Six Just Stop Oil supporters who were denied all legal defences during their trial were today given sentences of up to 30 months at Southwark Crown Court for peacefully climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022, to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects.
Just Stop Oil M25 action
Cosmo Cattell, Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames, Clara O’Callaghan and Michael Dunk took action on the M25 on 8 November 2022.
The six were among scores of Just Stop Oil supporters who climbed on gantries that week. They were sounding the alarm about the government’s plan to license over 100 new oil and gas projects against all expert advice.
They were found guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance in October 2025 in an 8 day trial before Judge Perrins, during which they were denied all legal defences.
Additionally, in a break with every previous Just Stop Oil trial for gantry actions on the M25, the prosecution refused to accept any agreed facts on the climate crisis as part of the evidence.
Sentences
Today, Judge Perrins handed down prison sentences of between 20 and 30 months to Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk. Cosmo Cattell and Clara O’Callaghan were given suspended sentences.
Adelheid Russenberger was sentenced to 30 months and Jane Touil to 20 months, with no costs. Each will serve 40% in custody. Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk will each serve 40% of 26 months and must pay £2,480 and £4,380 in costs respectively. Cosmo Catterall and Clara O’Callaghan were each sentenced to 20 months suspended for 2 years with 200 hours of unpaid work and £750 prosecution costs.
Three of the Just Stop Oil group had already spent time on remand in 2022 following the action. Adelheid Russenberger and Jane Touil spent 42 days and 5 days respectively in Bronzefield prison. Michael Dunk was remanded for 8 days. Whilst on bail in 2022, Cosmo Cattell spent 94 days living under a curfew and Michael Dunk 187 days. The Judge indicated that previous time on remand would be deducted from these sentences.
Mitigation
Speaking in mitigation today, Adelheid Russenberger, 34, a history PhD student from London said:
I believe that I acted morally and according to my conscience.
There is no justice in climate breakdown and without a stable climate no-one can live, let alone thrive.
I climbed onto the gantry to try and prevent the government’s disastrous plans to license more North Sea Oil and gas extraction – oil and gas that would have pushed us closer to lethal irreversible tipping points.
I climbed on a gantry because I refused to ignore that basic moral principle of acting to protect life.
Also speaking in mitigation, Jane Touil, 59, a visually impaired former crown servant from Rochdale, said:
We are in an unprecedented situation. Yet the law says our protest was not justified. Not necessary. Not reasonable or proportionate.
Disruption from flooding, extreme heat, extreme weather and wildfires is not a public nuisance. I am.
The law will not save us. I have always tried to live and act according to my conscience. I call on everyone in this courtroom and in this country to do the same.
Politicians will not make the change we need, but we can.
The judge’s position
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Perrins said that it would be wholly wrong to take the individual actions of each defendant in isolation. He said each knowingly took part in a much broader plan to cause as much disruption as possible.
Together the Just Stop Oil protests had eventually affected approximately 228,000 vehicles and caused 18,000 hours of vehicle delays. They affected nearly a quarter of a million people who were trying to go about their daily lives.
He said he was satisfied having heard the evidence that not one of the defendants took seriously the impact they had caused.
However, he noted that the defendants had acted on their conscience which would lessen their culpability.
No regrets
Speaking ahead of the sentencing, Clara O’Callaghan, 21, a recent graduate from Edinburgh said:
I have no regrets. I took action because I felt I had no choice.
By planning to license new oil and gas, our government was prepared to recklessly destroy my future and drive us even faster towards mass crop failure, starvation, water scarcity and war.
Civil resistance and mass disruption gave us a chance of forcing them to change. I was willing to risk prison because it is nothing compared to what is coming down the road.
I could not sit by and do nothing whilst this horror unfolds.
Touil added:
I am at peace with all the decisions I have made and the actions I have taken in support of love, life, humanity and a liveable future.
In the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, the government chose to legislate to silence dissent, rather than implementing policies to avert disaster.
People of conscience are imprisoned, while others remain free to continue destroying our life support systems.
Andrew Dames, 63, a Quaker, engineer and father of four from Cambridge, said:
Our government’s continued commitment to No New Oil that we and the country asked for – that is all that matters.
And a Just Stop Oil spokesperson summed up:
In 2024 Just Stop Oil successfully won its original demand of ‘no new oil and gas’ and on March 27th 2025 announced an end to the campaign of action.
However, our supporters will continue to tell the truth in court, to speak out for our political prisoners and to help build what comes next.
Luigi Mangione appears for the second day of a suppression of evidence hearing in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Criminal Court on Dec. 2, 2025 in New York City.Photo: Curtis Means/Pool via Getty Images
Luigi Mangione’s legal defense fund has swelled to more than $1.3 million and is still growing daily. As the December 4 Legal Committee, we created that fund — but it would mean nothing without the donations, prayers, and support of people from around the world. As corporate social media platforms censored support for Luigi, the fundraiser page became a place for people to share stories of senseless death and suffering at the hands of the for-profit health insurance industry in this country.
There is a deep irony in the widespread support for Luigi. People celebrate an alleged murderer not because they hate reasonable debate or lust for political violence, but out of respect for themselves and love for others. Across the political spectrum, Americans experience the corporate bureaucracies of our health care system as cruel, exploitative, and maddening. They feel powerless in the face of the unnecessary dehumanization, death, and financial ruin of their neighbors and loved ones.
One year ago, the December 4 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson temporarily suspended the usually intractable left vs. right polarization of America. Ben Shapiro’s audience revolted when he accused Luigi supporters of being “evil leftists.” Donors to Luigi’s fund come from across the political spectrum, and a common theme among them is their acute realization that the political differences of the culture war are largely manufactured to benefit the powerful. This was a crucial difference between Mangione’s alleged act and, for example, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. While the latter intensified existing political divides, the former seemed to strike upon the common ground of a different political landscape: from red vs. blue, or left vs. right, to down vs. up.
Luigi Mangione’s mugshot painted by the artist Sam McKinniss.Courtesy: Sam McKinniss
But a year on, it is clear that even bipartisan public support for killing a health care CEO on the street and the endless stories of suffering and death as a result of insurance claim denials are not enough to depose the for-profit health care system. Today, Medicare for All looks even more politically unrealistic than when Bernie Sanders made it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
This fact poses a challenge for Luigi’s supporters: Will his alleged act be remembered as nothing more than a salacious contribution to the true crime genre? Will we settle for him being installed as an edgy icon of celebrity culture, used to market fast-fashion brands and who knows what next?
We do not think his supporters, or anyone else who believes that health care is a human right, should accept that. But what would it take to make the events of last December 4 into a movement to build a more humane health care system in America?
The time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.
For the last year, we have been asking this question of medical professionals, community organizers, scholars, and ourselves.
In our forthcoming book, “Depose: Luigi Mangione and the Right to Health,” we offer the beginnings of an answer: The history of the struggle for the right to health in America shows that it is indeed politically unrealistic to expect politicians to deliver it from above — but our own dignity and intelligence demands that this right be asserted by all of us from below. The widespread support for Luigi shows that the time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.
Consider the sit-in movements to end Jim Crow laws and desegregate American cities. These were protests, insofar as participants drew attention to unjust laws — but they were also political direct actions. Organizers were collectively breaking those laws, and in doing so, were enacting desegregation. Activists organized themselves to support and protect each other in collectively nullifying laws that had no moral authority and, in the process, acted as if they were already free. This is what we mean by a shift from protest to direct action.
Less well known is the role of direct action in winning the eight-hour workday. For half a century, industrial workers had been struggling to shorten their hours so they could have some rest and joy in their lives. One decisive moment in this struggle came in 1884, when the American Federation of Labor resolved that two years later, on May 1, their workers would enact the eight-hour day. After eight hours, they would go on strike and walk off the job together. They called on other unions around the country to do the same and a number did — including in Chicago, where police deployed political violence to attack striking workers, killing two. While this action did not immediately win the struggle everywhere, it did succeed in beginning to normalize the 8-hour day and raised the bar for everywhere else to eventually do the same. The key is that this could only happen when workers stopped demanding something politically unrealistic and started changing political reality themselves.
The struggle for the right to health care has been ongoing in the United States for at least a century. At every turn, it has been thwarted by industry lobbyists and the politicians they control. But what would it look like to strategically shift the struggle for the right to health care in the U.S.? How would health care providers go on strike or engage in direct action without harming patients?
We found the beginning of an answer from Dr. Michael Fine, who has called on his fellow physicians to organize for a different kind of strike: not halting all their labor, but stopping the aspects of their work that are unrelated to their responsibility as healers. Fine writes, “We need to refuse, together, to use the electronic medical records until they change the software so that those computers free us to look at and listen to patients instead of looking at and listening to computer screens.”
All of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.
A strike by health care workers could mean not the cessation of care, but liberating this critical work from the restraints imposed by profit-seeking companies. Beginning from this idea, all of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.
If we step outside of our usual political bubbles and into a direct action movement to assert the universal right to health care, we might find that the common ground that Luigi’s alleged actions exposed is the precise point from which the wider political landscape may be remade.
For five months, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was the prisoner of a government that has branded him an “Antifa Cell operative.” He was accused of moving a box of anarchist zines from one suburb of Dallas to another after a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.
During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.
“I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am.”
On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.
It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.
“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”
Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.
Prairieview Protest
Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.
The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.
Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.
No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork.”
Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”
Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”
The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.
Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.
“I Did Not Participate”
Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.
“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”
Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.
A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.
He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.
“I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me.”
“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.
Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.
“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.
He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.
“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”
For five months, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was the prisoner of a government that has branded him an “Antifa Cell operative.” He was accused of moving a box of anarchist zines from one suburb of Dallas to another after a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.
During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.
“I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am.”
On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.
It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’simmigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request.)
In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.
“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”
Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.
Prairieview Protest
Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.
The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.
Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.
No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork.”
Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”
Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”
The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.
Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.
“I Did Not Participate”
Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.
“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”
Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.
A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.
He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.
“I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me.”
“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.
Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.
“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.
He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.
“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”
Update: December 4, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect that, after publication, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment.
A Quaker is appealing her climate conviction after a judge threatened the jury with contempt of court if they found defendants not guilty according to their conscience.
On Thursday 4 December the Royal Courts of Justice will hear the appeal of five women convicted of criminal damage for breaking a bank’s windows in protest at their fossil fuel investments.
The main ground for the appeal from the five appellants is that Judge Reid wrongly directed the jury.
Liverpool Quaker Amy Pritchard was sentenced to 12 months in prison for her part in the action at JP Morgan’s European head office in London in September 2021.
She has set up an open letter to the court, outlining how the judge’s actions undermines her Quaker faith.
What the judge told the jury
At the trial in February 2024, Judge Silas Reid told the jury that they would be committing a criminal offence if they made a verdict on anything other than the evidence.
This direction is counter to the centuries-old principle of the independence of juries. This was established during the trial of two Quaker preachers in 1670. There’s even a marble plaque in the Old Bailey to commemorate it.
Under jury independence, or equity, jurors can acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience, irrespective of the directions of the judge.
