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    Democratic socialists think they’re on a winning streak – can they build on Zohran Mamdani’s victory?

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    It’s an energizing time for democratic socialists across the country, and not only because New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in the New York City mayoral primary moves the United States’ most populous city closer than it ever has been to having a member as mayor.For supporters of the leftwing, worker-led political ideology, last weekend’s annual democratic socialists of America national convention in Chicago, which welcomed tens of thousands of politically minded individuals from across the country to the unionized McCormick Place convention center, was further recognition of the growing influence of the DSA, the country’s largest socialist organization, founded in 1982.Amid the backdrop of a fraught national political stage, one in which traditional Democrats are struggling to connect with voters and a Donald Trump-led GOP continues to push a far-right agenda, a growing cadre of democratic socialist politicians are finding increasing success in local elections by touting platforms of progressive policies, tapping into social media with snappy, engaging content, and connecting face to face with typically forgotten voter blocs.View image in fullscreenThe continued presence of democratic socialists Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative; and Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan representative, in Congress has been an inspiration to many of these similarly minded political hopefuls.However, it’s Mamdani’s recent success that many DSA-endorsed candidates like Jake Ephros, running for Jersey City council; Kelsea Bond, running for Atlanta city council; Jorge Defendini, running for Ithaca common council; and others who attended this convention are hoping to replicate. The goal is to show that the campaign isn’t a flash-in-the-pan win, but instead a burgeoning tide shift toward a leftwing political future divorced from capitalism, despite criticism from traditionalist Democrats and Republicans alike.“Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York or Omar Fateh in Minneapolis, also poised to become a socialist mayor of a major city – these are things that come after years of structure that DSA helped build up in a bunch of chapters … This is also why DSA is growing so much and having all this new energy, because we’re just really demonstrating what the alternative is,” said Ashik Siddique, the national co-chair of the DSA. “The Democratic party has not really presented a meaningful alternative.”With the DSA’s membership having surged in recent months, and both the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections on the horizon, this weekend’s convention was a key opportunity for many to strategize on how to capitalize on expanding influence and recent wins.“There’s so much excitement around our huge victory, Zohran Mamdani winning the primary,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair for the New York City chapter of the DSA. “People are coming up to us and asking us about the campaign, wanting to learn from our experience as well, and I’ll say that the big change that I’ve seen over the years is that DSA as an organization has matured politically.”While the NYC-DSA continues its work, other chapters will attempt to follow its lead, organizing around their own socialist candidates while the national DSA organization reaffirms its position on Palestine, organizes to end US aid to Israel, supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – which calls on consumers to stop supporting both Israeli companies and companies that have supported Israel – and stands against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in solidarity with immigrants.That and a clear economic agenda that supports the working class “over billionaires, the bosses, the corporations that are raising prices, that are keeping our wages low” are what will lead to further success for democratic socialist candidates, in Gordillo’s eyes.Persistence can also be helpful.It helped Alex Brower, who won his election for Milwaukee common council district three alderman in an April special election after the death of his predecessor, in his third bid for office as a democratic socialist.“That happens to a lot of socialists because … if socialists were 100% successful, we’d have a socialist America right now. So there’s a lot of losing, but I think, honestly, I think we learn more by losing than winning,” Brower said.Many DSA-endorsed candidates will also be deep in the throes of fieldwork in the coming months: knocking on doors, attending events, meeting with neighbors and being visible in communities, all key to keeping the DSA’s recent momentum going, according to Ephros, who is currently running for the Jersey City council on a platform of affordable social housing, universal rent control, universal childcare, public healthcare and the Green New Deal, among other issues.“It goes a long way to just demonstrate: ‘Oh, this isn’t some shadowy, weird, fringe guy who calls himself a socialist and that means scary things to me; it’s my neighbor and he’s active in the community and he’s showing up,’” he said.Over the three days of the convention, the conference’s largest in its history, DSA members gathered to deliberate resolutions that will guide chapter actions and concerns over the next two years.Members voted to approve a measure for “a fighting anti-Zionist DSA”, a resolution that prompted much debate and some resistance due to a clause that would expel members for supporting Israel. Arguments both for and against the measure were raised to the crowd of voting members on Sunday afternoon, delayed by calls from DSA leadership to hold applause in favor of the silent American Sign Language motion for clapping, consisting of the waving of both hands. The request was only mildly successful.Members also voted to prioritize efforts to put up a DSA-endorsed socialist candidate for the 2028 presidential election, and elected both new and returning delegates to the DSA’s national political committee, the 16-person body that serves as the organization’s board of directors.On Friday, members heard from Rashida Tlaib, the keynote speaker for this year’s convention. As one of Congress’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine, Tlaib largely spoke about the responsibility Congress has to condemn Israel’s bombing and starvation of the people in Palestine. She also emphasized the work she believes the DSA still has to do.View image in fullscreen“For DSA to live up to our potential, we have to be willing to grow ourselves. We need more members for more diverse communities and leadership roles, y’all. We are failing, and again, I’m telling you as a big sis, we are failing when a room like this only has a handful of our Black neighbors. You need to be intentional,” Tlaib said to Friday’s intently listening crowd.“A lot of working-class folks have strong historical ties to the Democratic party. They know they have been let down, and they’re looking for a new home. They want to envision the alternatives, and we have it.”Álvaro López, an electoral coordinator for NYC-DSA who assisted Mamdani’s campaign, attended the DSA convention for the first time after being a member since 2017. He’s grappling with what to take from the convention’s more introspective measures.“In this convention, unfortunately, Donald Trump was not raised. Zohran’s victory was not strategically discussed, and I think that’s a product of our larger, big-tent organization that we have. I think there is a lot of work for the left and the DSA to still get to a point where we are really thinking about how do we build power, and how we are not so inward looking and think of ourselves as the protagonist of everything around us,” López said.The NYC-DSA’s strategy for creating successful campaigns has previously involved contesting local and state-level positions, before shifting to one that seeks to place democratic socialists in the highest levels of local politics. With many DSA chapters strategizing what that looks like for them back home, taking similar steps may help, Gordillo believes.“Many working-class people, for example, don’t really know what the state assembly is,” he said.“It’s harder to get traction or to do mass communications that way, so we decided to run a socialist for mayor,” he said of reaching voters in local elections. “We need to do that, not just in New York City. We need to do it in Minneapolis. We need to do it in Los Angeles and in Detroit and Michigan, eventually in 2028. I hope that we take that to the federal stage in the presidential run.”A resolution brought up at this year’s DSA convention would create a strategy to build socialism in each of the 50 states and help the DSA build more statewide organizations. The DSA has also previously expanded an electoral program to provide more support to chapters that want to learn how they can run their own candidates and develop class-struggle elections.It’s political actions like these that can be the key to winning races, even by the smallest of margins, Tlaib said on Friday, reminding DSA members of her win in 2018 by only 900 votes.“We are standing at a crossroads in American history,” Tlaib said. “We are going to take this country back for our working families and defeat these pathetic, cowardly, hateful fascists. We’re going to win because we don’t have any other options, and yes, we are going to free Palestine. They don’t have any other choice. Our movement isn’t going anywhere, and we’re just getting started.” More

