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      National guard deploys in downtown LA amid eerie calm after two days of unrest

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      On a foggy, unseasonably cold morning in Los Angeles, the national guardsmen suddenly pressed into service by Donald Trump to quell what he called a “rebellion” against his government were nothing if not ready for their close-up.Outside a federal complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes a courthouse, a veterans’ medical centre, and a jail, two dozen guardsmen in camouflage uniforms were arrayed in front of their military vehicles with semi-automatic weapons slung over their shoulders for the benefit of television and news photographers clustered on the sidewalk.They stood with the visors of their helmets up so the reporters could see their faces. Most wore shades, despite the gloomy weather, giving them the eerie appearance of extras from a Hollywood action movie more than shock troops for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.After two days of unrest in response to heavy-handed raids by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in downtown Los Angeles and in the heavily Latino suburb of Paramount, the day started off in an atmosphere of uneasy, almost surreal calm.The skyscrapers and government offices of downtown Los Angeles were ringed by vehicles from multiple law enforcement agencies – Los Angeles police and parking enforcement, county sheriffs, highway patrol and private security guards.Most, though, were deployed for an entirely different event – a festival and two-mile walk organized by the non-profit group the March of Dimes to raise money for maternal and infant health.The streets around Grand Park, across from City Hall, were closed to traffic, but the police seemed less interested in sniffing out anti-Ice protesters than they were in posing for pictures next to a bubble machine with March of Dimes volunteers dressed as Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters.“We had the LAPD’s community engagement Hummer come by earlier and they told us we had nothing to worry about,” event organizer Tanya Adolph said. “They said they’d pull us if there was any risk to our safety. Our numbers are down markedly, I won’t hide that, but we’ve still managed to raise $300,000.”Local activists have called for demonstrations against the immigration crackdown; one demonstration set for Boyle Heights east of downtown and the other outside City Hall. Many activists, though, were worried about continuing Ice raids, particularly in working-class, predominantly Latino parts of the LA area such as Paramount – and worried, too, that any national guard presence heightened the risk of violence.Governor Gavin Newsom’s office reported on Sunday that about 300 of the promised 2,000 national guardsmen had deployed in the LA area. In addition to the small presence downtown, a group of them was reported to have driven through Paramount, scene of clashes between protesters and local police outside a Home Depot on Saturday.Trump congratulated the national guardsmen on a “great job” after what he called “two days of violence, clashes and unrest” but, as several California political leaders pointed out, the national guard had not yet deployed when city police and sheriff’s deputies used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear the streets.Both Ice and local activists estimated that about 45 people were arrested on Friday and Saturday, and several were reported to have been injured in confrontations with the police.Nick Stern, a news photographer, said he was shot in the leg by a less-lethal police round and was in hospital awaiting surgery. David Huerta, a prominent union leader with the Service Employees International Union, was also treated in hospital before being transferred to the Metropolitan detention center, the federal lockup in downtown LA.One of many slogans spray-painted on the walls of the federal complex, within eyeshot of the national guard and the news crews, read: “Free Huerta.”Others, daubed liberally on the walls of the complex around an entire city block, expressed rage against Ice and the Los Angeles police in equal measure. “Fuck ICE. Kill all cops!” one graffiti message said. “LAPD can suck it,” read another.Elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, little seemed out of the ordinary. Homeless people slept undisturbed on a small patch of lawn on the south side of City Hall. Traffic moved unhindered past the county criminal court building and the main entrance to City Hall on Spring Street.Alejandro Ames, a Mexican American protester, who had traveled up from San Diego sat at a folding table on the west side of City Hall with a hand-scrawled sign that read: “Republic against ICE and the police”.Ames said he was a Republican and hoped this would give extra credence to his plea for restraint by the federal authorities. “I don’t want ‘em to go crazy,” he said. “I want ‘em to go home.” More

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      How can Trump use the national guard on US soil?