Yet Judge Silas Reid directed the jury:
It is a criminal offence for a juror to do anything from which it can be concluded that a decision will be made on anything other than the evidence.
The appeal against his court’s convictions comes as Justice Secretary David Lammy plans to limit jury trial.
Critics say this would undermine a vital counterbalance for the people in resisting the power of the state.
Pritchard said:
Quaker faith and persecution are the origins of this vital legal principle of conscience, reaffirmed in the Warner case at the Old Bailey.
This appeal reaches much further than this case and aims to contribute to protecting what democracy we have left, whilst holding this abuse of power to account.
Previous form
Judge Reid has previously banned people charged for climate-related protests from referring to their motivations in their defence.
In 2023 he imprisoned three people for using the words “climate change” and “fuel poverty” in his courtroom. This was after he had forbidden the use of those words.
In February this year, the UN highlighted UK courts in an international report on state repression of environmental protest.
Yesterday, the Canary published an article on justice secretary David Lammy confirming that defendants in ‘either-way’ trials will no longer have the right to a jury trial if their sentence would be three years or less. Today, as promised, we’ll go through some of the rebuttals to Lammy’s speech given by other MPs.
Jury trials—that’s not the argument you think it is
The deputy PM argued that, in England and Wales, magistrates have long handled most criminal cases. That is, around 90% of trials aren’t handled by a judge already. Overall, only 3% of trial cases go before a jury. Likewise, three-quarters of the trials that go to crown court will go before a jury.
Lammy seemed to think that these would be reassuring points in favour of rolling back the right to jury trial. However, they only served to beg the question: If so few trials go before a judge and jury, how will scrapping a fraction of them actually serve to reduce the backlog?
The bar council, the law society, the criminal bar association have all said that juries aren’t the problem. Even Lammy himself stated that a judge-alone trial would only be about 20% faster.
Whose line is it anyway?
And that’s not the only question raised by the justice secretary’s parliamentary speech. Tory MP Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, pointed out that:
the best opponent of the justice secretary’s plans to curb jury trials is the justice secretary himself.
This is quite a fun reveal: We didn’t know Jenrick was a Canary reader. You see, we actually used the same line ourselves in earlier reporting on Lammy’s plans. If the shadow chancellor is reading today, we’d like to invite him to go fuck himself.
However, his/our point was a good one. Back in 2020, Lammy published a report on racial disparity in the justice system. He pointed out that Black and brown people often opt for a jury trial due to their recognition of racism among the judiciary. Likewise, he stated that juries will always have more diverse experience than a single judge, and that juries help to eliminate prejudice.
In other words, Lammy knows that his current line of argument is racist.
Jury trials—’Miscarriages of justice’
Labour’s own Diane Abbott — often a bastion of reason within the PLP — made a similar point. She pointed out that Lammy waxed lyrical about wanting to help victims. In particular, he spoke about wanting swift justice for victims of violence against women and girls. However, Abbott stated:
The entire house is concerned about victims, including attacks on women and girls, but the entire house is also concerned about the men and women who will undoubtedly suffer miscarriages of justice if the right to trial by jury is curtailed.
She went on to ask how Lammy could stand up and talk about rolling back the right to a jury trial:
when he knows very well the category of defendant who will suffer the ill-effects of that?
Lammy, in response, bizarrely pointed out that many of the crimes committed by women command a sentence of no more than 12 months, and are usually handled by magistrates. He then tried to turn the conversation back to victims, stating:
It cannot be right that we’re asking women to wait.
So, when Abbott stated that the justice secretary knew who would lose out from the lack of jury trials: apparently, he did not.
Again: FUND THE COURTS
Robert Jenrick also pointed out that, on the morning of the debate, 50 crown courtrooms sat empty in England alone. Likewise, 21,000 court days went unused this year. If they were funded, estimates hold that the trial backlog would actually have shrunk by 10,000, rather than growing.
Lammy pointed out that many Crown and Magistrates’ Courts closed under Tory austerity. In his original speech, he argued that funding alone would not fix the problem. This places his assessment of the issue at odds with over 100 lawyers who stated outright that any funding should go to additional court sitting days within the existing system.
Those same lawyers also pointed out that Lammy’s new judge-alone court system would still place strain on existing court infrastructure. They’d still need holding cells, courtrooms, waiting rooms and the rest. Yesterday, the Lib Dem’s Jess Brown-Fuller echoed this sentiment. She highlighted the £1.3bn court maintenance backlog for our crumbling judicial infrastructure, which Lammy’s plans would only serve to entrench.
Time and again in yesterday’s parliamentary debate, Lammy chose to evade the questions that were put to him.
He had no response to his own former arguments that his current course of action will disproportionately disadvantage Black and brown people, and that eroding the right to jury trials will entrench racial disparity in the justice system.
He had no decent answer to why he was choosing to plough money into a new branch of the judiciary, rather than better funding and fixing the current infrastructure.
All he could do was appeal to the idea that swift justice is true justice. However, he missed a simple fact: the system he is setting up may indeed be marginally faster, but it certainly cannot be more just.
Homeland Security Investigations officers search for two individuals who fled the scene after being stopped while selling flowers on the side of the road on Nov. 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C.Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.
For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.
Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.
Kicking the Hornets’ Nest
What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.
In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.
By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.
Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.
Blood in the Hills
For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.
Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored.
But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.
It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.
To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.
“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.
Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.
That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.
No Southern Comfort for Feds
This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.
The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.
On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.
Homeland Security Investigations officers search for two individuals who fled the scene after being stopped while selling flowers on the side of the road on Nov. 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C.Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.
For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.
Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.
Kicking the Hornets’ Nest
What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.
In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.
By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.
Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.
Blood in the Hills
For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.
Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored.
But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.
It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.
To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.
“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.
Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.
That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.
No Southern Comfort for Feds
This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.
The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.
On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.
Defend our Juries have announced a fresh Lift the Ban action, after the Judicial Review hearing against the proscription of Palestine Action finished on 2 December. Following the hearing the Claimant, Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, said:
Our legal challenge to the most extreme attack on our right to free expression in recent British history has laid bare what this unprecedented ban is really about.
The Government’s presentations in court have made clear the ban rests solely on property damage, not violence – actions we took to prevent harm by disrupting the flow of arms being used to kill Palestinian people. The Government offered no justification for refusing to consult those of us whose rights this ban strips away, while admitting they did consult the Israeli embassy, pro-Israel lobby groups and weapons manufacturers like Elbit, with Starmer even discussing the proscription with Donald Trump.
This ban was always about caving into pressure to appease those interests, not about public safety. Indeed it diverts police and counter-terror resources away from actual threats to the British public, while contributing to court backlogs and potentially to already overflowing prisons.
My legal team presented an open and shut case that this proscription amounts to discrimination, and the Government provided no answer to the prima facie evidence put before the court. This includes evidence that its own advisers warned at the time that proscribing Palestine Action would raise serious questions about why it was not banning other direct action groups using similar tactics, such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
The most disturbing revelation from this hearing has been the Government’s complete failure to address the severe chilling effect of this ban on free speech we have seen impact thousands of people across the country. Justice Chamberlain warned of this when granting the judicial review, and the last four months have proved him right. The 200 arrests at that time have exploded to 2,717 people, arrested under terrorism laws for silently holding a seven-word sign, many elderly and disabled.
The court heard evidence of the utterly dystopian impacts of the ban far beyond those expressing support for Palestine Action, from a Jewish woman woken by police at her door over an email she sent criticising the ban before it even came into effect, to the prospect of Sally Rooney withdrawing her books. Other Orwellian incidents include local Palestine solidarity groups having bank accounts frozen; and police interrogations of people going about their day for simply wearing Palestine flag badges and T-shirts, all of which have nothing to do with Palestine Action.
The Government’s arguments in court have shown there is no justification for this dangerous, authoritarian assault on our fundamental civil liberties.
Defend our Juries announce next Lift the Ban action
Defend Our Juries will hold a sign-holding action outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the day the judgement of the Judicial Review is read into the court record. People will hold handwritten signs with the now legendary wording: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said:
Although we do not know whether the judgement will be delivered in December or January, we do know that there are many people determined to continue to fight against the erosion of protest rights and our government’s complicity in genocide.
This will undoubtedly create a dilemma for the police – will they arrest us as the result of the Judicial Review is being read out?
If the appeal against proscription is successful, their action looks ridiculous.
If it is unsuccessful, we will continue our pressure against this unjust law, and the dilemma of whether to continue arresting peaceful protesters under terrorism legislation for having a moral conscience will continue.
We are also aware that should the judgement be in the favour of Huda Ammori, the state is likely to challenge the verdict to ensure the proscription still stands.
We cannot stand by while fundamental rights to protest and free speech are eroded, and while our government continues to support a country charged with genocide. We will have no option but to continue our resistance.
U.S. Border Patrol agents raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert late last month, taking three people into custody and breaking into a trailer without a warrant.
Video taken by No More Deaths, a faith-based aid group out of Tucson that operates the site, shows agents with flashlights prying open a trailer door and entering the structure. The camp, located just miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, has long been used to provide medical care to migrants crossing one of the world’s deadliest stretches of desert.
Monica Ruiz House, a No More Deaths volunteer who’d recently been involved in deportation defense work in Chicago, said the warrantless raid spoke to a rising culture of lawlessness among the Trump administration’s front-line immigration enforcement agencies.
“There’s this frightening pattern of impunity that’s happening across the country,” Ruiz House told The Intercept, “whether it’s Border Patrol, whether it’s ICE agents,” referring to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The November raid marks the third time in recent years that Border Patrol agents acting under the authority of President Donald Trump have targeted the remote Arizona site, and the first case in which the agency has entered a structure at the location without a warrant.
According to volunteers, Border Patrol agents claimed they were in “hot pursuit” when they broke into the group’s trailer. Hot pursuit has a particular legal meaning and typically applies in cases where law enforcement attempts to make an arrest, a subject flees into a private space, the opportunity to obtain a warrant is not available, and the risk of further of escape, destruction of evidence, or harm to others is high.
Amy Knight, an attorney who has represented No More Deaths volunteers in the past and is currently providing informal legal advice to the group, said there is no evidence that any of those factors were present in the November raid.
By all appearances, Border Patrol tracked a group of people to an aid camp but made no attempt to arrest them en route. “They were inside of a building on private property, and the agents were able to pretty well surround the place — so if they left, they could catch them,” Knight told The Intercept. “There was no reason why they couldn’t get a warrant.”
“Disappeared”
A handful of Border Patrol vehicles amassed at around 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of November 23 at the organization’s gate near the unincorporated community of Arivaca, according to a summary of events produced by No More Deaths in the immediate aftermath of the raid.
“United States Border Patrol,” said a voice on a loudspeaker, according to the summary, which was shared with The Intercept. “Come out.”
Volunteers who approached the gate were informed agents had tracked a group of suspected migrants to the location and requested access to make arrests.
Three people were on the property receiving medical care at the time, Ruiz House said.
The volunteers refused access to the camp without the presentation of a signed warrant, the summary said. An hour passed before Border Patrol agents parked at the gate and on a nearby hill entered the property. They made a beeline for a trailer on the property.