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      New York mayor frontrunner Mamdani trains fire on Trump as Cuomo attacks

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      New York City’s mayoral race is heating up, with Zohran Mamdani, the young progressive who leapt ahead of establishment figures in the primary to win the Democratic party nomination, appearing to widen his lead over his main rivals this week.Mamdani, 33, edged further ahead of the former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, with the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, far behind, in advance of the election this November to pick a leader for the largest city in the US.In a metropolis that leans Democratic, he was also far ahead of the Republican talkshow host Curtis Sliwa, and also another independent, the sky-diving former federal prosecutor Jim Walden.According to a poll released on Tuesday, Mamdani, who has been endorsed by fellow leftwingers on the national stage such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, held a 19-point lead over Cuomo, his nearest rival.It was however, a small-scale survey, in which the Siena poll sampled just 317 registered voters and cited an unusually wide 6.7% margin of error.Mamdani is a Muslim, which garnered some negative attacks ahead of the primary, and a member of the Democrat Socialists of America’s nine-member “State Socialists in Office” bloc in New York’s state assembly.Cuomo had been expected to win the Democratic primary, but despite his almost universal name recognition, he was beaten after being weighed down by an overly conventional campaign and a damaged political past having resigned as governor in a torrent of accusations of sexual harassment and bullying on the job.Mamdani was deemed on Tuesday by Siena to be 32 points ahead of Sliwa and held a 37-point lead over Adams, who has been plagued by allegations of corruption.With Mamdani as the candidate to beat, his credentials are now under attack and he has just four years under his belt as a state legislator. Cuomo has hit Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized – or rent-regulated – apartment – where the rent is $2,500 a month when the market rate would be $8,000, while he earns $147,000 a year and is campaigning on housing affordability and calling for higher taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers.Cuomo has accused Mamdani of “callous theft” and proposed a new means-test law, “Zohran’s Law”, that would control who gets to live in the city’s 1m rent-stabilized dwellings. The Mamdani campaign has said their candidate would have met Cuomo’s proposed qualify 30% rent-to-income standard when he moved in and was earning $47,000 a year, and described Cuomo’s proposal as “petty vindictiveness”.However, the Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said the issue was an opening for New York City voters who are leaning against Mamdani.“It won’t move the numbers for younger people who are the base of his support, but the argument could benefit both Cuomo and Adams because it makes Mamdani look like a hypocrite,” he said.Mamdani, meanwhile, has launched a “Five Boroughs Against Trump” tour of the city, shifting his focus to what many Democratic New Yorkers could agree is the common enemy, the Republican US president.Trump has threatened to intervene in New York – a threat made vivid with the national guard now patrolling Washington DC’s streets – if Mamdani is elected, and Cuomo posted that that was likely to happen and that “Trump will flatten him like a pancake”.Sheinkopf said Mamdani’s switch to attacking Trump was a wise political strategy because it deflects from his lack of governing experience. “He can be beaten but the problem is will any of these guys be able to figure it out? Cuomo’s numbers have to be much lower for Adams to win, and Adams has to pick up momentum.“The only way he [Mamdani] can get the Black vote back is offer a mea culpa that he made some mistakes early on but argue that crime is down, education and job numbers are up, tourist numbers are great, but what I need is more time to make sure 85,000 new housing units already budgeted for come through,” Sheinkopf says.Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a state assembly Democrat whose district includes much of eastern Brooklyn, is among moderates who are coming aroundto the leftwinger and attended a Mamdani-led anti-Trump meeting on Tuesday.“Democrats, both moderate and progressive, are uniting around urgent issues like affordability, housing, and protecting our democracy,” Hermelyn said. More