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday he’s deploying 2,000 California national guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of the California governor, Gavin Newsom.Here are some things to know about when and how the president can deploy troops on US soil.The laws are a bit vagueGenerally, federal military forces are not allowed to carry out civilian law enforcement duties against US citizens except in times of emergency.An 18th-century wartime law called the Insurrection Act is the main legal mechanism a president can use to activate the military or national guard during times of rebellion or unrest. But Trump didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act on Saturday.Instead, he relied on a similar federal law that allows the president to federalize national guard troops under certain circumstances.The national guard is a hybrid entity that serves both state and federal interests. Often, it operates under state command and control, using state funding. Sometimes national guard troops will be assigned by their state to serve federal missions, remaining under state command but using federal funding.The law cited by Trump’s proclamation places national guard troops under federal command. The law says this can be done under three circumstances: when the US is invaded or in danger of invasion; when there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the US government; or when the president is unable to “execute the laws of the United States”, with regular forces.But the law also says that orders for those purposes “shall be issued through the governors of the States”. It’s not immediately clear whether the president can activate national guard troops without the order of that state’s governor.The role of the national guard troops will be limitedTrump’s proclamation says the national guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting US immigration officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in military justice and national security law, says that’s because national guard troops can’t legally engage in ordinary law enforcement activities unless Trump first invokes the Insurrection Act.Vladeck said the move raises the risk that the troops could end up using force while filling that “protection” role. The move could also be a precursor to other, more aggressive troop deployments down the road, he wrote on his website.“There’s nothing these troops will be allowed to do that, for example, the ICE officers against whom these protests have been directed could not do themselves,” Vladeck wrote.Troops have been mobilized beforeThe Insurrection Act and related laws were used during the civil rights era to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central high school after that state’s governor activated the national guard to keep the students out.George HW Bush used the Insurrection Act to respond to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of white police officers who were videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King.National guard troops have been deployed for a variety of emergencies, including the Covid pandemic, hurricanes and other natural disasters. But generally, those deployments are carried out with the agreements of the governors of the responding states.Trump is willing to use the military on home soilIn 2020, Trump asked governors of several states to deploy their national guard troops to Washington DC to quell protests that arose after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Many of the governors agreed, sending troops to the federal district.At the time, Trump also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act for protests following Floyd’s death in Minneapolis – an intervention rarely seen in modern American history. But then defense secretary Mark Esper pushed back, saying the law should be invoked “only in the most urgent and dire of situations”.Trump never did invoke the Insurrection Act during his first term.But while campaigning for his second term, he suggested that would change. Trump told an audience in Iowa in 2023 that he had been prevented from using the military to suppress violence in cities and states during his first term, and said that if the issue came up again in his next term: “I’m not waiting.”Trump also promised to deploy the national guard to help carry out his immigration enforcement goals, and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, explained how that would be carried out: sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refused to participate, Miller said on The Charlie Kirk Show in 2023.After Trump announced he was federalizing the national guard troops on Saturday, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said other measures could follow.Hegseth wrote on the social media platform X that active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton were on high alert and would also be mobilized “if violence continues”. More

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      DC rally protests cuts to US veterans programs: ‘Promises made to us have come under attack’

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      A flurry of red, white and blue American flags fluttered across the National Mall on Friday as more than 5,000 military veterans and their allies descended on Washington to protest against the planned elimination of 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the cancellation of hundreds of contracts for veterans services with community organizations.“I hope that in the future veterans will be able to get their benefits,” said David Magnus, a navy veteran who decided to travel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his doctor told him she was quitting during a recent mental health appointment. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January, “the VA was good”, he said, but since then medical staff have faced harassment that puts the entire system at risk.“It used to be, you’d call and get an answer,” he said. “Now, so much is going on that they don’t know where to put you.”Organizers said that in addition to the march in Washington, there were more than 200 corresponding actions across the country, from watch parties to vigils held at VA clinics. Many veterans told the Guardian they came to the nation’s capital on their own after hearing about the rally online.The VA secretary, Doug Collins, has said the efforts are designed to trim bureaucratic bloat and will have no impact on veterans’ healthcare or benefits. Reporting by the Guardian last month found the agency, which provides healthcare to more than 9 million veterans, has already been plunged into crisis. Across the nation, appointments have been cancelled, hospital units closed, the physical safety of patients put at risk.View image in fullscreenDemonstrators said the Trump administration is seeking to destroy the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with 170 government-run hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, and replace it with a private voucher program that will provide substandard care.“We’re a generation of service. We volunteered and stepped up to lead. Now we are seeing the promises made to us come under attack,” said Kyleanne Hunter, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a Marine Corps veteran who flew multiple combat missions as an AH1-W Super Cobra attack pilot.The administration’s proposed budget for the VA, released on Friday, slashes spending for “medical services” by $12bn – or nearly 20% – an amount offset by a corresponding 50% boost in funding for veterans seeking healthcare in the private sector.“We’re already being starved,” said Sharda Fornnarino, a Navy veteran and one of about three dozen nurses brought to the rally by the National Nurses United union. Fornnarino, who works at the VA in Denver, Colorado, said that while politicians in Washington debate permanent staff reductions, essential healthcare positions are being left vacant.With fewer staff on the floor, veterans on hospice “are being left to die in their own piss and shit”, said Teshara Felder, a Navy veteran and nurse at the agency’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, said.A blue-ribbon commission established by the agency last year found veterans received significantly better care at lower cost from the public system. Private providers operated with little oversight, they wrote, and “are not required to demonstrate competency in diagnosing and treating the complex care needs of veterans nor in understanding military culture, which is often critical to providing quality care for veterans”.The VA says the budget submission “prioritizes care for our most vulnerable veterans, including those experiencing homelessness or at risk of suicide” and “eliminates nonessential programming and bureaucratic overhead that does not directly serve the veteran”.View image in fullscreenThe march was held on the 81st anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, a decisive turn in the war against Nazi Germany during the second world war. Organizers said their inspiration goes back even further – to the “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression, when thousands of first world war veterans gathered on the National Mall to demand promised benefits, only to have the US military deployed against them.Christopher Purdy, an Afghanistan war veteran and organizer of today’s march, said the Bonus Army rally helped set the stage for the New Deal social programs and eventually the GI Bill, which provided higher education, healthcare and home ownership to veterans returning from the second world war.Other speakers criticized Trump’s decision to impose a travel ban on visitors from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, where many of the demonstrators served alongside translators who risked their lives for the US. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered a pause on the US refugee admissions program, putting translators’ safety in doubt.“We all left behind people who are now marked,” said Nadim Yousify, who immigrated to the United States in 2015 after working as a US government translator in Afghanistan and later joined the Marine Corps. More