“If there are people locked in that trailer that’s a big concern,” one of the agents reportedly said.
Asked about their lack of warrant, the agents replied that they were in “hot pursuit” of suspects, according to No More Deaths, and their warrant exception was authorized by “the U.S.A.” — potentially referencing a call to an assistant U.S. attorney, often referred to as an “A.U.S.A”
“They’ve disappeared into the ICE custody black hole.”
In the past, Border Patrol respected the need to have a warrant before entering structures, said Ruiz House. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, declined to comment on the agents’ purported justification for entering the aid group’s property.
The first of the three people taken into custody was dragged to a Border Patrol truck as volunteers prayed. No More Deaths has been working to find the arrestees in the weeks since, to no avail. “They’ve somewhat disappeared into the ICE custody black hole,” Ruiz House said. “We’re trying to locate them.”
Years in Trump’s Sights
No More Deaths, also known as No Más Muertes, is the most prominent of several humanitarian aid providers in the Sonoran Desert, offering medical care to migrants for more than two decades in a region that has claimed thousands of lives since the U.S. government undertook a program of intensifying border militarization in the 1990s.
In June 2017, Border Patrol agents staked out the group’s camp near Arivaca for three days during a blazing heatwave. They entered after obtaining a warrant, and approximately 30 agents took four Mexican nationals into custody who were receiving treatment for heat-related illnesses, injuries, and exposure to the elements. The men had been traveling by foot for several days in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
The operation marked the beginning of a multiyear campaign by the Trump administration to imprison U.S. citizens involved in the provision of humanitarian aid. In a January 2018 raid at a separate aid station, Border Patrol agents arrested No More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren and two Central American asylum-seekers who’d become lost in Arizona’s ultra-lethal West Desert.
The Trump administration additionally levied federal littering charges against several No More Deaths volunteers for leaving jugs of water on a remote wildlife refuge where the dead and dehydrated bodies of migrants are often found.
Warren’s arrest came just hours after No More Deaths released a damning report, complete with video evidence, showing Border Patrol agents systematically destroying water jugs the aid group left in the area.
Warren was hit with federal harboring and conspiracy charges and faced up 20 years in prison.
The prosecutions became a cause célèbre in Tucson, with yard signs filling residents and businesses’ windows that read “Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime — Drop the Charges.”
Both cases collapsed at trial, with Warren’s defense attorneys successfully arguing that his volunteerism was the product of deeply held spiritual belief concerning the sanctity of human life and thus protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The administration targeted the camp again in 2020, again after No More Deaths released unflattering documents concerning the agency’s operations.
In both 2017 and 2020, the raids targeting No More Deaths were carried out by agents with BORTAC, a specialized SWAT-style arm of the Border Patrol now tasked with carrying out high-profile and controversial arrests in cities far from the U.S.–Mexico divide.
“ICE is increasingly relying on Border Patrol to carry out its internal operations,” said Ruiz House. “Having Border Patrol operate in the interior is absolutely a force multiplier because the fact is ICE simply doesn’t have all the resources to carry out mass deportations, they are going to need other agencies to help them, but there’s also a very big symbolic dimension.”
The green, soldier-like uniforms, she argued, instill a “particular kind of fear” in immigrant communities. It is precisely this externalization of militarized border enforcement that aid groups in the borderlands have been warning about, and Border Patrol leadership have spent years clamoring for.
As one senior agent told the New York Times recently, “The border is everywhere.”
In a parliamentary speech today, justice secretary David Lammy confirmed that he will go ahead to scrap plans to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of ‘either-way’ cases – that is, trials which could take place either at the Crown or Magistrates Courts.
In an interview with the Telegraph prior to his speech, Lammy stated:
Some argue that reform is an attack on the traditions that define our legal system. They reach for Runnymede and Magna Carta, insisting that nothing must disturb the arrangements of centuries past. These are grand claims but they overlook what Magna Carta actually says. Clause 39 promises the judgment of our peers and the law of the land and, crucially, clause 40 warns that to no one will we delay or deny right or justice.
When a victim waits years for a trial, when the courts are so backed up that criminals fear no punishment, when an innocent person sits under a cloud of accusation – justice is denied. Magna Carta was a protest against state failure. If its authors saw the delays in our courts today, they would not urge us to cling rigidly to tradition. They would demand action.
He later echoed that sentiment – that justice should not be delayed – in his parliamentary speech. In particular, he again cited the Magna Carta, stating that “we must never forget that it implores us not to deny or delay justice”.
Likewise, he also leaned heavily on the idea of doing away with jury trials as being more friendly towards victims. More specifically, he returned several times to the figure of the victim as a survivor of violence against women and girls:
Behind the statistics are real people. Katy was abused by her partner. She reported him to the police in 2017, but then had an unbearable 6-year wait for justice. During this time, she lost her job due to her mental health deteriorating, she became increasingly isolated, lived in fear, and lost faith in the court system.
This is well and good – delays in the justice system do place massive strain on victims. However, that doesn’t explain why it’s the right to trial by jury that should be sacrificed in order to relieve the burden on the courts. Likewise, it also fails to address the public loss of faith in the court system from the loss of that right.
Increase funding first
Lammy also attempted to address the concern that we should increase funding for court days before scrapping jury trials. He stated:
Some will ask why we don’t simply increase funding. This government has already invested heavily in the courts. Nearly £150 million to make them fit for purpose. £92 million committed a year for criminal legal aid solicitors, and funding for a record number of sitting days in our crown courts – 5000 more than those funded last year by the previous government. […]
I’m clear that sitting days for the Crown and Magistrates courts must continue to rise. […] But as Sir Brian has made clear, investment is not enough. The caseload is projected to reach 100,000 by 2028, and without fundamental change could keep rising, meaning justice will be denied to more victims and trust in the system will collapse.
Again, we’re eroding the right to a jury trial to support trust in the system, honest.
In place of jury trials, the justice secretary explained that he would introduce ‘swift courts’ to try either-way cases with a likely sentence of 3 years or less by judge alone. He estimates, based on the Leveson report, that this will result in a 20% increase in speed compared to a jury trial.
Of course, many actual legal professionals disagree with this optimistic estimate of time savings. They point out that it isn’t juries that consume time. Rather, the time taken by prosecutors to lay out their cases has ballooned in recent years.
Yet more reforms
Lammy also announced that defendants would no longer be able to opt for jury trials, in line with other Common Law countries. Likewise, Magistrate Courts will gain sentencing powers up to 18 months, so that they can take a greater proportion of low-level offending. The deputy PM speculated that this could rise as high as 2 years, should needs must.
Finally, he also stated that lengthy fraud and financial trials could now be sat by a judge alone. Ostensibly, this would relieve undue pressure on jurors. Notably, the government actually tried this same trick with the Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill of 2006. However, even this relatively minor amendment to the justice system didn’t make it into law at the time.
Of course, immediately after he gave his speech, Lammy was met with a wave of criticisms large and small. Many of these – even the ones that came from the Tories – had merit, and deserve dissecting in detail. As such, the Canary will report on the (many, many) rebuttals tomorrow.
For now, however, we have confirmation that Labour are still determined to carry out their attack on the right to trial by jury. And, along with it, the public’s right to a fair and balanced trial.
Speaking to the Home Affairs Committee, West Midlands Police have provided further detail on why they banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Aston Villa game. They’ve also disputed the claims of lord John Mann, who’s the government independent advisor on antisemitism:
The West Midlands Police explained to the Homes Affairs Committee why they decided to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, and every single person who tried to undermine the police and gaslight us should be ashamed of themselves. pic.twitter.com/oq2giBitmr
Speaking to the committee, chief constable Craig Guildford said:
on Wednesday the 1st of October… I sat down with the Chief Inspector, who is our planning expert, who had spoken to the three Dutch police commanders. And this really, panel, is where the difference occurs between what Lord Mann has said and the information that was provided to the Chief Inspector…
the information provided from the Dutch was very, very clear… they reflected on the days before, during, and after the match as a result of the clashes between the Maccabi ultras and the local Muslim community. …
Police in Amsterdam were very stretched, particularly the day before, because they hadn’t assessed the match as being high risk from their perspective. And they informed us very clearly, and I’ve spoken to the chief inspector myself on Wednesday of last week, that they said they deployed 2,000 riot police on the day of the match.
He noted it was the “professional assumption” of their silver commander that:
over the three and four days of the actual event, you’d need about 5,000 police officers.
So, in terms of what we were told, the ultras were very well organised – militaristic in the way that they operated. They attacked members of the local community, including taxi drivers, tore down flags, people were thrown into the river, and definitely the singing.
Regarding this singing, Guildford noted that Maccabi ‘ultras’ (hardcore hooligans) were known to sing:
there are no schools in Gaza, as the children were all dead.
The Dutch police also told West Midlands Police that the Maccabi ultras:
specifically targeted the local Muslim community deliberately. Members of the local and wider Muslim community subsequently reacted and deliberately then, on the day after mainly, attacked Maccabi fans on match day, both before the match and after the match, as Lord Mann has made reference to.
That’s what we were told.
The Dutch commanders were unequivocal. They would never want to have Maccabi Tel Aviv playing in Amsterdam again in the future.
That was what they said to our chief inspector.
Lord Mann also spoke at the committee, with his performance described as follows:
Comical scenes as Lord Mann – an obvious idiot and blowhard – huffs, roars and bullshits his way through yet another committee, while senior police officers quite reasonably explain what happened. Self-clowning shit, reported as if it’s *the cops* behaving horrendously. https://t.co/B2iJ4QLqSI
Infamously, Tel Aviv police banned a Maccabi match in their home town due to safety concerns, with this happening mere weeks after the Aston Villa ban:
west midlands police must apologise, resign then take an antisemitism training course. https://t.co/yd4Zfkigbq
Despite all of the above, political figures like John Mann continue to defend the honour of foreign hooligans, seemingly over the safety of British citizens.
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlongtrial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.
“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While Hernández awaits his freedom, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.
When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”
Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.
As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.
Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”
The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.
The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state,pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.
“If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.”
“We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,” he said. “If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.”
Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.
“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”
In 2019, when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.
It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hernández.
Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).
The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.
Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.
“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hernández is awaiting a ticket to freedom.
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlongtrial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Monday, according to Bureau of Prisons records.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.
“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While Hernández awaits his freedom, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.
When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”
Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.
As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.
Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”
The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.
The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state,pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.
“If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.”
“We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,” he said. “If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.”
Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.
“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”
In 2019, when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.
It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hernández.
Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).
The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.
Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.
“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hernández is awaiting a ticket to freedom.
Update: Dec. 2, 2025
This story has been updated to note that Juan Orlando Hernández has been released from prison.
Vinzons is a quiet coastal town in the eastern Philippines province of Camarines Norte in Bicol. With a spread out population of about 45,000. it is known for its rice production, crabs and surfing beaches in the Calaguas Islands.
But the town is really famous for one of its sons — Wenceslao “Bintao” Vinzons, the youngest lawmaker in the Philippines before the Japanese invasion during the Second World War who then took up armed resistance.
He was captured and executed along with his family in 1942.
