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      Trump administration begins new Ice operation in Massachusetts

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      The Trump administration has targeted Massachusetts as its next location to begin arresting and deporting immigrants, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to NBC News on Saturday.DHS and its US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm are calling the operation Patriot 2.0, modifying the name of a May deportation surge that led to the arrest of 1,500 people in the state, according to the reports.A spokesperson for DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The operation is expected to last several weeks, the New York Times said, quoting unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter. One of the sources told the Times that Patriot 2.0 was focused on targeting immigrants who had been released from custody despite Ice agents attempting to pick them up from local jails.It was not immediately clear how many federal officers were involved in the crackdown, which comes as Chicago braces for a Trump administration ramp-up of deportations in the third-largest US city.NBC10 Boston quoted a statement from a DHS spokesperson as deriding the Boston mayor Michelle Wu’s so-called sanctuary policies.“Sanctuary policies like those pushed by Mayor Wu not only attract and harbor criminals but also place these public safety threats above the interests of law-abiding American citizens. ICE is arresting sex offenders, pedophiles, murderers, drug dealers, and gang members released by local authorities,” the statement reported by NBC10 said.Tensions between Wu and the Trump administration have been steadily building since March when Wu testified before Congress alongside three other Democratic mayors to defend their cities’ immigration policies – specifically so-called sanctuary city laws that limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Critics of these policies claim that sanctuary laws undermine federal law enforcement’s ability to arrest and deport individuals with criminal records.As part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, it has pushed for mass deportations and targeted “sanctuary cities” in particular.Wu has defended her city’s policies in a letter to US attorney general Pam Bondi: “The City of Boston is the safest major city in America,” she wrote. “Our progress is the result of decades of community policing and partnership between local law enforcement and community leaders, who share a commitment to making Boston a safe and welcoming home for everyone.”In response, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, said that the agency intended to “flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions”.As the threat of federal actions looms, Wu said last week that her administration was actively preparing for the possibility of a federal national guard deployment.Wu also said her administration was reviewing relevant legal precedents and working “very closely” with community members “to ensure people know what’s happening and that this is not something that is needed or wanted or legally sound”.Anna Betts contributed reporting More

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      Postal traffic into US plunges by more than 80% after Trump ends exemption

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      Postal traffic into the United States plunged by more than 80% after the Trump administration ended a tariff exemption for low-cost imports, the United Nations postal agency said Saturday.The Universal Postal Union says it has started rolling out new measures that can help postal operators around the world calculate and collect duties, or taxes, after the US eliminated the so-called “de minimis exemption” for lower-value parcels.Eighty-eight postal operators have told the UPU that they have suspended some or all postal service to the United States until a solution is implemented with regard to US-bound parcels valued at $800 or less, which had been the cutoff for imported goods to escape customs charges.“The global network saw postal traffic to the US come to a near-halt after the implementation of the new rules on Aug 29, 2025, which for the first time placed the burden of customs duty collection and remittance on transportation carriers or US Customs and Border Protection agency-approved qualified parties,” the UPU said in a statement.The UPU said information exchanged among postal operators through its electronic network showed traffic from its 192 member countries – nearly all the world countries – had fallen 81% on 29 August, compared with a week earlier.The agency, based in Bern, Switzerland, said the “major operational disruptions” have occurred because airlines and other carriers indicated they weren’t willing or able to collect such duties, and foreign postal operators had not established a link to CBP-qualified companies.Before the measure took effect, the postal union sent a letter to the US secretary of state Marco Rubio to express concerns about its impact.The de minimis exemption has existed in some form since 1938, and the administration says it has become a loophole that foreign businesses exploit to evade tariffs and that criminals use to get drugs into the US.Purchases that previously entered the US without needing to clear customs now require vetting and are subject to their origin country’s applicable tariff rate, which can range from 10% to 50%.While the change applies to the products of every country, US residents will not have to pay duties on incoming gifts valued at up to $100, or on up to $200 worth of personal souvenirs from trips abroad, according to the White House.The UPU said its members had not been given enough time or guidance to comply with the procedures outlined in the executive order Donald Trump signed on 30 July to eliminate the duty-free eligibility of low-value goods. More

