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      Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’

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      A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast classified military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”The New York representative Pat Ryan called the incident “Fubar” (an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) and threatened to launch his own congressional investigation “IMMEDIATELY” if House Republicans fail to act.According to reporting in the Atlantic, the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited into a Signal chat group with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials including Vice-President JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, national security adviser, Mike Waltz, secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and others.The reporting exposes not only a historic mishandling of classified information but a potentially illegal communication chain in which sensitive military plans about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen were casually shared in an encrypted group chat with automatic delete functions.“It has made us look weak to our adversaries,” the California congressman Ro Khanna told the Guardian. “We need to take cybersecurity far more seriously and I look forward to leading on that.”As the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes has overseen countless classified briefings. But the Signal group chat leak of impending war plans has made him “horrified”.“If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,’ he said. “These individuals know the calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems, and they also know that if a lower-ranking official under their command did what is described here, they would likely lose their clearance and be subject to criminal investigation.”Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, posted on social media: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”The Republican senator John Cornyn described the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was “a huge screw-up” and suggesting that “the interagency would look at that” to determine how such a significant security lapse occurred.The White House confirmed the leak. The national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, told the Guardian: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”But the White House attempted to defend the communications, with Hughes describing the messages as an example of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” Hughes said.But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. The Rhode Island senator Jack Reed said on X that the incident represented “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.The echoes of past document controversies are also coming back to haunt some of the senior officials in the chat, who previously criticized similar security breaches. In 2024, Waltz – the current national security adviser – had said “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”In 2023, Hegseth had his own critique of the Biden administration handling classified documents “flippantly”, remarking on Fox News that “If at the very top there’s no accountability”, then we have “two tiers of justice”.The bombshell revelation also potentially violated federal record-keeping laws. The Federal Records Act, which mandates preservation of government communications, typically mandates that records are kept for two years, and the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically delete in under four weeks.The New York Republican representative Mike Lawler summed up the bipartisan consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.” More

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      Trump’s tariff obsession is a lose-lose proposition | Steven Greenhouse