One of the most interesting assets of the municipality of Vinzons — named after the hero in 1946, the town previously being known as Indan — is his traditional family home, which has recently been refurbished as a local museum to tell his story of courage and inspiration.
“He is something of a forgotten hero, student leader, resistance fighter, former journalist — a true hero,” says acting curator Roniel Espina.
As well as a war hero, Vinzons is revered for his progressive politics and was known as the “father of student activism” in the Philippines. His political career began at the University of Philippines in the capital Manila where he co-founded the Young Philippines Party.
The Vinzons Hall at UP-Diliman was named after him to honour his student leadership exploits.
Student newspaper editor
He was the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian, the student newspaper founded in 1922.
At 24, Vinzons became the youngest delegate to the 1935 Constitutional Convention and six years later at the age of 30 he was elected Governor of Camarine Norte in 1941 — the same year that Japan invaded.
In fact, the invasion of the Philippines began on 8 December 1941 just 10 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i.
The invading forces tried to pressure Governor Vinzons in his provincial capital of Daet to collaborate. He absolutely refused. Instead, he took to the countryside and led one of the first Filipino guerilla resistance forces to rise up against the Japanese.
His initial resistance was successful with the guerrilla forces carrying out sudden raids before liberating Daet. He was eventually captured and executed by the Japanese.
The bust of “Bintao” outside the Vinzons Town Hall. Image: Asia Pacific Report
The exact circumstances are still uncertain as his body was never recovered, but the museum does an incredible job in piecing together his life along with his family and their tragic sacrifice for the country.
One plaque shows an image of Vinzons along with his father Gabino, wife Liwayway, sister Milagros, daughter Aurora and son Alexander (no photo of him was actually recovered).
A family of Second World War martyrs . . . their bodies were never recovered. Image: Asia Pacific Report
According to the legend on the plaque:
“Wenceslao Vinzons with his father disappeared mysteriously – and were never see again. The Japanese sent out posters in Camarines Norte expressing regret that on the way to Siain, Quezon, Vinzons was shot while attempting to escape. ‘So sorry please.’
“The remains of the body of Vinzons, his father, wife, two chidren and sister have never been found.”
The Japanese Empire as portrayed in the Vinzons Museum. Video: APR
Imperial Japan showcase
One room of the museum is dedicated as a showcase to Imperial Japan and its brutal invasion across a great swathe of Southeast Asia and the brave Filipino resistance in response.
A special feature of the museum is how well it portrays typical Filipino lifestyle and social mores in a home of the political class in the 1930s.
The tourist author, Dr David Robie (red t-shirt) with acting curator Roniel Espina (left), Tourism Officer Florence G Mago (second from right) and two museum guides. Image: Asia Pacific Report
When I visited the museum and talked to staff and watched documentaries about “Bintao” Vinzons’ life, one question in particular intrigued me: “Why was he thought of as a ‘forgotten hero’?”
According to acting curator Espina, “It’s partly because Camarines Norte is not as popular and well known as some other provinces. So some of the notable achievements of Vinzons do not have a high profile around in other parts of the country.”
Based at the museum is the town’s principal Tourism Officer Florence G Mago. She is optimistic about how the Vinzons Museum can attract more visitors to the town.
“We have put a lot of effort into developing this museum and we are proud of it. It is a jewel in the town.”
The Vinzons family home . . . now refurbished as the town museum under the National Historical Institute umbrella. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Four Papuan political prisoners have been sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment on treason charges.
But a West Papua independence advocate says Indonesia is using its law to silence opposition.
In April this year, letters were delivered to government institutions in Sorong West Papua, asking for peaceful dialogue between Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto and a group seeking to make West Papua independent of Indonesia, the Federal Republic of West Papua.
Four people were arrested for delivering the letters, and this triggered protests, which became violent.
West Papua Action Aotearoa’s Catherine Delahunty said Indonesia claims the four, known as the Sorong Four, caused instability.
“What actually caused instability was arresting people for delivering letters, and the Indonesians refused to acknowledge that actually people have a right to deliver letters,” she said.
“They have a right to have opinions, and they will continue to protest when those rights are systematically denied.”
Category of ‘treason’
Indonesia’s Embassy based in Wellington said the central government had been involved in the legal process, but the letters fell into the category of “treason” under the national crime code.
Delahunty said the arrests were in line with previous action the Indonesian government had taken in response to West Papua independence protests.
“This is the kind of use of an abuse of law that happens all the time in order to shut down any form of dissent and leadership. In the 1930s we would call this fascism. It is a military occupation using all the law to actually suppress the people.”
Delahunty said the situation was an abuse of human rights and it was happening less than an hour away from Darwin in northern Australia.
The spokesperson for Indonesia’s embassy said the government had been closely monitoring the case at arm’s length to avoid accusations of overreach.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Big Brother Watch have warned that police forces are feeding passport data into facial recognition databases:
Your passport photo has secretly been turned into a facial recognition police mugshot.
By subverting our photos into a giant facial recognition database, we’re all at risk not only of profound invasions of privacy but misidentifications & injustice.https://t.co/KIFHRGsqVLpic.twitter.com/5zTrY2bBWD
This affects everyone with a passport. When you applied for your passport, brushed your hair, sat down for a photo that would stay with you for the next 10 years, I’m guessing you didn’t expect that photo to secretly be turned into a police mugshot. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
British passport and immigration databases are being used by the police for mass facial recognition searches without a clear legal basis or the public or parliament’s knowledge. The number of searches of the passport database has skyrocketed from two in 2020 to 417 in 2023.
This not only violates our privacy, it puts us at serious risk of misidentification and injustice. It means police officers could secretly take photos from protests, social media, or anywhere really, and seek to identify us.
The police shouldn’t be able to scan and track us without cause, consent or accountability. If you believe in privacy, freedom and justice, now is the time to act.
Police and private companies in the UK have been quietly rolling out facial recognition surveillance cameras, taking ‘faceprints’ of millions of people — often without you knowing about it. This is an enormous expansion of the surveillance state — and it sets a dangerous precedent worldwide. We must stop this dangerously authoritarian surveillance now.
Forty years after the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, award-winning journalist and author David Robie has revisited the ship’s fateful last mission — a journey that became a defining chapter in New Zealand’s identity as a nuclear-free nation.
It captures the courage of those who stood up to nuclear colonialism in the Pacific and draws striking parallels with the existential challenges the region now faces — from climate change to renewed geopolitical tensions.
“The new edition has a completely new 40-page section covering the last decade and the transition in global emphasis from ‘nuclear to climate crisis survivors’, plus new exposés about the French spy ‘blunderwatergate’. Ironically, the nuclear risks have also returned to the fore again,” Robie told The Australia Today.
“The book deals with a lot of critical issues impacting on the Pacific, and is expanded a lot and quite different from the last edition in 2015.”
In May 1985, the Rainbow Warrior embarked on a humanitarian mission unlike any before it. The crew helped 320 Rongelap Islanders relocate to a safer island after decades of radioactive contamination from US nuclear testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls.
Robie, who joined the ship in Hawai’i as a journalist, recalls the deep humanity of that voyage.
Back in 1985: Journalist David Robie (centre) pictured with two Rainbow Warrior crew members, Henk Haazen (left) and the late Davey Edward, the chief engineer. Robie spent 11 weeks on the ship, covering the evacuation of the Rongelap Islanders. Image: Inner City News
Humanitarian voyage
“The fact that this was a humanitarian voyage . . . helping the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, it was going to be quite momentous,” he told Pacific Media Network News.
“It’s incredible for an island community where the land is so much part of their existence, their spirituality and their ethos.”
The Rainbow Warrior sailing in the Marshall Islands in May 1985 before the Rongelap relocation mission. Image: David Robie/Café Pacific Media
The relocation was both heartbreaking and historic. Islanders dismantled their homes over three days, leaving behind everything except their white-stone church.
“I remember one older woman sitting on the deck among the remnants of their homes,” Robie recalls.
Their ship’s banner, Nuclear Free Pacific, fluttered as both a declaration and a demand. The Rainbow Warrior became a symbol of Pacific solidarity, linking environmentalism with human rights in a region scarred by the atomic age.
On 10 July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was docked at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf when two underwater bombs tore through its hull. The explosions, planted by French secret agents, sank the vessel and killed Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.
The front page of The New Zealand Herald on 12 July 1985 — two days after the bombing. Image: NZH screenshot
Bombing shockwaves The bombing sent shockwaves through New Zealand and the world. When French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius finally admitted that his country’s intelligence service had carried out the attack, outrage turned to defiance. New Zealand’s resolve to remain nuclear-free only strengthened.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. Image: Kate Flanagan /www.helenclarknz.com
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark contributes a new prologue to the 40th anniversary edition, reflecting on the meaning of the bombing and the enduring relevance of the country’s nuclear-free stance.
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of Fernando Pereira was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific,” she writes.
“It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through.”
Clark warns that history’s lessons are being forgotten. “Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those storm clouds gathering,” she writes.
“New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific.”
Clark’s message in the prologue is clear: the values that shaped New Zealand’s independent foreign policy in the 1980s — diplomacy, peace and disarmament — must not be abandoned in the face of modern power politics.
Author David Robie and the Rainbow Warrior III. Image: Facebook/David Robie
Geopolitical threats
Robie adds that the book also explores “the geopolitical threats to the region with unresolved independence issues, such as the West Papuan self-determination struggle in Melanesia.”
Clark’s call to action, Robie told The Australia Today, resonates with the Pacific’s broader fight for justice.
“She warns against AUKUS and calls for the country to ‘link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace, which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence.’”
Author David Robie with a copy of Eyes of Fire during a recent interview with RNZ Pacific. Image: Facebook/David Robie
When Eyes of Fire was first published, it instantly became a rallying point for young activists and journalists across the Pacific. Robie’s reporting — which earned him New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize 40 years ago — revealed the human toll of nuclear testing and state-sponsored secrecy.
Today, his new edition reframes that struggle within the context of climate change, which he describes as “the new existential crisis for Pacific peoples.” He sees the same forces of denial, delay, and power imbalance at play.
“This whole renewal of climate denialism, refusal by major states to realise that the solutions are incredibly urgent, and the United States up until recently was an important part of that whole process about facing up to the climate crisis,” Robie says.
“It’s even more important now for activism, and also for the smaller countries that are reasonably progressive, to take the lead.”
For Robie, Eyes of Fire is not just a history book — it’s a call to conscience.
“I hope it helps to inspire others, especially younger people, to get out there and really take action,” he says.
“The future is in your hands.”
“You can’t sink a rainbow” slogan on board the Rainbow Warrior III. Image: David Robie 2025
The Rainbow Warrior returned to Aotearoa in July to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing. Forty years on, the story of the Rainbow Warrior continues to burn — not as a relic of the past, but as a beacon for the Pacific’s future through Robie’s Eyes of Fire.
At first glance, the photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage outside New York’s City Hall suggest nothing other than a joyous public celebration. Taken on December 17, 1964, just one week after the civil rights leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. is seen formally receiving King as though he were a visiting head of state. Later that day, Wagner awarded the city’s Medallion of Honor to King, praising him as “a great American who has returned home after a great triumph abroad.”