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      Trump’s former surgeon general urges president to fire RFK Jr

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      The surgeon general from the first Trump administration on Saturday said that the US president should “absolutely” fire health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “dangerous” policies on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Jerome Adams, who has become a pointed critic of the public health decisions being swiftly rolled out in the second Trump administration, made his most fierce attack yet on what has been unfolding.“He’s putting us at risk,” Adams said of RFK Jr, adding that Kennedy is “endangering America at large” with moves to limit access to vaccines, such as shots to protect against the deadly Covid-19 virus.In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, anchor Victor Blackwell asked Adams, who served as Donald Trump’s surgeon general from 2017 to 2021, including through the height of the coronavirus pandemic, whether Kennedy should resign.“Well, he’s not going to resign,” Adams said.Asked whether, therefore, Trump should fire his health secretary, Adams said: “I absolutely believe that he should, for the sake of the nation.”Kennedy was praised by the president after a stormy committee hearing in the US Senate on Thursday where Democrats called for his resignation or firing and accused him of ignorance and “reckless disregard for science and the truth”.Although more muted, a select few Republicans were critical, including Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who had been a crucial vote to confirm Kennedy to his post, who said the secretary was “effectively denying people the vaccine” with his policy positions. Kennedy snapped back: “You’re wrong.”Adams said he was “flabbergasted” by new restrictions from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month on who is eligible to receive the latest version of the Covid-19 vaccination and hoped that Trump “will begin to see the danger … to America” of Kennedy’s leanings and will not be “in thrall” of his health secretary.On Friday, Adams was a co-author of a bipartisan opinion piece published in USA Today from three former surgeons general that said that Kennedy’s actions to shake up the CDC were actions that “jeopardize not only the institution’s integrity but also the health and well-being of millions of Americans”.The other authors were Jocelyn Elders, surgeon general in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration, and Richard Carmona, surgeon general under Republican George W Bush’s presidency.The CDC erupted in chaos in late August when the Trump administration fired the center’s director Susan Monarez, who had been in the post for mere weeks, in an apparent divide over vaccine policy – although she is refusing to leave. Several senior CDC leaders quit in protest at Kennedy’s move to oust her. This followed his June firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) and his replacing them with some who publicly hold anti-vaccine views.The three former surgeons general wrote that they were “gravely concerned” for the CDC as a “cornerstone of public health in America and across the world” that had saved countless lives through its science-driven approach, earning public trust.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The recent turbulence at the CDC threatens to undermine this legacy, and we feel this is not just a bureaucratic or political issue. It’s truly a matter of life and death,” the article said.Adams said in the CNN interview that organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have lost trust in the CDC under Kennedy’s leadership.He warned that Kennedy could effectively destroy the CDC and was “putting lives at risk by doing so”.Adams at times clashed with Trump when he was his surgeon general, including over policies over public masking during the pandemic.On Saturday, he warned that Kennedy’s policies threatened public health in general but that Covid vaccine restrictions were “specifically endangering Black, Hispanic and Native American communities, who experienced death rates during the pandemic that were twice as high as white Americans”.The day after the Senate hearing, former Massachusetts Democratic representative Joe Kennedy III, RFK Jr’s nephew, posted a statement on X calling the health secretary “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” and urging him to resign.Echoing that call to resign was one of the secretary’s siblings, Kerry Kennedy, who also posted on X and decried what she called “the decimation of critical institutions, like the [National Institutes of Health] and the CDC”. More

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      Trump claims Chicago is ‘world’s most dangerous city’. The four most violent ones are all in red states