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      New York City mayoral race: Mamdani leads Cuomo by 19 points, poll shows

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      The closely watched New York mayoral and governor’s races appear to be forming into shapes that will bring little comfort to centrist Democrats, with both elections happening in November.A new Siena Institute poll released on Tuesday shows New York City’s Democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, leading former New York governor Andrew Cuomo by 19 percentage points – while the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik is chipping away at incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul’s lead in a hypothetical contest for the New York governor’s mansion in 2026.Hochul’s lead over Stefanik, who was nominated to be US ambassador to the United Nations before withdrawing to help Republicans maintain a majority in Congress, has now dropped from 23 points in June to 14 points.Stefanik has not officially decided on whether to seek the governor’s office, but she has been noticeably attacking Hochul’s record. The poll found that 49% of voters in the state said it would be bad for New York if Stefanik were elected governor.In the mayoral race, the poll found 44% of registered New York City voters backing Mamdani, followed by 25% for Cuomo, 12% for the Republican party nominee, Curtis Sliwa, and only 7% for the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams.However, Cuomo leads among Black and Jewish voters, two groups that Mamdani underperforms with. But Mamdani holds a towering lead with younger voters, leading Cuomo by 49% among voters aged 18 to 34 but trailing Cuomo by 6% among voters 55 years and older.Mamdani is the Democratic party candidate in the race. Cuomo and Adams – who are both Democrats – are running as independents.Tuesday’s poll also signaled that outside New York City, surveyed voters have a negative impression of Mamdani, with 37% having an unfavorable opinion and 28% positive. But Cuomo scored lower, with 61% of voters polled statewide holding a poor impression.Yet leading centrist New York Democrats, including the US Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Hochul have yet to throw their weight behind Mamdani.“We still have many differences,” Hochul said two days earlier on Fox News Sunday. “I don’t know how you whitewash that away.”But she said she was willing to work with “whoever the voters elect” in New York City.On Monday, Mamdani kicked off a week-long tour titled Five Boroughs Against Trump, highlighting what he maintains are the dangers posed to the city by the presidential administration.Cuomo, meanwhile, is attempting to highlight what he sees as a flaw in Mamdani’s position on the key issue of housing and affordability.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCuomo’s campaign has pitched a state law to keep the rich out of rent-stabilized apartments that it calls “Zohran’s Law”. Cuomo has been bashing his rival for living in a $2,300 rent-stabilized, one-bedroom while making more than $140,000 a year as a state assembly member.Cuomo proposed that rent-stabilized apartments should go to individuals who pay no less than 30% of their income in rent to qualify. The Mamdani campaign has said their candidate would have met this standard when he moved in and was earning $47,000 a year.Mamdani responded to Cuomo’s accusation that he is too wealthy for his rent-stabilized apartment on Monday, saying: “I live rent-free in his head.”The Mamdani campaign also hit back in a video with insinuations of links between Cuomo and Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier who pleaded guilty in Florida to charges of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008.The video demanded that Cuomo release his list of consulting clients, noting the ex-governor once worked on a yacht marina project in Puerto Rico with Andrew Farkas, a former partner of Epstein on Caribbean marinas. More

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      ‘Looming over the city like gods’: the men who changed New York for better and worse

