents if they would allow him to return for that hearing. No one says anything in response.View image in fullscreen11.46am – Chaos breaks out as multiple federal agents grab Carlos while his sister screams.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen11.55am – Court employees had informed a sketch artist that she wouldn’t be allowed inside the courtrooms at the federal building, despite the fact that such artists are generally permitted in courtrooms where cameras are banned, as in high-profile federal trials. The sketch artist resorts to drawing the scene in the hallway. She would subsequently be allowed into the courtroom.View image in fullscreen12.58pm – A half-eaten snack bar sticks out of a tactical vest.View image in fullscreen1.51pm – After emerging from a hearing, a woman is immediately apprehended by a masked federal agent who asks for her name and to look at her documents. Upon reviewing her documents, the agent tells her she can leave. “Have a nice day,” he says in Spanish.View image in fullscreen2.11pm – Federal agents detain the father from the family observed at 8.57am and lead him to a stairwell. The Guardian later observed a photojournalist telling the man’s family in Spanish that he had been arrested. Their oldest child broke down in tears as the other two slept, after waiting for him for hours after their arrival. The mother said he had no criminal history and that their asylum cases were in progress.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen2.58pm – The last woman to emerge from her hearing holds a stack of documents in her hand, and she smiles briefly before a masked agent whose T-shirt reads “police” apprehends her. Her smile fades to an expression of fear as she learns that she will not be allowed to leave. Federal agents then rush her to a stairwell.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen More

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      The polls look bad for Trump – but tyrants don’t depend on approval ratings | Judith Levine

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      The fracas over the Jeffrey Epstein files – and declining poll numbers on every issue that won Donald Trump the 2024 election – indicate cracks in the Maga coalition and weakening support for the president’s self-proclaimed mandate.But reports of Maga’s death are probably exaggerated.Trump has cheated death, both physical and political, many times. And while every tyrant craves the adoration of the people – and claims to have it even when he doesn’t – no tyrant worth the title counts on public support to stay in power.Last week, when the administration pulled an about-face on releasing 100,000-odd documents related to Epstein – amid conspiracy theories of deep-state pedophile rings, which Trump promoted – it looked like Trump was on the ropes. “Trump can’t stop MAGA from obsessing about the Epstein files,” reported NBC. “Trump meets toughest opponent: his own base,” declared Axios. Trump was “on the defense”, NPR said. The Guardian reported on Maga hat burnings.Even after House Republicans blocked Democrats on a resolution to force a vote on releasing the files, even after the speaker, Mike Johnson, withheld from the floor a similar resolution, the far right would not be mollified. “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X. “The People … want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing less.”Now some of the commentariat are predicting that even if Trump survives, the damage to the GOP is done.In the Hill, Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman marshaled polls showing Trump’s sliding approval from before to after the Epstein affair and conjectured that it could sink the Republicans in the midterm elections.At the same time, the populace, including Republicans, is changing its mind on Trump’s master plans. Six in 10 respondents to a CNN poll oppose the federal budget bill; approval of Trump’s handling of the budget is down 11 points since March. On immigration, a Gallup poll showed a steep drop in respondents who favor more restricted admittance, from 55% in 2024 to 30% this June. The most striking change is among Republicans, from 88% who wanted fewer immigrants in 2024 to 48% in June 2025. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who think immigrants are good for America rose to a record 79%.The flood of TikToks showing masked men kidnapping people from the streets and manhandling elected officials has turned many people against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Two YouGov polls showed the agency’s favorability plummeting from a net positive of 15 points in early February to a deficit of 13 in late June. During Trump’s first term, “Abolish Ice” was the chant at tiny demonstrations by fringe-left organizations. Now more than a third of respondents to a Civiqs survey want to see the agency gone, including an uptick of six points among Republicans since November, to 11% .And as David Gilbert pointed out in Wired, even before the Epstein flap, some of the president’s most prominent supporters were defying him. The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson condemned the bombing of Iran. Trump whisperer Laura Loomer dissed his acceptance of a $400m plane from Qatar. Elon Musk defected over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And Joe Rogan deemed Ice raids targeting ordinary working migrants too much to bear.But Trump is not backing down. In fact, he’s doubling down on every policy. The deportation campaign has grown more vicious by the day. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” is being rightly condemned as a concentration camp. A recent Human Rights Watch investigation of three Miami area Ice facilities found detainees denied food and medicine, held in solitary confinement, and shackled at the wrists and forced to kneel to eat, as one man put it, “like animals”.The president muscled his budget and rescission package through Congress without regard to the disproportionate harm they augur for red-state residents, much less the deficit, the public health, or the planet’s future. His tariffs are barreling ahead, exasperating economists, hitting crucial US economic sectors and tanking entire economies overseas. General Motors reported second-quarter profits down by a third. In the tiny, impoverished nation of Lesotho, “denim capital of the world”, Trump’s threatened 50% duties have shut down the garment factories, leaving thousands out of work, hungry and desperate.Trump may feel insulted, which he does most of the time; he may temporarily lose his footing. But he’s not relinquishing power without a fight.Tyrants don’t need high approval ratings. They intimidate voters, rig elections, or stop holding them altogether; suppress protest and jail, deport or assassinate their critics. The Nazis achieved peak support in 1932, at 37.3%. Of the 1933 plebiscite that ceded all power to Hitler, the German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer wrote: “No one will dare not to vote, and no one will respond No in the vote of confidence. Because (1) Nobody believes in the secrecy of the ballot, and (2) A No will be taken as a Yes anyway.”Daria Blinova, of the International Association for Political Science Students, argues that autocrats cultivate approval while consolidating their own power through the “illusion of substantial improvements”, which are actually insubstantial. In 2017, for instance, nine in 10 Saudi youth supported Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman because of such reforms as allowing cinemas to reopen.The Trump administration has begun deploying some similar tactics. The justice department is pressuring state election officials to turn over their voter rolls and give it illegal access to voting machines. The Republican National Committee is training volunteers to “ensure election integrity” – AKA harassing voters and poll workers. It is trying to banish the opposition press. Homeland security is trying to deport the widely followed Salvadorian journalist Mario Guevera, who has covered Ice raids and protests. Migrants sent home or to third countries can face persecution, torture or death.Still, none of this means that Trump is invincible, even when his administration uses violence to achieve its aims and terrify its critics. First – simplest and most difficult –the resistance must show up. Get bodies into the streets. The second nationwide anti-Trump rallies were bigger than the first; the third, fourth and 10th can be bigger still.Gather bodies at the sites of injustice. Volunteers are swarming to immigration courts, where migrants who show up for mandatory hearings are being released into the clutches of waiting Ice agents. The court-watchers – experienced organizers and first-timers, retirees, students, clergy, elected officials, artists – are distributing “know your rights” leaflets in many languages, writing down names and contact information to inform families of their loved ones’ arrests or to connect arrestees to lawyers later on. Immigrants’ rights groups are holding training sessions. Spanish speakers are giving immigration-specific language lessons.This nonviolent gumming-up of the government’s criminal machine draws press and social media attention, multiplying participation, amplifying anger and mobilizing greater organization. At every step, people are bearing witness, storing it up for future accountability.The Epstein affair shows that no loyalty is unbreakable. The polls show that discomfort with Trump’s policies is growing. Discomfort can mature to rejection of injustice, rejection to resistance, resistance to action. A tyrant does not need majority support to maintain power. But neither does the opposition movement need majority participation to take power back. No tyranny lasts forever.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      RFK Jr wants bright artificial dyes out of food. Are Americans ready to let go?