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      As Donald Trump threatens to deploy national guard units to Chicago and Baltimore, ostensibly to quell violence, a pattern has emerged as he describes which cities he talks about.Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore.But not Jackson, Birmingham, St Louis or Memphis.An analysis of crime trends over the last four years shows two things. First, violent crime rates in America’s big cities have been falling over the last two years, and at an even greater rate over the last six months. The decrease in violence in America is unprecedented.Second, crime in large cities in the aggregate is lower in states with Democratic leadership. But the president focuses his ire almost exclusively on large blue cities in blue states, sidestepping political conflict with red Republican governors.The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).On Tuesday, Trump called Chicago “the most dangerous city in the world”, and pledged to send military troops there, as well as to Baltimore. “I have an obligation. This isn’t a political thing,” he said at a press conference. “I have an obligation when 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks and 75 are shot with bullets.”When talking about crime in Chicago, Trump regularly refers to the number of people who may have been shot and killed there. But Chicago has a population of about 2.7 million, which is larger than each of the least-populous 15 states. It is roughly the same population as Mississippi. Chicago’s homicide rate for 2024 was 17.5 murders for every 100,000 residents, only a few points higher than that of the state of Louisiana, which was 14.5 per 100,000 in 2024.As has become tradition, news outlets reported how many people were killed in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. At Louisiana’s rates, one would predict almost twice as many people to have been murdered there over the long weekend.But those numbers are harder to count. Chicago police report a single figure. One has to scour a hundred local news sites around Louisiana to aggregate the count for comparison.Notably, Trump discussed sending troops to New Orleans this week. “We’re making a determination now,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?”And Landry signaled his willingness to accede. “We will take President Trump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!” he wrote on X, posting a clip of the exchange.Still, Chicago is bracing to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.As reported by the FBI’s crime data unit in August, the United States had a homicide rate of about 4.6 per 100,000 residents in 2024. It is the lowest figure since 2014, and very close to the generational lows of 4 to 4.5 per 100,000 last experienced in the early 1960s. The pandemic wave of increased violence has largely receded.“We know that across the nation [violence is] going down,” said Dr Thaddeus Johnson, a former Tennessee police officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a policy thinktank.The 2024 homicide rate in the US decreased by about 15%, one of the largest drops in American history. Most of that decrease can be attributed to declines in the largest cities, Johnson said.Criminal justice researchers tend to place higher value on murder rates than other indicators of violent crime, because murder statistics are harder to manipulate. “It’s the most trustworthy data point,” Johnson said. But it’s not the only data point. “When you start talking about aggravated assaults and robberies, generally, we’ve seen that going down across the nation as well.”Both Chicago and Baltimore implemented or expanded antiviolence programs in 2022 using American Rescue Plan funding – much of which has been cut under Trump. Baltimore’s homicide rate has fallen about 40% since 2020, and in 2025 is pacing a 50-year low to date.Violent crime had also been falling in Washington DC by substantial margins before Trump took over the city’s policing. His announcement last month referenced DC’s 2023 crime rates, which spiked during the pandemic, while saying nothing about the precipitous fall since.In January, the Metropolitan police department and US attorney’s office reported that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, marking the lowest rate in over 30 years.The Guardian analyzed the murder rates for the largest 50 cities in the US and found that cities in blue states had the lowest, with just 7.8 murders per 100,000 people. The cities in red states have a much higher murder rate, of 12.9. Cities in swing states sit in the middle, with a murder rate of 10.2.Baltimore ranks fifth on a list of cities over 50,000 population by murder rate in 2024, as reported to the FBI statisticians. Washington DC is 15th. Between them are Wilmington, Delaware; Detroit; Cleveland; Dayton, Ohio; North Little Rock, Arkansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Shreveport, Louisiana; Camden, New Jersey, and Albany, Georgia.Compliance with federal rules on crime reporting is incomplete, and some agencies report incomplete data. One notable example of this is Jackson, Mississippi, which has consistently gathered crime data but only started submitting it to the FBI’s system this year. Jackson recorded 111 homicides in 2024, in a population of about 141,000: a rate of 78.7, the highest in America for any city with a population over 50,000.Though St Louis posted the second-highest homicide rate in 2024, violence there has been falling since 2023, and is on pace today for a 10% annual drop. Its rate will fall less sharply, however, because St Louis is losing population.Memphis led the country’s homicide rate in 2023. To date in 2025, murders and non-negligent homicides are down about 25%, after a 22% decrease in 2024. Like Baltimore, Memphis leaders attribute the decrease in part to an aggressive gun violence reduction initiative, Memphis Allies.Notably, small changes in smaller cities can have a big statistical effect.Birmingham, with a population of about 200,000, has cut its murder rate by more than half since the start of the year. Local officials attribute this, in part, to the arrest of a handful of people accused of violence, including Damien McDaniel, who has been charged in the murders of 18 people as a hired hitman. His arrest in October – and that of four other people who are linked to him – coincides with a 55% drop in Birmingham’s homicide rate since. More