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      I’ve been writing about manufacturing in the US since the 1980s, and it’s been heart-wrenching to report on dozens of factory closings and the devastation they have done to workers and communities. As the nation grasped for ways to slow these plant closings, I also wrote about Washington’s use of carefully employed trade measures, like targeted tariffs, and how they helped save some plants and jobs, especially in the steel industry.Carefully targeted tariffs can be a winning strategy, but Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs – especially across-the-board ones that are neither careful nor targeted – has already shown itself to be a lose-lose strategy. Perhaps it’s too generous to use the word strategy to describe what the president is doing, because his tariffs seem based on fiat and whim, not on thoughtful planning.Trump is like Elmer Fudd with his shotgun, shooting every which way: Canada today, China tomorrow and perhaps Champagne country the day after, with tariffs imposed one day, suspended the next and then re-imposed a few days later, but, wait, those re-imposed tariffs might be canceled next week. It’s a “strategy” of chaos and capriciousness, with some viciousness thrown in.Obsessed as he is with tariffs, Trump calls tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented”, and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. He talks as if tariffs will create an economic nirvana, but the opposite is happening. Stock markets are plummeting, corporate confidence is tanking, consumers fear higher prices and economists warn the measures might push the US into recession.Let’s count the ways Trump’s tariffs are a lose-lose proposition.First, at a time when Americans are feeling beaten and bruised from the pandemic-era burst of inflation, the tariffs – which are really a tax on imports – will inevitably push up prices. Trump’s tariffs will hit less affluent Americans hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on clothes and other imported goods. Many of those Americans voted for Trump, believing him when he said he’d reduce prices.Second, even though Trump boasts that tariffs will make American industry great again, it’s dubious whether Trump’s tariffs will do much to spur manufacturing. Trump has evidently forgotten that if you want to persuade corporations to build new factories – in this case, to bring back operations from overseas – then you need to reassure business executives that there will be economic and policy stability. But that’s the opposite of what Trump, the emperor of chaos, is all about. If you were a CEO, would you shell out $200m to build a new factory in the US in response to Trump’s tariffs when you know that Trump might lift those tariffs tomorrow or in two weeks or whenever a foreign leader flatters him or promises to let Eric and Don Jr build a Trump hotel at a beautiful seaside resort in their country?Trump is eager for hundreds of companies to build new factories in the US, but with his on-again-off again, here today-gone-tomorrow tariffs, he has made many stability-craving CEOs too scared to build new plants. Moreover, if Trump wants to attract the manufacturing industries and jobs of tomorrow, he’s been shooting himself and the US in the foot with his ideological war against the industries of the future, including electric vehicles, renewable energy and semiconductors. Trump is even threatening to kill Biden’s hugely successful subsidy program to build sophisticated new semiconductor plants in the US.Third, Trump’s tariffs are undermining economic growth; even Trump’s team has acknowledged the threat of recession. His tariffs are sabotaging supply chains, and that will disrupt production at many factories. His scattershot tariffs are so alarming companies that many are hesitating on plans to invest in new plant and equipment. That also undercuts growth. In addition, the widespread fears that tariffs will push inflation skyward have caused consumer sentiment to fall sharply. That could cause consumer spending, the major engine of the US economy, to decline.Fourth, Trump’s tariffs are hitting various U.S. industries hard. Trump’s hefty 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will hurt US auto makers by raising the cost of vital raw materials and making US-made cars less competitive vis-a-vis foreign automakers. Not only that, trade retaliation from Canada, Europe and China is already harming many US industries – including agriculture, motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon—and that, too, will push the economy toward recession. And let’s not forget that Trump’s tariffs are hurting the targeted countries, and that’s slowing their – and worldwide – economic growth.Fifth, another big way we lose is that Trump, by slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union, has further angered and alienated many of our closest allies, and that comes