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      How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people’s movements | Rev Dr Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

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      For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts.As anti-poverty organizers, we’ve often used the slogan: “They say cut back, we say fight back.” It’s a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we’ve been on the back foot. In the world’s richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we’re tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump’s cruelty and avarice, it’s time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises.There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues.In our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country’s most significant poor people’s movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us.We’re reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people’s organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members.In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a multi-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care.At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn’t do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative “projects of survival”. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the “welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood’s first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.”As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed “welfare as a right”, challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a “guaranteed adequate income”, an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history.In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: “For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival … As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In “the Johnnie Tillmon model”, poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty.In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s:

      The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements.

      These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life.

      The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival.

      These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development.
      The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with.The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we’re seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start.

      The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025) More

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      Jewish organizers are increasingly confronting Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

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      On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest from apartheid South Africa.They spoke as alumni and as Jews to condemn the university’s investments in Israel, its repression of pro-Palestinian speech, and its capitulation to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom in the name of fighting antisemitism on campus. They had planned to burn their Columbia diplomas in protest, but the rain got in their way, so many ripped them to pieces instead.“As a Jewish person, I’m really appalled at the idea that they are trying to make it sound as if opposing genocide is somehow antisemitic,” said Josh Dubnau, a professor at Stony Brook University who received a PhD from Columbia in 1995 and led the protest. “There are thousands of us who don’t believe in the right of the Jewish people to ethnically cleanse Palestine. There were Jews thousands of years before Zionism, and there will be Jews when Zionism is in the dustbin of history.”Another alumna, who graduated last year after being suspended over her participation in campus protests, wore a graduation gown and carried the photo of one of nearly 15,000 Palestinian students killed in Gaza during the current war.“We have a particular duty to show up as Jews because we are not being actively targeted in the way that Palestinian students, Muslim students and Arab students are,” said the student, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s our duty to weaponise our privilege as Jewish students.” New York police arrested her along with another protester after they set their Columbia diplomas on fire.View image in fullscreenNineteen months into Israel’s war in Gaza and the US protest movement it prompted, allegations of antisemitism on campuses have become one of the primary pretexts for the Trump administration’s multipronged attack on higher education, including billions in funding cuts, demands universities submit to a string of measures curtailing their academic freedom, and the detention and attempted deportation of international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.But increasingly, Jewish students, faculty and alumni are pushing back against the exploitation of antisemitism charges to justify repressive policies they say do not represent their Jewish values. They have written letters, led protests, lobbied legislators and denounced what they say is the systematic exclusion of Jewish perspectives that are critical of Israel from the national conversation over antisemitism.Jewish Americans – some identifying as “anti-Zionists”, others with a range of views about Israel – have been at the forefront of the movement against the war in Gaza. Last summer, some 200 people, almost all Jewish, were arrested at a protest on Capitol Hill a day before a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier this year, more than 350 rabbis, along with more Jewish creatives and activists, signed a New York Times ad denouncing Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza.But Jewish-led organising has broadened in recent months. As Jewish Americans continue to protest the war, they are also taking on Trump’s onslaught against higher education in the name of Jewish safety, rallying around detained students and condemning what they view as the exploitation of antisemitism in the service of a rightwing political project. In yet another New York Times ad, several former heads of leading Jewish advocacy groups, including conservative ones like Aipac and Hillel International, criticised US Jewish groups that “have been far too silent about the stunning assault on democratic norms and the rule of law” under Trump.