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      One year after Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was killed, the US has not investigated. Her family wants answers

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      Özden Bennett’s first reaction after learning of her younger sister’s killing was disbelief. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi had traveled to the occupied West Bank just three days earlier to volunteer with Palestinian communities facing violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers.But the shock and grief quickly gave way to dread – “that nothing would come of it, that she would have just died under that olive tree and that was it”, Bennett said this week, before the anniversary of Eygi’s death.Eygi, a 26-year-old American Turkish woman, was shot in the head on 6 September 2024 by an Israeli sniper. She had been attending a protest against settlement expansion near Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.Eygi’s family feared that securing justice would be an uphill battle. Indeed, one year later, nobody has been held accountable. An Israeli military investigation concluded within days of the incident that it was “highly likely” Eygi had been hit “indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her” but rather at others whom it alleged were throwing rocks. (A Washington Post investigation found that Eygi was shot half an hour after any clashes between protesters and soldiers, and that she was standing 200 yards from the soldiers.)US officials called the killing “unprovoked and unjustified” but, despite her family’s repeated requests, never launched an investigation of their own. (The Turkish government did, concluding that Eygi had been “deliberately targeted”, and it submitted evidence to the United Nations Security Council, the international court of justice and the international criminal court.Eygi was one in a string of US citizens killed by Israeli forces in occupied Palestinian territory in recent years, including the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by a sniper while reporting on military raids in Jenin in 2022. Since 7 October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have also killed at least four Palestinian Americans in the West Bank.View image in fullscreen“I’m heartbroken that there are so many families who have experienced the same thing,” said Bennett. “It’s infuriating because if something was done, and if Israel was held accountable … all those that have come after, they should still be here.”The absence of accountability has not been for lack of effort. When Eygi’s family first sat down with then US secretary of state Antony Blinken last December, they asked him: “What can you do?” recalled Hamid Ali, Eygi’s husband.The response, he said, amounted to “a lot of shoulder shrugging”.The state department told the family that launching an investigation would be a prerogative of the justice department, which wrote in a letter to the family that they would “carefully review” their request. They never followed up.A spokesperson for the state department said in a statement that the it had “no higher priority than the safety and security of US citizens”, but referred the Guardian to the Israeli government for updates. The justice department and IDF did not respond to requests for comment.“There are no red lines when it comes to Israel,” Bennett said, noting that the family is nonetheless “determined to show up, year after year, making the same demand for an independent investigation – because that’s the bare minimum and the right thing to do”. Later this month, they will be in Washington along with the families of other US citizens killed by Israeli forces and settlers to collectively advocate for a more robust response from the US government.The experience of seeking justice for Eygi has been deeply disillusioning for Ali, who had been married to Eygi for three years before she died.In more than a dozen meetings with the state department and members of Congress, he said, Eygi’s family pointed to former attorney general Merrick Garland’s words following the killing of several US citizens during the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel. Garland said that the US government would investigate “each and every one of the brutal murders of Americans”.Ali condemned what he said were clear double standards. “We’re just holding them to their own words,” he said.Ali spoke from Eygi’s family’s home town in Turkey, where she was buried near her grandmother and where a ceremony was held on Saturday to commemorate her. She loved Turkey and had made it a condition before their wedding that they would visit at least once a year, Ali said.Growing up in a Turkish household, Eygi and her sister were more tuned into global news than their peers in the US, Bennett said, and they were always aware of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and the periodic escalations in bombing and violence in Gaza. But it was after 7 October that advocating for Palestinian liberation became Eygi’s “whole world”, she added.At the University of Washington, Eygi became involved with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and with the student encampments. When she graduated with a degree in psychology, she hesitated about making her first trip to Palestine, concerned about the security risks. But she ultimately decided she needed to witness the occupation first-hand, and traveled to the West Bank as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement.Eygi, Ali said, had a knack for encouraging others “not to feel so hopeless”, he added.“I’m very cynical, and she kept reminding me that the exact function of these power systems is to make you feel like you’re just one against this mammoth,” he said. “But collectively, we’re able to take action and actually be effective.”“She had many sides to her,” Bennett said. “The part that gets focused on obviously is her activism and advocacy, and her passion for human rights in general, but especially Palestinians’ rights. But she was also a goofy 26-year-old. She was my little sister.” More

