17 September 25
Randi Weingarten’s new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, reveals why Trump and the right demean teachers, slash school funding, and rewrite history
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten‘s upcoming book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, draws on cautionary tales from history and Weingarten’s decades of experience in America’s public schools to argue that teaching critical thinking is essential, not just to learning but to resisting would-be dictators. It tells the story of what teachers do and why those who are afraid of freedom and opportunity try to stop them, and explains why all Americans should care about attacks on schools and teachers — whether they have school-age children or not.
“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Fascist leaders may campaign for our votes, but modern democracies more often fall because of autocratic candidates who work within the system to dismantle it, rather than coups or military takeovers.
“Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same,” writes the international democracy-monitoring organization Freedom House, reporting on the trend of “democratic backsliding” worldwide. It was Donald Trump, for instance, who fought endlessly to overturn the results of the 2020 election, still refusing to admit that he lost. And during the 2024 election, Trump said to his supporters that after this election “you’re not going to have to vote.” He’s not the first. Far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich once famously declared, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Prominent authoritarianism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that fascist and authoritarian leaders want to “damage or destroy democracy.” Democracy is people power. But fascists want one leader or a small group of elites to have all the power. And that is what’s happening in the United States right now — with billionaire Trump having enabled his shadow governing partner Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, to act as his co-president. Meanwhile, Trump’s initial second-term Cabinet was on track to be the wealthiest in history, “worth at least $382 billion — higher than the GDP of 172 countries.” The problem for fascists, then, is that a public with strong critical thinking muscles is more likely to strengthen democracy and resist authoritarianism. Scholars who study democracy worldwide are incredibly clear on this point: “On the whole, higher levels of education are associated with stronger democracies — a country with an educated populace is more likely to become or remain a democracy.” Looking at data from Latin American elections, researchers Amy Erica Smith and Mollie J. Cohen found, “The more education you have, the less likely you are to vote for an authoritarian.” In fact, some global scholars have gone as far as to suggest that “education causes democracy.”
So is the opposite true? Yes, history has shown us that. For instance, in 2017, the Financial Times found that among Dutch voters, having attained less education was the greatest predictor of support for the country’s anti-immigrant far-right political party. And after winning a primary election during the 2016 election, Donald Trump bragged how well he did with certain demographics, saying, “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” This may or may not have been just another sloppy aside from Trump, but it does reflect a deeper truth. Donald Trump was able to rise to power, yes, because of his keen political instincts and charisma, but also because he routinely says things he thinks voters want to hear, whether he can actually do anything about them or not.
Analyzing the source of his 2024 election win, Trump said, “I started using the word — the groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.” But after his win, he admitted, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard” — and indeed many of his second-term proposals, including tariffs and mass deportations, would arguably increase the price of groceries and other consumer goods. In fact, immediately after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the price of eggs went up.
Authoritarians actively attack truth, knowledge, and critical thinking because an uninformed public is easier to control. Degrading public education and critical thinking skills may only prime more Americans to not recognize disinformation and misinformation and take authoritarian leaders like Trump at their word.
Psychologist Bob Altemeyer studied personality traits that make people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. In his 2006 book The Authoritarians, Altemeyer documented his “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, writing: “The authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an ‘easy mark,’ custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.”
In other words, those inclined to support authoritarianism exhibit a general avoidance of or allergy to critical thinking. And authoritarians like it that way.
It makes me wonder whether far-right extremists are trying to deliberately inculcate an anti-critical thinking, pro-authoritarian disposition by undermining public education. Research conducted in 2004 and 2007 — even before our hyperpolarized current political climate — found that “blue states” that tend to vote for Democrats spend more money on education than “red states” that tend to vote for Republicans. Not incidentally, the students in red states also fare worse on math and reading assessments. As Diane Ravitch notes, if Trump loves the poorly educated, “His plans for his second term guarantee that there will be more of them to love.”
Certainly, Trump’s first executive orders in 2025 pointed in that direction — asserting unprecedented federal control of local school curricula to enforce the administration’s personal ideology against diversity, equity, and inclusion, while also directing federal funds for public schools to be used instead for private school vouchers and homeschooling. That level of federal strong-arming is contradictory, by the way, given that Trump has called for sending education “back to the states” — although states have always controlled education and have since the beginning of the republic. The federal government has a limited — but important — role to bolster opportunity for all, which of course Trump is also threatening. These tactics neither help students nor improve education. Trump’s executive orders merely perpetuate the strategy of demeaning public school teachers and sowing division while systematically defunding public education.