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      The Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement celebrated this month after the US dairy industry voluntarily pledged to remove all artificial dyes from ice-cream by 2028. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr prevailed upon the food industry to stop using artificial dyes, and many of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, including Nestle, Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo, have already promised to comply. But the ice-cream pledge made Kennedy especially happy because, he said, ice-cream is his favorite food.Prepare to say goodbye to the brilliant pink (from red dye No 40) that signifies strawberry, the cool green (yellow 5 and blue 1) of mint chocolate chip, and the heroic combination of red 40, blue 1, and yellow 5 and 6 that makes up Superman.One of the goals of the Maha movement is to prevent childhood diseases, which Kennedy argues can be accomplished by, among other things, addressing the use of additives in ultra-processed foods. A recent study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics calculated that, in 2020, 19% of food products contained artificial dyes – “the most egregious” additive, according to Kennedy. Those dyes, he claims, are responsible for a host of health issues, including cancer, hyperactivity and possibly autism.“The American people have made it clear – they want real food, not chemicals,” Kennedy said in a statement.View image in fullscreenAside from jokes on social media about Donald Trump’s skin tone and Kennedy’s alleged use of methylene blue (an artificial dye that some claim boosts “mitochondrial efficiency” and longevity), the initiative has faced little political opposition. In January, when Joe Biden was still president, the FDA announced a ban on red dye No 3 scheduled to go into effect in 2027. Red 3, the FDA explained, was shown to cause cancer in rats, and while it does not show up in food in large enough quantities to affect humans, it still violates a law forbidding additives that contain carcinogens.Meanwhile, states as politically varied as West Virginia, Texas and California have already established their own bans or requirements that foods containing artificial dyes carry warning labels, citing the need to protect kids. (In the UK and the EU, restrictions on artificial dyes have been in place for years.)Why the fuss over food coloring? Are natural dyes really that much better for our health?“They’re better for some people’s health,” says Jamie Alan, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University. “There is a very small percentage of children who are very sensitive to these dyes. And when they eat these dyes, they display behaviors that we sometimes associate with ADHD.”Alan stresses that there is no evidence that those kids actually develop ADHD. But research has found that after eating foods containing certain dyes, children, including those diagnosed with ADHD or autism, can show signs of hyperactivity, moodiness and inattentiveness. However many of these foods, particularly candy and soda, also contain sugar, which has also been connected to hyperactive behavior.Alan recommends that parents talk to a pediatrician and try an elimination diet to make sure the dye and not another ingredient is to blame. But she largely supports phasing out artificial dyes; most public health advocates think this is a good idea. “In my opinion,” Alan says, “because we’re talking about children and because they are a vulnerable population, I do think this is a great thing to do. But I will recognize that it is not going to impact the vast majority of the population.”One group that the change in dyes will certainly affect is the food manufacturers themselves. Switching from artificial to natural dyes is a complex process, says Travis Zissu, the co-founder and innovation lead of Scale Food Labs in Golden, Colorado, which offers a program to help manufacturers with the dye conversion.View image in fullscreenUnlike artificial dyes, which are derived from petroleum, natural dyes come mostly from plants: turmeric, for example, is used for yellows; algae and butterfly pea flower for blues; lycopene from carrots and tomatoes for reds. These dyes can be less stable, so Scale’s program begins with finding natural pigments that will not be affected by heat and other chemicals, followed by tests to determine which combination of dyes will produce the most reliable color. Next, Scale helps companies lock in contracts that will not force them to raise their prices too much and secure light-sensitive packaging to protect the colors. Finally, there are nine to 12 months of product testing to make sure production runs smoothly and that there are no adverse effects for consumers, such as red-dyed feces (something that has been known to happen with beet powder and extract; Alan says it’s harmless, but admits it can be unnerving).But Zissu’s biggest concern is that there won’t be enough to go around. Natural color demand is already up between 30-50% across the industry since food companies began announcing their intentions to stop using artificial color, he says, and the earliest deadline – 2027 – is still years away.“There is simply not enough supply to replace every single item in the market,” he says. “You’ll see the largest companies locking down colors soon, but there will not be enough until 2030.”There is also the worry that American consumers will reject the new colors altogether. While their counterparts in Europe, Canada and Japan have peacefully accepted the duller hues of natural dyes, Americans remain stubbornly attached to neon-bright candy and cereal.Case in point: in 2015, General Mills pledged to remove all artificial colors and flavorings from its products. The following year, it rolled out a natural version of Trix, the kid-friendly fruity breakfast cereal. But the muted Trix, colored by radishes, purple carrots and turmeric, was a flop. Customers missed the vibrant colors and complained that the new version didn’t taste right. By 2017, “classic Trix” had returned to grocery stores.On the other hand, when Kraft reformulated the powder for its macaroni and cheese and quietly began selling the all-natural version in December 2015, there was much less protest. As an Eater headline at the time put it: “Kraft Changed Its Mac and Cheese and Nobody Noticed.” Perhaps