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    Trump officials contacted El Salvador president about Kilmar Ábrego García, sources say

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    The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back to the US despite the US supreme court ordering it to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release.The contacts produced no new developments after Bukele rejected the outreach, the people said. The supreme court had ordered the administration to return Ábrego García to the US so that he would face immigration proceedings as he would have, had he not been sent to El Salvador.The discussions appeared to be an effort by the Trump administration to window dress the underlying legal case and build a paper trail it could reference before the US district judge Paula Xinis, who previously ruled that Donald Trump raising the matter in the Oval Office was insufficient.Ábrego García has since been moved out of Cecot, the mega-prison officials known as the terrorism confinement center, to another prison in El Salvador since the supreme court ruling which the administration has repeatedly tried to manufacture uncertainty around or otherwise misrepresent.The recalcitrance from the US administration to comply has been on display for weeks as senior Trump advisers have become increasingly determined to use it as a case to test the extent of presidential power and its boast that the courts have no practical way to ensure quick compliance with orders.At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said he would “never tell” if he had been in touch with Bukele. CNN earlier reported Rubio has had discussions with Bukele directly. The New York Times reported there had been a diplomatic note sent to Bukele.“I would never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said as he sat next to Trump, adding it was “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president to the united states and the executive branch, not some judge”.And in an interview with ABC News that aired the night before, the US president himself said he “could” tell El Salvador to return Ábrego García.When it was raised to him that he had the ability to call Bukele and say “send him back right now”, Trump deflected responsibility. “I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want to do this,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe remarks could yet pose major headaches for the justice department in court as it prepares in the coming weeks to face a series of probing questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers, in writing and in depositions, about the administration’s efforts to comply with the supreme court ruling.By Trump saying that his lawyers had told him not to call Bukele, it could open the department up to bruising questions about whether they were deliberately flouting the order and place them in threat of contempt.After a closed-door hearing on Wednesday in federal district court in Maryland, Xinis refused the justice department’s request to extend a pause in discovery proceedings, ordering it to respond to questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers about his detention by this Friday.Xinis also said in an expedited deposition schedule that Ábrego García’s lawyers could interview up to six administration officials – including Robert Cerna, a top official at Ice, and Joseph Mazarra, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security – by next Thursday. More

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      ‘He’s just a kid’: the Maryland teenager swept into Trump immigration dragnet

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      When 19-year-old Javier Salazar was loaded on to a bus from an immigrant detention center in northern Texas, he had no idea where he was being taken.He wondered if he was being transferred to another facility or maybe deported back to his native Venezuela. He and the other passengers, their hands and feet shackled, settled into a tense silence. Then a terrifying possibility crept into Salazar’s mind.“My fear was being sent to El Salvador,” he said, to the brutal prison where the Trump administration has dispatched more than 200 Venezuelans into a legal black hole. They are accused of being violent gang members, but reportedly on flimsy evidence for most, deported without even a court hearing.Salazar became stressed “because we’d been listening to the news and the other people at the facility”, he said in a telephone interview from detention.His and other buses in the convoy from the remote Bluebonnet facility pulled over on the side of the road for an unexplained 15 minutes then drove on to Abilene regional airport, about 200 miles west of Dallas. Salazar recognized it as where he landed a few days earlier from detention in Farmville, Virginia, where he had been for about a month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested him and his father in neighboring Maryland.But once they arrived at the airport in Abilene, the buses abruptly turned around. On the way back to Bluebonnet, a guard told them to be thankful to God, Salazar said. Later he found out the likely reason why. An emergency order in the early hours from the supreme court had temporarily blocked their removal from the US, in the latest clash between Donald Trump and the courts.View image in fullscreen“I thank God that we weren’t sent to El Salvador, but I am still sad knowing that I am in this detention facility when I do not [even] have any tattoos [and have committed] no crimes,” Salazar said in a 25 April phone call, through an interpreter.He is being held in stark conditions, separately from his father, and unable to speak with his ailing mother, who lives in Colombia.Salazar’s case demonstrates that “if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail,” said his attorney, Travis Collins. Based on court documents, exclusive interviews with Salazar, his brother and his attorney, and a review of an 23 April phone conversation between the 19-year-old and his legal team, the Guardian has pieced together how Salazar was swept into the administration’s dragnet.Javier Salazar came to the US as an unaccompanied minor in 2022 and reunited with his father and some other relatives. The Guardian is using only his middle name, as he fears retaliation in Venezuela.His father had listed him as a beneficiary on his own US asylum application, where an unmarried offspring under 21 gains asylum if it is granted to the parent. Javier has no known criminal record, was at school and, per the justice department website, has an immigration court date in Virginia scheduled for 14 May, where Collins had planned to request Salazar’s release from Ice detention while his legal case progresses.But on an early mid-March morning, agents entered his father’s house in Maryland and took Salazar and his father away in handcuffs.Afterwards, scrolling through his social media on their phones, agents interrogated Salazar and asked him to identify various people in his network. Salazar saw one of the agents writing down in his notes something about a gun – an English word he recognized, he said.View image in fullscreenThe agents did not show him the image, but Salazar remembers insisting to them that whatever they saw was probably a toy water pistol. The Guardian has reviewed an image that Salazar’s family thinks Ice may have been referring to, it shows a person standing near Salazar with a blue-and-white item peeking out of a pants pocket that resembles a small plastic water pistol.Salazar was recorded in the authorities’ computer system as an alleged member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang and was made to wear green prison clothing that signifies an alleged gangster, according to a court filing.Ice was approached by the Guardian for comment but did not respond before publication.Javier’s older brother Daniel described Salazar as the video game-obsessed “baby” of the family.“He’s just a kid, still in the process of growing up,” Daniel told the Guardian in Spanish. Daniel’s full name is being withheld as he has an open immigration case. “Like any human being, he deserves a chance,” he added.The family is in pain. “We miss him, my family, my aunts, my mom, what we do is cry,” Daniel said.He has been posting social media slideshows with photos and videos set to music of Javier making peace signs at the beach, doing bicep curls at the gym, horsing around in a school cafeteria, rolling up a snowball.“You are not a criminal, you are a human being with many dreams and goals, you do not deserve that injustice,” text on one of these slideshows reads in Spanish.On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that immigrants subject to the obscure Alien Enemies Act (AEA) wartime law Trump is using to justify summary deportations must be given due process and time to seek legal remedies “before such removal occurs”.A week later, attorneys heard murmurs that the Trump administration was preparing to ship more migrants to El Salvador. On 14 April, when a 9am video call with Salazar from detention in Virginia was abruptly cancelled via email at 7.11am, Collins knew something was wrong.He scrambled to figure out where his clients were, “fearing the worst”, he said. Only two days later did he learn that they were taken to northern Texas, which at that time was not subject to a court block on summary removals under the AEA.On 17 April, Bluebonnet staff separated Salazar from his father, took him outside and handed him a notice in English. They asked him to sign it without reading it to him in Spanish or giving him a chance to consult his lawyer. When he refused, the agent said: “It ‘doesn’t matter, you’re going to be deported within the next 48 hours. Where you’re being deported to, I don’t know,’” Salazar later recounted to Collins in the phone conversation reviewed by the Guardian.The next thing Salazar knew, he was on that bus. The supreme court order has now bought him some time, but the battle is far from over. In a court filing from 24 April, the administration said it believed a mere 12 to 24 hours was a “reasonable” amount of time for detainees to contest their removal – and that it may continue with removals even if such a petition is pending, if a court denies a request for an emergency pause.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Immigrants’ Rights Project vowed that his organization “will continue to fight in courts around the country, including the US supreme court, to ensure there is due process, so that no individual ends up, perhaps permanently, in a brutal foreign prison without ever having had a chance to contest the government’s allegations and use of a wartime authority during peacetime”, he told the Guardian.Salazar’s relatives grapple with their decision to seek refuge and opportunity in the US. Daniel had thought that “the process would have been fair” based on how America has been portrayed on television, he said.“I feel guilty because I told him to come so he could have a better life,” he said. “And look at what happened.” More

