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    How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

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    Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani’s identity may seem complex but to Ugandans he is simply their ‘own son’

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      Amid the trees clustered with jackfruit and the boda boda motorcycles weaving precariously around Kampala’s congested roads earlier this year was a campaign poster for Katongole Singh, an immaculately coiffed candidate who positively beamed alongside the president, Yoweri Museveni.With a Sikh Indian surname and an indigenous Ugandan first name, Singh is no rarity in the Ugandan capital, where people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated “African Indian” identity – as indeed does the Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City.Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala.The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American”.The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.)Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as “constrained” boxes to capture the “fullness of my background”, and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as “an American who was born in Africa”.In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves.View image in fullscreen“We have people from India with Ugandan indigenous names, and they speak the Ugandan language,” said Sarah Kirikumwino, a 20-year-old communications student. “They will tell you they actually do not know anything about India because they were born here.”Be that as it may, Indian cultural influence is easy to identify here, not least through food. Near Kampala’s Acacia mall, a Black Ugandan woman selling chai made the sign of the cross before dipping her vegetable samosa into an emerald green chutney.“Asian cuisine such as samosas, chapatis and chai is very well integrated into Ugandan society,” said Aman Kapur, a Kenyan restaurateur of Indian descent, who catered for Mamdani’s wedding. “They were introduced here in the early 19th century by the Asians who were brought in to work.”Mamdani’s mother, the Oscar-nominated film director Mira Nair, is Indian. His father – the post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani – was born to Indian parents in India.Kapoor said Mamdani’s wedding feast was as mixed as the heritage shared between him and his American-Syrian wife, who he met on Hinge: a smorgasbord of Mediterranean, Indian, Pakistani and Ugandan cuisine, including servings of rolex – a staple Ugandan street food of chapati rolled around eggs, which shares the same name as the Swiss watch.The backlash Mamdani faced over his identity reminds Mark Niwagaba – a student at Kampala’s Makerere University – of the “birther movement” conspiracy theory, in which Donald Trump claimed Barack Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen, as the constitution requires of presidents.“Obama’s dad was of Kenyan origin and the mum was Hawaiian – he wasn’t Black enough, and he wasn’t white enough,” the 24-year-old said at an open-mic poetry night at Kardamom and Koffee, a cafe Mira Nair is said to frequent. (Obama’s mother was born in Kansas and studied at the University of Hawaii.) “Mamdani seems to face the same challenge.”The history of Indians in Uganda has not been without strife. South Asian migrants – most of them Indian – were brought into the country by British colonial powers as indentured labourers from 1894. It was Ugandan Indians who built a 600-mile railway that linked Uganda’s side of Lake Victoria to the port of Mombasa in Kenya.View image in fullscreenFavoured by the British to manage tea and coffee plantations, they quickly established successful businesses and gained affluence while Black Ugandans struggled.Then in 1972, Idi Amin expelled about 50,000 Ugandans of south Asian origin, giving them 90 days to leave.Nevertheless, despite now making up less than 1% of the population, Ugandans of Indian descent remain a thriving community here, contributing 60% of tax revenues. From signs for the billion-dollar Madhuvani group to hotels like the four-star Fairway Boutique hotel – one of Uganda’s first hotels, founded by the Jaffer family – the affluence of Ugandans of Indian descent can be seen across the capital.Many have lived their whole lives in Uganda and are accepted as African. Yashwant Patel, 71, who was born in Kampala and now lives in Birmingham, in England, recalls childhoods spent swimming in Lake Victoria, sprawled across the city of Entebbe, and eating mangoes and guavas.“Nobody looked at us like we were invading the place,” Patel recalls. “On the way to Entebbe … you could buy a whole basketful of mangoes which we would eat. I can still remember the juice! And the mango seeds were of course brought from India. Although I hadn’t been to India, my mother and father would say, ‘this is like being in India!’”Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African. “Our own son is taking up a big position in the US, and we Ugandans are very happy with that,” said Fred Ndaula, a Ugandan tour guide in Kampala. “They are Ugandans. This is their country.”Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an “African” identity. “African American” is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade.View image in fullscreenThe case of Rachel Dolezal – an academic and former president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – is one infamous example of a white woman who masqueraded as Black until she was exposed in 2015.“This has generated African-American resentment, and therefore not a surprise that Mamdani’s attempt to accurately reflect his complex heritage on a form designed for binary Black/white thinking would ruffle many US African-Americans,” said Dr Kim D Butler, a Black historian and associate professor at the department of Africana studies at Rutgers University.But Mamdani, she added, “is more closely connected to a specific African country than I have yet to discover for my paternal ancestors, who worked the land of a revolutionary war officer, having left a land whose name we no longer remember these 200+ years.”She added: “‘He’s not really African’ conveys a subtle message we have heard spoken about us – “We’re not really American.”Indeed, Indians from Africa do not always fit easily into US racial categories, notes Amishi Aggarwal, an Indian researcher at the University of Oxford who has been working with refugee communities in Uganda.He points to one of Nair’s films, Mississippi Masala, as a reference point. The film follows a Ugandan-Indian family forced to flee Amin’s Uganda for the US, where one of the daughters falls in love with an African American man played by Denzel Washington. The film shows the racism expressed by her family – even as they face racism, too, as immigrants in the deep south.“There’s a lot of dynamics around caste and class within the Indian-Ugandan community as well, and there can be internal racism,” says Aggarwal.Mamdani’s own history is even more complex: his family moved from Uganda to South Africa, where his father Mahmood taught at the University of Cape Town. The young Mamdani’s affinity to his African Ugandan identity could be attributed in part to the work and activism of his father, the prolific author of several books including on colonialism, the Rwandan genocide, Darfur and the so-called war on terror.Mahmood picked up that activism after moving to the US, where, inspired by Uganda’s independence movement in the 1960s, he joined the civil rights movement and was involved with the Montgomery bus boycotts. He also named his son Zohran Kwame after Ghana’s first democratic president, the icon of Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah.Historian Shamil Jeppie, who worked with Mahmood at the university, first met Zohran Mamdani as a child there. As an anti-apartheid student activist, Jeppie saw not only how race was weaponised by the apartheid regime, but how centuries of migration and mixing of communities created multi-hyphenated identities and communities like his own that couldn’t be understood in the global north.“‘African’ is not a race,” said Jeppie. “Africa is a continent, a space. It’s not co-terminous with race, language or religion. It is populated by all varieties of languages, religion and ethnic groups.”He says it’s no surprise Mamdani’s identity is too complex to fit neatly into a box on a university application. “‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘Muslim’ – for us Africans, these are not contradictions at all.” More