But a few details about the photographs — published here for the first time — make clear that the person behind the camera harbored a far less flattering impression of King. That’s because the prints are held in the New York City Municipal Archives files of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, the New York Police Department’s former political intelligence unit, where I found them while researching for my new book, “Police Against the Movement.”
In a Dec. 17, 1964, NYPD surveillance photo, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King, arrive in New York City.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner.
One thing unites the images: None of the 14 individuals who appear at close range betray the slightest hint of recognition that their picture is being taken; no one looks directly at the camera. Their lack of acknowledgment suggests that they may not have realized they were being photographed — certainly not by police. But their placement in the Bureau of Special Services“Red Squad” files make the NYPD’s sentiments clear. (These files were first discovered by city archivists in a Queens warehouse in 2016, more than three decades after the landmark Handschu federal court settlement mandated they be made available to the activist subjects of NYPD surveillance, and two years after a lawsuit by historian Johanna Fernandez called for their release. Today, the NYPD “Red Squad” files represent the most significant collection of publicly accessible police intelligence records in the United States.)
For the NYPD, Wagner’s public flattery of King mattered much less than the unfavorable comments made just one month earlier by the nation’s premier law enforcement official, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking to a group of reporters in November 1964, Hoover condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” skewering the civil rights leader for his suggestion that the Bureau only reluctantly investigated segregationist attacks on civil rights activists. Hoover’s comments may seem quaint in our current era — in which politicians launch profanity-laced fusillades at their opponents and the president of the United States posts AI-generated videos depicting him as a fighter pilot bombarding No Kings protesters with raw sewage — but that insultsucceeded in further delegitimizing King and the civil rights movement in the eyes of law enforcement officials. Wagner might have overtly praised King, but police in New York covertly surveilled him. They could care less what their mayor thought, because they worshipped the FBI director as the nation’s top cop.
Coretta Scott King greets New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. This Dec. 17, 1964 NYPD surveillance photo was taken one week after Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
Just as Donald Trump demonizes leftist organizers today as domestic terrorists, both federal officials and local police in the South and North condemned civil rights activists as rioters and insurrectionists. Just as Trump falsely disparaged Zohran Mamdani as a communist in recent months (before opting not to repeat the charges in asurprisingly friendly meeting with the mayor-elect in the Oval Office), Southern officials slandered King as a communist. And just as Trump’s Justice Department is indicting his political enemies on legally specious mortgage fraud charges, state officials in Alabama unsuccessfully indicted King on felony criminal charges for income tax perjury in 1960.
But the NYPD — nor any other local police department — did not need to wait for encouragement from the feds to spy on King and his allies. A common misperception is that local police were content with physically assaulting protesters while leaving the sophisticated work of surveillance and slander to Hoover’s FBI. But police were far more experienced in spying on and sabotaging activists than we have acknowledged — so much so that the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program against “Black extremists,” launched in August 1967, should be recognized for federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.
An NYPD surveillance memo reporting on King’s movements, in this case an Oct. 27, 1961, event at Columbia University.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
Long before Hoover denounced King as a liar, the NYPD issued a surveillance report on the civil rights leader’s visit to Harlem in 1958, with other memos to follow in the early 1960s. Rank-and-file organizers supporting King received unwanted attention as well. As they prepared for the March on Washington — now widely celebrated across the political spectrum as a shining moment for democracy thanks to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — attendees were monitored by the NYPD, as they were by the police departments of Birmingham, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Police agencies did not limit themselves to surveilling civil rights activists. They also deployed the weaponry of deception and disruption in hopes of crippling the movement. When Herb Callender, a Congress of Racial Equality chapter leader, confronted police violence with street protests in New York in 1964, BOSS dispatched the undercover spy Ray Wood to infiltrate the Bronx organizer’s inner circle. Wood ultimately coaxed his newfound activist friends into a ludicrous scheme to perform a citizens’ arrest on Wagner, the mayor, at City Hall — which got Callendar arrested and landed him in the Bellevue psych ward.
Then, in December 1964, just three days before BOSS photographed King, Wood made contact with associates of the tiny Black Liberation Front collective. In short order, he encouraged three activists loosely connected with the group to join him in an outlandish plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Wood prodded the men for weeks and talked one of them into taking into his possession a box of dynamite purchased with department funds, which triggered the activists’ swift arrest. Glowing headlines detailing Wood’s efforts appeared on front pages across the country, and coverage included a photograph of Wood receiving a promotion for the work, his face carefully turned away to protect his identity. At that point, the FBI assumed control of the case, and federal prosecutors indicted the men on felony charges. All three were convicted on the basis of nothing more than Wood’s word and the box of dynamite, and each served time in federal prison.
The prosecution of these activists was a watershed moment where the feds and NYPD recast the broadly tolerated liberal civil rights movement that they secretly spied on into the dangerous radical extremist movement they publicly indicted on felony charges — all of which clearly anticipated not only COINTELPRO, but also today’s coordinated local–federal attacks on so-called antifa activists and domestic terrorists.
These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump’s first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president.
King arrives in New York City on Dec. 17, 1964.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
There’s little reason to think that such investigations will cease. Protesters against ICE and Israel’s war on Gaza draw continued law enforcement monitoring — not least of all in New York, where the outgoing mayor has echoed the president’s criticisms of protests against ICE as attacks on law enforcement, and local organizers have increased their calls for the NYPD to disband its Strategic Response Group, a secretive unit that continues the work of BOSS by attending protests and conducting surveillance.
Words matter. Federal authorities who vocally attack protesters telegraph to law enforcement agents that they would be mistaken to not monitor and probe activists. Insults and slander give way to surveillance and invasions of privacy, which in turn lay the foundation for harassment by public officials, and in some cases result in criminal proceedings.
Time will tell which actions the federal government will take against the activists that they have recently branded as terrorists. But we can’t lose sight of the actions of the local law enforcement agencies that look to the feds for guidance — and we must recognize that the untruthful words of a president, no matter how far-fetched, have real-life consequences for the activists on the receiving end.
At first glance, the photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage outside New York’s City Hall suggest nothing other than a joyous public celebration. Taken on December 17, 1964, just one week after the civil rights leader had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. is seen formally receiving King as though he were a visiting head of state. Later that day, Wagner awarded the city’s Medallion of Honor to King, praising him as “a great American who has returned home after a great triumph abroad.”
But a few details about the photographs — published here for the first time — make clear that the person behind the camera harbored a far less flattering impression of King. That’s because the prints are held in the New York City Municipal Archives files of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, the New York Police Department’s former political intelligence unit, where I found them while researching for my new book, “Police Against the Movement.”
In a Dec. 17, 1964, NYPD surveillance photo, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King, arrive in New York City.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
On their face, the images are mundane. King emerges from a car, greeted by two men in suits. In another, King stands with family and confidants, including his wife, the activist Coretta Scott King; his mother, Alberta Williams King; and his friend and adviser Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington. In a third shot, Coretta shakes hands with Wagner.
One thing unites the images: None of the 14 individuals who appear at close range betray the slightest hint of recognition that their picture is being taken; no one looks directly at the camera. Their lack of acknowledgment suggests that they may not have realized they were being photographed — certainly not by police. But their placement in the Bureau of Special Services“Red Squad” files make the NYPD’s sentiments clear. (These files were first discovered by city archivists in a Queens warehouse in 2016, more than three decades after the landmark Handschu federal court settlement mandated they be made available to the activist subjects of NYPD surveillance, and two years after a lawsuit by historian Johanna Fernandez called for their release. Today, the NYPD “Red Squad” files represent the most significant collection of publicly accessible police intelligence records in the United States.)
For the NYPD, Wagner’s public flattery of King mattered much less than the unfavorable comments made just one month earlier by the nation’s premier law enforcement official, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking to a group of reporters in November 1964, Hoover condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” skewering the civil rights leader for his suggestion that the Bureau only reluctantly investigated segregationist attacks on civil rights activists. Hoover’s comments may seem quaint in our current era — in which politicians launch profanity-laced fusillades at their opponents and the president of the United States posts AI-generated videos depicting him as a fighter pilot bombarding No Kings protesters with raw sewage — but that insultsucceeded in further delegitimizing King and the civil rights movement in the eyes of law enforcement officials. Wagner might have overtly praised King, but police in New York covertly surveilled him. They could care less what their mayor thought, because they worshipped the FBI director as the nation’s top cop.
Coretta Scott King greets New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. This Dec. 17, 1964 NYPD surveillance photo was taken one week after Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
Just as Donald Trump demonizes leftist organizers today as domestic terrorists, both federal officials and local police in the South and North condemned civil rights activists as rioters and insurrectionists. Just as Trump falsely disparaged Zohran Mamdani as a communist in recent months (before opting not to repeat the charges in asurprisingly friendly meeting with the mayor-elect in the Oval Office), Southern officials slandered King as a communist. And just as Trump’s Justice Department is indicting his political enemies on legally specious mortgage fraud charges, state officials in Alabama unsuccessfully indicted King on felony criminal charges for income tax perjury in 1960.
But the NYPD — nor any other local police department — did not need to wait for encouragement from the feds to spy on King and his allies. A common misperception is that local police were content with physically assaulting protesters while leaving the sophisticated work of surveillance and slander to Hoover’s FBI. But police were far more experienced in spying on and sabotaging activists than we have acknowledged — so much so that the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program against “Black extremists,” launched in August 1967, should be recognized for federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.
An NYPD surveillance memo reporting on King’s movements, in this case an Oct. 27, 1961, event at Columbia University.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
Long before Hoover denounced King as a liar, the NYPD issued a surveillance report on the civil rights leader’s visit to Harlem in 1958, with other memos to follow in the early 1960s. Rank-and-file organizers supporting King received unwanted attention as well. As they prepared for the March on Washington — now widely celebrated across the political spectrum as a shining moment for democracy thanks to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — attendees were monitored by the NYPD, as they were by the police departments of Birmingham, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Police agencies did not limit themselves to surveilling civil rights activists. They also deployed the weaponry of deception and disruption in hopes of crippling the movement. When Herb Callender, a Congress of Racial Equality chapter leader, confronted police violence with street protests in New York in 1964, BOSS dispatched the undercover spy Ray Wood to infiltrate the Bronx organizer’s inner circle. Wood ultimately coaxed his newfound activist friends into a ludicrous scheme to perform a citizens’ arrest on Wagner, the mayor, at City Hall — which got Callendar arrested and landed him in the Bellevue psych ward.
Then, in December 1964, just three days before BOSS photographed King, Wood made contact with associates of the tiny Black Liberation Front collective. In short order, he encouraged three activists loosely connected with the group to join him in an outlandish plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Wood prodded the men for weeks and talked one of them into taking into his possession a box of dynamite purchased with department funds, which triggered the activists’ swift arrest. Glowing headlines detailing Wood’s efforts appeared on front pages across the country, and coverage included a photograph of Wood receiving a promotion for the work, his face carefully turned away to protect his identity. At that point, the FBI assumed control of the case, and federal prosecutors indicted the men on felony charges. All three were convicted on the basis of nothing more than Wood’s word and the box of dynamite, and each served time in federal prison.