It’s a downward spiral. Faced with some of the lowest-performing education systems in the country, do these red states work with teachers to improve math and reading instruction or maybe incorporate innovative, skills-based learning models? Do they take action to adequately fund public education? Certainly some states have — like Mississippi, which worked with teachers to dramatically improve literacy rates statewide, a program that was so effective it inspired the AFT to work with several partners to launch a similar approach called Reading Universe.
But more often than not, instead of these states working to improve public education, we see a troubling trend in the other direction — red states doubling down on far-right indoctrination. In Oklahoma, the state’s extremist school superintendent required every school in the state to teach the Bible and tried to use taxpayer money to buy Trump Bible editions. Plus the Oklahoma superintendent tried to force every school in the state to show students a video of him praying for Donald Trump. This is the same Oklahoma superintendent who, after a terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, blamed teachers’ unions for “teaching kids to hate their country” in classrooms that were actually “terrorist training camps.” What’s more disturbing than people in positions of power saying this garbage is that people actually believe them. During the 2024 election, when Donald Trump and others falsely accused immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating pets,” those outrageous, flagrant lies led to dozens of bomb threats against local schools and other public agencies. Again, the goal wasn’t knowledge and truth but lies and indoctrination.
And what do fascists do when they’re worried that students might learn about the truth on their own? They ban books. Book bans are a very old and deeply disturbing tactic that, frankly, I never thought we’d see with such horrifying scope and scale in our country. But here we are. According to the ACLU, in 2023, “more than 3,000 books have been banned in schools across America. These books disproportionately feature stories about LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, and others who have been marginalized.” Even though gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and teens today, the far right goes to extraordinary lengths to block any restrictions whatsoever on access to assault weapons or high-capacity rounds of ammunition. But they’ll use every means at their disposal to make sure high school students can’t check a book about gay identity out of the restricted section of the school library.
This has profoundly disturbing precedents. In March 1933, an election consolidated Hitler’s power. Two months later, Nazis ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering medical center that studied gender and sexuality. The institute advocated for queer rights. Nazis removed all of the books from the institute — 20,000 books in total — for the first book burning in the Nazi regime. Book burning is part of a broader fascist pattern of attacking knowledge, freedom of information, and critical thinking. The Nazi government also closed down or took over newspapers, controlled radio broadcasts, and even made it treasonous to tell a joke about Hitler. And the attack on gay and trans books wasn’t just symbolic. The Nazi government eventually rounded up and jailed gay and trans Germans and thousands were sent to concentration camps — which presaged slaughtering 6 million Jews as well as people with disabilities and others. Dehumanizing groups of people isn’t just rhetorical; it paves the path for violence.
The point of diverse books isn’t to promote one identity or another — it’s to make sure all students have access to age-appropriate reading to inform their lives and choices. Factual, trustworthy, honest information isn’t propaganda — it’s power. Over the past several decades, one of the most banned books in America has been It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris. At quick glance, it’s sort of easy to understand why. It’s a book about sex, all different kinds of sex, written in an age-appropriate way for a middle school audience, with illustrations. Ideally, every child would be learning about safer sex and healthy relationships at home, but many aren’t. Plus the far right has systematically attacked and undermined sex education for decades.
Age-appropriate books and curriculum about health and safety provide vital information to all students and can even be lifesaving for some. One story about It’s Perfectly Normal stopped me in my tracks. A 10-year-old girl at the library with her mother checked out a copy of the book. Eventually, the girl showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, “This is me.” The girl was being sexually abused by her father and the book gave her a way to tell her mom what was happening. Eventually, when the father was convicted, the judge in the case said, “There were heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.” Robie Harris, in retelling the story, said the girl’s mother was also a hero for listening to her daughter. And the librarian who ordered the book was a hero, too. Over the decades, Harris was smeared as a pornographer, a child abuser, and worse simply because she believed “kids have a right to have the accurate information that can keep them healthy and safe.” Banned books save lives. When we ban books, we take away power from parents to decide what information they do or don’t want their children to have access to. Banning books is anti-democratic and anti-American. That’s why the majority of Americans oppose the government legislating what can or cannot be in schoolbooks. And a majority of Americans “oppose efforts to have books removed from their local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them.”