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      ‘Debilitating consequences’ in Uganda after USAID cuts – photo essay

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      In northern Uganda, the unfolding consequences of US funding cuts to international humanitarian aid are palpable. Thousands of families have been living in refugee camps along the border with South Sudan for almost a decade, and newcomers are reported every day as the never-ending conflict within the country intensifies.Uganda has long been a crossroads of migration, shaped by historical and contemporary population movements. Today, it hosts over 1.9 million refugees and asylum seekers – one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Persistent violence in South Sudan and the eruption of armed conflict in Sudan have displaced millions. As both countries spiral further into instability, Uganda remains one of the few safe havens in the region.The decision by Donald Trump’s administration to cut support to USAID, a giant in the international humanitarian assistance network, disrupted the lives of millions of people across the continent, and other humanitarian groups were impacted. In March, the World Food Programme (WFP), an international non-profit, announced a cut to food distribution to 1 million refugees in Uganda.The AVSI Foundation, along with many other humanitarian actors, was forced to abandon a project that employed more than 200 local field officers, leaving their families without a steady income, and thousands of refugees unable to enroll in agricultural training, schools, or start small businesses. Before the end of 2024, they had identified 13,000 households to receive support that vanished just a few days after Trump’s inauguration day.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAmong a slew of executive orders, and actions by the “department of governmental efficiency” (Doge), led then by Elon Musk, the funding cuts dashed people’s hopes and expectations of leaving extreme poverty. A general sentiment of failure and retreat spread among the refugee and host communities. In the following months, a consequent rise in suicides was reported, as Jatuporn Lee, a UNHCR local representative, explained.“Families are struggling to cope with the impact of reduced support, increased food insecurity, higher land rental costs, growing mental health and psychosocial challenges, surges in gender-based violence, school drop-outs, child neglect, abandonment, and child labor,” she said. “We would be cautious about drawing a direct link between funding cuts and suicide rates. As a non-clinical specialist, drawing such a correlation can be misleading. However, these concerning vulnerability trends are clear indicators of growing vulnerability and underscore the urgent need for sustained donor support to promote refugees’ protection, welbeing, and social and economic inclusion.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn April and May, I spent two weeks in several northern Ugandan districts, including Lamwo, Kitgum, Madi-Okollo and Terego, at the very time when new refugees from South Sudan and Sudan were arriving at the border seeking safety. Olive Ngamita, the representative of AVSI Foundation in Kampala, said that 200 humanitarians in Kitgum had to leave, and that they had paid several months of rent in advance, relying on their upcoming salaries.The absence of international humanitarian support left a vacuum in the ecosystem of refugee settlements and host communities. Teachers who stop receiving their salary volunteer to maintain continuity in their students’ education, but struggle to support their families. Since the beginning of 2025, children and youth have been abandoning schools in large numbers, unable to afford the enrollment fees that were once subsidized. Small restaurants and street food vendors, who had looked forward to expanding their activities through loans and microcredit initiatives, have instead scaled back their operations.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn the quiet corners of these settlements, there is a visible loss of rhythm – routines once built around schooling, training sessions and market days have been disrupted. The absence of humanitarian programming leaves young people idle, exposing them to greater risks of recruitment, trafficking or exploitation.Trump and his cohorts replied to harsh criticism of the cuts from the agency’s officials and the humanitarian world, saying they would not cut life-saving aid. Massive humanitarian operations in critical situations have the primary goal of providing food and access to healthcare, indeed. But the bigger picture is to sustain a community, not to let it free fall.One of the first people I met in the Palabek camp in Lamwo was Viola, a 23-year-old pregnant woman who, unable to treat malaria and lower her fever, miscarried. Antimalarials were not delivered