on top of his disparaging Nato and increasingly allying the US with Russia. In this way, Trump may destroy the Atlantic Alliance, which has been pivotal for maintaining peace and prosperity, though not perfectly, since the second world war.Sixth, any honest, fair-minded cost-benefit analysis will show that Trump’s tariffs will cause far more damage than gain. Although Trump says his tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before”, economic studies have found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term failed to increase the number of jobs. Those tariffs created a small number of jobs in some industries, but retaliation and supply-chain disruptions caused job losses in other industries. A study by economists at MIT, the World Bank, Harvard and the University of Zurich concluded that Trump’s first-term tariffs “neither raised nor lowered US employment” and didn’t “provide economic help to the US heartland”.With Trump’s tariffs changing day to day, it’s impossible to predict how many jobs those tariffs will create or destroy. Thus far, his tariffs have caused US stock markets to lose $4tn in value, and those losses could grow. If Trump’s tariffs were to create 100,000 jobs, which some economists say is unrealistically optimistic, the cost would be an astronomical $40m per job ($4tn divided by 100,000). If his tariffs created 10,000 jobs, the cost would be $400m per job.With Trump’s tariffs slowing economic growth, if they result in a 1 percentage point drop in annual GDP, that would mean a loss of $300bn a year in economic output. (1% of the nation’s $30tn GDP). If Trump’s tariffs yielded 100,000 jobs, the cost would be $3m per job. Or if Trump’s tariffs raise inflation by 1%, that would cost American consumers roughly $200bn a year – which would mean a cost of $2m per job created.Returning to Elmer Fudd, his goal was always to shoot Bugs Bunny, but his gun often blew up in his face by mistake. With his tariffs, Elmer Trump seems well on his way to shooting the US economy by mistake.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Anger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike Waltz

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      Greenland’s prime minister has accused Washington of interfering in its political affairs with the visit of an American delegation this week to the Arctic island coveted by the US president, Donald Trump.“It should be said clearly that our integrity and democracy must be respected without foreign interference,” Múte Egede said on Monday, adding that the planned visit by the second lady, Usha Vance, along with the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, “cannot be seen as just a private visit”.Vance, the wife of the US vice-president, JD Vance, will travel to Greenland as Trump clings to the idea of a US annexation of the strategic, semiautonomous Danish territory.Vance will visit Greenland on Thursday with a US delegation to tour historical sites, learn about the territory’s heritage and attend the national dogsled race, the White House said. The delegation will return to the US on 29 March.Waltz and the energy secretary, Chris Wright, will also travel to Greenland to visit a US military base, a US official said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump has made US annexation of Greenland a significant talking point since taking office for a second time on 20 January and has said it will become part of the US “one way or the other”.Speaking on Sunday to the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq, Egede said: “The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us, and the signal is not to be misunderstood. He is Trump’s confidential and closest adviser, and his presence in Greenland alone will certainly make the Americans believe in Trump’s mission, and the pressure will increase after the visit.”Greenland’s strategic location and rich mineral resources could benefit the US. It lies along the shortest route from Europe to North America – vital for the US ballistic missile warning system.The governments of Greenland and Denmark have voiced opposition to such a move.The Greenlandic government, which is in a caretaker period after an 11 March general election won by a party that favours a slow approach to independence from Denmark, did not reply to requests for comments.The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in a written comment reacting to news of the visit that “this is something we take seriously”. She said Denmark wanted to cooperate with the US but it should be cooperation based on “the fundamental rules of sovereignty”.She added that the dialogue with the US regarding Greenland would take place in close coordination with the Danish government and the future Greenlandic government.Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      In Canada, I saw how Trump is ripping North America apart – and how hard its bond will be to repair | Andy Beckett