Books give students the power of knowledge and critical thinking. That’s why, in contrast to those banning books, the AFT gives out books. In schools and at book fairs, during school days and on weekends, we’ve given away more than 10 million free books to children and their families over the course of our decade-long initiative. In just the last two years alone, we organized four hundred book giveaway events in 25 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Our agenda is literacy. For students and their families, literacy is the key to knowledge. And loving reading is the key to literacy. We give away books that are geared to interest and excite young people and foster the love of reading.
I remember a grandmother of Haitian descent at one of our free book fairs in New York City. With pride in her eyes, she thanked me for the wide variety of books we were giving away while she clasped a copy of Freedom Soup, a book about the traditional New Year’s Day dish that celebrates Haitian independence. She was excited to read it to her grandchildren so they could learn about their heritage.
At another book fair in McDowell County, West Virginia, a little boy had a book clutched so tightly to his chest that I couldn’t even read the cover. He exclaimed to me, excitedly, “I’m going straight home to put this in my library!” I asked him what other books were in his library and, without missing a beat, he gushed, “This is the first one!” While fascists want to control what children read and how children think, teachers spread knowledge — and literally give away books.
We partner with the organization First Book and we use member dues to help buy books in bulk. Our members agree that buying books to give away is an expression of our values. In 2024 alone, we gave out over 575,000 books in 144 events across the country. The year before that, we put over 1 million books in the hands of children, parents, and teachers from Portland, Oregon, to St. Petersburg, Florida, and everywhere in between. Our members love this work. They know access to books and information is key. We just want kids to read and learn and think for themselves. We want to help them learn how to think, not what to think. Because that’s fundamental to their development and to a healthy democracy.
Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the extremist Moms for Liberty activists, bankrolled by billionaires and the far right, who took over school boards and launched a culture war by banning books and pride flags. In the Central Bucks School District outside Philadelphia, the Moms for Liberty-controlled school board banned several LGBTQ-themed books under a policy secretly written with the help of a far-right Christian “think tank.” In the case of one of the books they banned, there was only one copy in the whole district. But extremists were apparently so concerned it was “dangerous” that they mailed images from the book to 17,000 households in the community.
Try to wrap your head around that. It just goes to show that Moms for Liberty’s real goal is to spread anti-LGBTQ hate and fearmongering to divide the community and distract from the fact that they are trying to systematically defund public education. But remember, it didn’t work. In 2023, in that district and nationwide, Moms for Liberty school board members were roundly voted out of office — by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents horrified that fascist factions were creating problems in our schools instead of solving the actual problems local districts are facing.
Americans don’t want far-right culture wars. They want teachers, school nurses, better science labs, decent ventilation and air-conditioning — and they want their kids to be adept at critical thinking.
How Pam Bondi Became MAGA’s Patsy
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on June 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. (photo: Getty)
Sophia Tesfaye, Salon
Tesfaye writes: "The right needs a hate speech scapegoat."
Trump, for his part, has given several indications that he’s ready to move on from headlines dominated by Kirk’s killing. When asked by reporters two days after Kirk’s death to address the meaning of the popular podcaster’s assassination, he bragged about the White House ballroom, which is now under construction. On Sunday he skipped a vigil for Kirk, held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to golf.
The Turning Point USA founder was a major MAGA organizer, and in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss, he became one of the loudest “Stop the Steal” voices. So Trump’s administration is now moving full tilt to use his killing, hitting the airwaves in an attempt to manufacture consent for their coming crackdown on civil liberties. (Coincidentally, for the next two weeks, the entire U.S. Constitution, with all its 27 amendments, will be on display at the National Archives for the first time in history.) But the White House’s rush job is so sloppy that even Trump’s most ardent supporters are crying foul — and it looks as though Attorney General Pam Bondi might take the fall.
“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society [for hate speech],” Bondi explained to Katie Miller, the right-wing podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, on Monday. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Kirk, however, argued that “hate speech does not exist legally in America.”
Hours after her conversation with Miller, Bondi appeared on Fox News to announce that the Department of Justice, which reportedly just removed a study showing domestic terrorists are right-wing, is investigating claims that businesses have refused to print Kirk’s picture for vigils. “We can prosecute you for that,” she warned.