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      ‘Not addressing the issues’: DC residents wary of Trump’s national guard deployment even amid youth crime

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      With a small group of school-age children around him, Dylan Whitehorn is the center of attention with his clippers, trimmers and brushes. He’s known as “Mr D the Barber”, and on this summer afternoon in mid-August, Whitehorn had a steady line of kids waiting for a free back-to-school haircut at a neighborhood carnival.Several Metropolitan police department (MPD) officers patrolled the event, but their presence wasn’t overwhelming. It was a distinct difference from other parts of Washington DC, where upwards of 2,000 national guard troops were on the ground as part of Donald Trump’s temporary takeover of the city’s police department with federal troops.“It’s really been heartbreaking to see it,” said Whitehorn. “And to hear Donald Trump tell [federal officers] do what you want. You know, that kind of gasses them up, because they pretty much know or feel like they can gun you down, and there won’t be any accountability for that. And when you’re sending your kids to school in that climate, especially when this country has a history of killing young Black males, it’s a terrifying thought.”Amid a sweeping crackdown that has included immigration raids and checkpoints, Trump has called for teens as young as 14 years old to be charged as adults when accused of certain crimes in DC, citing the recent case of a 19-year-old former “department of government efficiency” (Doge) staffer who was allegedly assaulted by a group of teens.In late August on Fox & Friends, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, also doubled down, and said she would push to prosecute teens even younger than what Trump suggested. “We have got to lower the age of criminal responsibility in Washington DC. The gangs and the crews are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, I can’t touch them,” said Pirro in the clip. “If someone shoots someone with a gun and they’re 17 years old and that person does not die, I can’t prosecute them. I can’t get involved with them.”Minors aren’t part of Pirro’s jurisdiction because the US attorney for the District of Columbia is responsible for prosecuting adult felonies, while the local DC attorney general handles youth criminal cases. But the focus on young people committing crimes has become one of the central issues in the capital city’s friction with the Trump administration.Juvenile justice advocates say that DC’s current legal system ensures accountability and responsibility for minors involved in harmful behavior, without incarcerating them in a system built for adults. But DC natives and parents said they had mixed thoughts about how to effectively respond to youth crime. Frustration with community gun violence, even as violent crime has gone down after the pandemic surge, has made many residents in the Democratic city warily consider federal assistance.“It honestly depends on the crime because I’ve seen some of the younger kids out here carrying guns, like I can’t even sugarcoat it. If you out here killing then, yeah, you can serve adult time,” said Will Scales, a DC parent of three. “The punishment should be appropriate.”Research from the DC Policy Center shows the juvenile arrest rate in Washington DC is nearly double the national rate. There were more than 1,120 juvenile arrests from 1 January to 29 June this year, making up roughly 7% of all arrests in the city, according to data from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an independent DC agency that tracks public safety statistics. These trends have remained consistent since 2023, when youth crime spiked after the pandemic.The MPD has not publicly released any information about juvenile arrests during this federal operation, as it only publishes reports on juvenile arrests twice a year.Whenever a minor is arrested, an MPD spokesperson said, they are taken to the juvenile processing center. Depending on the severity of