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      As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state – geographically or diplomatically – can be a precarious existence. All it takes is an aggressive new government in the stronger state and a relatively equal relationship of economic and military cooperation can suddenly turn exploitative, even threatening.Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, this realisation has been dawning across the west, but nowhere more disconcertingly than in Canada. Its border with the US is the longest in the world: 5,525 miles of often empty and hard to defend land, lakes and rivers. Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, are only a few hours to the north, were you to approach them in a US army tank.Earlier this month, I spent a week in some of this particularly vulnerable stretch of Ontario and Quebec, visiting my daughter at university and encountering a new, more anxious Canada. At times, as the trains I took crawled along the congested trans-Canadian rail corridor, the roofs of individual American buildings were visible, glinting in the cold sun across the border. The feeling of being a foreigner in a tense, contested place reminded me of when I lived in West Germany, near the East German border, during the early 1980s, one of the most fraught phases of the cold war.Until Trump started talking so insistently about making Canada his country’s “51st state”, that would have been an absurd comparison. But not any more. “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” said the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his first speech as Liberal leader. “If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.” Supposedly one of the most harmonious – and strategically important – relationships between rich western countries appears to have changed radically.The Canadians I spoke to, in shops, at bus stops and stations, at home and by email, were generally less dramatic about the situation than Carney, who has a reputation as a leader to establish, and now an election to win next month. There was some anger at the US – and at Britain’s failure to condemn Trump’s threats against a Commonwealth country. “The king is proud to align himself with a despot for … a dangled trade agreement,” a Montreal academic told me, referring to King Charles’s recent invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain. “A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”More often, however, people shook their heads or rolled their eyes at Trump’s behaviour. He was crazy, chaotic, totally inconsistent, people told me – not like a steady and realistic Canadian, they implied. There were satisfied smiles at the tariff-driven slide in the US stock market. And yet, people also said, Trump’s threats meant that Canadian life would have to change profoundly. Though what those changes might be was a topic they generally avoided – except for a baker in Montreal, who sold me some sourdough while we discussed whether Canada would need to get nuclear weapons.Relations between America and Canada have not always been peaceful. The US invaded Canada in 1775 and 1812, without success. During the 1920s and 1930s it drew up a more hypothetical invasion scheme, War Plan Red. In fundamental ways, fear of the US shaped Canada, encouraging its unification out of what had originally been disparate territories, and also the decision to site its capital in Ottawa, further from the border than its other eastern cities.As in Britain, in the mid-20th century the Canadian state sought to create what it called a “special relationship” with the US. Canada’s export-oriented economy – necessary because of the country’s relatively small and scattered population – got access to US markets. US businesses got access to prosperous Canadian consumers, often close to America’s manufacturing heartlands. During the cold war, both countries saw Canada as a key place to build defences against Russian attack.With Trump seemingly much closer to Moscow than Ottawa, that North American alliance may in effect be dead. By area, Canada is the world’s second-biggest country after Russia, but its armed forces are tiny, about half the size of Britain’s. The feeling that Canada has been abandoned militarily by the US possibly explains the huge “Fuck Trump” flag I saw flying from the back of a pickup truck in the usually polite city of Kingston, Ontario, home of the Royal Military College of Canada.Economic ties will take longer to unravel. There were still California carrots on Montreal supermarket shelves, and my trains were passed by endless goods wagons from the famous old American freight company Union Pacific. Yet the number of Canadians visiting the US is already plummeting: last month it was as low as during the latter stages of the pandemic. In this, as in much else, Canada may be an early adopter of new habits regarding the US which then spread across what is left of the liberal west. For left-leaning foreigners, Americana and American places may lose much of their appeal, because the US has been made so authoritarian and hostile to outsiders by such a quintessentially American figure.Canada is self-consciously following another path. “Canada is a mosaic,” says Carney, and pro-diversity messages pour out of its government and businesses, as if calculated to wind up US conservatives. As well as vast, increasingly coveted supplies of water and minerals, Canada – despite its considerable inequalities and very heavy per capita carbon footprint – offers an increasingly different model of how to live on the North American continent.Will Trump or any hard-right successors in the White House allow this provocation to continue? Another US invasion may not actually be imminent. Trump already has too many ambitious policy goals. Conquering, let alone occupying, as enormous and physically extreme a country as Canada would be an intimidating prospect even for the fantasy-driven Republicans.Yet it’s equally hard to imagine US-Canadian relations returning quickly to their former state. Too many imbalances and contrasts between the countries have been pointed out, too many threats offered. Trust has been lost. Political careers are being made on both sides by acting tough towards the neighbouring government.Canadians are less known than Americans for flying the flag, but there were a lot of them fluttering along the border this month. It may be many years before they come down.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump revokes legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans

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      Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, in the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.It will be effective 24 April.The move cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the immigrants under former president Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.Trump, a Republican, took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of immigrants in the US illegally. He has argued that the legal entry parole programs launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a 20 January executive order.Trump said on 6 March that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. Trump’s remarks came in response to a Reuters report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.Biden launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US. It remains unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection or legal status. More

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      ‘He is innocent’: family of deported Venezuelan rebukes Trump claims

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      Donald Trump’s White House has described the Venezuelan migrants deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador as “heinous monsters” and terrorists who “rape, maim and murder for sport”.But relatives of Francisco Javier García Casique, a 24-year-old from the city of Maracay, say he was a hairdresser, not a crook.“He has never been in prison, he is innocent, and he has always supported us with his work as a barber,” his younger brother, Sebastián García Casique, said from their family home in Venezuela.Less than a week ago, the García brothers were preparing to be reunited, with Francisco telling relatives he expected to be deported from a US immigration detention facility to his South American homeland after being arrested by immigration officials on 2 March.The flight was scheduled for last Friday. A family gathering was planned in Maracay. On Sunday those plans were shattered when El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, published a cinematographic propaganda video on social media showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody in his country’s “terrorism confinement centre”.“It’s him,” a shell-shocked Sebastián told their mother after spotting his sibling among those shackled men.“I never in my life thought I would see my brother like that – handcuffed, his head shaved, in a prison for murderers, where they put rapists and kidnappers. It is very painful because he is innocent,” he said of his brother, who travelled to the US in late 2023 chasing a better future.Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based immigration lawyer, was another person who found herself scouring Bukele’s sensationalist video for any sign of her client, another Venezuelan migrant she feared had also been unjustly dispatched to El Salvador after seeking shelter from political persecution in the US.“I felt sick … absolute shock,” Toczylowski said of the moment she saw those pictures in which detainees are shown being forced to their knees to have their heads shaved by masked security forces with batons and guns.“It really is such an escalation … and to see it paraded and celebrated by the White House and by Bukele was just an absolutely shocking escalation of human rights abuses against migrants,” said the lawyer who works for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group.García and Toczylowski’s client – an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker she declined to name out of fears for his safety – appear not to be the only Venezuelans deported to El Salvador despite having no criminal history in their home country or the US. More than 260 people were deported to the Central American country last weekend, 137 of them under 227-year-old wartime powers invoked by the US president called the Alien Enemies Act.In recent days, a succession of Venezuelan families have gone public to demand the release of their loved-ones: young working men whose main “crimes” appear to have been their nationality and having tattoos that US immigration authorities deemed a sign of affiliation to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Experts in South American organized crime reject the idea that tattoos are a meaningful indicator of gang membership in Venezuela.García’s tattoos include one – inspired by a verse from the Book of Isaiah and inked onto his skin during a stint living in Peru – that reads: “God gives His toughest battles to his strongest warriors”. His brother, Sebastián, has the same tattoo.In a video plea posted on social media, Mercedes Yamarte, the mother of another migrant sent to El Salvador, Mervin Yamarte, described her 29-year-old son as “a good, hardworking boy” who had never been involved in crime. But Yamarte, who entered the US in 2023 and had lived in Dallas, also has tattoos – one with the name of his daughter, another paying tribute to his mum – which were seemingly interpreted as an indication of gang membership by US authorities.“Everyone close to him knows he has a big heart and NOTHING TO DO WITH TREN DE ARAGUA,” his brother, Francis Varela, wrote on social media. “My brother went in search of the American dream,” Varela added. “A dream that has now become a nightmare for us all.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToczylowski’s client also has tattoos which she said immigration enforcement officials used to allege he was a Tren de Aragua member. “[But] they are not gang tattoos and he has no gang membership affiliation at all,” the lawyer insisted.García’s shock incarceration in El Salvador ended a six-year quest to build a better life for himself and his family, which the Venezuelan Zoomer documented on Instagram.After leaving his economically shattered country, in 2019, García migrated to Callao, a seaside city near Peru’s capital Lima, hoping to make enough money to help his family survive back home. “I miss you Venezuela,” he posted the following year, between photos and videos that highlighted his love for hairdressing, football and his numerous tattoos.In late 2023 García, like many Venezuelan migrants, decided to relocate to the US to escape the post-pandemic economic crisis in Peru. An Instagram photo shows him posing outside a train station in the Mexican state of Jalisco as he heads to the southern border. The post is accompanied by a song by the Mexican singer Peso Pluma called Nueva Vida” (New Life) which captured his aspirations.Two months later, another image shows him cutting hair at a Marvel-themed salon in Longview, Texas named after the Incredible Hulk. “May it be everything we dreamed of,” García wrote of his fresh start beside an emoji of the Stars and Stripes flag. Last weekend that dream came to an abrupt and unexpected end in Bukele’s mega prison near San Salvador.Immigration advocates have voiced outrage at the plight of men such as García and the lack of due process in their cases.“It’s enraging because they clearly don’t have any affiliation with Tren de Aragua at all,” said Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank.Isacson said that in the past such migrants tended to face detention in a “miserable [detention] centre here in the United States” or were “shipped back” home. “It did not mean that you were sent to some medieval jail of an authoritarian leader in another country. So we’re in brand new ground here,” Isacson warned, adding that while it was possible some of those deported to El Salvador were hardened criminals, many appeared to be innocent.Sebastián García Casique insisted that was the case of his older brother who their mother had raised to be an “honest and good” person. He urged Trump to review his brother’s case and free him.“I believe this is an injustice,” said García, 21. “Maybe one or two [of the prisoners] have criminal records, and if they did something, punish them for it … But the innocent should be sent to Venezuela … What is he doing in El Salvador if he committed no crime there? … Why don’t they say what crimes they are accused of?” More