As with her claim to have the Epstein files on her desk, Bondi’s rush to feed the Fox News clip mill without facts or evidence as backup has again exploded in her face. Almost immediately, nearly all of MAGA media, from Megyn Kelly to Tucker Carlson, slammed the attorney general’s comments as an affront to free speech.
“Pam Bondi said one of the dumbest things you can say as an attorney general,” Megyn Kelly said on her massively popular podcast Tuesday. “Pam Bondi just said there’s hate speech. That’s a lie,” Tucker Carlson told his podcast audience. “She must think she is the Attorney General of the United Kingdom,” quipped Red State founder Erick Erickson. “Get rid of her. Today,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh demanded. On CNN, even the usually loquacious MAGA mouthpiece Scott Jennings struggled to defend her.
In a post on X following the backlash, Bondi attempted to clarify her comments but reiterated her pledge to apply the law with political bias. “You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech,’” she wrote. The attorney general did not define, however, how the federal government defines doxxing.
While many on the right are patting themselves on the back for rejecting Bondi’s hate speech comments, she is simply saying out loud what others in the administration, from the president on down, have hinted at while using Kirk’s assassination as political cover.
To close out the first episode of Kirk’s podcast since his passing, guest co-host Vice President JD Vance called on Kirk’s followers — whose numbers have reportedly swelled since the shooting — to “put on the full armor of God” and “commit ourselves to that cause which Charlie gave his life.” Vance instructed Republicans to call people’s employers and have them fired if they are saying things about Kirk that his followers find offensive. (Notably, after Trump’s last vice president was threatened with political violence on Jan. 6, the president justified the protesters’ righteous anger and eventually pardoned them.) Vance also named liberal philanthropist George Soros and the Ford Foundation as targets of the federal government, accusing them of funding The Nation magazine, which he had attacked over its criticism of Kirk.
Trump, of course, made clear he has no concern with principles and sees free speech through the prism of what the issue means for him personally, seemingly confusing people who hate him with hate speech. First, he revealed on Monday that he has instructed Bondi to investigate pro-Palestine protesters who interrupted one of his few public outings in Washington, D.C., last week. ”I’ve asked Pam to look into that because they should be put in jail.” On CNN Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested the protesters could be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Then, when Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked Trump on Tuesday about Bondi’s hate speech comments, he responded: “We’ll probably go after people like you…because you treat me so unfairly — it’s hate.” On Monday, Trump announced he was suing the New York Times for $15 billion, which follows lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the parent companies of ABC News and CBS News.
MAGA’s response to Kirk’s tragic assassination has been a kind of mask-off moment for the right’s persecution complex. In 2022, Stephen Miller wrote, “If the idea of free speech enrages you — the cornerstone of democratic self-government — then I regret to inform you that you are a fascist.” Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk claimed that “The Democratic Party openly wants to take your freedom of speech under the guise of what THEY deem to be ’hate.’” Shortly after taking office, the vice president stood before European leaders in Munich and warned that free speech was “in retreat” across the West.
By using a national tragedy as a pretext to flip the script and set out to limit protected speech, the Trump administration is echoing patterns seen in darker chapters of world history. MAGA media is trying to throw Pam Bondi under the bus, but it’s clear the plan is much bigger than her.
US Justice Department Removes Study Finding Far-Right Extremists Commit ‘Far More’ Violence
Signage outside the US Department of Justice headquarters in Washington DC in 2023. (photo: Bloomberg)
Report finding rightwing extremists have killed more Americans than other domestic terrorist groups vanished from DoJ website
The report, now archived, titled What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism, vanished from the Department of Justice website between 12 and 13 September, according to Daniel Malmar, a PhD student studying online extremism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who had been monitoring the page. Kirk, the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder and Trump ally, was gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University on 10 September.
The vanished study opened with: “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged with Kirk’s murder and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. In the aftermath of the shooting, Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have blamed “radical left” elements for the attack.
The National Institute of Justice study, which was based on research spanning three decades, represented one of the most comprehensive government assessments of domestic terrorism patterns. It found that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States” and that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism”.
Where the report once appeared, the justice department wrote it was “reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent executive orders”, according to 404Media, though the page is now unavailable.
But the findings align with independent research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which analyzed 893 terrorist plots between 1994 and 2020. That study concluded: “Rightwing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.”
In congressional testimony in 2023, Heidi Beirich, the executive vice-president of Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told lawmakers as an expert witness that “data on acts of political violence clearly shows that it is the far right that is driving terrorism in the US, including targeting and, in certain cases, murdering law enforcement”.