the criminal charge, the teen may be held overnight before they can see a judge the next day, or if they are eligible to participate in a diversion program, the teen is released to their guardian the same day as the arrest.Last year, the local DC attorney general’s office prosecuted over 84% of violent juvenile offenses, including homicide and attempted homicide, gun possession, carjacking and robbery cases.Still, city officials and advocates stress that the city has done more than prosecution alone.When crime spiked in 2023, DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, issued a public emergency declaration on juvenile crime, which expanded city resources and programs. This spring, the city launched the juvenile investigative response unit, a new initiative within the police department that expands outreach to teens in the criminal justice system and investigates violent crime involving youth.More recently, the DC city council approved tougher juvenile curfews after a series of incidents involving large groups of teens engaging in harmful and criminal behavior throughout the city.“There’s no question they still need to work on public safety,” said the DC city council member Robert White in an interview. “If we could actually get support from the federal government to keep doing the things that are working, we could continue to drive down crime. If the president spent just what he is spending from the defense budget, deploying the guards to DC on homelessness and crime, we could end both of them this week, but that’s not his goal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehorn, meanwhile, acknowledges that youth crime has been an issue in DC, but he believes the answer isn’t as simple as locking teens up in jail. He knows this from his own experience: Whitehorn went to prison twice, spending nearly 15 years behind bars.“I get it that [if] they kill somebody, and I hate [for it] to be me or someone I love, but 14 years old, that’s just too young. I think it’s too young to get life … and that’s normally what you get for murder,” said Whitehorn. “I don’t think they have to be tried as an adult.”DC resident and parent Benetra Hudson believes there should be more parental involvement. She said this included more community policing efforts from neighbors, not police.“I’m 40 – when I was growing up, I had a whole community,” Hudson said. “I couldn’t do things because the lady at the corner knew my mom, and she would tell my mom or my grandmother before I could even get home from doing whatever it was I was not supposed to do.”When it comes to punishment, Hudson believes that teens aged 13 and 14 are too young to grasp the reality of their mistakes fully.“I feel like it gives them less of an opportunity if they’re charged as an adult, because they’re not going into a real adult situation in jail, and they’re not rehabilitated to look forward to the future,” said Hudson. “It’s a different thing when you’re actually incarcerated and you’re going to a juvenile facility to rehabilitate you to be better than you were as a juvenile, so when you are an adult, you don’t have those same mishaps.”Michael Umpierre, director of the Center for Youth Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, agreed that police surveillance was not the most effective way to prevent youth crime.“If we truly want safer communities, we should be investing in schools, family supports and community-based youth programming. That is how we create pathways for young people – and all community members – to thrive,” he said in a statement.Others in the community echo that sentiment, arguing that the national guard’s presence won’t address the root causes of crime in the city.“People are not coming out because you’re out there, but they’re still going to kill, they’re still going to do all they’re doing as soon as you’re gone,” said Whitehorn. “It’s not fixing, it’s just blanketing the situation, but it’s not addressing the issues.” More

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      The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