The prosecution of these activists was a watershed moment where the feds and NYPD recast the broadly tolerated liberal civil rights movement that they secretly spied on into the dangerous radical extremist movement they publicly indicted on felony charges — all of which clearly anticipated not only COINTELPRO, but also today’s coordinated local–federal attacks on so-called antifa activists and domestic terrorists.
These surveillance tactics are of more than just historical significance. Local police continue to deploy weapons of political espionage against movements for justice to this day. In Trump’s first term, police in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago surveilled the same racial justice activists disparaged by the president.
King arrives in New York City on Dec. 17, 1964.Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
There’s little reason to think that such investigations will cease. Protesters against ICE and Israel’s war on Gaza draw continued law enforcement monitoring — not least of all in New York, where the outgoing mayor has echoed the president’s criticisms of protests against ICE as attacks on law enforcement, and local organizers have increased their calls for the NYPD to disband its Strategic Response Group, a secretive unit that continues the work of BOSS by attending protests and conducting surveillance.
Words matter. Federal authorities who vocally attack protesters telegraph to law enforcement agents that they would be mistaken to not monitor and probe activists. Insults and slander give way to surveillance and invasions of privacy, which in turn lay the foundation for harassment by public officials, and in some cases result in criminal proceedings.
Time will tell which actions the federal government will take against the activists that they have recently branded as terrorists. But we can’t lose sight of the actions of the local law enforcement agencies that look to the feds for guidance — and we must recognize that the untruthful words of a president, no matter how far-fetched, have real-life consequences for the activists on the receiving end.
Protesters in Fiji and Aotearoa New Zealand kicked off the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People today as Israel faced global condemnation over more “war crimes” against Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
At least 13 people, including two children, were killed and 25 were wounded as Israel launched another incursion into Syrian territory in the Damascus countryside, according to state media.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned “the criminal attack carried out by an Israeli occupation army patrol in Beit Jinn”.
At Albert Park in Fiji’s capital Suva today, members of Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network (F4PSN) defied police repression and gathered to celebrate Solidarity Day.
They issued a statement declaring:
“On the 48th anniversary of this day, we must be clear: Fiji cannot claim to stand for human rights while aligning itself with GENOCIDE, APARTHEID and OCCUPATION.
“We refuse to let our government speak in our name while supporting systems of colonial oppression.”
Fiji ‘not on side of Palestine justice’
The statement went on to state that in 1977, the UN General Assembly had called for the annual observance of November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
But now, Palestinians faced dispossession, military occupation, forced displacement, and the systematic destruction of their homes and lives.
“The world is watching genocide unfold in Gaza — entire families wiped out, children buried under rubble, hospitals bombed, and civilians starved — while governments continue to fund Israel’s genocidal campaign and shield it from accountability,” the network said.
Fiji was not on the side of justice and humanity, added the network. These were some of the reasons why:
Fiji has repeatedly abstained or voted against resolutions protecting Palestinian rights at the United Nations, including resolutions calling for humanitarian ceasefires;
Fiji voted against renewing support for Palestinian refugees under UNRWA;
Fiji abstained on a resolution supporting a two-state solution;
Fiji was the only country to publicly support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and land annexation at the International Court of Justice; and
Fiji has opened an embassy in Jerusalem, in Occupied Palestine.
“This is not foreign policy — this is complicity,” said the network.
Fiji pro-Palestinian protesters in Albert Park, Suva, today marking UN Solidarity Day. Image: Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network
“And we say loudly from Fiji: End occupation. End apartheid. End genocide. Free Palestine — from the River to the Sea.”
Powerful speeches in NZ
In New Zealand’s Te Komititanga Square beside Auckland city’s main transport hub, protesters heard several powerful speakers before marching up the Queen Street shopping precinct to Aotea Square and raised the Palestinian flag.
Journalist and videographer Cole Martin, of Aotearoa Christians for Peace in Palestine who recently returned from six months bearing witness in the occupied West Bank, gave a harrowing account of the brutality and cruelty of daily life under Israeli military control.
Describing the illegal destruction of Palestinian homes by Israeli military bulldozers in one village, Martin said: “They [villagers] put up tents. And they Israeli military returned because the tents, they say, didn’t have the correct permits, just like their homes.
“And so they demolished them.
“But when Palestinians apply for permits, they are pretty much never granted them. It is an impossible system.”
Journalist Cole Martin speaking at the UN Solidarity Day rally in Auckland today about his recent experiences bearing witness in the occupied West Bank. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Speaking for Amnesty International Aotearoa, people power manager Margaret Taylor described the US President Trump-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza as “dangerous” because it gave the illusion that life in Gaza was returning to normal.
“We here today are aware that the ‘normal’ for the people of Gaza is the ongoing genocide perpetrated against them by Israel.
“Earlier this week Amnesty international again came out saying, ‘yes, it is still genocide’.
“‘It is still genocide. It is still genocide.” It continues unabated.
“We had to do that because world leaders have denied that it is genocide and are using this alleged ceasefire.”
“Boycott Israel” declares a banner at today’s UN Solidarity Day rally in Auckland. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Gaza flotilla plans
Gaza Sumud Flotilla activist Youssef Sammour, who was also rally MC, brought the crow up-to-date with plans for another flotilla to attempt to break the Israeli siege around the Gaza enclave.
About 30 other protests are happening across New Zealand this weekend over the Gaza genocide.
Global news media reports described Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, although little was reported in New Zealand media.
Several Israeli soldiers were also reported wounded in clashes at the town of Beit Jinn.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned “the criminal attack carried out by an Israeli occupation army patrol in Beit Jinn”.
Al Jazeera reports that Israeli military incursions have become more brazen, more frequent and more violent since Israel expanded its occupation of southern Syria.
Several Israeli soldiers were also reported wounded in clashes at the town of Beit Jinn when local people fought back against the Israeli incursion.
Meanwhile, the UN has condemned an incident in Jenin in the occupied West Bank as another “apparent summary execution” and warned that killings in the Occupied West Bank were surging “without accountability”.
Footage from Jenin showed Israeli forces shooting two Palestinian men in the back after they had raised their hands to surrender. They were unarmed.
“The beast must be stopped” says a placard held aloft by protest artist Craig Tynan among the Christmas decorations in downtown Auckland today. Image: Asia Pacific Report
As New Zealand pro-Palestinian protesters prepared for demonstrations across the country today to mark the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, they awoke to news of Israel attacking three countries in the Middle East — Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
This is the 112th consecutive week that the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has held protests over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network has also held frequent rallies in defiance of Fiji police restrictions.
At least 13 Syrians have been killed and others wounded during an Israeli ground incursion and air strikes on the town of Beit Jinn, southwest of Syria’s capital Damascus.
Palestine’s Foreign Ministry is demanding action from the international community to halt Israel’s “war crime” as it continues its large-scale military assault on the occupied West Bank.
Ibrahim Olabi, Syria’s representative to the UN, has condemned Israel’s latest attack on the southern town of Beit Jinn, saying it further exposes Israel’s disregard for international law and reflects its fear of a strengthening Syria.
The incident is “yet another indication to the world of which country in the region is the one abiding by international law and which isn’t,” Olabi told Al Jazeera.
It highlights “who really wants a peace deal, a security agreement — who wants to be able to get the region into stability — and who doesn’t,” he said.
Israel is acting out of anxiety over Syria’s trajectory and its growing “regional and international prominence” he said.
‘Israel is terrified’
“Israel is terrified by a strong and prosperous and stable Syria. We are heading in that direction no matter what.”
Olabi described Israel’s latest assault as a signal aimed not only at Syria, but also at its allies.
The attack indicated Israel was “running out of options”.
Since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel has violated the agreement many times with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people.
Stop complicity with Israel war crimes – a PSNA poster for today’s rally. Image: PSNA
The Government Media Office in Gaza said Israel shot at civilians 142 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 21 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 228 times, and demolished people’s property on 100 occasions.
Israeli forces have also detained 35 Palestinians in Gaza over the past month, and continue to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy homes and infrastructure across the Strip.
Last night, New Zealand photojournalist Cole Martin spoke of daily life in the occupied Palestine Territories as he experienced Israeli brutality during six months based in Bethlehem in an inspiring public kōrero at Saint Matthew-in-the-City Cathedral, Auckland, and offered a “what now?” prescription of hope for the future.
He is also speaking at today’s UN solidarity rally in Te Komititanga Square at 2pm and will give another kōrero at 7pm tonight at Cityside Baptist Church, 8 Mt Eden Road.
Sitiveni Rabuka, the instigator of Fiji’s coup culture, took to the witness stand for the first time today — fronting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Suva.
The TRC was set up by Rabuka’s coalition government with the aim of promoting truth-telling and reconciliation regarding political upheavals dating back to 1987.
The five-member TRC began its work earlier this year. It was led by Dr Marcus Brand, who was appointed in January, and has reportedly already finished his role.
Rabuka had stated earlier this year he would “voluntarily appear” before the commission and disclose names of individuals involved in his two racist coups almost four decades ago.
The man, often referred to as “Rambo” for his military past, has been a permanent fixture in the Fijian political landscape since first overthrowing a democratically elected government as a 38-year-old lieutenant-colonel.
But now, at 77, he has a weatherbeaten face yet still carries the resolute confidence of a young soldier. He faced the TRC commissioners, wearing a tie in the colours of the Fiji Army, to give a much-anticipated testimony by Fijians locally and in the diaspora.
He began by revisiting his childhood and the influences in his life that shaped his worldview. He fundamentally accepted the actions of 1987 were rooted in his racial worldview.
Protecting Indigenous Fijians
He acknowledged those actions were a result of his background, being raised in an “insulated” environment (i.e. village, boarding school, military), and it is his view that he was acting to protect Indigenous Fijians.
Asked if the coups had served their purpose, Rabuka said: “The coups have brought out more of a self-realisation of who we are, what we’re doing, where we need to be.”
“If that is a positive outcome of the coup, I encourage all of us to do that. Let us be aware of the sensitivity of numbers, the sensitivity of a perceived imbalance in the distribution of assets, or whatever.”
But perhaps the most important response from him came toward the end of the almost 1hr 50min submission to a question from the facilitator and veteran journalist Netani Rika, who asked Rabuka: “Do you see the removal of immunity for coup perpetrators from the [2013] Constitution as a way towards preventing a repeat of these incidents [coups]?”
“There should be [a] very objective assessment of what can be done,” Rabuka replied.
“There are certain things that we cannot do unless we all agree [to] leave the amendment to the [2013] Constitution open to the people. If that is the will of the people, let it be.
“At the moment our hands are tied,” confirming indirectly that the removal of immunity for coup perpetrators is off the table as it stands.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“Israel appears set on destroying the framework created to ensure compliance with international law . . . ”, the International Court of Justice heard in April 2025.
To a similar effect, Norway’s Development Minister said in May that Israel was setting a dangerous precedent for international human rights law violations in Gaza.
Both accounts stem from the belief that Israel’s crimes in Gaza are so extreme that they have broadened the scope of impunity under international law. That would make future conflicts more fluid and the world more dangerous, possibly precipitating the emergence of a New World Order.
