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      The desperate search for a father disappeared by Trump to El Salvador: ‘We don’t know anything’

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      The last time Joregelis Barrios heard from her brother Jerce, the call had lasted just one minute.Immigration officials had moved Jerce from the detention center in southern California where he had been for six months to another one in Texas. He sounded worried, as if he had been crying. He told his sister he might be transferred somewhere else soon.No one has heard from him since.Within hours of that call, Jerce was forced on a plane to El Salvador and booked into the country’s most notorious prison: the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot). He was one of more than 260 men that Donald Trump’s administration had accused of terrorism and gang membership. His sister thought she recognized him in the videos shared by the Salvadorian government, among the crowd of deportees with shaved heads and white prison uniforms, being frogmarched to their cells by guards in ski masks. Then CBS News published a leaked list of the deportees’ names, confirming her worst worries.“It was a shock,” said Joregelis. “Jerce has always avoided trouble.”Jerce, a 36-year-old professional soccer player and father of two, had come to the US last year to seek asylum, after fleeing political violence and repression in Venezuela.An immigration hearing to review his case was scheduled for 17 April, just weeks after he was abruptly exiled to El Salvador.“He was so optimistic, up till the last day we spoke,” said Mariyin Araujo, Jerce’s ex-partner and the co-parent of his two daughters, Isabella and six-year-old Carla.“He believed the laws there in the US were the best, that it would all work out soon,” she said. “How far did that get him?”Barrios was flown to Cecot on 15 March. For the past two months, his family has been obsessively scanning news updates and social media posts for any sign that he is still alive and healthy. They have been closely monitoring the court cases challenging Trump’s invocation of the wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act against the Venezuela-based gang known as Tren de Aragua, to exile immigrants – most of whom have no criminal history – to one of the most notorious prisons in the world. And they have been wondering what, if anything, they can do for Jerce.In Machiques, a small town near Venezuela’s border with Colombia, locals have painted a mural in Jerce’s honor. His old soccer club, Perijaneros FC, started a campaign demanding his release – and children from the local soccer school held a prayer circle for him. “We have created TikToks about him, we have organized protests, we held vigils,” said Araujo.“We have looked for so many ways to be his voice at this moment, when he is unable to speak,” she said.But as the weeks pass, she said, she is increasingly unsure what more she can do. The Trump administration has doubled down on its right to send immigrants to Cecot, despite a federal judge’s order barring it from doing so.To justify these extraordinary deportations, both Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, have publicly insisted that the men sent to Cecot are the worst of the worst gang members. To mark Trump’s first 100 days in office, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a list of “Noteworthy individuals deported or prevented from entering the US” – and characterized Jerce as “a member of the vicious Tren de Aragua gang” who “has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating membership” in the gang.Jerce’s family and lawyer say the only evidence DHS has shared so far is that he has a tattoo on his arm of a soccer ball with a crown on top – a tribute to his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. His other tattoos include the names of his parents, siblings and daughters.“My brother is not a criminal,” Joregelis said. “They took him away without any proof. They took him because he’s Venezuelan, because he had tattoos, and because he is Black.”She’s still haunted by the strange sense of finality in his last call. He had asked after his daughters, and whether his Isabella had been eating well. “I told him she had just had some plátano,” Jorgelis said. “And then he said to me: ‘I love you.’ He said to tell our mom to take care.”Araujo has struggled to explain to her daughters why their father hasn’t been calling them regularly. She lives in Mexico City with Carla, her six-year-old. Isabella, three, is in Venezuela with Jorgelis.Carla, especially, has started asking a lot of questions. “Recently, she said to me: ‘Mom, Dad hasn’t called me, Mom. Could it be that he no longer loves me?’” Araujo said. “So I had to tell her a little bit about what had happened.”Now Carla cries constantly, Araujo said. She misses her father, she misses his scrambled eggs, she misses watching him play soccer. She keeps asking if he is being treated well in detention, if he is eating well. “It’s too difficult,” Araujo said. “From a young age, kids learn that if you do something bad, you go to jail. And now she keeps asking how come her dad is in jail, he’s not a bad person. And I don’t know how to explain. I don’t know how to tell her there is no logical explanation.”Jerce had been in detention of some sort ever since he set foot inside the US.Last year, he had used the now defunct CBP One app to request an appointment with immigration officials at the border. After more than four months of waiting in Mexico, agents determined that he had a credible case for asylum – but decided to detain him in a maximum-security detention center in San Ysidro, California, while he awaited his hearing.“Jerce didn’t tell us much about what it was like there, because he didn’t want us to worry,” said Jorgelis. “The only thing he did say was, why did he have to be Black? I believe he faced a lot of racism there.”When he first arrived at the border, immigration officials had alleged he might be a gang member based on his tattoos and on social media posts in which he was making the hand gesture commonly used to signify “I love you” in sign language, or “rock and roll”.His lawyer, Linette Tobin, submitted evidence proving that he had no criminal record in Venezuela, and that his hand gesture was benign. She also obtained a declaration from his tattoo artists affirming that his ink was a tribute to the Spanish soccer team and not to a gang. Officials agreed to move him out of maximum security shortly thereafter, in the fall of last year. “I thought that was a tacit admission, an acknowledgement that he’s not a gang member,” Tobin said.When officials moved him to a detention center in Texas, Tobin worried that transfer would complicate his asylum proceedings. Since she is based in California, she wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to continue to represent him in Texas.Jerce had been worried when Tobin last spoke to him on the phone, in March, but she had reassured him that he still had a strong case for asylum. Now, the US government has petitioned to dismiss Jerce’s asylum case, she said, “on the basis that – would you believe it – he’s not here in the US”.“I mean, he’d love to be here if he could!” she said.Other than ensuring that his case remains open, Tobin said she’s not sure what more she can do for her client. After the ACLU sued Donald Trump over his unilateral use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove alleged members from the US without legal process, the supreme court ruled that detainees subject to deportation must be given an opportunity to challenge their removals.But the highest court’s ruling leaves uncertain what people like Jerce, who are already stuck in Salvadorian prison, are supposed to do now. As that case moves forward, Tobin hopes the ACLU will be able to successfully challenge all the deportations.But in a separate case over the expulsion of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the administration admitted was sent to Cecot in error, the supreme court asked the administration to facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the US – and the administration said it couldn’t, and wouldn’t.In his last calls with his family, Jerce told them he’d be out of detention soon – that it would all be better soon. Once he was granted asylum, he said, he would try to join a soccer league in the US and start earning some money. He had promised Carla he’d buy her a TV soon.Now, Araujo said: “I don’t even know if he is alive. We don’t know anything. The last thing we saw was a video of them, and after that video many speculations, but nothing is certain.” More