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      Trump hails achievements of first 100 days despite polls revealing American disapproval on economy – as it happened

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      Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.This brings our coverage of day 100 of Donald Trump’s second term to a close. We will be back in the morning, as the next of 1,000-plus days dawn, but in the meantime we leave you with this list of the day’s developments:

      At Donald Trump’s rally in Michigan, his supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting”: “USA! USA!”

      As Trump defended his broadly unpopular handling of the economy, he criticized Fed chair Jerome Powell, saying: “I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that.” The businessman president who used bankruptcy law to rescue his failed enterprises six times added: “I know much more about interest rates than he does”.

      Trump mistakenly attacked the Michigan representative John James, calling the Republican he had endorsed “a lunatic” for trying to impeach him. That was someone else.

      Trump supporters praised by the president at a rally included the former member of a violent cult who founded Blacks for Trump, and a retired autoworker who once told people to read David Duke’s “honest and fair” book about race.

      The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of immigrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings.

      Trump called Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos on Tuesday morning to complain about a report that the company planned to display prices that show the impact of tariffs. Trump told reporters later that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during their call, and “he solved the problem very quickly”.

      The Trump administration has reached one trade deal already but won’t tell us who with until that country’s prime minister and parliament approve the deal, the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said told CNBC.

      The United States proposed sending up to 500 Venezuelan immigrants with alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador as the two governments sought to reach an agreement on the use of the nation’s notorious mega-prison, according to emails seen by CNN.

      Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation. The measure gives automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.

      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

      Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.

      Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.
      One notable feature of Tuesday’s Trump rally in Michigan is that it featured cameos from supporters of the president who have been fixtures of his campaign rallies for nearly a decade.Early in the speech, as he pointed to familiar faces, Trump recognized the Front Row Joes, a group of diehard supporters akin to groupies who have traveled the country to attend dozens of his rallies. He also shouted out Blake Marnell, a supporter who wears a “brick suit” in homage to Trump’s border wall and witnessed the assassination attempt last year in Butler, Pennsylvania.“There’s my friend, Blacks for Trump. I like that guy. He follows me”, the president said pointing into the crowd. “We love you, your whoile group has been so supportice over the years, I want to thank you”.“Everyone thinks I pay you a fortune”, Trump added. “I don’t even know who the hell he is, I just like him”.As I reported in 2020, the “Blacks for Trump” founder is Maurice Symonette, a.k.a. Michael the Black Man, a former member of a violent cult who posts anti-Semitic screeds and racist conspiracy theories online, and yet has been a featured member of the audience at Trump campaign events since 2016.Symonette was known as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites. Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted. After the trial, he changed his last name to Symonette, which was his father’s surname, before eventually reinventing himself as Michael the Black Man.On his website, Symonette makes a variety of bizarre claims, including that Omar and other prominent Black Democrats, artists and athletes — including former President Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, Colin Kaepernick, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. — are “DECEVING [sic] FAKE BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INDIANS!” In a sermon now deleted from YouTube, he claimed that the Senate is controlled by a secret underground of “Cherokee Mormons.”Later in the speech, Trump called to the stage another supporter who has been a figure at rallies since 2016: Brian Pannebecker, a retired auto worker who told the crowd, “We have the greatest President, probably not just in our lifetimes, but in the history of this country!”Pannebecker’s brief cameo was clipped and shared on social media by an official White House account, despite the fact that it was first reported a decade ago that he had written a glowing review of David Duke’s book, “My Awakening”, in which he called the former Klansman’s work “honest and fair”. After reading the book, Pannebecker wrote in his online review, people “will be able to discuss the issue of race without the fear of being labeled a racist because you will have the facts and the truth on your side”.A federal judge in New Jersey ruled on Tuesday that Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and Palestine solidarity activist who was detained on 8 March in his apartment building in New York and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views.“This Court has habeas jurisdiction over this case” Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote. “And as set out in this Opinion, that jurisdiction is intact. It has not been removed.”“As I am now caring for our barely week-old son, it is even more urgent that we continue to speak out for Mahmoud’s freedom, and for the freedom of all people being unjustly targeted for advocating against Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife said in a statement. “I am relieved at the court’s finding that my husband can move forward with his case in federal court. This is an important step towards securing Mahmoud’s freedom. But there is still more work to be done. I will continue to strongly advocate for my husband, so he can come home to our family, and feel the pure joy all parents know of holding your first-born child in your arms.”“The court has affirmed that the federal government does not have the unreviewable authority to trample on our fundamental freedoms,” Noor Zafar of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said in a statment emailed to reporters. “This is a huge step forward for Mahmoud and for the other students and scholars that the Trump administration has unlawfully detained in retaliation for their political speech, and a rebuke of attempts by the executive to use immigration laws to weaken First Amendment protections for political gain.”The US Department of Justice has begun the first criminal prosecutions of migrants for entering a newly declared military buffer zone created along the border with Mexico, according to court filings, Reuters reports.At least 28 migrants were charged were charged in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Monday for crossing into the 170-mile-long, 60-foot-wide militarized buffer zone patrolled by active-duty US troops.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, visited the area last week and said it was the start of a plan to extend the buffer zone along the border.“The reason we are here today, at almost the 100-day mark of President Trump’s administration is because you’re standing on a National Defense Area, this may as well be a military base” Hegseth said in a defense department social media video posted online. “Any illegal attempting to enter that zone is entering a military base.”“As New Mexicans, we have deep concerns about the enhanced militarization of our borderlands communities” the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico in a statement last week. “The expansion of military detention powers in the ‘New Mexico National Defense Area’ – also known as the ‘border buffer zone’ – represents a dangerous erosion of the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians.”The idea of militarizing the border has long been a dream of far-right politicians, like the failed Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters, who devoted a campaign ad to the idea in 2022.Trump has left the stage, and his supporters are filing out of the venue, which we are told by the pool reporter there has a capacity of 4,000, but was only about half or three-fifths full.One bizarre moment early in the speech that we would have heard a lot more about had the speaker been Joe Biden was when Trump tore into Representative John James, telling the crowd the Michigan Republican he had endorsed and campaigned with was “a lunatic”.“Some guy that I never heard of, John James. Is he a congressman? This guy? He said, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to start the impeachment of Donald Trump”, Trump told the crowd. Many of his supporters in the room, and watching at home, were probably aware that the president, who celebrates his 79th birthday in six weeks, had confused James with Representative Shri Thanedar, the Michigan Democrat who did, in fact, introduce articles of impeachment against Trump on Monday.Trump has just finished speaking and departed to the strains of the Village People anthem YMCA. He spoke for about 90 minutes in what was a fairly typical rally speech and even told the crowd early on, “I miss you guys. I miss the campaign”.If there has been one constant theme throughout his time in office, it has been that he clearly loves the adulation of the crowd that comes from making campaign speeches far more than the work of governing.Trump just made the entirely false claim that, “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction”.“For the first time ever, in, I think, ever, that they’re saying the country is headed in the right direction”, Trump added. “Has never happened before”.It is not clear why the president thinks this is true, or indeed if he does, but it is very clearly not true.In the latest nationwide poll, conducted from April 17-21 for the Associated Press by National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the overwhelming majority of Americans said that the country is headed in the wrong direction (62% vs 37%).The latest Gallup poll, from earlier in April showed that just 34% were satisfied with the way things were going in the US, and 64% were dissatisfied. While those numbers were markedly better than last summer, when satisfaction was as low as 18% and dissatisfaction reached 80%, the majority still clearly says the country is headed in the wrong direction.It is also not true to say that American have never previously said the country was going in the right direction. Gallup found that 50% of the public said that things were going n the right direction at this point in George W. Bush’s first term in 2001. There was even more optimism in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, when the right direction number reached 70%.Defending his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his trade war and the prospect of rising inflation, Trump just told his supporters in Michigan: “Inflation is basically down, and interest rates came down despite the fact that I have a Fed person who’s not really doing a good job, but I won’t say that. I want to be very nice. I want to be very nice and respectful to the Fed. You’re not supposed to criticize the Fed; you’re supposed to let him do his own thing, but I know much more about interest rates than he does, believe me.”At his rally in Michigan, Donald Trump’s supporters reacted to the screening of a long video, set to ominous music, showing the harsh treatment of men he had deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador without due process by chanting “USA! USA”!”The video, first posted on Elon Musk’s social media platform X by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in March, shows 238 men accused of being members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, being taken from planes and confined in the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot.The images of the abusive treatment clearly delighted Trump, and his supporters. The fact that the men were not given an opportunity to contest the accusation that they are members of either Tren de Aragua or the Salvadoran gang MS-13, seemed not to trouble Trump.Instead, he accused Democrats of “racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth”.“They’re racing to the courts to help them”, Trump claimed, ignoring the fact that his own administration has admitted in court that at least one of the man deported, Kilmar Ábrego García, was sent there by mistake, in violation of an order issued during hjis previous term in office. The families of other men seen in the video have pointed to multiple errors in the interpretation of their tattoos as proof that they are gang members.Trump is speaking now at a rally in Warren, Michigan and he has fulsome praise for what he calls “the most successful 100 days of any administration in the history of our country”.A raft of opinion polls released this week shows that a majority of Americans disagree, strongly, expressing deep disapproval of his performance as president, and particularly his handling of the economy, which has been severely damaged by his chaotic imposition of tariffs against nearly even nation, except Russia.A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Tuesday shows that 45% of those asked to grade Trump’s performance as president gave him an F, 7% a D, 8% a C, 17% a B, and 23% an A.Half of independents said Trump deserves an F, and only a slim majority of Republicans gave him an A.“Today, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke with the President of the United States, Donald J Trump”, a statement from the Canadian prime minister’s office said.“President Trump congratulated Prime Minister Carney on his recent election. The leaders agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment. To that end, the leaders agreed to meet in person in the near future.”Carney’s center-left Liberal party won Monday’s general election thanks to a wave of resentment about Trump’s threats to annex Canada and the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports.“As I’ve been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country”, Carney said in his victory speech late Monday. As the crowd jeered and shouted “Never!” Carney agreed. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, never, ever happen”.As Canadian went to the polls on Monday, Trump posted what seemed like an endorsement of Carney’s rival, the Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, suggesting that the pro-Trump politician would help bring about Canada’s absorption into the United States. When the votes were counted, however, Poilievre, who had a commanding lead in the polls before Trump started talking about annexing the country, had not only failed to lead the Conservatives to power, he had even lost his own seat.Despite Carney’s office claiming on Tuesday that he and Trump had agreed to work together “as independent, sovereign nations”, White House officials insisted that Trump is still serious about his stated desire to make Canada the 51st US state.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked during a briefing for rightwing influencers if Trump was “truthing or trolling” when he says that he wants to annex Canada, and Greenland. “Trump truthing, all the way”, she replied. “And the Canadians would benefit greatly, let me tell you that”.Donald Trump surprised Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by inviting her to speak during his address at Selfridge air national guard base on Tuesday afternoon.Trump, who came to Macomb county, Michigan, for an evening rally to celebrate what he calls the historic accomplishments of the first 100 days of his second term, despite widespread disapproval of his actions by a majority of Americans in a series of polls, announced a new fighter jet mission for the base outside Detroit, easing fears that the installation would be closed.For decades, Trump said, the base has “stood as a crucial pillar of North American air defense”.“In recent years, many in Michigan have feared for the future of the base. They’ve been calling everybody, but the only one that mattered is Trump,” he said. “Today I have come in person to lay to rest any doubt about Selfridge’s future.”Whitmer’s political standing was damaged earlier this month when she was photographed hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office after Trump invited her to be present as he signed executive orders, two of which demanded investigations of critics who had served in his first administration.On Tuesday, she was careful to begin her impromptu remarks by saying that she had not expected to speak, and then praised the decision as a boon for the local economy, but did not praise Trump, as Republicans he invited to make remarks did.Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Tuesday that offers temporary relief to automakers from the 25% tariffs he imposed in March in a previous proclamation.The White House confirmed to Fox Business earlier that the new measure would give automakers a break for two years to give them time to move auto production back to the United States.The proclamation outlines a series of technical changes to the tariff regime, “to modify the system imposed in Proclamation 10908 by reducing duties assessed on automobile parts accounting for 15 percent of the value of an automobile assembled in the United States for 1 year and equivalent to 10 percent of that value for an additional year”.As we reported earlier, the changes will allow carmakers with US factories to reduce the amount they pay in import taxes on foreign parts, using a formula tied to how many cars they sell and the price.Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, accused the Trump administration of turning “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”, after he and other Joe Biden appointees were removed from the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.Emhoff, who is Jewish and spoke passionately against the rising tide of antisemitism during his time as the second gentleman, said he was informed on Tuesday that he had been removed from the museum’s council.“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve,” he said.“No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combatting hate and antisemitism. I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms – because silence is never an option.”The New York Times reported that the Trump administration also fired Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff; Susan Rice, national security adviser to Barack Obama, and Biden’s top domestic policy adviser; and Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who was a senior adviser to the former president.Trump defeated Harris, then the US vice-president, in November. Emhoff’s law firm recently struck a deal with the Trump administration to avert an executive order targeting its practice, a decision Emhoff is reported to have voiced his disagreement with.Pete Hegseth has abruptly banished the Pentagon’s Women, Peace and Security program as part of his crusade against diversity and equity, dismissing it as a “woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative” despite it being a signature Donald Trump achievement from his first term.In a post on X, the US defense secretary wrote: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the [Department of Defense]. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops – distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”Hegseth added that the program was “pushed by feminists and left-wing activists”, claiming: “Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.”But the decision is raising some eyebrows, as the initiative was established during Trump’s first administration when he signed the Women, Peace and Security Act in 2017, making the US the first country in the world to codify standalone legislation on the matter.The Trump campaign even courted female voters by citing the initiative as one of its top accomplishments for women on its website.Attempting to square this circle, Hegseth later claimed the Biden administration had “distorted & weaponized” the original program. “Biden ruined EVERYTHING, including ‘Women, Peace & Security,’” he insisted.The Senate has confirmed billionaire investment banker Warren Stephens to be ambassador to the UK, backing Donald Trump’s nominee by 59 to 39.Stephens is chair, president and CEO of Stephens Inc, a privately owned financial services firm headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a longtime contributor to Republican candidates, including Trump, having donated millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaigns and 2025 inauguration fund.Asked about negotiations with Congress over tax legislation, Trump said: “The Republicans are with us. I think we’ve got the big beautiful deal that’s moving along, and I think we’re going to have it taken care of.” He added:
      A very important element that we’re working on now, more important than anything with the border in good shape, is the fact that we want to get, and very importantly, the big beautiful new deal. If we get that done, that’s the biggest thing … And I think we’re going to get it done. We have great Republican support. If the Democrats blocked it, you’d have a 60% tax increase. I don’t think that’s going to happen. We have great support from Republicans. …
      The next period of time, I think, my biggest focus will be on Congress, the deal that we’re working on. That would be the biggest bill in the history of our country in terms of tax cuts and regulation cuts, and other things. More