“The repression has been growing, but so has the resistance,” said Marianne Hirsch, a retired literature professor at Columbia University, who researches memory and the Holocaust and is outspoken against efforts to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. “I’m seeing a really cross-generational, Jewish faculty, student, and community mobilisation against this narrative.”A need for nuanceJewish Americans’ views on Israel, the war in Gaza, antisemitism on campuses and the Trump administration’s actions are far more complex than mainstream political discourse may suggest.A recent poll by the Jewish Voters Resource Center found that a majority of Jewish Americans are concerned about antisemitism and say they are “emotionally attached” to Israel, although older respondents poll much higher on both questions than younger ones. But the survey also found that 64% disapprove of Trump’s policies to purportedly combat antisemitism, and 61% believe arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters contribute to increased antisemitism. A rightwing Israeli thinktank found last year that one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.While large numbers of Jewish students point to feelings of ostracization on campus in the last year and a half, their views on the campus protests vary widely. A qualitative study of the experiences of Jewish students, published this month, criticizes representations of campus life that “compartmentalize students into either/or categories, diminishing nuances between them”. The authors point to “a need for nuanced discussions about Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish identity that respect generational differences and diverse perspectives”.View image in fullscreenBut tackling complex questions – for instance, about when anti-Zionism veers into antisemitism – has become difficult in an increasingly repressive climate. “It is making it impossible to have discussions in the classroom,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College.Swanson noted that many Jewish Americans are now mobilising against precisely the kind of repression their ancestors came to the US to escape. “The very liberal principles that have enabled Jewish thriving in the United States are being chipped away at systematically, one by one,” he said.Many of those who identify as anti-Zionist have found a home under the umbrella of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian Jewish group whose membership has doubled since the war started – to 32,000 dues-paying members – and whose student chapters were banned from several campuses during last year’s protests. In Baltimore, earlier this month, members of the group’s dozens of chapters gathered for a national convening. Over four days of workshops at the heavily secured event, participants talked about organising from campuses to religious spaces to promote a “Judaism beyond Zionism”, as the conference tagline read, as well as address authoritarianism in the US.Leaning on JewishnessAs US universities have become political battlefields, much Jewish organising is happening on campuses and academic spaces.Responding to what they view as a crisis in their scholarly field precipitated by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Hirsch, the Columbia scholar and others have launched a multidisciplinary Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, a group of mostly Jewish academics invoking their expertise to advocate against universities capitulating to authoritarianism.Jewish faculty and students have also organised in defense of pro-Palestinian students detained by the Trump administration. Following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained for nearly three months with no charges, more than 3,400 Jewish faculty across the country signed a letter to denounce “without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities”. Several Jewish students and faculty wrote letters to the court in support of Khalil. And Jewish groups and synagogues filed a court briefing in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was detained over an op-ed critical of Israel and released earlier this month as her case continues.“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” they wrote. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of [our] members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”View image in fullscreenFaculty and students have also denounced congressional hearings against antisemitism on campuses that they say misrepresent their experiences and exclude their perspectives. As their president prepared to face legislators for a fresh round of antisemitism hearings in Congress this month, Jewish faculty and students at Haverford College issued a statement saying that their voices “have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism” and questioning the credibility of mostly non-Jewish, Republican legislators leading the battle over antisemitism on campuses.Earlier this month, a group of Jewish students from Columbia University visited Congress to talk to legislators about their participation in campus protests that politicians paint as antisemitic, bringing their views “to lawmakers who are almost never hearing from that specific perspective”, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace’s action group, who accompanied the group.As the Trump administration has sought to justify its repressive measures in their names, many American Jews have found themselves invoking their Jewishness in a public way for the first time. “We’ve been criticising identity politics and the way everything gets siloed into identities, and suddenly we find ourselves saying ‘as Jewish faculty’ or ‘as the daughter of Holocaust survivors’,” said Hirsch.“I’ve always tried to steer clear of having a public Jewish identity. I never felt like I had to advertise it,” echoed Joshua Moses, an anthropology professor at Haverford College. “But this moment kind of demands it.” More

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      Indivisible: the mass movement leading the progressive fight against Trump