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      Jonathan Mahler didn’t plan to publish his new book about New York City from 1986 to 1990, tumultuous years culminating in a historic mayoral election, amid a similarly dramatic campaign for city hall. But he’s not unhappy to do so.The Gods of New York tells how the Democrat Ed Koch sought a fourth term as mayor but by election year, 1989, was widely seen as an “incumbent plagued by scandal, just like Eric Adams now”, Mahler said.“We had Rudy Giuliani, the tough guy from the outer boroughs – in Giuliani’s case Brooklyn, now in Andrew Cuomo’s case, Queens. And then we had the candidate of color who was saying: ‘I’m going to take the city back for the people who are getting left out.’ It was David Dinkins then and it’s Zohran Mamdani now.”Wary of generalization, as befits a veteran New York Times reporter, Mahler nonetheless said that as the city “went through a big transformation” from 1986-90, so “it’s going through another now.”The Gods of New York is a sequel of sorts to Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Mahler’s book about the city in crisis in the late 70s. Turning to the late 80s, Mahler presents a riot of stories from a period beset by racial tensions, the crack epidemic, soaring crime, sensational cases and an economic boom overwhelmingly boosting the rich. Keeping ordinary New Yorkers in mind, Mahler nonetheless presents extraordinary characters.“I will confess I went back and forth on the title, which was suggested by a friend,” Mahler said. “I thought: ‘That’s the perfect title.’ And then a handful of people were like: ‘You can’t possibly call it The Gods of New York. Are you saying Donald Trump is a god? And Rudy?”Forty years ago, no one foresaw the Trump of today: occupying the White House, dividing America, Giuliani a shameless sidekick.“I was like: ‘Well, not gods in that sense. This is much more like the Greek gods. They were kind of on their own tabloid Mount Olympus. Really, what I meant was that [Trump, Giuliani and others] were looming over the city like gods, not necessarily benevolent. Remember, the Greek gods were … wrathful, vengeful and petty. That was definitely what I was going for. Less literal, more figurative. So I stuck with it.”View image in fullscreenReaders could do worse than make The Gods of New York a double bill with Paper of Wreckage, an acclaimed oral history of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post published last year, a chronicle of the gutter press and the stars.“All the characters were operating from the same playbook, in a way,” Mahler said of a cast that contains others still prominent, among them Spike Lee, then shooting his remarkable first films in Brooklyn, and the Rev Al Sharpton, a Black leader through the Howard Beach racist attack, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and other scandals once boiling, now near-forgotten.“They were all trying to get the city’s attention and use that attention. We now use the term ‘attention economy’ all the time. This was really kind of the beginning of the attention economy and all these characters kind of intuitively understood that.The gay rights campaigner Larry Kramer “was organizing these incredibly in-your-face protests against the city and the country’s handling of Aids [that were] no different, in a way, from what Trump was doing and is still doing, which is trying to get people’s attention and keep it, trying to start a story and keep it going.“I’m not sure that I would have seen that parallel if I hadn’t seen Trump do it in 2016 when … I was working on reporting the [presidential] campaign. It was kind of crazy to watch him get elected, particularly as a New Yorker.”Working on The Gods of New York, Mahler saw Trump “using the same power to its ultimate effect: the insistence that he is never wrong, that you just keep moving forward. You act bulletproof, then you are bulletproof. I don’t know that I would have understood what he was doing in the 80s and what all these guys were doing if I hadn’t seen it play out on the biggest stage in recent years.”Kramer died in 2020, after giving a last interview to Mahler. In 2024, Trump surged back to power. Amid the fire and fury of the second term, reading about Trump in the 80s can feel a little jarring. As Mahler shows, even the Times was once drawn in.View image in fullscreen“There’s a great note in the Abe Rosenthal papers,” Mahler said, referring to the long-serving editor. “A staff member wrote him a note saying: ‘No wonder Donald Trump has such a huge ego: I don’t think anyone’s ever got on the cover of so many New York Times sections in such a short period of time.’“I guess in some ways that’s a failure on the part of the Times to see who Donald Trump was, but I think also the context is important. In that moment, New York was recovering from some really dark days. The city was in a real death spiral for years. And then along comes this guy ready to invest in New York in audacious ways, really doubling down on the city.“And so you can sort of understand why, if you’re an institution like the New York Times that is very connected to New York, much more so then than today … they might feel like: ‘Well, this guy believes in New York, he’s betting on New York,’ and you can see how that might earn him some goodwill.”Mahler also documents Trump’s disastrous fixation with Atlantic City, which he utterly failed to turn into a gambling hub, to his considerable cost; his callous treatment of women; his notorious call for the Central Park Five, Black youths ultimately shown to have been falsely convicted of rape, to be sentenced to death.Crime stories run through Mahler’s book. The so-called Preppy Murder also centers on Central Park, where Jennifer Levin’s body was discovered. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein emerges as a thwarted hero, aghast at suspect Robert Chambers’ protection by the Catholic church and escape from the harshest sentence. And yet Fairstein went on to help subject the Central Park Five to a historic miscarriage of justice.“She was so demonized after the Central Park Five,” Mahler said. “I think it was interesting to see these two cases sort of as a pair, and the way in which Fairstein was so bitter about how the Chambers case played out … and then not even a couple years later, she’s confronted with the chance to sort of make amends. Not that this was a conscious decision, but you could see how maybe she was more zealous than she should have been [regarding the Central Park Five], because she felt … unsatisfied with the resolution of the Chambers case.”A man who held the stage longer than most, Koch, is perhaps Mahler’s central character. At the start, the mayor is riding high. By the end, he’s been brought low.Mahler said: “His third term was pretty clearly a disaster. But I think of him as a really sympathetic character … someone who was so flawed but also so committed to New York … he really cared about the city. I think that’s a good lens through which to see his feud with Trump [over Trump’s real-estate plays], because Trump was in it for Trump and Koch knew that was not in the best interest of New York.”Koch will also be known to history for being gay but not coming out, his mayoralty covering the worst years of the Aids epidemic, campaigners such as Kramer raging.View image in fullscreenMahler tells that story, counting himself “very fortunate that the Times did a big piece a couple years ago about Koch’s sexuality, and kind of outed him. I feel like now … we all know this is how it was.”Was Koch a good mayor?“I think you would have to say yes and no,” Mahler said. “Though I’m not sure he had any other choice, as he had to do something to save the city, he set in motion this transformation, this shift toward private business that I guess we’re now seeing the sort of reaction against, with Zohran.”We’re back to the current campaign. Thirty-six years ago, in the election that ends Mahler’s book, Dinkins beat Koch in the Democratic primary then seized the big prize. Mahler rates the city’s first Black mayor as a good one “dealt a terrible hand”, the same fate that befell Benjamin Ward, the city’s first Black police commissioner. Dinkins served one term, losing to Giuliani in 1993. The city’s transformation continued. It always will, which helps make The Gods of New York such an enthralling read. The city Mahler shows is gone, but its stories remain.