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      Denied, detained, deported: the people targeted in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting people requesting asylum and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green-card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested without due process in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March, denied release to attend the birth. He told an immigration judge that he and hundreds of other detainees were being denied rights the court itself had claimed to prioritize: “Due process and fundamental fairness.”View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student near Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, as first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen. The administration’s arcane justification is that his activism could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process, citing a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). He is detained in Vermont. Democratic lawmakers have visited Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi but failed to secure their release.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother Columbia student, Chung, 21, sued the administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they wanted to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, 32, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”He was taken to the same Louisiana federal detention center as Khalil. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said he was a threat to national security, without providing details, and the state department had revoked his visa, while an immigration judge refused to release him.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the Indian citizen’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.View image in fullscreenKseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana. Her colleagues say her expertise is “irreplaceable” and Petrova said foreign scientists like her “enrich” America.Student visas revoked, then restored amid chaosMore than 1,400 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, in what the specialist publication Inside Higher Education called “an explosion of visa terminations”.Amid scant information and rising panic, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some were cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some could find no explanation. Then in the face of multiple court challenges, the administration in late April reversed course and restored legal statuses that had been rescinded en masse, but said it was developing a new policy. Uncertainty prevails.The legal rollercoaster came too late for this high-profile case:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of the University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. The Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Removed by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadorian man was removed to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But it is essentially defying a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing, to a brutal mega-prison, then later transferred to another facility. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge repeatedly and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis.He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans deported there. He has begged to speak to his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who insists he is not a criminal. The sheet metalworkers union chief, Michael Coleman, described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadorian prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández RomeroView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes Barriosskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the DHS, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting against the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country without due process because their countries of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody. She is possibly still in Panama trying to get a foothold.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Adam PeñaThis San Diego-based US citizen now carries his American passport and birth certificate everywhere with him and thinks he was sent one of the “time for you to leave” letters in error but because he represents clients in Ice detention locally. “I do believe this email was sent intentionally to immigration advocates around the country to instill fear and intimidation,” he told NBC news.Americans removedChildren who are seven, four and two and are US citizens were removed from the US in late April when their mothers were deported to Honduras. DHS said the two women chose to take their children with them but one of their lawyers told the Guardian that they were denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on deportation flights from Louisiana. A federal judge said it was “illegal and unconstitutional” to thus remove a US citizen “with no meaningful process”.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green-card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      ‘They disappear them’: families of the detained see grim echo of Latin American dictatorships in Trump’s US