to the camp’s clinic. The supply chain, because of the freeze on international aid, had been interrupted. Her story is not an exception. In places where disease can spread fast, even short interruptions in supplies can be fatal.View image in fullscreenUSAID was meant to secure the United States’s dominance as part of a system aimed at stabilizing countries and strengthening diplomatic relations through cooperation. The long-term ramifications of this policy shift are only beginning to emerge. What is unfolding in Uganda today may soon reflect broader regional patterns, where donor disengagement risks creating power vacuums ripe for instability.As Nicholas Apiyo, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights defender, explains: “There is an absolute uncertainty in the future. National and international organizations that depended on USAID have either closed or scaled down their operations. People are left with no continuous care, and many have already lost their lives.“The USAID office in Kampala, is now closed, with debilitating consequences. Although funding for life-saving aid partially resumed, the disruption left a heavy toll on the beneficiaries of treatment to cure Ebola, HIV and malaria. A restoration enabling the supply chain to resume will take time, and lives will be lost in the process.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenUganda will have to adjust to a new funding mechanism, which, according to Apiyo, must increase its national budget for assistance. African countries could now strengthen their ties with Russia, India, Iran and China – those countries are seen as more predictable and less “schizophrenic”, as Apiyo puts it.“You need soft power to rule the world. The colonial roots of the humanitarian system have always had their negative consequences in the majority world as a way to extend its dependency on the donor.”An example of successIn the Madi-Okollo and Terego districts, located near a triple border, hundreds of refugees from the DRC and South Sudan cross into Uganda daily at unofficial border crossing points, converging to form a growing community in established refugee settlements. There, interventions that received funding before the imposition of the new policies remain operational, promoting sustainable economic practices and creating job opportunities. However, educators are concerned that without further funding, those children, out of school without job opportunities, could be driven to illegal survival strategies and be at higher risk of forced recruitment in their country of origin, contributing to internal instability. Local teachers and social workers spoke of “a race against time”, where every month of consistent support can be the difference between a child learning to read or joining an armed group.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAVSI Foundation implemented the Step – Transition from Emergency to Sustainable Development Program, a project funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, in collaboration with the Office of the Ugandan Prime Minister, UNHCR, local leaders and partners. It aimed at improving the socioeconomic stability of refugees and host communities by addressing their priority needs through a multisectoral approach. The project reached 600 direct participants.The project promoted the use of renewable technologies among households, increasing adoption from 0% to 61%. These included briquette production, small-scale irrigation, water harvesting, energy-saving cooking solutions, and partnerships with private renewable energy providers.View image in fullscreenBy the end of the initiative, 92% of families reported higher agricultural production. This was supported through training, access to farming tools and seeds, and the establishment of backyard gardens with a reliable water supply. The program also formed 24 production and marketing groups, bringing together refugees and host community members to improve cooperation and create income opportunities.Support systems for the most vulnerable were strengthened, offering mental health and psychosocial services, gender-based violence prevention, and legal assistance through community dialogues, legal clinics and coordinated referral pathways. Cases of abuse and neglect were promptly referred as a result of child protection and birth registration initiatives.Special focus was placed on pregnant adolescents, young women and youth, who received life skills training, mentorship and sport therapy, resulting in 80% showing positive behavior change. Positive parenting sessions also improved family relationships, with follow-up home visits and group mentoring helping communities sustain these changes. These models – holistic, inclusive, and locally adapted – should guide future international efforts. What they demonstrate is clear: when investments are sustained, results follow.View image in fullscreen More