The First World Order emerged in 1920 with the creation of the League of Nations, the first intergovernmental organisation. The goal was to prevent conflicts and wars from ever happening again. But because of, inter alia, structural weaknesses and the unresolved injustice of the defeated parties, the Second World War erupted in 1939 and the world order crumbled.
The horrors of the Second World War thus paved the way to the emergence of the Second World Order. It rallied universalism with the establishment of the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was reinforced by numerous bodies and treaties to maximise compliance with international law.
While International law was never perfect, let alone fully implementable, it has had an indirect, normative influence on shaping domestic politics, academia, civil society, and journalism. It set in motion the emergence of a global rights-based consciousness, setting a frame of reference against which states are morally and legally judged, even if lacked enforcement.
‘Self-defence’ claim Israel is the product of the Second World Order. It was initially legitimised by the UN Partition Plan of Palestine in November 1947, and was admitted as a full UN member state in May 1949.
It is today a signatory of multiple UN treaties and engages with international law in various domains. Yet for years it has employed quasi-legal concepts hoping to inject dangerous exceptions in the law tailored to its own image.
It dealt with international law based more on self-perceived legitimacy (via historical victimhood or Biblical ties to the land of Palestine) than objective legality. That resulted in the production of Israeli societal beliefs regarding the country’s boundless right to, say, “self-defence”, that only few in the international community shared.
This exclusive outlook was helped, ironically, by international law’s own lingua franca, its rhetorical nature. It equipped Tel Aviv, like several other states, with the linguistic tools to justify themselves.
Think of how Israelis defend their military occupation of Palestinians by quoting legal arguments regarding self-defence. Or by re-interpreting the UN Resolution 242, which calls for the “withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967”, to mean not “all” territories.
They also argue that the Gaza Strip was not occupied since 2005. But ignore Israel’s continued “effective control” over it, which makes it an occupation as per the Fourth Hague Convention.
And while Israel isn’t a party to the Convention, it is customary international law, and therefore binding.
Dahiya Doctrine In the same vein, Tel Aviv’s ratification in 1995 of the convention on certain conventional weapons, did not stop it deploying cluster bombs against civilians in Beirut’s southern Dahiya’s district in 2006.
The Israeli army readily denied it was in violation of international law, because “they warned the area’s population”.
It is in Dahiya that a new legal threshold was crossed, or rather twisted. One that would define Israel’s next military campaigns, namely “The Dahiya Doctrine”. It permits the unleashing of extraordinary force against the civilian population and infrastructure.
While a clear violation of international law’s “principle of proportionality”, Israeli officials often justified the attacks as lawful for they target the civilian bedding of “terrorists”.
Needless to say, the Israeli definition of terrorism encapsulates almost every act of dissidence directed at the state, or Jews. Regardless of the legitimacy of that act, and irrespective of its form — violent or passive.
Israel would upscale the Dahiya Doctrine in its consecutive onslaughts on Gaza since 2008, while continuing to pay lip service to international law.
After 7 October 2023, even the words of justification had been abandoned. Calls by Israeli officials and some journalists to commit war crimes in Gaza, including genocide, were mostly unapologetic.
Save for the gas chambers, the Israeli army committed every atrocity imaginable against Gaza’s civilians. Gaza became the world’s largest graveyard of children. Most hospitals, schools, and universities were destroyed, alongside nearly 80 percent of the Strip’s infrastructure and homes.
More journalists were targeted and killed in Gaza than both world wars, the Vietnam War, wars in Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan combined. And unknown to modern conflict, Israel systematically went after aid workers, including UN-associated ones.
Enemies and allies The gun barrels were then turned against the very representative of international law, the UN. In October 2024, the Knesset banned the UNRWA — going even further by labelling it a “terrorist organisation”.
Sure, Israel has long looked at the UN as biased, and saw the UNRWA as detrimental to Tel Aviv’s wishes to erase the Palestinian refugee problem from existence. But after October 7, not only did Israel unleash a genocidal war against Palestinians, it used quasi-legal instrument and military prowess to neutralise the legal bodies that may limit its scope.
This is unprecedented in the United Nation’s history.
Yet, despite its unbridled brutality, Israel could have been kept at bay had it not been for the US support.
Indeed, the White House helped Israel normalise its violations of international law in two ways. Firstly, by emphasising the “reason of the state” doctrine over international law. The White House under Biden and Trump, almost fully embraced the Israeli narrative of self-defence after October 7, even when it was evident that the Israelis went too far in Gaza.
Secondly, the US was already waging its own lateral war on international law. In February 2025, Donald Trump issued an Executive Order authorising sanctions on the ICC and its Chief Prosecutor.
It expanded the sanctions on four ICC officials in August, saying they had been pivotal in efforts to prosecute Americans and Israelis.
Trump had withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018, allegedly over anti-Israel bias. The Biden administration re-joined in 2021 despite being critical of the council’s “disproportionate attention on Israel”. But in 2025 Trump re-withdrew from the organisation.
Ultimately, whether Israel is being driven by a sense of doom post-October 7, one that has overshadowed rationality, or it is rationally using whatever necessary militarily capacity it has to achieve its war objectives, matters little.
Whatever the explanation, what stands is that Israel’s unprecedented crimes set a trajectory in the international system. There is now a possibility that under the increasing normalisation of such crimes, the system will ultimately break.
But if the trajectory follows the same pattern as in the past 100 years, then the crisis may usher in a third world order. A rectifying phase. But that remains speculative, for the path of history is not linear.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism. Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
Indonesia is preparing one of the largest peacekeeping deployments in its history — a 20,000-strong force of soldiers, engineers, medics and logistics personnel — to enter the shattered and starving Gaza Strip.
Three brigades, three hospital ships, Hercules aircraft, a three-star general, a reconnaissance team, battalions for health services, construction and logistics — Jakarta is moving with remarkable speed and confidence.
But the moral clarity that Indonesia prides itself on in its support for Palestine is now in danger of being muddied by geopolitical calculation.
And that calculation, in this case, is deeply entangled with a plan conceived and promoted by US President Donald Trump — a plan that critics argue would freeze, not resolve, the structures of domination and blockade that have long suffocated Gaza.
Indonesia must ask itself a hard question: Is it stepping into Gaza to help Palestinians — or to help enforce a fragile order designed to protect the status quo?
For years, Indonesian leaders have proudly stated that their support for Palestine is grounded not in expediency but in principle.
President Prabowo Subianto has reiterated that Jakarta stands “ready at any moment” to help end the suffering in Gaza. But readiness is not the same as reflection. And reflection is urgently needed.
Tilted towards Israel
Trump’s so-called stabilisation plan envisions an International Stabilisation Force tasked with training select Palestinian police officers and preventing weapons smuggling — a mission framed as neutral but structurally tilted toward Israel’s long-standing security demands.
The plan does little to address the root political causes of Gaza’s devastation. It does not confront Israel’s decades-long military occupation.
It does not propose a just political horizon. And it does not establish meaningful accountability for continued violations, even as reports persist that ceasefire terms are repeatedly breached.
A peacekeeping force that does not address the underlying conditions of injustice is not peacekeeping. It is de facto enforcement of a deeply unequal arrangement.
Indonesia’s deployment risks becoming just that.
Former deputy foreign minister Dino Patti Djalal has urged caution, warning that Indonesian troops could easily be drawn into clashes simply because the territory remains saturated with weaponry, competing authorities and unresolved political tensions.
He argues that Indonesia must insist on crystal-clear rules of engagement. With volatility always a possibility, a mission built on ambiguity is a mission built on quicksand.
Impossible peacekeeper position
His warning deserves attention. A peacekeeper who does not know whether they are expected to intervene, withdraw or hold ground in moments of confrontation is placed in an impossible position.
And should Indonesian forces — admired worldwide for their professionalism — be forced to navigate chaos without a political framework, Jakarta will face unpredictable political and humanitarian consequences at home and abroad.
More troubling is the lack of political strategy behind Indonesia’s enthusiasm. Prabowo’s government frames this mission as a humanitarian and stabilising operation, but it has not clarified how it fits within the long-term political resolution that Indonesia claims to champion.
For decades, Jakarta has stood consistently behind a two-state solution. Yet today, after the destruction of Gaza and the collapse of any credible peace process, many Palestinians and international observers argue that the two-state paradigm has become a diplomatic mirage — repeatedly invoked, never realised, and often used to justify inaction.
If Indonesia truly wants to stand for justice rather than merely stability, it must be willing to articulate alternatives. One of those alternatives — controversial but increasingly discussed in academic, political and human rights circles — is a rights-based one-state solution that guarantees equal citizenship and security for all who live between the river and the sea.
Such a political horizon would require courage from Jakarta. Supporting a single state would mean breaking sharply from US policy preferences and acknowledging that decades of partition proposals have failed to deliver anything resembling peace.
But Indonesia has taken courageous positions before. It has spoken against apartheid in South Africa and, most recently, called out the global community’s double standards in the treatment of Ukraine and Palestine.
Jakarta must be moral voice
If Jakarta wants to be a moral voice, it cannot outsource its vision to a proposal drafted by an American administration whose approach to the conflict was widely criticised as one-sided.
Indonesia’s soldiers are being told they are going to Gaza to help. That is noble. But noble intentions do not excuse political naivety.
Before Jakarta sends even a single battalion forward — before the hospital ships are launched, before the Hercules engines warm, before the three-star commander takes his post — Indonesia must ask whether this mission will move Palestinians closer to genuine freedom or merely enforce a temporary calm that leaves the underlying injustices untouched.
A peacekeeping force that sustains the structures of oppression is not peacekeeping at all. It is maintenance.
Indonesia can — and must — do better.
Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA Desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East, earning a BA in international affairs from Qatar University. He later completed his MA in International Politics and PhD in politics at the University of Manchester. This article was first published by Middle East Monitor.
Indonesia is preparing one of the largest peacekeeping deployments in its history — a 20,000-strong force of soldiers, engineers, medics and logistics personnel — to enter the shattered and starving Gaza Strip.
Three brigades, three hospital ships, Hercules aircraft, a three-star general, a reconnaissance team, battalions for health services, construction and logistics — Jakarta is moving with remarkable speed and confidence.
But the moral clarity that Indonesia prides itself on in its support for Palestine is now in danger of being muddied by geopolitical calculation.
And that calculation, in this case, is deeply entangled with a plan conceived and promoted by US President Donald Trump — a plan that critics argue would freeze, not resolve, the structures of domination and blockade that have long suffocated Gaza.
Indonesia must ask itself a hard question: Is it stepping into Gaza to help Palestinians — or to help enforce a fragile order designed to protect the status quo?
For years, Indonesian leaders have proudly stated that their support for Palestine is grounded not in expediency but in principle.
President Prabowo Subianto has reiterated that Jakarta stands “ready at any moment” to help end the suffering in Gaza. But readiness is not the same as reflection. And reflection is urgently needed.
Tilted towards Israel
Trump’s so-called stabilisation plan envisions an International Stabilisation Force tasked with training select Palestinian police officers and preventing weapons smuggling — a mission framed as neutral but structurally tilted toward Israel’s long-standing security demands.