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      Judge rejects Trump administration request to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury transcripts

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      Dismissing it as little more than a “diversion,” a federal judge in New York has formally rejected the Trump-led US justice department’s request to release transcripts of pre-indictment, grand jury interviews with witnesses in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and associate of Jeffrey Epstein.Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote that the transcripts could not be released publicly – “casually or promiscuously” – as Donald Trump’s government had pushed for because it would risk “unraveling the foundations of secrecy upon which the grand jury is premised”.Nonetheless, while Engelmayer said that releasing the transcripts would jeopardize the confidence of people called to testify before grand juries, he also made it a point to write that the transcripts were “redundant of the evidence at Maxwell’s trial”.Engelmayer also said that the government did not identify information of consequence in the record that was not already public in its request to release the Maxwell case’s grand jury testimony.That observation raises questions about whether the Trump administration meant to substantially address the bipartisan calls for transparency in Epstein’s case through its move for the transcripts’ release.And Engelmayer sought to answer those questions in his ruling.“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion – aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.“Contrary to the government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest,” he added. “Far from it. It consists of garden-variety summary testimony by two law enforcement agents.”Brad Edwards, a Florida lawyer who has represented nearly two dozen Epstein accusers, told the Associated Press that he did not disagree with the the Engelmayer’s ruling Monday.“Our only concern was that if materials were released, then maximum protection for the victims was essential,” he said. “The grand jury materials contain very little in the way of evidentiary value anyway.”Trump’s administration had requested the release of grand jury transcripts in July amid intense political heat around the investigation of Epstein – the late financier and convicted pedophile – and his co-conspirator Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence.Members of the president’s Republican party joined the calls for his administration to resolve questions about the scandal, some of which center on him.Maxwell recently was interviewed by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, and soon after was moved from a prison in Florida to a lower security prison in Texas, prompting accusations that a cover-up of evidence linking Epstein to Trump was in progress.An attorney for Maxwell says she spoke truthfully to Blanche. The lead prosecutor in the 2022 case against Maxwell, Maurene Comey, was dismissed from the southern district of New York federal prosecutor’s office before the interview took place.The request to unseal the testimony has been seen as an incremental measure: the government has acknowledged they contain no testimony from witnesses who weren’t members of law enforcement.But thousands of other documents and electronic files are in the government’s possession. In early July, the US justice department and FBI released a memo stating they found no evidence of an Epstein “client list” or blackmail – and that no further materials would be released to protect victims.Yet the fight over Epstein-Maxwell grand jury testimony is not complete. A federal judge in Florida is looking at releasing transcripts from the grand jury testimony that led to an earlier federal indictment against Epstein – from 2006 – that was later shelved.To resolve that case, Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida state charges of soliciting minors and entered into a non-prosecution agreement to protect himself and four named others from future prosecution. Maxwell has appealed her conviction to the US supreme court, claiming she should have been shielded under that earlier agreement.But a number of avenues remain open. The Republican-led House oversight committee has subpoenaed the justice department and issued subpoenas to Bill Clinton, ex-secretary of state and Hillary Clinton – whom Trump defeated in 2016 to secure his first presidency – and eight former top law enforcement officials to appear before the committee in the fall. More

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      Several people arrested at anti-Ice protest outside NYC immigration court

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      Several protesters outside New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza government building were arrested on Friday for disorderly conduct, with demonstrators accusing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency of operating a covert detention facility there, according to several reports.Protesters marched to the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan on Friday morning and chanted outside the building. Demonstrators demanded access to the site, which was denied, and they later held a sit-in outside the courthouse, according to ABC7.Within a few minutes the New York City police department moved in to arrest some of the protesters for disorderly conduct, according to reports, as activists could be seen blocking the street.“No fear, no hate, no Ice in our state!” chanted demonstrators during their march to the site, where Ice agents routinely detain immigrants after immigration court proceedings, in a move that goes against previously normal practice.Demonstrators allege detainees are being held in overcrowded conditions without many basic amenities or legal access at 26 Federal Plaza’s 10th floor, where the agency denies it detains people, and are demanding unrestricted access for elected officials, journalists and faith leaders. Friday’s protest was one of several in the city this week.Last month, footage from inside 26 Federal Plaza shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) showed two dozen men in bare rooms, some lying on the floor with emergency blankets and with few basic provisions.“Just to be a presence, we’re here to say that the American people are opposed to these kinds of policies. And for Ice agents, maybe that will lead some of them to reconsider their career choice,” Jeffrey Courter, the chair of the Justice Ministries Committee of the Presbytery of New York City, told ABC7.Authorities insist the facility is only a processing center.Lawmakers have been denied access to the site. In June, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, was arrested while escorting an immigrant from a hearing.Several groups, including the grassroots protest movement known as 50501 and NYIC, as well as faith-based groups, were present at the protest.Courthouse detentions have become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, which aims to arrest 3,000 people daily. Reports from cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago and El Paso, Texas, describe routine court appearances devolving into tense encounters. A newly filed class-action lawsuit seeks to ban the practice of making Ice arrests at immigration courthouses. More