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      Trump reportedly eyes $26m in funding cuts for US national parks

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      The Trump administration is reportedly eyeing dozens of grants across the National Park Service for termination, according to reporting from the New York Times, one of several moves destabilizing the US’s investment in public lands.According to the newspaper, staff members at Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” have created a spreadsheet of federal grants earmarked for cuts, with total funding cuts amounting to some $26m.The proposed eliminations follow a familiar pattern for the Trump administration, with reasons given for program cuts including “climate change/sustainability”, “DEI” and “LGBQ”. Programs listed for potential elimination include “Scientists in Parks”, which places undergraduate and graduate students as well as early-career scientists across the country in natural resource management-focused positions.The focus on DEI, LGBTQ+ issues and climate change matches cuts “Doge” has made across the federal government, and specifically at the Department of the Interior, which houses the National Park Service. The interior department and the NPS were heavily hit by Doge’s early rounds of layoffs, along with the US Forestry Service, which manages nearly 200m acres (81m hectares) of public land.Since then, the administration has continued to slash at the NPS’s workings. Earlier this spring, the department closed the National Park Service Academy, which was a partnership designed to bring Americans from underrepresented backgrounds into the park service and make a more diverse set of Americans feel comfortable working in and exploring the outdoors.Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that the administration had suspended air quality monitoring programs at national parks across the country, issuing stop work orders to two companies providing the monitoring. Some park service staffers have requested that the stop work orders be rescinded.More cuts appear to be on the horizon. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the full cost of proposed cuts could bring a 75% reduction to NPS services in order to meet the goal of more than $1bn in reductions.Critics have said that cuts to the NPS, Department of the Interior and US Forestry Service not only risk the preservation of America’s national parks, but could put land management and fire reduction in jeopardy as well.They also have the potential to hit rural, and often conservative, parts of the country economically the hardest. National parks in particular can be an economic engine, generating more than $55.6bn in economic input, according to the National Park Service.Resistance within the National Park Service to the Trump administration’s plans has been spirited, with more than 300 billboards erected across the country protesting cuts, and protesters rallying in support of parks across the country in recent months. More