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      I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

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      There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon, a small town in the northernmost part of Canada. I always knew I wanted to do something bigger with my life. I left home early and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I built a career spanning multiple industries – acting in film and television, owning bars and restaurants, flipping condos and managing Airbnbs.In my 30s, I found my true passion working in the health and wellness industry. I was given the opportunity to help launch an American brand of health tonics called Holy! Water – a job that would involve moving to the US.I was granted my trade Nafta work visa, which allows Canadian and Mexican citizens to work in the US in specific professional occupations, on my second attempt. It goes without saying, then, that I have no criminal record. I also love the US and consider myself to be a kind, hard-working person.I started working in California and travelled back and forth between Canada and the US multiple times without any complications – until one day, upon returning to the US, a border officer questioned me about my initial visa denial and subsequent visa approval. He asked why I had gone to the San Diego border the second time to apply. I explained that that was where my lawyer’s offices were, and that he had wanted to accompany me to ensure there were no issues.After a long interrogation, the officer told me it seemed “shady” and that my visa hadn’t been properly processed. He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.I was devastated; I had just started building a life in California. I stayed in Canada for the next few months, and was eventually offered a similar position with a different health and wellness brand.I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it. Hours passed, with many confused opinions about my case. The officer I spoke to was kind but told me that, due to my previous issues, I needed to apply for my visa through the consulate. I told her I hadn’t been aware I needed to apply that way, but had no problem doing it.Then she said something strange: “You didn’t do anything wrong. You are not in trouble, you are not a criminal.”I remember thinking: Why would she say that? Of course I’m not a criminal!She then told me they had to send me back to Canada. That didn’t concern me; I assumed I would simply book a flight home. But as I sat searching for flights, a man approached me.“Come with me,” he said.There was no explanation, no warning. He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands and ordered me to put my hands against the wall. A woman immediately began patting me down. The commands came rapid-fire, one after another, too fast to process.They took my shoes and pulled out my shoelaces.“What are you doing? What is happening?” I asked.“You are being detained.”“I don’t understand. What does that mean? For how long?”“I don’t know.”That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”They brought me downstairs for a series of interviews and medical questions, searched my bags and told me I had to get rid of half my belongings because I couldn’t take everything with me.“Take everything with me where?” I asked.A woman asked me for the name of someone they could contact on my behalf. In moments like this, you realize you don’t actually know anyone’s phone number anymore. By some miracle, I had recently memorized my best friend Britt’s number because I had been putting my grocery points on her account.I gave them her phone number.They handed me a mat and a folded-up sheet of aluminum foil.“What is this?”“Your blanket.”“I don’t understand.”I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.View image in fullscreenFor two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was and no one answered our questions. No one in the cell spoke English, so I either tried to sleep or meditate to keep from having a breakdown. I didn’t trust the food, so I fasted, assuming I wouldn’t be there long.On the third day, I was finally allowed to make a phone call. I called Britt and told her that I didn’t understand what was happening, that no one would tell me when I was going home, and that she was my only contact.They gave me a stack of paperwork to sign and told me I was being given a five-year ban unless I applied for re-entry through the consulate. The officer also said it didn’t matter whether I signed the papers or not; it was happening regardless.I was so delirious that I just signed. I told them I would pay for my flight home and asked when I could leave.No answer.Then they moved me to another cell – this time with no mat or blanket. I sat on the freezing cement floor for hours. That’s when I realized they were processing me into real jail: the Otay Mesa Detention Center.View image in fullscreenI was told to shower, given a jail uniform, fingerprinted and interviewed. I begged for information.“How long will I be here?”“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”Months.I felt like I was going to throw up.I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”I told her I had only recently found God, but that I now believed in God more than anything.“I believe God brought you here for a reason,” she said. “I know it feels like your life is in a million pieces, but you will be OK. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help others.”At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept.I felt like I had been sent an angel.I was then placed in a real jail unit – two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.For the first day, I didn’t leave my cell. I continued fasting, terrified that the food might make me sick. The only available water came from the tap attached to the toilet in our cells or a sink in the common area, neither of which felt safe to drink.Eventually, I forced myself to step out, meet the guards and learn the rules. One of them told me: “No fighting.”“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” I joked. He laughed.I asked if there had ever been a fight here.“In this unit? No,” he said. “No one in this unit has a criminal record.”That’s when I started meeting the other women.That’s when I started hearing their stories.View image in fullscreenAnd that’s when I made a decision: I would never allow myself to feel sorry for my situation again. No matter how hard this was, I had to be grateful. Because every woman I met was in an even more difficult position than mine.There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.If someone is a criminal, I agree they should be taken off the streets. But not one of these women had a criminal record. These women acknowledged that they shouldn’t have overstayed and took responsibility for their actions. But their frustration wasn’t about being held accountable; it was about the endless, bureaucratic limbo they had been trapped in.The real issue was how long it took to get out of the system, with no clear answers, no timeline and no way to move forward. Once deported, many have no choice but to abandon everything they own because the cost of shipping their belongings back is too high.I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.There were women who had been picked up off the street, from outside their workplaces, from their homes. All of these women told me that they had been detained for time spans ranging from a few weeks to 10 months. One woman’s daughter was outside the detention center protesting for her release.That night, the pastor invited me to a service she was holding. A girl who spoke English translated for me as the women took turns sharing their prayers – prayers for their sick parents, for the children they hadn’t seen in weeks, for the loved ones they had been torn away from.Then, unexpectedly, they asked if they could pray for me. I was new here, and they wanted to welcome me. They formed a circle around me, took my hands and prayed. I had never felt so much love, energy and compassion from a group of strangers in my life. Everyone was crying.At 3am the next day, I was woken up in my cell.