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      US immigration officials intend to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda

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      US immigration officials said they intend to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda, after he declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.The Costa Rica offer came late on Thursday, after it was clear that the Salvadorian national would probably be released from a Tennessee jail the following day.Ábrego declined to extend his stay in jail and was released on Friday to await trial in Maryland with his family. Later that day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified his attorneys that he would be deported to Uganda and should report to immigration authorities on Monday.According to official documents posted online, the DHS told Ábrego’s attorneys on Friday afternoon that the “DHS may remove your client … to Uganda no earlier than 72 hours from now (absent weekends)”.Immigration and Customs Enforcement also directed Ábrego to report to its Baltimore office on Monday, according to records posted online.Ábrego entered the US without permission in about 2011 as a teenager after fleeing gang violence. He was subsequently afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador.The 30-year-old was initially deported by federal immigration officials in March. Though the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego’s deportation was an “administrative error”, officials have repeatedly accused him of being affiliated with the MS-13 gang, a claim Ábrego and his family vehemently deny.During his detention at El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), Ábrego was physically and psychologically tortured, according to court documents filed by his lawyers in July.Following Ábrego’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration faced widespread pressure to return him to the US, including from a supreme court order that directed federal officials to “facilitate” his return.In June, the Trump administration returned Ábrego from El Salvador, only to charge him with crimes related to human smuggling, which his lawyers have rejected as “preposterous”. His criminal trial is expected to begin in January.Before his deportation, Ábrego had lived in Maryland for more than a decade, working in construction while being married to an American wife.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Ábrego was deemed eligible for pretrial release, he had remained in jail at the request of his attorneys, who feared the Republican administration could try to immediately deport him again if he were freed. Those fears were somewhat allayed by a recent ruling in a separate case in Maryland, which requires immigration officials to allow Ábrego time to mount a defense.Separately, in a statement earlier this week, Uganda said that it agreed to a “temporary agreement” with the US to accept some asylum seekers who are deported from the country.Bagiire Vincent Waiswa, permanent secretary of Uganda’s foreign ministry, said: “The agreement is in respect of third country nationals who may not be granted asylum in the United States but are reluctant to or may have concerns about returning to their countries of origin.”Waiswa added: “This is a temporary arrangement with conditions including that individuals with criminal records and unaccompanied minors will not be accepted. Uganda also prefers that individuals from African countries shall be the ones transferred to Uganda. The two parties are working out the detailed modalities on how the agreement shall be implemented.” More