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      Vance says Russia asking ‘too much’ in ceasefire talks with Ukraine

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      JD Vance has said that Russia is asking for “too much” in its negotiations with Ukraine in the latest sign of growing frustration from Washington with ceasefire talks to end the war between the two countries.Speaking at a security conference of senior military and diplomatic leaders in Washington, the US vice-president said that the White House is focused on getting the two sides to hold direct talks and is ready to walk away if certain benchmarks are not reached.“I wouldn’t say that the Russians are uninterested in bringing this thing to a resolution,” Vance said during an onstage interview with the Munich security council president, Wolfgang Ischinger.“What I would say is, right now, the Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions in order to end the conflict. We think they’re asking for too much. OK?”Asked about those comments later on Wednesday, Donald Trump said: “It’s possible that’s right.”“We are getting to a point where some decisions are going to have to be made,” said the US president. “I’m not happy about it … I’m not happy about it.”Senior administration officials, including Vance and the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, are said to be growing more frustrated over Russia’s inflexibility in discussions to end the war. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, has held four rounds of direct talks with Putin, but those have not yielded concrete concessions from the Russian side.During his remarks, Vance reiterated the threat that the White House would “walk away if [Trump] thinks he’s not making progress”.“In particular, the step that we would like to make right now is we would like both the Russians and the Ukrainians to actually agree on some basic guidelines for sitting down and talking to one another,” he said. “Obviously, the United States is happy to participate in those conversations, but it’s very important for the Russians and the Ukrainians to start talking to one another. We think that is the next big step that we would like to take.”After meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Vatican last month, Trump threatened Russia with secondary sanctions over the continued bombardments of Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities despite talks to reach a permanent ceasefire.“There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days,” Trump wrote then. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently.”Senior Russian officials have maintained a hardline position, demanding both a rollback of Nato as well as limits on Ukraine’s security and a degree of control over its internal politics.“Marco Rubio expressed yesterday, I think, also the assessment that they had the American team now is getting a better understanding of the Russian position and of the root causes of this situation,” said Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, during an interview on Meet the Press last week. “One of this root causes, apart from Nato and creation of direct military threats to Russia just on our borders, another one is the rights of the national minorities in Ukraine.”Joe Biden in his first interview since leaving office accused Trump of “modern-day appeasement”, saying the expectations that Ukraine ceding territory to Russia would end the war was “foolish”. More

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      House panel on campus antisemitism likened to cold-war ‘un-American’ committee