“Pack your bag. You’re leaving.”I jolted upright. “I get to go home?”The officer shrugged. “I don’t know where you’re going.”Of course. No one ever knew anything.I grabbed my things and went downstairs, where 10 other women stood in silence, tears streaming down their faces. But these weren’t happy tears. That was the moment I learned the term “transferred”.For many of these women, detention centers had become a twisted version of home. They had formed bonds, established routines and found slivers of comfort in the friendships they had built. Now, without warning, they were being torn apart and sent somewhere new. Watching them say goodbye, clinging to each other, was gut-wrenching.I had no idea what was waiting for me next. In hindsight, that was probably for the best.Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle.When we arrived at our next destination, we were forced to go through the entire intake process all over again, with medical exams, fingerprinting – and pregnancy tests; they lined us up in a filthy cell, squatting over a communal toilet, holding Dixie cups of urine while the nurse dropped pregnancy tests in each of our cups. It was disgusting.We sat in freezing-cold jail cells for hours, waiting for everyone to be processed. Across the room, one of the women suddenly spotted her husband. They had both been detained and were now seeing each other for the first time in weeks.The look on her face – pure love, relief and longing – was something I’ll never forget.We were beyond exhausted. I felt like I was hallucinating.The guard tossed us each a blanket: “Find a bed.”There were no pillows. The room was ice cold, and one blanket wasn’t enough. Around me, women lay curled into themselves, heads covered, looking like a room full of corpses. This place made the last jail feel like the Four Seasons.I kept telling myself: Do not let this break you.Thirty of us shared one room. We were given one Styrofoam cup for water and one plastic spoon that we had to reuse for every meal. I eventually had to start trying to eat and, sure enough, I got sick. None of the uniforms fit, and everyone had men’s shoes on. The towels they gave us to shower were hand towels. They wouldn’t give us more blankets. The fluorescent lights shined on us 24/7.Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.I tried to stay calm as every fiber of my being raged towards panic mode. I didn’t know how I would tell Britt where I was. Then, as if sent from God, one of the women showed me a tablet attached to the wall where I could send emails. I only remembered my CEO’s email from memory. I typed out a message, praying he would see it.He responded.Through him, I was able to connect with Britt. She told me that they were working around the clock trying to get me out. But no one had any answers; the system made it next to impossible. I told her about the conditions in this new place, and that was when we decided to go to the media.She started working with a reporter and asked whether I would be able to call her so she could loop him in. The international phone account that Britt had previously tried to set up for me wasn’t working, so one of the other women offered to let me use her phone account to make the call.We were all in this together.With nothing to do in my cell but talk, I made new friends – women who had risked everything for the chance at a better life for themselves and their families.Through them, I learned the harsh reality of seeking asylum. Showing me their physical scars, they explained how they had paid smugglers anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 to reach the US border, enduring brutal jungles and horrendous conditions.One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.Some believed they were being used as examples, as warnings to others not to try to come.Women were starting to panic in this new facility, and knowing I was most likely the first person to get out, they wrote letters and messages for me to send to their families.It felt like we had all been kidnapped, thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity.We were from different countries, spoke different languages and practiced different religions. Yet, in this place, none of that mattered. Everyone took care of each other. Everyone shared food. Everyone held each other when someone broke down. Everyone fought to keep each other’s hope alive.I got a message from Britt. My story had started to blow up in the media.Almost immediately after, I was told I was being released.My Ice agent, who had never spoken to me, told my lawyer I could have left sooner if I had signed a withdrawal form, and that they hadn’t known I would pay for my own flight home.From the moment I arrived, I begged every officer I saw to let me pay for my own ticket home. Not a single one of them ever spoke to me about my case.To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.A small group of us were transferred back to San Diego at 2 am – one last road trip, once again shackled in chains. I was then taken to the airport, where two officers were waiting for me. The media was there, so the officers snuck me in through a side door, trying to avoid anyone seeing me in restraints. I was beyond grateful that, at the very least, I didn’t have to walk through the airport in chains.To my surprise, the officers escorting me were incredibly kind, and even funny. It was the first time I had laughed in weeks.I asked if I could put my shoelaces back on.“Yes,” one of them said with a grin. “But you better not run.”“Yeah,” the other added. “Or we’ll have to tackle you in the airport. That’ll really make the headlines.”I laughed, then told them I had spent a lot of time observing the guards during my detention and I couldn’t believe how often I saw humans treating other humans with such disregard. “But don’t worry,” I joked. “You two get five stars.”When I finally landed in Canada, my mom and two best friends were waiting for me. So was the media. I spoke to them briefly, numb and delusional from exhaustion.It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.The strength I witnessed in those women, the love they gave despite their suffering, is what gives me faith. Faith that no matter how flawed the system, how cruel the circumstances, humanity will always shine through.Even in the darkest places, within the most broken systems, humanity persists. Sometimes, it reveals itself in the smallest, most unexpected acts of kindness: a shared meal, a whispered prayer, a hand reaching out in the dark. We are defined by the love we extend, the courage we summon and the truths we are willing to tell. More