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      Mamdani Travels to Uganda in Break From Mayoral Campaign

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      Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, said that he and his wife were going to the African country where he was born to celebrate their recent marriage.Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Sunday that he was visiting Uganda, where he was born, in a break from campaigning for the general election in November.In a video posted on X and Bluesky, Mr. Mamdani said he was making the trip to Africa with his wife, Rama Duwaji, whom he married in February, to celebrate their marriage with family and friends.He left the city during the traditional summer lull in the weeks after the June primary, while, at the same time, his most formidable opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was seeking to strengthen his own run on an independent ballot line with appearances across New York in the aftermath of his surprise defeat by Mr. Mamdani.In a statement, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is running for re-election as an independent, criticized his opponent for taking a vacation. (Mr. Adams has taken numerous trips abroad before and after becoming mayor, including a weeklong “spiritual journey” to Ghana shortly after his election in 2021.)“At a time when public safety, housing, and education remain top concerns for working New Yorkers, the mayor is here — managing the responsibilities of running the largest city in America,” Mr. Adams said in a prepared statement. “This election is about who’s prepared to lead, not who can rack up the most passport stamps or press headlines. Eric Adams is working. Others are sightseeing.”A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Mamdani’s spokesman, Jeffrey Lerner, said in a statement that the candidate would return to New York before the end of the month “and looks forward to resuming public events and continuing his campaign to make the most expensive city in America affordable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Ebola Spreads in Uganda, Trump Aid Freeze Hinders Effort to Contain It, U.S. Officials Fear

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      Two more people are reported dead from the disease, and dozens are in isolation, as the outbreak grows.The Ebola outbreak in Uganda has worsened significantly, and the country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, American officials said this week.The officials, representing a variety of health and security agencies, made the assessment during a meeting with U.S. Embassy staff in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, on Wednesday. An audio recording of the session was obtained by The New York Times.There have been two more deaths, the mother and newborn sibling of a 4-year-old who died last week, an American official said. The mother and sibling died earlier than the 4-year-old, but were not identified as probable Ebola cases until after they were buried through belated contact tracing.Eighty-two people have so far been identified as close contacts of the mother and her two children, at high risk for infection, and 68 of them are now in quarantine while the others are still being traced. The officials said public health workers’ ability to trace their contacts and conduct surveillance for new cases is severely hindered without U.S. assistance.Two of the contacts are already symptomatic and have been admitted to an isolation hospital ward, an American official in Uganda said in the meeting. The 4-year-old was taken for treatment at four different health facilities before being diagnosed with Ebola, meaning that many of those who have potentially been exposed to the virus are health care workers.During the meeting Wednesday, American officials said that the Ugandan government also lacked sufficient laboratory supplies, diagnostic equipment and protective gear for medical workers and people tracing contacts. The termination of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development was impeding the ability to procure those supplies, one official said. The meeting, conducted by video, was attended by representatives from the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the Defense Department, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gilead Shot Provides Total Protection From HIV in Trial of Young African Women

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      An injection given just twice a year could herald a breakthrough in protecting the population that has the highest infection rates.Researchers and activists in the trenches of the long fight against H.I.V. got a rare piece of exciting news this week: Results from a large clinical trial in Africa showed that a twice-yearly injection of a new antiviral drug gave young women total protection from the virus.“I got cold shivers,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, an investigator in the trial of the drug, lenacapavir, describing the startling sight of a line of zeros in the data column for new infections. “After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.”Yvette Raphael, the leader of a group called Advocacy for Prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in South Africa, said it was “the best news ever.”The randomized controlled trial, called Purpose 1, was conducted in Uganda and South Africa. It tested whether the every-six-months injection of lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, would provide better protection against H.I.V. infection than two other drugs in wide use in high-income countries, both daily pills.The results were so convincing that the trial was halted early at the recommendation of the independent data review committee, which said all participants should be offered the injection because it clearly provided superior protection against the virus.None of the 2,134 women in the arm of the trial who received lenacapavir contracted H.I.V. By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women (or 1.5 percent) who took Truvada, a daily pill that has been available for more than a decade, and 39 of 2,136 women (1.8 percent) who received a newer daily pill called Descovy were infected.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      US may restrict visas for Ugandan officials in wake of anti-LGBTQ+ laws