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      Neiyerver Rengel’s captors came one sunny spring morning, lurking outside the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and pouncing as soon as he emerged.The three government agents announced the young Venezuelan man had “charges to answer” and was being detained.“Everything’s going to be OK,” the man’s girlfriend, Richely Alejandra Uzcátegui Gutiérrez, remembers the handcuffed 27-year-old reassuring her as she gave him one last hug.Then Rengel was put in a vehicle and vanished into thin air: spirited into custody and, his family would later learn, dispatched to a detention centre notorious for torture and inhuman conditions hundreds of miles from home.“We have to take him,” Uzcátegui recalls one officer saying before they left. “But if this is a misunderstanding, he’ll be released and given a phone call to contact you.”That call never came.View image in fullscreenThe scenes above might have played out in any number of Latin American dictatorships during the 20th century, from Gen Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Gen Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina. Thousands of regime opponents were seized at home or on the street – and slipped off the map, becoming “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).But Rengel’s disappearance took place on 13 March this year in Donald Trump’s US, where what campaigners call the “forced disappearance” of scores of Venezuelan migrants has fuelled fears of an authoritarian tack under a leader who vowed to be a dictator “on day one” of his presidency. Those fears intensified on Friday amid reports that a judge had been arrested by the FBI for supposedly helping “an illegal alien” evade arrest.Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director, said she had no hesitation in calling the detentions of those Venezuelans enforced disappearances. “Under international law, when someone is detained and there’s no account of where the person is, it amounts to enforced disappearances – and this is exactly what has happened,” she said.View image in fullscreenFor five weeks after Rengel’s detention in Irving, Texas, relatives remained in the dark over his whereabouts. His brother, Nedizon León Rengel, said he spent hours calling immigration detention centres but failed to get clear answers. “They told us he’d been deported but wouldn’t say where,” recalled Nedizon, who migrated to the US with his brother in 2023.Finally, on 23 April, came the bombshell: a report on NBC News said Rengel was one of at least 252 Venezuelans who had been flown to authoritarian El Salvador and jailed for supposedly belonging to the Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang that Trump’s administration has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.“Finding out through the news was devastating. But the worst part was having to tell my mum,” said Nedizon. “Before I came here, the US represented a land of opportunity – a place to fulfil dreams and improve our quality of life … Now it feels like a nightmare. Human rights aren’t even being respected any more – not even the right to make a phone call, which is guaranteed to anyone who is detained.”Rengel was not the only Venezuelan to disappear after being ensnared in Trump’s crackdown on immigrants he has repeatedly smeared as rapists, murderers and terrorists who have supposedly launched an “invasion” of the US.Ricardo Prada Vásquez, 33, was apprehended in Detroit in mid-January, days after sending his brother a video showing the Chicago snow – a magical moment for a man raised on Margarita, a sun-kissed Caribbean island, who had never seen a northern winter.On 15 March, Prada told a friend he was being deported to Venezuela – but he never arrived. Nor was Prada’s name on a list published five days later by CBS News identifying 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s “terrorism confinement” prison. (Rengel was also not on the list. US and Salvadoran authorities have refused to publish a register of the prisoners’ names.)For the next five weeks, Prada’s relatives – who deny he is a criminal – also had no idea where he was.View image in fullscreen“It’s mentally exhausting to be constantly thinking about how he is and what he’s going through,” his brother, Hugo Prada, said from Venezuela. Only last Tuesday, after Prada’s story was featured in the New York Times, authorities did confirm where he had been sent.“This TDA gang member didn’t ‘disappear’. He is in El Salvador,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, wrote on X, claiming Prada had been “designated a public safety threat”.Prada defended his brother, a former shoe salesman he described as a laid-back, hard-working quipster who migrated to the US last year hoping to provide a better future for his four-year-old son, Alexandro, who still lives on Margarita. “Dammit, he went [to the US] in search of a better life and what he got was this disaster,” said Prada, insisting his sibling was innocent.Before Prada’s detention, he held near-daily video calls with his child. In recent days, Alexandro has repeatedly asked relatives why he can no longer speak with his father. “They say he’s working,” said Hugo, voicing shock that people could vanish into custody in the US.“It’s unbelievable that they just grabbed them and sent them to a concentration camp for them to die, just like Hitler did with the Jews,” Prada added. “[The US is] a democratic country – and it’s as if we’ve gone 50 or 100 years back in time.”View image in fullscreenNelson Suárez, the brother of a third Venezuelan jailed in El Salvador, said the treatment of the detainees – some of whom have been paraded on television with shaved heads and in shackles – reminded him of how the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro dealt with his foes. “[They are doing] the same thing they do in Venezuela when they capture a political prisoner. They lock them up and disappear them – and nobody hears anything more from them until the government feels like it,” said Suárez, whose brother, Arturo Suárez, is a musician with no criminal background.The wave of detentions and disappearances has devastated the US’s Venezuelan community, which has swelled in recent years as a result of the South American country’s economic collapse.“The community lives in uncertainty and in terror,” said Adelys Ferro, who runs the Venezuelan American Caucus advocacy group. “People are petrified. They are thinking: ‘What if I am next? What if they stop me? What is going to happen?’“Even people with documents are terrified. Even people with green cards are terrified,” added Ferro, a Venezuelan-American who has lived in the US for 20 years. “This is something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in the world, much less – for Christ’s sake – in America.”Six weeks after federal agents seized her hairdresser boyfriend outside their home in Irving, Texas, Uzcátegui said she was still not convinced she knew the full truth about his plight, despite the DHS admitting last Tuesday that he had also been sent to El Salvador.View image in fullscreenWithout offering evidence, McLaughlin told NBC News Rengel was “an associate of Tren de Aragua … a vicious gang that rapes, maims, and murders for sport” – a claim relatives reject. Rengel’s only run-in with the law appears to have been being last year fined $492 after he was stopped in a co-worker’s car in which police found a marijuana trimmer.“To me, he’s still missing. This doesn’t give me peace of mind,” Uzcátegui said of the government’s admission. “Because there’s no record, no photo, no phone call. I insist – he’s still missing.”Even families who now know their loved ones were sent to El Salvador do not know how they are, in which prison they are being held, what charges, if any, they face, or how long they may be held there.“On one hand I feel a little bit calmer knowing that he’s somewhere and he’s not dead. But what situation awaits us? What comes next?” wondered Hugo Prada, who had no idea what charges his brother was facing or how long a sentence he could face.Ferro vowed to continue denouncing the “nightmare” such families were facing. “It is exhausting, and so painful and disheartening. But that pain is not going to make us cease fighting for justice, that’s for sure,” she said.Speaking from her home in Venezuela, Rengel’s 50-year-old mother, Sandra Luz Rengel, recalled begging him “from the bottom of my heart” not to travel to the US. But he was unmoved – and now he was lost.“Not knowing anything about him is outrageous,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do.” More

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      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      What is Tren de Aragua and has the group ‘invaded’ the United States?