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      After the biggest day of protest of the second Trump presidency, when millions of people rallied in more than 1,300 cities and towns across the country, Ezra Levin addressed thousands of faithful progressive activists.For the previous few months, as Trump reclaimed the White House and Democrats struggled to oppose him, the drumbeat of opposition had steadily grown. Protest was back in the air. Democrats were finding their way. And it was because of activists like them, Levin told the crew gathered on a weekly organizing call for Indivisible, the progressive movement that started during Trump’s first term.The day of the Hands Off protests, 5 April, was an “inflection point” in the movement against Trump, the Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director said.The pressure had mounted. Trump’s approval rating had tanked. Elon Musk, a frequent villain in protests and pushback, was in retreat, returning to his car company after its stock fell following sustained demonstrations and boycotts. A growing number of universities, law firms and private organizations had started pushing back on Trump’s agenda of retribution.“Who are they going to be when democracy reasserts itself? They now have to think about that. All of these institutions, all of these leaders, are sticking their finger into the wind, and they’re trying to see which way the wind is blowing. And on Saturday, we changed the weather. That’s what we did together,” he said.Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization with a national office and thousands of offshoots in cities and towns around the country, grew out of a Google Doc created by Levin and his wife, Leah Greenberg, when Trump won in 2016. At the time, the document suggested progressives use the Tea Party tactic of constituents pressuring their members of Congress to derail Trump’s agenda.View image in fullscreenNow, more than eight years later, the organization has matured and formed a critical flank of the opposition, using its millions of members across the country to quickly spin up town halls, rallies, educational events and protests. Since Trump won in November, progressive activists have launched or restarted more than 1,200 chapters, reigniting a level of activity the organization hasn’t seen since the early days of Trump’s first term.“If your theory of winning against the authoritarians is mass peaceful protest, what’s the first word? Mass. It’s got to be big,” Greenberg said during a recent Indivisible call. “It’s got to be overwhelming. And you don’t just snap your fingers and get there. You build. You build over time.”The tactics meet new obstaclesTrump’s first term began with the massive Women’s March protest. His second term started with a question mark for the resistance: how would the adrift Democrats oppose a man they revile who shocked them by winning the popular vote? And how could the opposition be effective without elected power?Those questions cleaved the party. Some suggested sitting back while the Republicans fought within their own ranks and Trump took it too far, like Democratic strategist James Carville, who wrote in the New York Times that Democrats should simply “roll over and play dead” for now.Indivisible capitalized on the leadership vacuum. When Democrats were voting for Trump nominees or priorities, it was time to call or show up at their offices. When Democratic leaders showed some spine by holding protests or breaking filibuster records, they deserved praise.This time, the organization had models for success – it helped block the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, one of the first big wins for the left in the first Trump administration, by pressuring moderate Republicans at town halls to keep it.David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political advocacy and strategy, said Indivisible created a “vessel for localized outrage”.Trump was not an anomaly, the organization acknowledges, but an increasingly authoritarian threat, and his rise transformed the Republican party into a group of loyalists. It also acknowledged that “a lot of people are burned out on the idea of protesting and marching” after the first Trump term and the racial uprisings in 2020.“Too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy. Let’s be clear: protest is a strategic tool to achieve your goal. It is not a form of self-expression or therapy,” the 2024 guide says.They also had to reckon with Democrats’ serious losses in 2024. Some in Democratic circles were quick to blame groups like Indivisible for pushing Democrats too hard on issues like trans rights and the war in Gaza. This sense of indignation from the establishment toward the grassroots created a chasm in the party.Indivisible members first started whipping up Democrats in February to form the party into a more uniform anti-Trump bloc, though that wasn’t taken kindly by some. Some Democratic lawmakers told Axios that they were upset at Indivisible and other groups, who should be calling Republicans instead.“It’s been a constant theme of us saying: ‘Please call the Republicans,’” the representative Don Beyer said in February. In some places, local Indivisible groups are still turning up to pressure Democratic lawmakers, including the representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.Building a movement again required first aligning Democrats with a basic truth, at least in Indivisible’s eyes: the country is in a constitutional crisis that needs the opposition party to use every tool to block the Trump agenda.One of the first big tests came when Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer helped pave the way for a Republican bill to keep the government open. Indivisible chapters across the country resoundingly called for him to be replaced as leader.During weekly organizing calls since November led by Levin and Greenberg attended by thousands, questions hit on common themes: whether Trump would crack down on protests (he already has, but don’t give him more power by staying home), how to protest against the courts (many judges are lifetime appointments, so they’re not necessarily swayed by protests), impeachment (not a practical move right now) and the benefit of a proactive policy agenda right now (now is the time for defense, offense comes later).Levin and Greenberg often allude to the experts who study authoritarians. Timothy Snyder, a professor and author of On Tyranny, is frequently cited, as are historian Heather Cox Richardson and Erica Chenoweth, who studies mass movements.“These are the experts in how authoritarianism takes over. And what they tell us is, do not wait for somebody else to come and save you. If you wait for that, it will be too late,” Levin said. “When institutions fall, it is up to people to organize. That’s the tool we’ve got.”The married couple who grew a movementCo-directors Levin and Greenberg work from their Washington home, where they are also raising two young children, so their days include a constant stream of messages about work and household tasks.In weekly calls with thousands of people across the group’s nationwide chapters, they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the camera, a guitar beside them on the wall.Both attended Carleton College in Minnesota, a private liberal arts school, but didn’t meet until they were working in Washington, in the early Obama years.Greenberg is from Maryland, where politics is in the water, she told a group of new Indivisible chapter leaders on a recent call. She started organizing before she knew the word for it, running anti-sweatshop campaigns in middle school. Much of her professional work was in anti-human trafficking policy and advocacy. She also worked as a staffer and then on the campaign for the former representative Tom Perriello.Levin was