The plan does little to address the root political causes of Gaza’s devastation. It does not confront Israel’s decades-long military occupation.
It does not propose a just political horizon. And it does not establish meaningful accountability for continued violations, even as reports persist that ceasefire terms are repeatedly breached.
A peacekeeping force that does not address the underlying conditions of injustice is not peacekeeping. It is de facto enforcement of a deeply unequal arrangement.
Indonesia’s deployment risks becoming just that.
Former deputy foreign minister Dino Patti Djalal has urged caution, warning that Indonesian troops could easily be drawn into clashes simply because the territory remains saturated with weaponry, competing authorities and unresolved political tensions.
He argues that Indonesia must insist on crystal-clear rules of engagement. With volatility always a possibility, a mission built on ambiguity is a mission built on quicksand.
Impossible peacekeeper position
His warning deserves attention. A peacekeeper who does not know whether they are expected to intervene, withdraw or hold ground in moments of confrontation is placed in an impossible position.
And should Indonesian forces — admired worldwide for their professionalism — be forced to navigate chaos without a political framework, Jakarta will face unpredictable political and humanitarian consequences at home and abroad.
More troubling is the lack of political strategy behind Indonesia’s enthusiasm. Prabowo’s government frames this mission as a humanitarian and stabilising operation, but it has not clarified how it fits within the long-term political resolution that Indonesia claims to champion.
For decades, Jakarta has stood consistently behind a two-state solution. Yet today, after the destruction of Gaza and the collapse of any credible peace process, many Palestinians and international observers argue that the two-state paradigm has become a diplomatic mirage — repeatedly invoked, never realised, and often used to justify inaction.
If Indonesia truly wants to stand for justice rather than merely stability, it must be willing to articulate alternatives. One of those alternatives — controversial but increasingly discussed in academic, political and human rights circles — is a rights-based one-state solution that guarantees equal citizenship and security for all who live between the river and the sea.
Such a political horizon would require courage from Jakarta. Supporting a single state would mean breaking sharply from US policy preferences and acknowledging that decades of partition proposals have failed to deliver anything resembling peace.
But Indonesia has taken courageous positions before. It has spoken against apartheid in South Africa and, most recently, called out the global community’s double standards in the treatment of Ukraine and Palestine.
Jakarta must be moral voice
If Jakarta wants to be a moral voice, it cannot outsource its vision to a proposal drafted by an American administration whose approach to the conflict was widely criticised as one-sided.
Indonesia’s soldiers are being told they are going to Gaza to help. That is noble. But noble intentions do not excuse political naivety.
Before Jakarta sends even a single battalion forward — before the hospital ships are launched, before the Hercules engines warm, before the three-star commander takes his post — Indonesia must ask whether this mission will move Palestinians closer to genuine freedom or merely enforce a temporary calm that leaves the underlying injustices untouched.
A peacekeeping force that sustains the structures of oppression is not peacekeeping at all. It is maintenance.
Indonesia can — and must — do better.
Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA Desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East, earning a BA in international affairs from Qatar University. He later completed his MA in International Politics and PhD in politics at the University of Manchester. This article was first published by Middle East Monitor.
Relatives of Palestinians who lost their lives in Israeli attacks that violated the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip mourn at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Nov. 23, 2025.Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images
If Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for — especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country’s own genocide against Indigenous Americans.
To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones’ support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.
I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It’s painful, and I don’t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.
I’ll be thinking of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza.
Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I’ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn’t heard from them in over two weeks.
It is for families like my student’s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.
Unending Destruction
While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead of relentless, Israel’s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures.
At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.
In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it’s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal; that a major wave of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.
“What we need is a justice plan,” Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian writer and poet, told a U.N. meeting this week. “It is time to stop accepting the illusion of peace processes that only entrench injustices.”
With the state of the world as it stands, it feels unlikely that Israeli leaders will be held accountable for their war crimes any time soon. Justice for Palestine is hard to imagine, but we can continue to apply pressure in ways that have already seen paradigms shift. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election was a genuine victory against the perverse weaponization of antisemitism against Israel’s critics. Now New Yorkers must push our next mayor to uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity and international law.
And there is more those of us living in safety can do. We can send funds and share resources, as so many already do. And we can continue heading and supporting Palestinians’ call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and apartheid.
Activist sometimes say, “Solidarity begins at home.” Yet not everyone can choose their home. If you have the great fortune of spending the holidays with loved ones who share your commitments to justice and liberation, I hope your time together is full of joy. Most of the time, though, solidarity actually begins anywhere but home. So if you choose to spend time with your family knowing that it will be fraught, I wish you luck. The weekend will pass, and there’s urgent work to be done.
Relatives of Palestinians who lost their lives in Israeli attacks that violated the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip mourn at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Nov. 23, 2025.Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images
If Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for — especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country’s own genocide against Indigenous Americans.
To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones’ support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.
I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It’s painful, and I don’t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.
I’ll be thinking of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza.
Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I’ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn’t heard from them in over two weeks.
It is for families like my student’s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.
Unending Destruction
While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead of relentless, Israel’s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures.
At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.
In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it’s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal; that a major wave of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.
“What we need is a justice plan,” Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian writer and poet, told a U.N. meeting this week. “It is time to stop accepting the illusion of peace processes that only entrench injustices.”
With the state of the world as it stands, it feels unlikely that Israeli leaders will be held accountable for their war crimes any time soon. Justice for Palestine is hard to imagine, but we can continue to apply pressure in ways that have already seen paradigms shift. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election was a genuine victory against the perverse weaponization of antisemitism against Israel’s critics. Now New Yorkers must push our next mayor to uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity and international law.
And there is more those of us living in safety can do. We can send funds and share resources, as so many already do. And we can continue heading and supporting Palestinians’ call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and apartheid.
Activist sometimes say, “Solidarity begins at home.” Yet not everyone can choose their home. If you have the great fortune of spending the holidays with loved ones who share your commitments to justice and liberation, I hope your time together is full of joy. Most of the time, though, solidarity actually begins anywhere but home. So if you choose to spend time with your family knowing that it will be fraught, I wish you luck. The weekend will pass, and there’s urgent work to be done.
Civil society forces in Chile are preparing to launch an international campaign to demand the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations.
This is based on Article 6 of the United Nations Charter against the backdrop of what the campaign describes as “continuous and systematic violations” of international law and resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
The official launch of the campaign is due to take place tomorrow during a public event in the capital Santiago while a collection of signatures by electronic petition has already begun.
Campaign data indicated that the petition addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had already exceeded 57,000 signatures, with a goal of quickly reaching 100,000 signatures.
The organisers of the civil society initiative say the rapid response reflects a “broad popular response” to the dire humanitarian situation in Palestine, and embodies “international civil pressure” to get the international system moving after decades of inaction.
At the media event introducing the initiative, lawyer and former Chilean ambassador Nelson Haddad presented the legal framework for the campaign, explaining that Israel had become a “pariah state according to the definitions of international law,” and that it “does not abide by UN resolutions, nor by the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and practises systematic violations that have been ongoing for more than seven decades”.
Campaign organisers say this mechanism has been used in historical moments, such as the Korean War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that activating it now could constitute an “institutional pressure tool” capable of overcoming obstruction within the UN Security Council.
‘Reforming the UN’
The organisers also believe that the goal is not limited to imposing measures against Israel, but extends to “reopening the file of reforming the structure of the United Nations”, restricting the power of the veto, and restoring the principle of legal equality between states in order to limit the ability of one state to “disrupt international justice.”
The petition read as follows:
“We, the undersigned, respectfully but firmly appeal to you to initiate formal procedures to expel the State of Israel from the Organisation, in accordance with Article 6 of the Charter of the United Nations, because of its repeated violations of the principles contained therein.”
The letter continues:
“Emphasising that Israel, through official statements, declares its intention to eliminate the State of Palestine with all its inhabitants, infrastructure, and memory, and accuses every party that criticises its policies of ‘anti-Semitism,’ and practices repression even against Jewish citizens who oppose genocide, thus making its violations extensive, deep, and directed against everyone who disagrees with its orientations.”
The letter describes what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a “complex war crime,” noting that the occupying state is killing “Palestinians with bombs and missiles, destroying medical infrastructure, and exterminating nearly two million people through hunger and thirst”.
‘Starving population, poisoning the land’
Israel is also depriving the population of water, food, and medicine, and destroying and poisoning the land, representing “one of the most serious documented crimes in the modern era”.
The letter adds that the continued dealings of international and academic institutions with Israel are “unjustified and unacceptable”, and that “Israel must be immediately expelled from all international activities, all institutional relations with it must be severed, and a comprehensive arms embargo imposed that contributes to the continuation of the genocide.”
The message concluded by saying: “With Gaza, humanity dies too. We want Palestine to live, for it is the heart of the world.”
The Fijian Media Association (FMA) has demanded better police protection after a journalist working for the state broadcaster Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) was violently attacked outside a courthouse
In a statement today, the FMA again called for police to be more vigilant in managing security and threats outside the Suva High Court in the capital after another Fijian journalist was violently attacked by a convicted murderer leaving under police guard.
Journalist Apenisa Waqairadovu of the FBC suffered injuries to his arms and hands after he was attacked by Sairusi Ceinaturaga, who had just been convicted of murdering the one-year-old child of his de facto partner, the FMA stated.
After his conviction, Ceinaturaga walked out of the courtroom in handcuffs, followed a metre or two behind by a police officer who was outrun and scrambled to catch up when Ceinaturaga chased the journalist.
Ceinaturaga threatened Waqairadovu, swore and ran after him before pushing him down the stairs.
“This has been happening too often to journalists outside the courtroom, and we do not see any improved process despite our repeated calls for stronger security and protection,” the FMA stated.
“We have been consistently calling for urgent action from police to protect media workers — even after another convicted murderer Tevita Kapawale tried to attack journalists outside the courthouse in August.
‘Physical threats every year’
“Journalists have faced physical threats every year while covering court cases, and the Fiji Police Force’s repeated failure to provide adequate security for media personnel is unacceptable.
“The media plays a vital role in ensuring transparency and accountability in our justice system. Journalists have the right to report on matters of public interest without fear of violence or intimidation.”
The FMA is now demanding the Fiji Police Force immediately implement proper security protocols for court proceedings, including secure perimeters during prisoner transport and adequate police presence to protect journalists from violent offenders — the same call it made following the August incident.
The FMA says police must do better and relook at how they provide security at the courthouse.
“In the past officers would surround the accused person and escort him out, not let them just walk out with officers strolling at the back.
“In this case the journalist kept their distance but was still chased down and attacked and this is totally unacceptable.”
The FMA said reporters covered court stories in order to inform the public and to ensure that justice was served under the law.
“We are again urging the public to appreciate and understand the role journalists play in providing the coverage of how justice and the rule of law is administered in this country.”
Your passport photo has secretly been turned into a facial recognition police mugshot.
’s peaceful, family-friendly events for Palestine
for week 1⃣1⃣2⃣ 
(North to South): 