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      Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack

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      The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.“It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY’s allocation given the rise in the threat environment,” a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, highlighted the attack in her late July letter to the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, asking why the Trump administration had not announced the amounts each city would receive from the program this year. Fema is part of the Department of Homeland Security.Noem’s office did not respond to two messages from Reuters asking why the federal government cut New York’s funding.In December 2024, the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot dead on the street in Manhattan in a targeted attack. And security has been particularly tight in New York City ever since the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people in lower Manhattan when Islamist extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.Fema uses “an analysis of relative risk of terrorism” to decide how much money cities will receive, according to the grant notice posted on Friday. The agency may change the amounts later, according to the notice.In 2023, the agency considered city visitor counts, population density and proximity to international borders, among other factors, to determine the totals, according to a report signed by then Fema administrator Deanne Criswell.Fema has been decreasing terrorism prevention money for New York City each year since at least fiscal year 2022. The drop is much more drastic this year at 41% year-over-year.The New York City police department has used the funding in the past to pay for the Domain Awareness System, a network of cameras, license plate readers and detection devices, according to a 2016 statement from the former mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. More

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      The Mamdani effect: how his win spurred more than 10,000 progressives to consider run for office

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      In mid-July, Erik Clemson signed on to a Zoom call from Honolulu, Hawaii, energized by a mayoral candidate in a city far across the country, to hear how he could run for office himself.Clemson, a 39-year-old machinist instructor who has a YouTube channel where he explains the economy, had long considered a political run some time in the future, but Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory provided a push off the sidelines.“After I saw Mamdani win the primary in NYC, I decided to stop wasting time and try to learn what I can as soon as I can,” Clemson said.Clemson is one of more than 10,000 people with an interest in running for office who signed up for Run for Something – a progressive political organization that helps younger candidates learn the ropes – after Mamdani won the primary. He’s part of a surge in young progressives who saw Mamdani’s win in June as hope for a different brand of politics and plan to learn from his example.Co-founder Amanda Litman called it the group’s biggest organic candidate recruitment surge ever.“They saw a young person who took on the establishment against the odds and was able to center the issues that young people really care about – cost of living, especially, housing, childcare, transportation – and talk about it in a way that felt hopeful and made people feel like maybe better things are possible,” Litman said.The Mamdani bump blends together excitement about the candidate, interest in leftist policies and zeal for shoe-leather campaigning, both on the ground and online. The organization recognizes that it’s not that Mamdani’s exact policy ideas should be the focus of campaigns nationwide, but that campaigns should be tailored to and inspired by the people they will directly serve.Clemson said he watched Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary debate, the first time he had watched a debate somewhere other than where he lives. He earned a degree in international business, and his career in blue-collar manufacturing led him to create a YouTube channel called Working Class Economics, where he explains the economy. He has a nine-year-old son, so he said he may run for a school board or the city council.He saw how Mamdani used man-on-the-street social media videos to talk to voters in a way that didn’t feel concocted by political consultants. The campaign and its policies didn’t feel tailored to the donor class – and the fact that Mamdani was running in the home of Wall Street felt like a rebuke to the system, Clemson said.“It just seems like he genuinely cares about his city and the people who live there, and it seems like they like him too, which sounds like it should be the case for everybody, but it seems like that’s rare,” Clemson said. “In politics, there seem to be so many people who have very little connection to the areas they represent.”Overall, about 10% of the people who sign up with Run for Something at any given time run for office, usually about a year or so out from when they sign up, Litman said. Run for Something often sees people sign up after elections, including after Democrats’ big loss last November. Fear and despair motivate people, but so does hope, she said. Mamdani’s win also came at a time of flagging enthusiasm for Democrats and amid soul-searching on the left for a path forward.“The policies that you campaign on in the New York City mayoral election and the policies you campaign on for literally anywhere else, they’re not going to be the same,” Litman said. “I think the point is that he really ran values-first, voter-first. His campaign wasn’t really about him. It wasn’t about his personal story, per se. It was about what it meant to be a New Yorker, what it meant to be someone who loves this city and wants to make it better, what it meant to really listen to voters about what they cared about. That is replicable, no matter where you are.”Existing campaigns with similarities to Mamdani – younger candidates, Democratic socialists, economy-focused campaigns – have benefited from comparisons to the New York mayoral hopeful.In Minneapolis, a state senator and Democratic socialist candidate for mayor, Omar Fateh, secured the city’s Democratic party endorsement in July after Mamdani’s win brought him more attention.Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to the Mamdani campaign, said the campaign resonated because it spoke to the “urgent need for leaders who will fight for working people” during a time when people are struggling with affordability.“This campaign showed what’s possible when you meet people where they are and offer a clear, bold message,” Rahim said. “That’s why it made history – with Zohran receiving more votes than any primary candidate in New York’s history – and why it’s inspiring so many others to imagine themselves in positions of leadership. We’re thrilled to see that energy spreading, because everyone deserves a government that truly fights for them.”Nick Sciretta, a 35-year-old from Valley Stream, New York, is running for Congress in the state’s fourth district, a long-shot bid to unseat an incumbent Democrat, representative Laura Gillen. Gillen has called Mamdani “too extreme” and “the absolute wrong choice for New York”.Sciretta, who canvassed for Mamdani in south Queens, feels the opposite. He was planning to run for office in April anyway – and then he heard about Mamdani’s campaign.“The first thought I had was, we need more regular guys running for positions of power,” said Sciretta, a longtime International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees crew member. “Ultimately, he’s doing something beautiful, which is getting the rank and file, the regular guys, regular New Yorkers, to believe in themselves more than anything.”Sciretta had “lost everything” twice, losing work during the writers’ strike and then the pandemic, and has moved back home. He is a one-man campaign operation: he’s gathering signatures to qualify for the ballot, setting up his own website, tabling in public or sitting in coffee shops with a sign that he’s running for Congress.Mamdani, who is a member of the state assembly, still felt like a regular person who you could sit next to on the bus, Sciretta said. That appeal helped others see they could run for office, too, because you didn’t need to be a certain age or pedigree to win.“The people who are like, ‘Zohran is bad for the city’ … they’re afraid of guys like me who want to follow in his footsteps,” Sciretta said. “Because if there are more Zohrans everywhere in the country, that’s when real change happens.” More