born and raised in rural Texas, where he described his family as low-income. He told the new leaders that he, like many people, was radicalized by the country’s healthcare system. He worked on anti-poverty policy and served as staff for the Texas representative Lloyd Doggett.When Trump won in 2016, they, along with other former congressional staffers, wrote a guide that detailed how progressives could fight back using the Tea Party model (minus the racism and on very different policy lines) to get members of Congress to listen. Written in about two weeks, the guide flew around political and activist circles, crashing the Google doc with its virality.They thought the most likely outcome of publishing the guide was losing their jobs; they didn’t intend to start an organization, much less one that’s grown this much. A footnote in the guide says: “PS: we’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything.”People started forming local groups, gathering in living rooms and basements and calling themselves Indivisible, before a national organization officially existed. In early January 2017, Levin and Greenberg wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and Levin went on Rachel Maddow’s show to talk about it. At that time, whenever a new Indivisible group would join, he would get an email. While he did the show, his pocket in his pocket was buzzing nonstop. “I could literally feel it growing in real time,” he said.Levin is bombastic, prone to a full-throated characterization of what they’re up against. Trump and his allies are “malicious muppets”. When a Democratic elected official who voted against progressive principles comes up, he doesn’t hesitate to launch into a critique. Greenberg is more wonkish, laying out the steps it takes to achieve a broad opposition movement and peel off independents or moderate Republicans and responding to questions about immigration and deportation policies.“We successfully get to the right combination of risk and caution between the two of us,” Greenberg said. “It’s been eight years. When we first started, we had to learn each other’s work personalities.”They now also have to protect themselves and their family from the ire of the right, who have accused Levin and Greenberg of orchestrating criminal activity, paying protesters and astroturfing Trump opposition, in posts often laced with antisemitism.Levin and Greenberg didn’t want to comment to the Guardian about safety threats, but told an organizing call that they expected this kind of response when they wrote the 2024 version of the Indivisible guide. “We knew what we were getting into. We knew this was an authoritarian regime,” Levin said. The fact the right is fighting them shows Indivisible is effective and that the right is scared of these widespread protests, he said.“They think we’re the leaders of this. Look, we could be gone tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. There are thousands and thousands of people across the country who are leading this movement. They are up against much more than just little old me and Leah,” Levin said.But on the weekly calls, which are public, Levin also often jokes that he looks forward to seeing clips of him and Greenberg circulating in rightwing media.“Shoutout to the special people on the call who are Maga infiltrators,” he said on a call on 27 March. “Look, I know a lot of Trump supporters were looking for a lower price of eggs and bread, and they got this fascist nut in the White House. You’re probably looking for ways to organize, too. Welcome.”The local chaptersIndivisible has nearly 2,000 active groups registered across the country. In the past six months, the number of new or reinstated chapters has kept growing considerably: 101 in January, 319 in February, 395 in March, down a bit to 261 in April.“This is by far the biggest surge in new Indivisible groups forming since that initial wave in 2017 when the movement began,” Levin said.In November, after Trump’s win, about 135,000 people joined a call hosted by a coalition of progressive groups, which Greenberg helped lead. After Indivisible released its revamped guide, 31,000 people joined a zoom to discuss it. In the months since then, Levin and Greenberg have drawn about 7,000 people weekly to their organizing calls.The structure of local groups feeding into a national movement is common among social movements, including the movements for civil rights and migrant farmworkers, said Hahrie Han, a political science professor who studies organizing and collective action at Johns Hopkins University.“The key is to develop national purpose, but local action,” Han said. “You need all the ships sailing in the same direction, obviously, otherwise it doesn’t add up to anything bigger. But you need people to feel like they’re independently strategizing and developing their own locus of control over the work that they do.”Cyndi Greening, a Wisconsin retiree who fought for women’s rights and abortion access during her career and intended to spend her retirement gardening and flinting, spent the first couple months after Trump’s second victory in despair. But she started joining the weekly calls and learning what she could do with her chapter. Her first group meeting for Chippewa Valley Indivisible had 28 people; she now has more than 900 members.Many local Indivisible leaders, including Greening, have been called “fake protesters” or “paid actors” by the right. They’ve also been falsely accused of approving violence to achieve their goals.Levin described nonviolence as critical to the movement, saying: “There’s nothing that the administration would like to see more than some sort of violence in the streets that they can then use as an excuse to crack down on normal, everyday Americans organizing and protesting. So we embrace nonviolence as a hard-headed strategic matter.”Lots of Indivisible chapters are run by older white women, partly because they were the people who hadn’t already been organizing before Trump’s first term, Greenberg said, which often raises questions. “We think older women organizing is amazing, because they’re bringing their skills, they’re bringing their resources, they’re bringing their experiences from their previous lives,” she said.Mary Jane Meadows runs one of the longest-running Indivisible chapters, started after Trump’s 2016 win. The group, based in north-east Mississippi, provided a life raft in a deep-red part of the country, where people were initially scared to talk about their distaste for the president. She was not previously politically active.The chapter was initially mostly white women, but the group has worked to diversify by reaching out to other organizations and holding events together, building trust along the way.“We began on this journey never knowing where it would take us,” Meadows said. “And we found community and we found purpose and a voice. And now, our machine is ready to go into battle.”Each week on the Indivisible calls, someone will ask what comes next. How can they get more people involved? When can they start round-the-clock sit-ins and general strikes and mass boycotts?“Those require enormous amounts of planning, preparation, building of muscles, building of potential,” Greenberg told a recent group. “We should just be real about the fact that those are not things that people are capable of doing right now.”Some also ask whether progressives should be crafting a policy agenda for when Democrats have more political power. Thinking about a policy platform can happen alongside pushing back on Trump, but it can’t be the sole focus.For now, Levin and Greenberg say, the goal is to build a broad-based coalition that aligns behind a simple message of no to Trump. That group will not agree on everything – and that’s OK for now.You have to make it to the next round of free and fair elections first, Levin said. More