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      A congressional panel investigating antisemitism on US college campuses on Wednesday was accused of trying to chill constitutionally protected free speech and likened to a cold-war era committee notorious for wrecking the lives of people suspected of communist sympathies.The comparison was made by David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University law centre, who told the House education and workforce committee that its proceedings resembled those staged by the House un-American Activities Committee (Huac) during and after the second world war.Cole, a former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, accused the present-day committee of “broad-based charges of antisemitism without any factual predicate”.“These proceedings, with all due respect, have more in common with those of the House un-American Activities Committee,” he told committee members. “They are not an attempt to find out what happened, but an attempt to chill protected speech.”HUAC, originally formed in 1938 to investigate Nazi subversion, switched focus to communism after the war and grew infamous after its high-profile hearings – including into suspected communism in Hollywood – led to blacklists and people losing their jobs.Cole’s criticism came in the eighth hearing held by the committee, which has previously looked into antisemitism sparked by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests at elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The Trump administration has demanded sweeping changes in the governance of some of the country’s leading universities, including Harvard – prompting a backlash from academics and administrators, who believe antisemitism is being used as a pretext to curtail academic freedom.Pervious hearings had led to the resignations of several university heads after they were deemed to have given legalistic responses to questions – mainly posed by Republicans – over whether certain anti-Israeli slogans were genocidal or protected by free speech.Wednesday’s hearing included presidents from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, DePaul University in Chicago and California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.Even before it began, questions were raised about how truly concerned some members of Congress were prejudiced against Jews.A memo signed by Haverford academics – most of them Jewish – and reported by the Guardian expressed concern that one had quoted Adolf Hitler, others had failed to condemn antisemitic activity in their districts, and Tim Walberg, the committee’s Republican chair, had links to a Christian group that “trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity”.Jewish Voice for Peace, a leftwing group, took nine Jewish students from Columbia to Capitol Hill to meet members of Congress on Tuesday, while condemning the hearings as “McCarthyite” and more concerned with suppressing pro-Palestinian protest than antisemitism.Walberg told the hearing campus antisemitism “continues to traumatize students, faculty and staff”. He cited a letter from a group of Jewish students at Haverford who claimed to have been “marginalized, ostracized and at times, outright attacked. College officials reacted with “indifference”, he said.Cole, who had been called as a witness by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott, said the hearings were flawed on free speech grounds and for focusing on the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, which – under Title VI – outlaws discrimination in education on the grounds of race, colour or national origin in institutions receiving federal funding.“Antisemitic speech, while lamentable, is constitutionally protected, just like racist speech, sexist speech and homophobic speech,” he said, adding that the US supreme court had defended the rights of the Nazi party to march in a town where Holocaust survivors lived.On civil rights, he said: “Title VI does not prohibit antisemitic speech. An antisemitic slogan at a protest or online does not deny equal access to education any more than a sexist or a racist comment.”More broadly, Cole said, committee members had not conducted proper investigations into specific incidents.“Getting to the bottom of what happened requires fair hearings where both sides are heard about specific incidents,” he said. “This committee has not held a single hearing looking into a specific incident, having the perpetrator and the complainant testify.”Suzanne Bonamici, a Democratic representative from Oregon, who is Jewish, cited a letter from 100 Jewish faculty members at Northwestern University in Illinois expressing “serious concerns” about how the committee was addressing antisemitism.“We are united by the conviction that our Jewishness must not be used as a cudgel to silence the vigorous exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of university life,” she quoted them as saying.She added: “As an active member of my synagogue for more than 25 years, I can no longer pretend that this is a good-faith effort to root out antisemitism.”Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York, who rose to prominence in December 2023 with a high-profile cross-examination that prompted the resignation of the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, tried a similar tack with Haverford’s head, Wendy Raymond.“Is calling for the genocide of Jews protected speech on your campus?” Stefanik asked.Raymond replied that it was not, but struggled to answer when asked if students or staff had been disciplined or investigated for using such language. Stefanik said: “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”She added: “For the American people watching, you still don’t get it. Haverford still doesn’t get it. It’s a very different testimony than the other presidents who are here today, who are coming with specifics. This is completely unacceptable. Higher education has failed to address this gorge of antisemitism, putting Jewish students at risk at Haverford and other campuses across the country.” More

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      UK officials land in Washington as talks over trade agreement continue