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      ‘People are scared to go out’: fear of Ice agents forces cancellation of US summer festivals

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      For Orlando Gutierrez in Kansas City, the thought of cancelling his community’s summer Colombian Independence Day festival first surfaced “the week after the inauguration” in January, “when the raids started happening”. The decision was rooted in “trying to be safe”, Gutierrez said. “We’re not talking about folks that are irregular in terms of their immigration status. You only have to look a certain way and speak a certain language and then you’re in danger.”For decades prior to 2025, the event had gone on interrupted – “in rain, in extreme heat” – and hosted thousands of Colombians and non-Colombians alike, Gutierrez said. “Our mission is to share our culture with people that don’t know it,” he added. “To not have the opportunity – that’s where it hurts the most.”In Donald Trump’s second term as president, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been historically expansionist: it now aims for an unprecedented 3,000 minimum arrests a day. Its agents have thrown undocumented people, residents with protected legal status, and even American citizens into a deportation system that increasingly does not respect due process.Out of fear of being targeted indiscriminately, cultural and musical events from coast to coast – block parties and summer concerts in California; Mexican heritage celebrations in Chicago; soccer fan watch parties in Massachusetts – have been postponed or canceled altogether. Even religious gatherings are no longer perceived as safe from Ice. In San Bernardino, California, Bishop Alberto Rojas has dispensed his congregation from the obligation to attend mass out of fear of deportation raids.Every decision to cancel is heartbreaking. In Philadelphia, Carnaval de Puebla, which was scheduled for April, made the call to cancel in February, said organizer Olga Rentería. “We believe this is not a time to celebrate,” Rentería explained, “but a time to remain united, informed, and strong.” In Los Angeles, organizers of Festival Chapín, a celebration of Guatemalan culture, have postponed the event from this August to October. “It was really hard to take that decision,” Walter Rosales, a restaurateur and one of the event’s organizers, told the Guardian. “We have a lot of attendees; more than 50,000 people every year. People have hotels, they have flights. We hire people to be there. But I think it was the best [choice.] The first thing we want is the security of the people.”View image in fullscreenRosales said he hopes that by waiting a few months, Festival Chapín can take place amid a different political climate, one in which Ice sticks to promises made by Trump to target primarily undocumented people with criminal records.But mass raids are likely to get more frequent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, legislation forced through Congress by Republicans and signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July, will slash social programs while funding Ice at levels comparable to the budget of the US army.It means that even huge stars are questioning whether concerts are safe for their fans. When the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny announced a recent tour that skips the continental US altogether, social media speculation centered on the notion that the artist did not want to put his fans in Ice’s crosshairs. That theorizing was in part fueled by Bad Bunny’s own dips into the wider political conversation: he’s called Ice agents “sons of bitches” on social media and his “NUEVAYoL” video – in which the Statue of Liberty is garlanded with the Puerto Rican flag – is a lovely and grand ode to New York’s immigrants.View image in fullscreenOf avoiding the US on his upcoming tour, the artist himself has only said that, after touring regularly in the US in recent years, more dates at this time were “unnecessary”. (A representative for Bad Bunny did not respond to a request for comment.)Gabriel Gonzales, the bandleader of the Los Angeles Latin music ensemble La Verdad, said some of their gigs have had to be cancelled this summer. “A lot of people are very scared to go out,” he said. “It’s kind of like the pandemic all over again.”But as La Verdad continue to perform around Los Angeles and elsewhere, Gonzales is finding new meaning in playing live amid the Trump administration’s policies.“It’s not like a rebellion,” he said. “It’s more like a resistance. As musicians, we are there to take people away for a few moments. I see communities pulling together and I feel like everything is going to be OK.”For Joyas Mestizas, a Seattle-based Mexican folk dance youth group, which cancelled their annual festival this year, the plan is to be “more creative” going forward. “But we’re not going anywhere,” said the group’s co-director, Luna Garcia. “If I have to teach kids out of my basement, I’ll do it. The kids are going to dance.”For some organizers of cultural events for Latino communities, pushing through and executing their plans despite fears of raids has become its own kind of crusade.In July, federal agents were spotted on the premises of Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture just days before the institution was scheduled to hold its annual Barrio Arts Festival. The museum said the agents entered the property, “refused multiple requests to present a warrant, badge, or identification”, and “informed museum staff that they were assessing entry and exit points for upcoming events that may draw undocumented attendees”.