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      The Trump administration has fixated on portraying a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as a state-sponsored international terrorist organization that has invaded the US.Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US.The US president claims the criminal group “is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare” here, which in turn should allow agents to arrest Venezuelans and exile them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador’s Cecot prison without even a court hearing.Yet experts say the claims do not reflect reality and, instead, Donald Trump has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown.What is Tren de Aragua?TdA is a gang that originated in Venezuela but has since expanded its reach to other countries in Latin America, alongside a more general mass diaspora of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing autocratic rule under the president, Nicolás Maduro.Some scholars track the group’s early days to 2005, when a trade union’s members started to embezzle funds and extort contractors while working on a railroad project – hence the “tren”, or “train”, in the Aragua region.TdA then took off in Venezuela’s Aragua state around 2014, within the Tocorón prison, where members had access to restaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub and other amenities atypical of a lock-up. The penitentiary became TdA’s headquarters – where leaders on the inside directed criminal activity on the outside – until 2023, when the Venezuelan government raided Tocorón and the gang began to fragment.One scholar wrote: “The TdA is of modest prominence and is nowhere near as established as other gangs in Central and South America.” Some of those more influential criminal organizations, such as MS-13 and Mexico’s cartels, have long had a foothold in – or even have their origins in – the US.That said, TdA has been powerful enough to torment and exploit other Venezuelans at home and abroad, preying particularly on vulnerable women, who are forced into the sex industry to pay off their debt after the gang smuggles them to nearby countries such as Chile, Colombia or Peru.TdA members have also started working with Mexican cartels, infiltrating groups of immigrants and then colluding with Mexico’s organized crime networks to extort them.Has Tren de Aragua ‘invaded’ the US?Tren de Aragua does have a presence in the US, but that presence is diffuse, uncoordinated, and on a smaller scale than the Trump administration’s repeatedly sounding the alarm and citing TdA in immigration-related arrests might make it seem. Three experts put it bluntly when they wrote for the New York Times: “Tren de Aragua is not invading America.”That’s not to say that individual TdA members – or people purporting to be TdA members for clout – haven’t caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the US. In Miami, a former Venezuelan police officer was reportedly abducted and murdered by a TdA member. Another supposed gang member allegedly shot two New York police officers. And the criminal organization has seemingly imported its sex-trafficking model, exploiting Venezuelan women who owe them for transportation into the US.Even so, InSight Crime, a thinktank that studies organized crime across the Americas, has said that TdA is growing weaker, not stronger, and “now operates more as a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization”.Earlier this month, US authorities revealed federal charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, firearm offenses and robbery against 27 alleged current or alleged former TdA members and associates, indictments and arrests that attorney general Pam Bondi said would “devastate TdA’s infrastructure”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy late last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was looking into more than 600 immigrants in the US suspected of having some connection to TdA, though whether they were victims, witnesses or gang members remained unclear.That number represents fewer than 0.09% of the 700,000 Venezuelans who have resettled in the US, many of whom feel they are being smeared.The criteria cited as justification for alleging detainees or people being removed from the US without due process are TdA members include suspects making hand signs, wearing Chicago Bulls paraphernalia or similar, or having certain tattoos, which prominent researchers of gangs have said are not strong indicators, or indicia at all, of gang membership.Meanwhile, several federal judges say essentially that Trump’s using the AEA and claims of “war” and “invasion” are invalid, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed lawsuits across the country challenging its use to skirt due process.Is Tren de Aragua working with Venezuela’s government?Trump is relying on highly controversial measures, chiefly the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, to summarily deport people the administration alleges are TdA members, many of whom have not been charged with crimes. His justification is that the gang is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.That’s unlikely. TdA was protected by the Venezuelan government in the past, according to InSight Crime. But that agreement no longer stands, with the raid on the criminal organization’s prison headquarters a case in point.The Washington Post reports that a recent National Intelligence Council internal assessment – which relied on information from the US’s 18 intelligence agencies – determined that while TdA has some low-level contacts in Maduro’s government, it is in no way commanded by Maduro. This makes Trump’s using the invasion argument to bypass due process flimsy – and contrary to the US supreme court’s insistence of the right for individuals to challenge the government. More

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      in US Politics

      I used to laugh at my Chilean father’s paranoia about life in the US – not any more