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      A team of senior British trade negotiators has landed in Washington as talks over a deal between the two countries gather pace.Officials from the business and trade department are in the US for much of this week, attempting to get an agreement signed before the planned UK-EU summit on 19 May.Downing Street did not deny reports the deal could be signed as early as this week, although government sources said the recent announcement by the US president, Donald Trump, of film industry tariffs had proved a significant setback.One person briefed on the talks said: “We have a senior team on the ground now, and it may be that they are able to agree something this week. But the reality is the Trump administration keeps shifting the goalposts, as you saw with this week’s announcement on film tariffs.”Another said Trump’s threat of 100% tariffs on films “produced in foreign lands”, which could have a major impact on Britain’s film industry, had “gone down very badly in Downing Street”.UK officials say they are targeting tariff relief on a narrow range of sectors in order to get a deal agreed before they begin formal negotiations with the EU over a separate European agreement. A draft deal handed to the US a week ago would have reduced tariffs on British exports of steel, aluminium and cars, in return for a lower rate of the digital services tax, which is paid by a handful of large US technology companies.The Guardian revealed last week the Trump administration had made negotiating a trade deal with the UK a lower-order priority, behind a series of Asian countries. UK officials said they have been able to continue talks with their US counterparts despite that, describing the Trump administration’s approach as “chaotic”.Officials from the trade department arrived in Washington this week hoping to reach an agreement on two outstanding issues, pharmaceuticals and films.Trump has said he will impose tariffs on both industries, mainstays of the British economy, but has not yet given details.This week, the US president said the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” because of the incentives other countries were offering to draw American film-makers, and promised to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films. Britain offers producers generous reliefs on corporation tax to locate their projects there, which help support an industry now worth about £2bn, with major US films such as Barbie having recently been shot in Britain.Trump also said that he planned to unveil tariffs on imports of pharmaceutical products “in the next two weeks”. The UK exported £6.5bn worth of such goods to the US last year.Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has ruled out reducing food production standards to enable more trade of US agricultural products, as officials prioritise signing a separate agreement with the EU, which is likely to align British standards with European ones.Officials are racing to sign the US agreement before the planned UK-EU summit, at which both sides will set out their formal negotiating positions. Leaked documents revealed on Wednesday the two remain far apart on their demands for a youth mobility scheme, with Britain demanding that visas issued under the scheme should be limited in number and duration, and should exclude dependents.EU ambassadors met in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss the progress of the deal. One diplomat said: “Negotiations are going well, the mood is still good but it is a bit early to see bold moves from one side or another.”This week Starmer also signed an agreement with India after giving way on a demand from Delhi for workers transferring to the UK within their companies to avoid paying national insurance while in the country.The concession has caused some unease in the Home Office, with Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, not having been told about it in advance.It was also criticised by Kemi Badenoch, who accused the prime minister of bringing in a “two-tier” tax system. The Tory leader denied reports, however, that she had agreed to the same concession when she was business secretary.The prime minister defended the deal on Wednesday, telling MPs at PMQs it was a “huge win” for the UK. Other senior Tories have also praised the deal, including Steve Baker, Oliver Dowden and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the latter of whom said it was “exactly what Brexit promised”.British officials say they have been surprised at the willingness of the Labour government to sign agreements which have been on the table for years but previously rejected by the Conservative government.With economists having recently downgraded the UK’s growth outlook, Starmer is understood to have decided to sign deals such as that with India, even though they do not include a number of British demands, such as increased access for services.One source said the approach was to clinch a less ambitious agreement and use that to build a fuller economic partnership in the coming years. More

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      ‘Maduro did not close our bureau – Trump did’: Voice of America journalists speak out