(In a statement, homeland security said agents “staged and held a quick briefing in the Museum’s parking lot in advance of an enforcement action related to a narcotics investigation”.)In response to the presence of the federal agents, the museum decided not to cancel the festival – but, rather, to ensure it would go forward without endangering its attendees. Veronica Ocasio, the museum’s director of education and programming, said that in the days before Barrio Arts, she and her team “met non-stop” in order to create “as tight a security plan as we could”. The museum is located inside Chicago’s Humboldt Park; in order to cover the park’s 200 acres, Ocasio and her co-organizers assembled a group of volunteer immigration advocates who created a trigger warning and stood guard on rotation for the entirety of the two-day festival. If Ice agents were spotted, the museum was ready to shut down the event, close the gates, and bunker in place – holding attendees inside until the agents left. The plan then called for Ocasio and other museum employees to stand out front with immigration attorneys, holding the fort.View image in fullscreenDelia Ramirez, an Illinois congresswoman, was also a key part of the museum’s plan. In order to head off potential Ice raids, Ramirez as well as other elected officials were on the premises “around the clock”, she said. “State representatives, city council folks, the mayor. All to protect constituents from homeland security.”“The president has taken away people’s healthcare so he can hire more Ice agents to terrorize communities,” added Ramirez, but that doesn’t mean “there’s no oversight or accountability. At a time where the federal government wants to harm you, we will keep each other safe”. For Ramirez, Barrio Arts Festival was “a beautiful showing of people saying to Ice, ‘not here, not now, not ever’.”Beyond her support for local cultural events, Ramirez is attempting to push back on Ice action more broadly: she’s a co-sponsor of the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act which would prohibit Ice from the now-common practice of carrying out their deportation actions while masked. “People are freaking the hell out,” she said. “They don’t know whether it’s an Ice agent who is going to criminalize them with no due process or it’s someone who wants to rob them. No other law enforcement agency does this.”Ultimately, not only did the Puerto Rican event in Chicago go on without interruption, but it was “our largest, most well attended Barrio Fest in our twenty-five year history”, Ocasio said. “We stood against intimidation and we created a blueprint for festivals in the city of Chicago.” The museum has already shared the safety plan it developed on the fly with organizers of upcoming events representing the local Colombian and Mexican communities.Ahead of New York’s Colombia Independence Day festival – held in July in Corona, a working class neighborhood in Queens – organizers were similarly concerned about the possibility of Ice raids. They took precautions by bordering off the event, marking it as private, and creating a single entrance point where they would have stopped Ice agents operating without a warrant, organizers told the Guardian. Like Chicago’s Barrio Arts Festival, they had lawyers on hand from a local legal services organization. Ultimately, like Barrio Arts, they too set a new attendance record, with around 20,000 festival goers.View image in fullscreenCatalina Cruz, a New York state assembly member who helped plan the Colombian festival, said that all the precautions she and her fellow organizers took “doesn’t explain why so many people came out – from all over the city and beyond”. She credited attendees with a certain kind of mental fortitude: “I’m not in their minds, but I don’t think they were giving a fuck about the president.”Of course, that fuzzy feeling of having put on a successful mass event for the Latino community in the era of all-pervading fear of Ice isn’t a panacea. As Cruz put it: “What would have really stopped [Ice] if they wanted to get in? As we have seen in the case of California” – where federal agents have forcefully and en masse raided parks and working farms – “not a goddam thing.”Newly flush with cash thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, Ice is now actively recruiting waves of new agents – to, in their words, “defend the homeland” – by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, has promised to “flood the zone” with Ice agents in New York and other sanctuary cities.But on that Sunday in Queens, the Colombian festival ticked along beautifully with no sight or sound of the federal government’s aggressive deportation machine. Vendors pushed street-cart ceviche and plastic pouches full of high-octane primary-color beverages: “Coctelitos, coctelitos!” Seemingly every other person wore the powerful yellow jersey of the Colombian national soccer team. Twentysomethings salsa’d next to older family members grooving in their wheelchairs.When a performer with serious pipes sang the Star Spangled Banner, everybody perked up. When she followed it up with the national anthem of Colombia, throat-bursting singalongs broke out. After she wrapped up, the DJ smashed the ehh-ehh-EHH horns and, all together, folks chanted: “Viva Colombia! Viva Colombia!” More