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      View image in fullscreen“Don’t open the door to nobody,” my father warned throughout my childhood – right up until the day he died. He trusted no politicians, no organized religion and definitely no strangers knocking unannounced.Lately, his words echo louder than ever.In California, where I teach at university, the year began with wildfires. They’re out now, but there is no containment for the political blaze sweeping through higher education. One after another, Donald Trump’s executive orders have scorched the landscape: slashing funding, silencing communication, terminating grants, capping research.Each one feeds the fire. As Trump remarked in his address to Congress, he’s “just getting started”.So between grading papers and making dinner, the real questions linger: will I still have a job next year? Will my department survive? Will my students be safe? Will my work be banned for using words like disability or inequality?These questions aren’t paranoid. They’re familiar.They’re the same kinds of questions my father asked himself in 1975 before fleeing Chile for the US, trading a brutal dictatorship for freedom.The speed and ease with which words like “purge”, “erasure” and “forced removal” have flooded our lexicon, crammed into news updates about attacks on minority groups and immigrants, brings to mind 11 September 1973.Though I wasn’t born yet, that day lives beneath my skin as one of Chile’s daughters. On that day, the military overthrew the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and ushered in a 17-year dictatorship under Gen Augusto Pinochet.View image in fullscreenThe new regime tortured and murdered thousands of Allende supporters. And because Pinochet feared free speech and a free press, public debate and intellectual freedoms, he specifically targeted writers, academics, students and artists.Authoritarian regimes always do.Now consider what’s happening today to those on Trump’s growing enemy list. This includes the recently detained Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, my alma mater. Trump hasn’t even tried to hide his desire for retribution; instead, he vowed that Khalil’s arrest would be the first of “many to come”.Since then, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has revoked 300 scholars’ visas and federal agents have detained at least a dozen students and professors, often without clarity on charges or alleged crimes other than protesting and speaking out.The case of the Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk– arrested in broad daylight by plainclothes Ice agents – stands out for me. Her only known offense was co-authoring an op-ed in the campus newspaper that criticized the university’s response to students’ demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel over the Gaza conflict.Some ideas are now deemed so dangerous they must be erased, free speech be damned.View image in fullscreenWith the thought police now in full force in my country – our country – I can’t help but think of the killing of Víctor Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter often dubbed the Bob Dylan of Chile. His curly hair, olive skin and Mapuche features so resemble my father’s that I tear up watching black-and-white performances of El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The Right to Live in Peace).Born into an impoverished peasant family and a fierce supporter of working-class and Indigenous people, he threaded their stories into song. “We’ve had enough of that music that doesn’t speak to us, that entertains us only for a moment, but leaves us empty,” he said. “We began to create a new kind of song. It was music that was born out of total necessity.”Jara was closely aligned with Allende’s leftist Popular Unity coalition, even rewriting the lyrics to its anthem, Venceremos (We Shall Prevail), which made him a prime target for the opposition.Like many workers, Jara responded to Allende’s call on the morning of 11 September to occupy their workplaces in defiance of the unfolding coup. As a professor at the State Technical University, he went to campus. Despite a strict curfew – anyone found on the streets risked being shot – hundreds of students and faculty sought refuge in university buildings, which were later shelled by tanks and raked with machine gun fire.A survivor, Osiel Núñez Quevado, recalled in a documentary: “Without absolutely no warning, they began machine-gunning the university’s central building. They got everybody out, putting professors and students on the floor with hands on their heads. There among them, was Víctor.”Pinochet’s forces found Jara’s message so threatening that when he was identified among the prisoners brought to Estadio Chile – the stadium later turned into a detention center and renamed to honor the singer’s memory – he was singled out for torture in an especially cruel way.Soldiers broke his hands and wrists, then taunted him to play his guitar and sing. Badly beaten and bloodied, in the two hours before his death he secured a pen and paper from a friend and gathered the strength to write his final song, Estadio Chile.He defiantly performed Venceremos before his captors killed him with a gunshot to the head, further riddling his body with 44 bullet wounds before dumping his corpse in the street.View image in fullscreenSuch brutality, forever seared into the consciousness of Chileans like my father, has shaped generations across national borders, thousands of miles, and decades. The ghosts of a decimated democracy haunted Dad’s nightmares, and they continue to haunt me.When I turned 18, my father actively discouraged me from voting, fearing that my name could end up on a list used against me one day, that I could be killed like one of los desaparecidos – the thousands of Chileans who were abducted by state forces during Pinochet’s rule, never to be seen again.The deeper I dig into history, the more parallels I uncover between then and now.I recently learned about Chile’s failed coup in June 1973, which eerily resembles the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. Riding on growing discontent within the military, Lt Col Roberto Souper launched an unsuccessful attempt against Allende. Though poorly coordinated, it served as a kind of dress rehearsal, helping the military understand the conditions necessary for success in a future attempt.The commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, Gen Carlos Prats, helped squelch the rebellion. But by August, having lost the military’s support, Prats resigned and personally recommended his replacement: his second-in-command, Pinochet. (The following year, while in exile, Prats and his wife Sofía were killed in a car bombing in Buenos Aires, carried out by Chile’s secret police.)Pinochet swiftly pardoned those arrested during the failed coup attempt – mostly men from various branches of the military – and assigned them to guard the Estadio Nacional, where so many were tortured and killed.The similarities are impossible to ignore: a failed insurrection, full pardons for the perpetrators, and ensuing vengeance.As the attorney Almudena Bernabéu observes, “Dictatorial regimes are fueled by arrogance and by the ability to deny that their power will ever end.”View image in fullscreenEmboldened and once again in power, Trump’s ire threatens most of the American public, save for a small segment of wealthy oligarchs.And just as in Chile, where poverty soared in the dictatorship years, the most vulnerable Trump voters will suffer most from rising prices and cuts to crucial social safety net programs.Allende’s wide-ranging platform had promised to alleviate extreme inequality, at a time when 28.5% of Chileans lived in poverty. He had pursued a number of reforms including increasing wages, providing free milk to poor children and nationalizing the copper industry. He won a close race, after having garnered nearly 37% of the vote, partly thanks to worker and peasant turnout.But his victory came at a time of extreme political polarization and foreign interference. The National Security Archive contains a trove of documents exposing the US government’s efforts to eradicate the perceived communist threat by attempting to prevent Allende’s win and then undermining his presidency with anti-leftist propaganda and economic encroachment to destabilize the country.Severe inflation and scarcity had left people like my father – an intended beneficiary of Allende’s policies – disgruntled. His frustrations help me understand the deep dissatisfaction and distrust felt by the large swathes of midwestern voters who supported Trump.Dad had never graduated from high school. He had toiled in nitrate mines in the Atacama desert, loaded cargo on ships, hauled trash in buildings – dirty jobs that left his hands calloused and his psyche bruised – eventually securing a union job as an elevator operator and later doorman.He would often recount his dissatisfaction with Allende, given long food lines and the exorbitant prices for black market goods, and had been especially stung by the indignity of a waiter at a “nice” restaurant handing him newspaper to wipe his hands instead of napkins.Between the lack of economic opportunity, especially for those like Dad born into the working class, and the violence and repression during the dictatorship, my father emigrated in 1975. He joked: “I left because I wanted to be rich.”Chile’s right wing capitalized on growing discontent, organizing the 1971 protest March of Empty Pots and Pans, which, according to a CIA memorandum, “drew more support from angry Chilean housewives than had been anticipated even by the sponsors”.View image in fullscreenArtists, writers and intellectuals continued to offer Allende strong support, including Chile’s celebrated poet Pablo Neruda, his friend and adviser. Neruda died just 12 days after the coup, before he could seek refuge in Mexico, prompting the recently confirmed speculation that he had been poisoned.This is Pinochet’s legacy: layers and layers of horrific secrets that are still being unveiled, which might explain why Dad urged me never to vote for fear of being tracked down.I had the privilege, then, of laughing off such worries. “Don’t be paranoid, Dad. They don’t keep track of who you voted for here,” I said, explaining secret ballots. He wasn’t convinced.Suddenly, Dad doesn’t seem so paranoid any more.I’ve never been good at keeping my big mouth shut. My father was a masterly kvetcher and, as a New Yorker, I consider complaining my birthright. While I enjoy commiserating as a way to connect with others, my griping also helps me search for answers, question what we take for granted, and untangle vexing puzzles.Perhaps naively, I once believed tenure would grant more academic freedom – that our right to dissent would be protected. But as we slide toward authoritarianism, the train’s moving in reverse. Instead of my horizon expanding as I near that milestone, I feel the walls closing in.Earlier in my career, when I voiced doubts, a mentor wisely cautioned: “You don’t want to twist yourself into a pretzel for a job you don’t want any more.” How far will we twist, bend, compromise, modify, avoid – or hide? One of my personal heroes, the photographer Bill Cunningham, memorably declined food and drink while working events, explaining: “Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty is the most expensive.” What price are we willing to pay for an academic job?I inherited many things from my father – his hazel eyes, his acid reflux, his politics of fear – and his stubbornness. I’ve come too far to hide now. I spent years ashamed of my socioeconomic background and ethnic surname, but I’ve come to see that what once made me feel like an outsider also sharpened my tools – especially the way I observe the world as a sociologist.And I’ve gained a deeper respect for my father’s distrust. He never returned to Chile, yet despite the pain bound up in that homeland, he held on to a fierce love for it –he never burned the bridge back. That bridge may one day provide me with an escape route, thanks to my eligibility for Chilean residency through him.Dad’s lifelong fear kept him metaphorically sleeping with one eye open, always listening for danger in the distance. Now, it’s helping me prepare for a new era of terror. I will still vote. I will still speak my mind – because he often couldn’t. But I’m no longer naive about the repercussions.Lately, I’ve caught myself practicing the words: “I was once a college professor.” It’s been a meaningful ride, but if it ends, so be it. I’d rather say, “I used to be a college professor” than “I once stood up for my beliefs and values.” Because what good is all this education if I haven’t learned the most important lesson?In that case, I might as well light the match myself.

      Stacy Torres is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America.
      Spot illustrations by Angelica Alzona. More

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      Want to beat authoritarianism? Look to Latin America | Greg Grandin