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      The US may restrict visas issued to Ugandan officials in its latest condemnation to the African country’s enactment of stringent – and highly controversial – anti-LGBTQ+ laws.Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said that Joe Biden’s White House is “deeply troubled” by the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was signed into law by Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, on Monday. Blinken said that he was looking to “promote accountability” for Ugandan officials who have violated the rights of LGBTQ+ people, with possible measures including the curtailment of visas.“I have also directed the department to update our travel guidance to American citizens and to US businesses as well as to consider deploying existing visa restrictions tools against Ugandan officials and other individuals for abuse of universal human rights, including the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons,” Blinken said in a statement.Uganda’s government has faced widespread criticism over the new laws, with the EU, human rights groups and LGBTQ+ organizations all calling for it to be reversed. Biden, who has raised the possibility of sanctions against Uganda, has called the law a “tragic violation of universal human rights” while Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, described the law as “devastating”.Homosexual acts were already illegal in Uganda but now those convicted face life imprisonment under the new laws, with the legislation imposing the death penalty for “aggravated” cases, such as gay sex involving someone below the age of 18. People convicted of “promoting” homosexuality face 20 years in prison, with Human Rights Watch noting the bill essentially criminalizes “merely identifying” as LGBTQ+.Anita Among, Uganda’s parliamentary speaker, said on the Twitter the new law will “protect the sanctity of the family”.“We have stood strong to defend the culture, values and aspirations of our people,” Among said.But the measure appears to have bipartisan disapproval in the US, with the Republican senator Ted Cruz calling the law “horrific and wrong”. Cruz wrote on Twitter: “Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ is grotesque & an abomination. ALL civilized nations should join together in condemning this human rights abuse.#LGBTQ”Cruz’s remarks drew out some domestic detractors because fellow Republican lawmakers in Texas – his home state – have this year promoted bills banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender children. They have also sought to limit classroom lessons on sexual orientation and the college sports teams that trans athletes can join.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican governor who is running for US president, has overseen the so-called “don’t say gay” law in his state, prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms, a ban on people from entering bathrooms other than their sex assigned at birth and a crackdown on children seeing drag artists. More