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      Now is the time for scientists to stand up against Trump’s repressive agenda | Daniel Malinsky

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      There is a stereotype that the natural political activists in academia are the humanities professors: literary scholars, social theorists and critics of culture are the ones who speak truth to power and fight back against oppression.Yet scientists also ought to stand up and organize against the Trump administration’s attacks – not only the attacks on scientific research and integrity, but also the attacks on immigrants, on political speech and on democracy. Scientists cannot see themselves as above the fray but rather in coalition with other workers resisting authoritarianism.History is replete with examples of scientists that have taken on great risks to resist authoritarianism. The Dutch neurologist GGJ Rademaker reorganized his laboratory into a base of resistance (complete with printing press, radio equipment and hidden weapons) against fascist forces in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Some German scientists, including the psychoanalyst John Rittmeister and biochemist Heinrich Wieland, opposed the Nazi regime by hiding Jews and distributing banned anti-fascist literature. Brave German scientists even aided the Allied forces during the second world war.At this year’s meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, the CEO of this research society, Margaret Foti, encouraged cancer scientists to take part in demonstrations and meetings with elected representatives. Professors from all corners of campus are already fighting back against funding cuts, the attempted deportations of our international students and usurpations of democratic governance. At Columbia, where I work, faculty have been organizing to urge our university leadership to provide real protections to students at risk of deportation and sue the Trump administration, among other demands. Contrary to the stereotype, much of the organizing work is being spearheaded by science faculty – psychiatrists, epidemiologists, astronomers, mathematicians, economists, statisticians, oceanographers – hand in hand with our colleagues in the humanities.Despite the notion that scientists are and should be cautious or apolitical, professors in the sciences are well-suited to political activism. The work of political organizing is not so different from the work of managing a research lab: skills in divvying up tasks, managing people with sensitivity and foresight, and creating clear, compelling narratives to communicate accomplishments (eg to peer reviewers reading our manuscripts) are all clearly transferrable to activism. All science professors were once science students, doing the typically monotonous labor of scientific work, spending hours carefully tinkering in the laboratory, debugging computer code, or meticulously collecting information on the human or natural world. Often political activity involves straightforward but time-consuming tasks such as printing leaflets or making phone calls to representatives. Sometimes there are simple logistics that need taking care of in organizing a protest march. Some activism involves strategizing in coalitions to distribute needed resources or build supportive institutions. None of this is as difficult as “rocket science” and it is in fact remarkably similar to the more banal parts of everyday science.Many recent actions taken by the Trump administration impinge quite obviously on the expertise of scientists: the attacks on federal research funding, the rollback of decades-long protections of our environment and human health, the excising of research specifically related to climate change or vaccine development. Robert F Kennedy Jr has recently promised to dedicate scientific resources to studying the alleged relationship between autism and vaccination – a question that has been addressed by dozens of studies and on which the scientific consensus to the contrary is clear – and thrown the weight of the government behind stigmatizing and dangerous initiatives related to autism, contested by experts and advocates. Donald Trump has also taken steps to sabotage congressionally mandated research on the climate crisis by dismissing expert authors of the National Climate Assessment. Opposing these moves and organizing against them as scientists is a no-brainer. Yet also scientists must fight tooth and nail against the secretive and seemingly baseless incarceration of immigrants, the usurpation of democratic checks and balances, and the reorganization of society along ever more hateful lines. These things affect all of us regardless of our job descriptions. It should go without saying that scientific inquiry cannot flourish in a society dominated by fear, censorship and hate.Scientists are drawn to the work we do for many different reasons, but I would venture that for most of us there is an underlying goal of advancing humanity – whether that is by finding cures to disease, new technology or more abstractly by pushing the boundaries of human knowledge so that future generations are better off. All of that is at risk if we remain “neutral” or “apolitical” at the wrong moment in history. Though there is a plausible argument for erring on the side of “apolitical” in normal times, to ensure trust and guard against undue politicization of scientific work, the argument stretches thin and breaks down given our current political environment and apparent slide toward fascism. Our scientific research itself must remain free from prejudice and aimed wherever the truth may lead, but the work before us is not only scientific research. We must also work to preserve the conditions of life that make both science and society flourish. In these times that means that scientists have a duty to dissent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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      Judge blocks Trump administration’s ban on Harvard accepting international students