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      Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice.They became victims, and some were abused for years, because of the power differential between Epstein and the girls and young women. His power consisted not only of his immense and still-unexplained wealth, but of aid from a host of others. Some actively cooperated in manipulating and abusing them, as groomer and pimp-in-chief Ghislaine Maxwell did, along with the fellow rapists to whom Epstein offered these children and young women. Others knew and chose to protect him and his fellow abusers, and some still do, all the way to the very top.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump … This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, ordered this frantic censorship scheme to protect Trump, which should have begotten a thousand front-page news stories demanding to know what exactly it took a thousand agents to hide from us and who exactly Trump is that he requires this kind of anti-democratic protection. Like Johnson, and like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who conducted a long, deeply wrong exculpatory softball interview with Maxwell, she’s serving one man rather than the 342 million people of this country. Trump himself, who over the summer seemed terrified and eager to distract from whatever there is to be found out about his role in all this, once again attempted to silence victims by calling the whole thing “a Democrat hoax” immediately after the news conference. Survivor Haley Robson called out Trump and declared: “I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax.”The women who spoke at Wednesday morning’s press conference made it clear they still fear they face threats, that the machinery of silencing is still at work. Katie Tarrant of the Washington Post writes, “Lisa Phillips, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyer Brad Edwards, said victims were scared to speak publicly about other abusers for fear of legal action. Her response came in response to a question about a client list some victims said they are compiling.” Another Post journalist reports, “Anouska De Georgiou, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, said she and her daughter were threatened when she volunteered to be a witness in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.”And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.Pete Hegseth, who himself settled rape allegations out of court, has fired women in high positions in the military, claims women are less qualified than men and has been reposting videos from Christian fanatics asserting women should not have the right to vote. Trump’s is quite literally a pro-crime administration, as major branches of federal government are pulled away from pursuing criminals to persecuting immigrants, often violating the law to do so. The administration has sought to cut funding for and dismantle programs addressing domestic violence. And of course the Trump administration is headed by Donald J Trump – a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll. It’s rapists all the way down, and enablers all the way up.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Trump news at a glance: South Koreans arrested in Ice raid at Hyundai, Pentagon rebranded as ‘Department of War’

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      South Korea’s foreign ministry has expressed concern after “many of our nationals” were among hundreds detained during a major Ice raid on a Hyundai factory in Georgia, in a dramatic iteration of the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on immigrants in the US.“The economic activities of our companies investing in the United States and the interests of our citizens must not be unduly violated during the course of US law enforcement,” a ministry spokesperson, Lee Jae-woong, said in a statement on Friday.The facility is part of what would be the biggest industrial investment in the state’s history and had been hailed as a huge boost for the economy by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.Here’s the day’s Trump administration news at a glance.At least 475 workers detained in major Ice raidHundreds of workers at a factory being built in Georgia to make car batteries for Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles were detained in a huge raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday that stopped construction.About 475 workers were arrested, according to US immigration officials on Friday, the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US in New York and Washington DC.Read the full storyTrump signs order rebranding Pentagon as ‘Department of War’Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947. The directive will make “Department of War” the secondary title while instructing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to pursue congressional approval for a permanent change.Read the full storyEric Adams says he’s staying in New York mayoral race amid dropout talkThe New York City mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Friday that he is going to stay in the fall’s highly anticipated mayoral race, just days after reports that Donald Trump was encouraging him to drop out in order to help fellow independent candidate Andrew Cuomo gain more votes against the frontrunner, the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani.Read the full storyUS added just 22,000 jobs in August amid Trump tariffsThe US jobs market stalled over the summer, adding just 22,000 jobs in August and continuing a slowdown in the labor market as businesses adjusted to disruptions caused by tariffs.The latest jobs report also contained more bad news. The US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to the latest survey, the first time it went into the negative since December 2020.Read the full storyTrump sends 10 stealth fighter planes to Puerto RicoDonald Trump is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region, it was reported on Friday. If follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers, and comments by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday that such attacks “will happen again”.Read the full storyUS killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 missionUS Navy Seals shot and killed a number of North Korean civilians during a botched covert mission to plant a listening device in the nuclear-armed country during high-stakes diplomatic negotiations in 2019, the New York Times reported on Friday.Read the full storyChicago gears up as Trump troop deployment looms: ‘We aren’t helpless’Communities are on edge as the long-discussed arrival of federal law enforcement and Ice agents in Chicago is reportedly set to begin in the coming days, marking the potential start of a contentious period of federal policing in the Democratic-led midwestern city.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have continued to plummet following Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s premier performing arts venue.

      A potential UN-endorsed reconstruction plan for Gaza is being discussed with the US to prevent the UN general assembly descending into a bitter row about the symbolic recognition of Palestine as a state.

      A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 September 2025. More