it was the marketing strategy – Kraft did not bother to make a big announcement until after it had sold 50m boxes – or maybe it was because the natural dyes were just as orange as the original. (Alan recalls that her young nieces and nephews were slightly worried about the change but accepted the new mac and cheese without much fuss.)As the adage goes, we eat with our eyes. The appearance of food should not change our perceptions of how it tastes, but, as anyone who has ever bought produce knows, it definitely does. In nature, brighter colors indicate that foods are ripe and will taste good. This principle also applies to human-made food.As far back as the middle ages, according to Ai Hisano, a professor of business history at the University of Tokyo and author of Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat, dairy farmers would mix carrot juice and annatto from achiote trees into their butter to make it a more appetizing yellow. When scientists discovered petroleum-based dyes in the mid-19th century, the dairy industry was one of the earliest adopters: the artificial dyes were cheaper, and they helped create uniform yellows for butter and cheese that appealed to shoppers.Other food producers quickly followed suit. Meat would be red! Sandwich bread would be white! Oranges – which sometimes stayed green, even when they were ripe – would be orange! By the early 20th century, the US government had started regulating food coloring to make sure it didn’t kill anyone.This was also the beginning of the golden age of industrial food such as candy, breakfast cereal and, most notoriously, Jell-O, which came in colors never seen in nature. Food dye became vital for branding, Hisano writes. Even if brighter color didn’t really affect flavor because the food was entirely manufactured, people perceived that it did, and that was what mattered. Would a beige Flamin’ Hot Cheeto taste as spicy?View image in fullscreen“I assume many consumers in the early 20th century were frightened by those bright-red foods,” Hisano told the Atlantic in 2017. “But one reason consumers liked them is because they were excited about these colors they had never seen before.” And the knowledge that they were regulated by the FDA made them feel they were safe to eat.Because the identity of their products depends on color, the most resistance to Kennedy’s initiative has come from America’s candy manufacturers. A spokesman for the National Confectioners Association said that candy makers will not adopt natural dyes until federal regulations compel them to. Of all the biggest US food companies, only Mars, maker of M&Ms, Skittles and Starburst (incidentally, Trump’s favorite candy), has not yet pledged to give up artificial dye, except for the already banned red 3. However, FDA commissioner Marty Makary told Fox News that he thinks Mars will come around sooner than later.Zissu, the food dye consultant, foresees “an R&D sprint” to develop natural dyes before the 2027 deadline. And indeed, since May, the FDA has approved four new natural colors – three blues and one white – for a wide range of food, including juices, milk-based meal replacements, cereal, chips, sugar and ready-to-eat chicken products.But Zissu does not think that a transition to natural dyes means that the color of food will revert to a pre-industrial dullness. “I believe we will always see the bright colors in candy and other items that consumers come to expect,” he says. “There will just be a lot more research dedicated to getting those colors if artificial [dye] is banned.”It may also help if America’s food manufacturers act en masse, as they appear to be doing: the change will be so overwhelming that, as Zissu puts it, “neon synthetics will look as dated as trans fats.” Perhaps in a few years, we will look back at green mint chip ice-cream in wonder. (Some people already do: many ice-cream producers, including Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, don’t use green as the signifier for mint.)It seems Maha is poised to help shake America of its affair with artificial colors. But it celebrates this victory at the same time as the Trump administration guts public health infrastructure.The ice-cream industry’s pledge came just 11 days after Congress passed a spending bill that will cut Medicaid spending, and therefore healthcare for millions of children, and slash Snap food assistance for US families. It came the same day that the Department of Health laid off thousands of employees. Under Trump, the government has also cut research grants to scientists studying, among other things, disease prevention and vaccines (of which Kennedy is a notorious skeptic). Underlying issues such as food and housing insecurity and child poverty that devastate children’s wellbeing are likely to worsen.Alan thinks that if Kennedy is serious about improving the health of America’s kids, there are much more pressing issues than food dye to work on. “I just can’t believe that someone would be given a chance to make such an impact,” she says, “and this is what they choose to do.” More

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      in US Politics

      Sentence before verdict: Trump’s attack on Obama is straight out of Alice in Wonderland | Austin Sarat

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      Almost every American knows that in our legal system, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent. The burden is on the government to overcome that presumption and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.Those simple but powerful maxims were once a source of national pride. They distinguished the United States from countries where government officials and political leaders branded the opponents guilty before they were charged with a crime or brought to trial.In Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of “sentence first-verdict afterwards” came to life in infamous show trials. Those trials lacked all the requisites of fairness. Evidence was manufactured to demonstrate the guilt of the regime’s enemies. Show trials told the story the government wanted told and were designed to signal that anyone, innocent or not, could be convicted of a crime against the state.So far, at least, this country has avoided Stalinesque show trials. But the logic of the show trial was very much on display this week in the Oval Office.In a now-familiar scene, during a meeting with the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Donald Trump went off script. He turned a reporter’s question about the unfolding Jeffrey Epstein scandal into an occasion to say that former president Barack Obama had committed “treason” by interfering in the 2016 presidential election.