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      Inspiration on how to beat back authoritarianism is in short supply, but those searching for hope in these dark times might consider Latin America.It’s not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about democracy, associated as it is with coups, death squads, dictatorships, inequality, drug violence and now a country, El Salvador, offering itself up to Donald Trump as an offshore prison colony for deportees.It is a bleak place in many ways, especially for the jobless and the poor who flee their home countries in search of a better life somewhere else, often in the United States. The bleakness, though, only highlights the paradox: for all its maladies, for all its rightwing dictators and leftwing caudillos, for all its failings when it comes to democratic institutions, the region’s democratic spirit is surprisingly vital.Other areas of the world emerged broken from the cold war, roiled by resource conflicts, religious fundamentalism and ethnic hatreds. Think of the bloody Balkans of the 1990s or 1994’s Rwandan genocide.Not Latin America, where, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of its anti-communist dictatorships had given way to constitutional rule. With the jackboot off their necks, reformers went on the offensive, seeking to redeem not just democracy but social democracy.Today, in the United States at least, the concept of democracy is generally defined minimally, as comprising regularly held elections, a commitment to due process to protect individual rights, and institutional stability. But earlier, in the middle of the last century, a more robust vision that included economic rights prevailed – that indeed the second world war was fought not just against fascism but for social democracy. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to say. Reporting from Europe in late 1945, William Shirer described a groundswell demand for social democracy, in an article headlined: Germany is finished, communists distrusted, majority wants socialism.Latin America joined in the demand, and by 1945 nearly every country understood citizenship as entailing both individual and social rights. Latin Americans broadened classical liberalism’s “right to life” to mean a right to a healthy life, which obligated the state to provide healthcare. “Democracy, political as well as social and economic,” wrote Hernán Santa Cruz, a childhood friend of Salvador Allende and a Chilean UN delegate who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “comprises, in my mind, an indivisible whole”.That whole was shattered to pieces by the death-squad terror of the cold war, much of it patronized by Washington, followed by the free-market neoliberal economics pushed on Latin America during that war.Yet once the repression abated and citizens were free to vote their preference, they began to elect social democrats as presidents, men and women who represented a variety of historical social movements: feminists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, Indigenous rights campaigners, heterodox economists, environmentalists and liberation theologians. Today, a large majority of Latin Americans live in countries governed by the center left. Despite the best efforts of Friedrich von Hayek and his libertarian followers in the region to convince them otherwise, most Latin Americans do not believe that welfare turns citizens into serfs.Pankaj Mishra, in his survey of the horrors inflicted on Palestinians, has written about the “profound rupture” in the “moral history of the world” since 1945. No region has done more to heal that rupture than Latin America.And no region has had as much experience beating back fascists, long after the second world war had ended, than Latin America. Rightwing authoritarians, gripped by the same obsessions that move Trump supporters in the United States, have some momentum, though they haven’t been able to escalate occasional electoral victories, including in Argentina and Ecuador, into a full-on continental kulturkampf.Center-left democrats hold the right at bay by putting forth an expansive social-democratic agenda, one flexible enough to include demands for sexual and racial equality. As the US rolls back abortion rights, momentum in Latin America moves in the other direction – Argentina, Mexico and Colombia either decriminalizing or legalizing abortion. Gay marriage and same-sex civil unions have been recognized in 11 countries.Spasms of ethnonationalist rage gripped much of the world the 1990s – Indonesia’s 1998 anti-Chinese rampage, for example. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala burst into politics as the best bearers of the social democratic tradition, adding environmentalism and cultural rights to the standard menu of economic demands. Today, many countries have retreated behind an aggrieved nationalism. For the most part, Latin Americans have not. Their reaction to the depredations of corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic or conspiratorial tropes, as a struggle against “globalists”. Nationalism in Latin America has long been understood as a gateway to universalism.Frontline activists stand unbowed before police batons and paramilitary guns. In 2022, Latin America clocked the world’s highest murder rate of environmental activists. Unionists, students, journalists, and women’s and peasant rights activists are assassinated at a regular clip. Yet organizing continues. In Brazil during the four-year presidency of the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), the Landless Workers’ Movement, already the largest social movement in the world, grew even larger.When it comes to interstate relations, Latin America is one of the most peaceful regions. There is no nuclear competition, thanks to one of the most successful arms control treaties in history, the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.In 1945, Latin American diplomats drew on their long history in opposing Washington’s interventionism to play a key role in founding the liberal multilateral order, the global system of governance now upended by Trump. Most importantly, the region’s leaders insisted that nations should be organized around the premise of cooperation, not competition, that diplomacy should be used to settle differences, and that war should be a last resort. Their post-cold war counterparts have loudly defended these principles, first against George W Bush during the war on terror, and more recently against Joe Biden and Trump, insisting that the art of diplomacy must be relearned. “Brazil has no enemies,” the country’s defense minister once said, notable considering that the Pentagon has marked out the entire globe as a battlefield.Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, among others, have criticized the return to power politics and balance-of-power diplomacy. If the past teaches anything, they say, it is that opening a belligerent multi-front balance of power – with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for dominance – will lead to more confrontation, more war. As with the United States’s shapeshifting, amorphous domestic culture war, there is no clear endgame to this new era of militarized economic competition, of war by proxy and privateer, which only increases the odds of conflict spinning out of control.One need not romanticize Latin America. To recognize the strength of the social democratic ideal in Latin America does not require one to celebrate all those who call themselves socialists, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example. And even those we might celebrate, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, preside over states loaded with significant amount of repressive power, often directed at some of their country’s most vulnerable, such as Mapuche activists in southern Chile.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is no other region of the world that so persistently continues to insist on taking the Enlightenment at its word, whose leftwing politicians and social movements win by advancing a program of universal humanism. Trump has transformed the United States government into a predator-state, a tormenter of citizens and non-citizens alike. Latin American social democrats – Lula in Brazil and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Petro in Colombia, among others – do what they can to use state power to fulfill an obligation: the ideal that all people should live in dignity.The forcefulness in which Latin American leaders such as Lula and Sheinbaum defend social rights contrasts with the timidity of the Democratic party. Biden did pass legislation suggesting it was breaking with the old neoliberal order. But Biden’s team couldn’t find its voice, unable to link a reinvestment in national industry with a renewed commitment to social citizenship. Democrats are shrill in denouncing Trump’s extremism even as they are timid in offering an alternative.Confronted with a existential crisis that people feel in their bones, the Democratic party puts forth weak-tea fixes in an enervating technocratic jargon, its counselors saying the lesson of Kamala Harris’s loss is that the party has to think even smaller, has to shake off its activist constituencies and move to the center.A recent op-ed in the New York Times urged Democrats to lay out their own Project 2029, to counter the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025. What did the author of the op-ed believe should be in this new project? A call for national healthcare? No. Affordable housing? No. Paid vacations, universal childcare or an increase in the minimum wage? None of that. He suggested that the Democrats promise to streamline regulations and improve “the quality” of “customer-service interactions”.Woodrow Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s would-be governing liberals in the United States imagine nothing. They treat the promise of a humane future – or of any future at all – like a weight from the past, hard to bear, easy to toss aside.Democrats in the United States can’t simply mimic social democrats in Latin America; they operate in vastly different political contexts. But Latin America is a useful mirror, reflecting the considerable distance Democrats in the US have drifted from New Deal values. They might want to read Roosevelt’s Faith of the Americas speech, where he said that the best way to defuse extremism was to use government action to ensure “a more abundant life to the peoples of the whole world”.Latin America social democrats today – and not the Democratic party in the United States – are the true heirs of FDR’s vision. They know that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power. Latin American reformers know that the way to beat today’s new fascists is the same as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising, in a voice simple, clear and sure, to improve the material conditions of people’s lives.“People have to have hope again,” as Lula put it in his most recent successful run for re-election, “and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner”.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is that in a place like Latin America, where the forces of reaction are so fierce, social movements led by feminists, peasants, first peoples, and gay and trans activists continue to fight back against fierce repression with enormous courage. Political theorists like to measure “democracy” according to institutional stability and free elections, and by that standard, many places in Latin America come up short. But if we measure democracy by courage, by a tenacity to continue to fight for universal, humane values, for a more sustainable, more equal, more human world, then Latin America carries forward the democratic ideal.

      Greg Grandin, the C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale, is the author of the recently published, America, América: A New History of the New World, from which parts of this essay were based. More