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      in US Politics

      Netanyahu will never accept peace. Where will his perpetual war lead next? | Simon Tisdall

      by

      The first and last rule of Benjamin Netanyahu’s doctrine of perpetual warfare is brutally to the point: peace cannot and must not be allowed to last. As indiscriminate, deadly fire once again descends upon the defenceless people of Gaza, unleashed on the orders of Israel’s bellicose prime minister, an anguished cry is heard. Is the precious two-month-long ceasefire with Hamas definitively over? To which comes the dismaying answer: it barely matters. This truce, now shattering into a million pieces, was but a brief, deceptive pause in a war that never stops.It doesn’t stop because Netanyahu is sustained in office by the unceasing state of national emergency that he and his supporters have nurtured and prolonged since the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks. The war doesn’t stop because Netanyahu’s overarching aim – the destruction of Palestinian hopes of nationhood – is doomed to fail. It does not stop because those, inside Israel and abroad, who criticise Israeli government actions face being dismissed and abused for supposedly acting not in good faith and out of alarm at the human toll, but from antisemitic motives.Most of all, perhaps, the war that the terrorists triggered 18 months ago continues, and threatens once more to expand, because Netanyahu and his far-right Jewish nationalist and ultra-religious partners have found in it a vehicle to pursue the larger goal of a greater Israel. They and their violent settler allies use it as an excuse to expand land grabs and intimidate Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank. New areas of Syria’s Golan Heights have been seized. Resettlement of Gaza itself is another stated objective.Perpetual warfare can only be sustained if the other “side” continues to fight. So degraded are Hamas’s forces, it almost seems unable to do so any longer. The lack of an immediate armed response to the Israeli strikes that began on Monday night speaks to relative weakness. And yet Hamas is not vanquished. Each time a hostage was handed over, its black-hooded fighters made a great show of militant defiance. As long as any credible, agreed “day after” plan is lacking – and absent a ground invasion and full-scale, long-term occupation – Hamas will remain in effective charge in Gaza. And so the war goes on.Netanyahu did not want the ceasefire in the first place and has constantly sought a breakdown he could blame on others. He only consented to stop shooting on 19 January under pressure from Donald Trump and his ubiquitous envoy, Steve Witkoff. Due to be inaugurated the following day, Trump was imperiously demanding an end to the conflict his predecessor, Joe Biden, failed to halt. Loth to rain on Trump’s parade, and eager to win favour, Netanyahu agreed, fingers crossed tightly behind his back.Yet even then, with more than 48,000 Palestinians dead, tens of thousands injured or traumatised and most of Gaza’s 2 million population homeless, Netanyahu was not ready to stop. He knew that far-right cabinet ministers would not tolerate peace for long. One, Itamar Ben-Gvir, had already resigned in protest. Others were threatening to do so, thereby potentially collapsing his government. He knew, though for him this has been a secondary consideration throughout, that many Israeli hostages remained in captivity – 59 at the last count, alive and dead.Netanyahu never seriously intended to honour the second phase of the ceasefire, which was supposed to begin on 1 March and which calls for full Israeli military withdrawal. He blocked humanitarian aid; he cut water and electricity supplies; he delayed second-phase implementation and obstructed talks to get it back on track. He waged war by other means. And when these provocations failed, he insisted, in breach of the ceasefire deal, that Hamas unilaterally liberate more hostages while offering only limited prisoner releases and a temporary truce extension in return.Perpetual warfare, even when undeclared, is difficult to justify and Netanyahu, indicted for war crimes by the international criminal court and widely condemned in Europe and the Arab world, is desperately short of backers. His predicament has worsened of late. Accused of a growing authoritarianism, he is embroiled in a row over his bid to sack the Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar. A new corruption scandal involving Qatari money also swirls around him. In this context, a Gaza “distraction” may be considered timely.“Netanyahu is waging a holding action on every possible front – against early elections, against a state commission of inquiry [into the 7 October attacks], against a deal that would bring back the 59 remaining hostages, living and dead,” wrote Haaretz’s Amos Harel. “The prime minister is acting like someone who has nothing left to lose. Intensifying the battle to the point of chaos serves him.”With more than 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, killed so far, and with Israel threatening continuing and expanding strikes, cries of anger, horror and dismay from the Palestinians, the UN, international aid agencies and foreign governments echo like ghostly laments across the devastated Gazan wasteland. They are as familiar as they are futile and disregarded.A far from chastened White House, proudly confirming complicity in the Israeli strikes, appears keen they continue. The January ceasefire process appears dead. Trump’s absurd plan for a Gaza Riviera is nowhere to be seen or heard now. Thwarted, he hits back vicariously, egging on Netanyahu. Yet it would be naive not to see a broader, schematic Trump connection. In recent days, he has rattled sabres in Iran’s face, demanding Tehran resume talks on curtailing its nuclear programme or face military action. At the same time, he launched huge airstrikes on Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen.In Trump’s simplistic, zero-sum world, it’s all the same deal. “As President Trump has made clear, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran – all those who seek to terrorise not just Israel but the US – will see a price to pay, and all hell will break loose,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said. Is Yemen an early warning? Is Trump moving to defend Israel against Iranian attack – a possibility relentlessly rehearsed by Netanyahu to justify his unending state of war? Or is Trump actually preparing the ground for an Israeli-US strike going the other way, as many in Tehran believe?Like some previous US presidents, and oblivious as ever to history, Trump believes he can remake the Middle East almost by an act of imperial will. But unlike Barack Obama, who dreamed in Cairo in 2009 of a democratic renaissance, Trump is remodelling by diktat, backed by the use or threat of brute force. Palestine is the benighted place in which Trump’s messiah complex and Netanyahu’s doctrine of perpetual war collide. Where next? And who now will help those who cannot help themselves?

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More