“He’s guilty,” Trump asserted, “This was treason. This was every word you can think of.”Speaking after the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president said: “Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton.”Republican congressmen and senators, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who investigated allegations of Obama’s involvement five years ago, found nothing to support them. But none of that mattered to the president on Tuesday.As Trump put it: “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly.” Not hiding his motives, Trump said: “It’s time to start after what they did to me.”Guilt first. Charges, trials and other legal niceties come later.This is American justice, Trump-style. He wants no part of the long and storied tradition in which presidents kept an arms-length relationship with the justice department and did not interfere with its decisions about whether and whom to prosecute for crimes.What Trump said about Obama is, the New York Times notes, “a stark example of his campaign of retribution against an ever-growing list of enemies that has little analogue in American history”. Putting one of his predecessors on trial also would take some of the sting out of Trump’s own dubious distinction of being the only former president to have been convicted of a felony.Some may be tempted to write off the president’s latest Oval Office pronouncements as an unhinged rant or only an effort to distract attention from Trump’s Epstein troubles. But that would be a mistake.A recent article by the neuroscientist Tali Sharot and the law professor Cass Sunstein helps explain why. That article is titled: “Will We Habituate to the Decline of Democracy?”Sharot and Sunstein argue that the US is on the cusp of a dangerous moment in its political history. They say that we can understand why by turning to neuroscience, not to political science.Neuroscience teaches us that “people are less likely to respond to or even notice gradual changes. That is largely due to habituation, which is the brain’s tendency to react less and less to things that are constant or that change slowly.”In politics, “when democratic norms are violated repeatedly, people begin to adjust. The first time a president refuses to concede an election, it’s a crisis. The second time, it’s a controversy. By the third time, it may be just another headline. Each new breach of democratic principles … politicizing the justice system … feels less outrageous than the last.”Americans must resist that tendency. To do so, Sharot and Sunstein argue, we need “to see things not in light of the deterioration of recent years but in light of our best historical practices, our highest ideals, and our highest aspirations”.In the realm of respect for the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, we can trace those practices, ideals and aspirations back to 1770, when John Adams, a patriot, practicing lawyer and later the second president of the United States, agreed to defend British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.Adams did so because he believed that everyone, no matter how reprehensible their act, was entitled to a defense. That principle meant that people needed to learn to withhold judgment, to respect evidence and to hear both sides of a story before making up their minds.That was a valuable lesson for those who would later want to lead our constitutional republic, as well as for its citizens. The trial of the British soldiers turned out, as the author Christopher Klein writes, to be “the first time reasonable doubt had ever been used as a standard”.Fast forward to 1940, and the memorable speech of the attorney general, Robert Jackson, to a gathering of United States attorneys. What he said about their role might also be said about the president’s assertions about Obama.Jackson observed that US attorneys had “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America”. A prosecutor, he explained, “can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations … The prosecutor can order arrests … and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial.”Sound familiar?The president is not a prosecutor, but since he has returned to power, President Trump has behaved and encouraged those in the justice department to ignore Jackson’s warnings that a prosecutor should focus on “cases that need to be prosecuted” rather than “people that he thinks he should get”. Targeting people, not crimes, means that the people prosecuted will be those who are “unpopular with the predominant or governing group” or are “attached to the wrong political views, or [are] personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself”.Jackson restated a long-cherished American ideal, namely that those with the power to ruin lives and reputations should seek “truth and not victims” and serve “the law and not factional purposes”.Since then, presidents of both parties, in even the most controversial cases and those involving allies or opponents, have heeded Jackson’s warnings. They have said nothing about pending cases, let alone announcing that it’s time “to go after” people.But no more. The justice department seems ready and willing to do the president’s bidding, even though there is no evidence that Obama did anything wrong in regard to the 2016 election. In addition, he may have immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he did in his official capacity.Trump’s attack on the “traitorous” Obama may be predictable. But it should not be acceptable to any of us.Sharot and Sunstein get it right when they say, “To avoid habituating ourselves to the torrent of President Trump’s assaults on democracy and the rule of law, we need to keep our best practices, ideals, and aspirations firmly in view what we’ve done.” We need “to compare what is happening today not to what happened yesterday or the day before, but to what we hope will happen tomorrow”.To get to that world, it is important to recall the words of John Adams and Robert Jackson and work to give them life again.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More