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      in Elections

      Your Tuesday Briefing: Uganda Enacts an Anti-Gay Law

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      Also, a rare daytime assault on Kyiv.Gay rights groups say hundreds of gay Ugandans have reached out to them in recent weeks seeking help.Abubaker Lubowa/ReutersUganda’s harsh new anti-gay lawThe president of Uganda signed a punitive anti-gay bill yesterday that includes the death penalty as a punishment, enshrining into law an intensifying crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. people in the conservative East African nation.It calls for life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex. Anyone who tries to have same-sex relations could be liable for up to a decade in prison. The law also decrees the death penalty for anyone convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” which is partially defined as acts of same-sex relations with children or disabled people.Context: Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda. But the new law — one of the world’s most restrictive anti-gay measures — calls for far stricter punishment and broadens the list of offenses.Reaction: Many L.G.B.T.Q. people have fled Uganda since the law was introduced in Parliament in March. “There’s fear that this law will embolden many Ugandans to take the law into their hands,” said Frank Mugisha, the most prominent gay rights activist in Uganda.Politics: President Yoweri Museveni has dismissed widespread calls — from the U.N., Western governments and civil society groups — not to impose the measure.Region: A growing number of African countries, including Kenya and Ghana, are considering passing similar or even stricter legislation.Patients and medical staff, including injured soldiers, sheltered in the basement of a hospital in Kyiv.Nicole Tung for The New York TimesA rare morning assault on KyivPowerful explosions ripped through Ukraine’s capital yesterday morning, just hours after Russia launched an overnight barrage. Frightened pedestrians hurried to get off the streets, and children wearing backpacks started to run and scream when booms resounded, a video showed.Ukraine said it shot down all 11 of the missiles that Russia fired. Falling debris caused some damage, and information about possible casualties was still being clarified.Russia has launched 16 attacks on Kyiv this month, but this was the first daytime strike there in many weeks. Ukrainian officials say that Moscow is adjusting its tactics to try to inflict maximum damage. So far, Ukrainian air defenses, reinforced by Western weapons, have largely thwarted the aerial attacks on Kyiv, limiting casualties and damage in the highly populated area.Details: More than 41,000 people took shelter in subway stations when air raid sirens sounded around 11 a.m., officials said. Parents raced to protect their children, and hospital workers huddled in shelters. A billboard that shows the pictures of Chinese astronauts.Mark Schiefelbein/Associated PressChina’s expanding space ambitionsChina plans to land a person on the moon by 2030, a government official said yesterday. The announcement came as three astronauts were preparing to launch today from Earth to China’s new space station, completed late last year.A lunar landing would be a significant achievement for China in its competition with the U.S. in space. No human has been on the moon since the U.S. Apollo missions in the 1960s and ’70s. NASA wants to put people on the moon again, with a target of 2025, but that plan, known as the Artemis program, has faced delays. A U.S. report last year warned that China could overtake the U.S.’s abilities in space by 2045.China in space: It is the only country to have successfully landed on the moon in the 21st century, and in 2019 it became the first to land a probe on the moon’s far side.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificFishermen maneuvered on a breakwater dike in Manila.Francis R Malasig/EPA, via ShutterstockTyphoon Mawar will most likely stay north of the Philippines, though it could cause heavy rains in some parts of the country. The impact on Taiwan, China and South Korea could be minimal.The police in New Delhi arrested a man for fatally stabbing a teenage girl, the BBC reports. A video that shows people watching the assault, which occurred in public, has provoked outrage.The Indian state of Sikkim is offering cash to encourage people to have babies, a sign of India’s uneven population growth.Around the WorldPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez leads a fragile coalition government.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain called for a snap election in July after his party suffered defeats in regional elections over the weekend.Analysts think the U.S. economy is well positioned to withstand the debt deal’s proposed budget cuts. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may approve Sweden’s NATO membership bid now that he has been re-elected as Turkey’s leader.A Morning ReadIseto’s sake masters check and control the temperature of the alcohol with their hands, not thermometers.James Whitlow Delano for The New York TimesA travel writer used a 22-year-old guidebook to lead him through Tokyo on his search for bars and restaurants that express the city’s traditional eating and drinking culture. It took him to old stalwarts like Iseto, a sake den that’s operated out of the same wooden house since 1948.“The long-term survival of old-school places like Iseto is an accurate barometer of how much a city has been able to stay true to itself and resist the onslaught of the hot and new, often bywords for globalized sameness,” he writes.ARTS AND IDEASLessons from ‘Succession’Matthew Macfadyen and Sarah Snook in the “Succession” series finale.HBOWith the show’s finale on Sunday, viewers of HBO’s satire of the ultrawealthy learned the fate of the media empire of Logan Roy, the late tyrant. (Here’s a recap.)The final episodes were set against the backdrop of a country in crisis. But the Roys fanned those dark political forces for ratings — and then they backed a far-right presidential candidate. Indeed, our chief television critic writes that “Succession” has showed how the problems of the ultrawealthy affect all of us: “They have so much influence and so little sense of responsibility.”Are you a “Succession” superfan? Take our quiz. And if you already miss the show, here’s what to watch next.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookRyan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero.The secret to great salmon: Add salt and wait.What to ReadIn “Yellowface” a white writer takes credit for her dead Asian American friend’s manuscript.HealthWhy does day drinking feel different?Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Reverberating sound (four letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you tomorrow. — AmeliaP.S. Yesterday was Memorial Day in the U.S., which honors those who have died in war.Write to us at briefing@nytimes.com with any questions or suggestions. Thanks! More