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      Carolina Valladares Pérez, a Washington-based correspondent for the government-funded international news service Voice of America, has reported from places where press freedom is severely restricted – war zones and autocratic states – in the Middle East and across Latin America. Intimidation and threats from state officials were not unusual – but she always managed to get the story out.Now for the first time in her career, Valladares Pérez says she has been silenced – not by a faraway regime, but by the government of the United States.“Nicolás Maduro did not close our bureau,” she said, of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader. “Donald Trump closed it. I find this astonishing.”Valladares Pérez is one of hundreds of VoA journalists who remain shut out of their newsroom nearly two months after Donald Trump signed a late-night executive order aimed at dismantling their parent company, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The journalists had been hopeful they might be able to return to their broadcasts this week – VoA was even included in the rotation of news outlets assigned to cover the president as part of the White House press pool. But whiplashing court orders and a newly announced “partnership” to broadcast a hard-right, pro-Trump news outlet have clouded their path forward.“We have 3,500 affiliates around the world – these are television stations, radio stations, digital affiliates, who depend on our content,” said Patsy Widakuswara, VoA’s White House bureau chief, who is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the president’s authority to gut an independent agency. “The void is going to be filled by our adversaries – it already is.”VoA’s pro-democracy programming reaches hundreds of millions of people across the globe, broadcasting in 47 languages. It is often the only alternative to state-run media in places where press freedom is severely restricts, including in Russia, China and Iran. But the administration has denigrated the outlet as the “Voice of Radical America” and accused it of producing “propaganda”.View image in fullscreenFollowing Trump’s March edict, VoA’s broadcast went dark for the first time since its founding during the second world war, initially to counter Nazi propaganda. Some radio stations began playing music instead of the news. VoA’s website remains frozen in time, the homepage dated to that Saturday morning. As many as 1,300 VoA employees have been placed on administrative leave.The order also directed USAGM to cancel the federal grants that support VOA’s sister outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Without funding, those broadcasters have struggled to remain operational.The Trump administration has defended the decision to cut the broadcasters as part of its effort to downsize the federal government and slash what it described as “frivolous expenditures that fail to align with American values or address the needs of the American people”.“Shut them down,” the Trump ally and adviser Elon Musk declared on X earlier this year, as his so-called “department of government efficiency” began its work.In response to the president’s March order, Kari Lake, a fierce Trump loyalist and prominent election denier who was installed as a special adviser to the US’s global media agency, declared that VoA’s networks were “not salvageable”. But it appears the former local news anchor turned unsuccessful Republican candidate is now working to bring the news outlet back on air and online in some capacity.In a statement on Monday, Lake said “the plan has always been to have meaningful, comprehensive, and accurate programming. However, this administration was halted in its tracks by lawfare, which prevented the implementation of much-needed reforms at VoA.”On Tuesday night, she announced on X that the One America News Network (OAN), which has perpetuated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was sued by voting-machine companies for promoting claims of election fraud, will provide VoA’s “newsfeed and video service free-of-charge”.Last month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle VoA, as well as Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. But VoA staff and journalists remain on administrative leave while the court process plays out.The judge, US District Judge Royce Lamberth, later ordered the administration to restore funding Congress appropriated for Radio Free Europe, but the ruling was paused on appeal.On Saturday, a divided panel of three circuit court judges paused parts of the ruling, ordering the Trump administration to return the VoA employees back to work. In a dissent, federal appeals court judge Cornelia Pillard warned that the stay “all but guarantees that the networks will no longer exist in any meaningful form” by the time litigation is resolved.Challenging the ruling, attorneys representing the VoA journalists have asked the full US court of appeals for the DC circuit to rehear the case en banc.The Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the US’s largest and oldest international broadcaster is part of a broader crackdown on press freedom in the US, journalists and experts say. In late April, the president also signed an executive order aimed at slashing federal funding for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of similarly spreading “radical woke propaganda”.“The reason we have such a huge audience is because we’re not propaganda,” Widakuswara said. “Much of our audience lives in places where there is government propaganda, and they can smell it a mile away. They turn to us because they trust us.”Ilan Berman, senior vice-president at the American Foreign Policy Council, said VoA and its sister outlets were an “indispensable” asset in the information war, countering anti-American narratives and disinformation in unfree societies.“Authoritarian regimes understand very well that controlling information is essential to controlling their populations,” Berman, who serves on the board of RFE/RL and MBN, wrote in an email, while traveling in the Middle East, where he said media outlets hostile to the US already saturate the airwaves.“America and its allies have unfortunately been playing defense for a while now,” he added. “And the shuttering of our messaging outlets is only going to make those voices stronger, and ours weaker.”Desperate to return to work, Widakuswara has been leading the charge to raise awareness of VoA’s plight and keep newsroom morale up amid the turbulence of the last several weeks. On 4 May, the account, @savevoanow was suspended by X, the platform owned by Musk, for allegedly “violating rules against inauthentic accounts”. The account has since been restored but it unnerved Widakuswara and her colleagues, who have vowed not to remain silent.“What we’re fighting for is not just for our job but our continued editorial independence,” the White House reporter said.A ‘reward to dictators and despots’The silencing of VoA has alarmed press freedom advocates but drew gleeful reactions from Chinese and Russian state media. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed RT network, who cheered Trump’s “awesome decision”.The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a prominent press freedom organization, called Trump’s effort to eliminate the news outlets a “reward to dictators and despots” and urged Congress to restore the agency it created “before irreparable harm is done”.“When a US president is behaving this way domestically towards media, it creates a kind of permission structure for world leaders to treat the press the same way in their home countries,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the CPJ’s Canada and Caribbean program coordinator.US-based foreign journalists whose visas are now in jeopardy because of the dismantling of USAGM say deportation to their home countries would put them at risk of reprisal, imprisonment and possibly even death at the hands of authoritarian governments.“In Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA,” Jaewoo Park, a journalist for Radio Free Asia in Washington, recently told the Guardian. “It’s very risky for them. Their lives are in danger if Radio Free Asia doesn’t exist.”According to the agency, 10 of its journalists remain jailed or imprisoned around the world – in Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan.At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the organization’s president, Eugene Daniels, voiced solidarity with VoA’s journalists.“To our friends at Voice of America, I can’t wait until you’re back at the White House grounds to continue reporting important stories for audiences around the world, especially in countries where leaders suppress the freedom of expression and the press,” he said during a speech that eschewed punchlines in favor of a robust defense of the first amendment and press freedom.Valladares Pérez is also looking forward to that day.“Our reporters want to go back to work. Our job is not to be at home, being silent and not publishing,” she said. “Our job is to take our microphones, to keep talking, reaching our audiences and telling them what’s happening in the US. This is our mission.” More