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      A US federal judge on Friday blocked the government from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students just hours after the elite college sued the Trump administration over its abrupt ban the day before on enrolling foreign students.US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston issued the temporary restraining order late on Friday morning, freezing the policy that had been abruptly imposed on the university, based in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday.Meanwhile, the Trump administration has accused Columbia University of violating civil rights laws, while overseas governments had expressed alarm at the administration’s actions against Harvard as part of its latest assault on elite higher education in the US.Harvard University announced on Friday morning that it was challenging the Trump administration’s decision to bar the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign students, calling it unconstitutional retaliation for the school previously defying the White House’s political demands.In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, Harvard said the government’s action violates the first amendment of the US constitution and will have an “immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders”.“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission,” Harvard said in its suit. The institution added that it planned to file for a temporary restraining order to block the Department of Homeland Security from carrying out the move.The Trump White House called the lawsuit “frivolous” but the court filing from the 389-year-old elite, private university, the oldest and wealthiest in the US, said: “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most are graduate students and they come from more than 100 countries.Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services’ office for civil rights late on Thursday cited Columbia University, claiming the New York university acted with “deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 7, 2023, through the present”, marking the date when Hamas led the deadly attack on Israel out of Gaza that sparked a ferocious military response from the Jewish state, prompting prolonged pro-Palestinian protests on US streets and college campuses.“The findings carefully document the hostile environment Jewish students at Columbia University have had to endure for over 19 months, disrupting their education, safety, and well-being,” said Anthony Archeval, the acting director of the office for civil rights at HHS, in a statement on the action.It continued: “We encourage Columbia University to work with us to come to an agreement that reflects meaningful changes that will truly protect Jewish students.” Columbia University had not yet issued a statement on the citation as of early Friday morning.Orders by the Trump administration earlier this month to investigate pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University raised alarms within the Department of Justice, the New York Times reported. A federal judge denied a search warrant for the investigation.Earlier this year, Columbia University agreed to a list of demands from the Trump administration in response to $400m worth of grants and federal funds to the university being cancelled over claims of inaction by the university to protect Jewish students.Burroughs said Harvard had shown it could be harmed before there was an opportunity to hear the case in full. The judge, an Obama administration appointee, scheduled hearings for 27 May and 29 May to consider next steps in the case.The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that the Department of Homeland Security gave Harvard 72 hours to turn over all documents on all international students’ disciplinary records and paper, audio or video records on protest activity over the past five years in order to have the “opportunity” to have its eligibility to enroll foreign students reinstated.Before Harvard filed suit, the Chinese government early on Friday had said the move to block foreign students from the school and oblige current ones to leave would only hurt the international standing of the US. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology extended an open invitation to Harvard international students and those accepted in response to the action against Harvard.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Friday afternoon, despite the judge’s ruling, Chinese students at Harvard were cancelling flights home and seeking legal advice on staying in the US and saying they were scared in case Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents came to their accommodation to take them away, as they have done to other foreign students.The former German health minister and alumnus of Harvard, Karl Lauterbach, called the action against Harvard “research policy suicide”. Germany’s research minister, Dorothee Baer, had also, before Harvard sued, urged the Trump administration to reverse its decision, calling it “fatal”.Harvard’s lawsuit lists as the plaintiffs the “President and fellows of Harvard college” versus defendants including the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Department of Justice and the Department of State, as well as the government’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program and individual cabinet members – Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary; Pam Bondi, the attorney general; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; and Todd Lyons, the acting director of Ice.The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said on Friday: “If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.”She added: “Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment instead of filing frivolous lawsuits.”Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, wrote an open letter to students, academics and staff condemning an “unlawful” and “unwarranted” action by the administration.“The revocation continues a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body,” it said.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More