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      US supreme court allows Trump trans military ban to take effect

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      The Trump administration can begin to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the military while a challenge to the policy plays out in the courts, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a significant decision that could lead to the discharge of thousands of military members.The court’s order was unsigned and gave no explanation for its reasoning, which is typical of decisions the justices reach on an emergency basis. The court’s three liberal members – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – all noted their dissent from the decision.Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which represented challengers in the case, called the decision “a devastating blow to transgender servicemembers”.“By allowing this discriminatory ban to take effect while our challenge continues, the Court has temporarily sanctioned a policy that has nothing to do with military readiness and everything to do with prejudice,” the groups said in a statement. “Transgender individuals meet the same standards and demonstrate the same values as all who serve. We remain steadfast in our belief that this ban violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and will ultimately be struck down.”Immediately after coming into office, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order from the Biden administration that allowed transgender people to serve openly in the military. On 27 January, the president issued a second executive order that said transgender people couldn’t serve in the military.“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order said. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.” The defense department began implementing the ban at the end of February.A defense department estimate from earlier this year said there were 4,240 people in the military with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – roughly 0.2 % of the 2 million people currently serving.Seven transgender servicemembers and one transgender person who would like to join the military challenged the ban. Lawyers for the lead platiniff, navy pilot Emily Shilling, said the military had spent $20m on her training, according to SCOTUSBlog.Several lower courts had halted the ban. The case before the supreme court involved a ruling from US district court judge Benjamin Settle, who blocked the ban in March.“The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record,” Settle, an appointee of George W Bush, wrote at the time. “The government’s unrelenting reliance on deference to military judgment is unjustified in the absence of any evidence supporting ‘the military’s’ new judgment reflected in the Military Ban.”Another judge, Ana Reyes, of the US district court in Washington DC, also blocked the ban, saying it was “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration asked the supreme court to intervene last month. “The district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch’s authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces,” John Sauer, the US solicitor general, wrote in a brief to the court.Trump’s ban is broader than a similar policy enacted during his first term. The previous policy allowed those who had come out before the ban to continue to serve in the military. The more recent policy affects nearly all active serving transgender members.Pausing the order, Shilling’s lawyers said, would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to immediately begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers … thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units”.A majority of Americans support allowing transgender people to serve in the military, according to a February Gallup poll. However, there is a sharp partisan split. While 84% of Democrats favor such a policy, only 23% of Republicans do. More