“That is not to say there is no violence from far-left actors,” she continued, “it is just simply not on the scale or as deadly as what is coming from far-right actors.”
Kirk had built Turning Point USA into a major conservative youth organization and spoke at last year’s Republican national convention. He was addressing students when he was shot.
The justice department has not responded to requests for comment about the study’s removal.
ICE Raids Confirm Worst Fears of Young Immigrants
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrest a foreign national during a targeted enforcement operation in Los Angeles. (photo: AP)
Immigration sweeps are having a chilling effect on Dreamers, key leaders in the California resistance.
But last week, the fake news became real. On the morning of Feb. 9, the Los Angeles office of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights was flooded with calls from attorneys and eyewitnesses. It took immigration officials one day to confirm that they had arrested more than 160 people during an operation targeting “known street gang members, child sex offenders, and deportable foreign nationals with significant drug trafficking convictions.” According to advocates, the raid also picked up so-called collateral arrests—family members, roommates, and even people who opened doors who also happened to be undocumented.
This wasn’t supposed to happen so soon—at least not until California could become the nation’s first “sanctuary state.” Many state lawmakers have been working behind the scenes to give shape to the anti-Trump “resistance” movement: fast-tracking legislation that would prevent local law enforcement from sharing information with ICE agents, while using state funds to help immigrants defend themselves in federal deportation cases.
Gov. Jerry Brown vowed at his recent State of the State Address that his administration would defend all immigrants, “every man, woman and child— who has come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.” According to a recent poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, 65 percent of adults in the state say local governments should pursue their own policies to protect the rights of unauthorized immigrants.
These raids, meanwhile, and those likely to come, are having an impact on a burgeoning group of young activists: California’s Dreamers.
California has the largest immigrant population in the country. More than 10 million Californians were born outside of the U.S.; an estimated one million of those are undocumented. One out of 10 workers in the state is without proper documents and roughly 250,000 so-called Dreamers, children brought to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants, call the state home.
During the Obama years, the Dreamers were the friendly, unthreatening public face of the immigrant rights movement. They were between 15 and 30 years old, enrolled in school and thriving academically. Most notably, they had clean records: They didn’t cut Trump’s “bad hombres” profile.
“They’re the good ones,” Maria Blanco, executive director of the Undocumented Student Legal Services Center, which provides immigration-related legal services for undocumented students at six University of California campuses, told me recently. “They came through no fault of their own; they are the future.”
Dreamers changed the discourse on immigration in California before Trump came along. They carried a powerful message, even as the legislative proposal that would have granted them permanent residency—the DREAM Act—failed to pass Congress. Their activism did win them Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012, allowing those who entered the country as minors to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit. But since then, a growing number of Dreamers have started to reject the special treatment that was granted to them—and not to their parents. The anti-immigration rhetoric of Trump, as well as the white nationalism ethos of his key adviser, Steve Bannon, has further fanned this movement of resistance.
“Now they have a new consciousness about including everyone and not just young people,” Blanco said. “I believe they will become a real force in movements that go beyond Dreamers and that include all immigrants.”
That new consciousness is meanwhile adding to a growing resistance. Starting with California’s Proposition 8, which restricted same-sex marriage from 2008 through 2012, Dreamers protested alongside LGBT activists. Their get-out-the-vote campaigns mobilized many Latinos, granting former President Barack Obama 71 percent of the California vote. And their efforts to obtain in-state tuition prompted the creation of resource centers across the state, providing a safe haven and extensive counseling services for Dreamers and all other immigrant students.
Dreamers have continued to be activists. Soon after Trump signed his travel ban, for example, protests broke out at major airports in the West, including Denver, Phoenix and Seattle. Among those who showed up to the impromptu protests at Los Angeles International Airport were Dreamers. But, thanks to the fear of immigration raids—fears that have now proven well-founded—not every Dreamer who wanted to be at the protests took part. The Trump administration’s attitude toward undocumented immigrants is already having a chilling effect.
Karen Zapien, a Dreamer activist, told me she was moved by the response she saw on social media. Zapien herself didn’t go to Los Angeles International Airport. The 23-year-old stayed home, fearful, though many of her friends did rally at the airport.
“I have such a huge sense of despair these days,” said Zapien. “It’s the first time in my life that I see myself not going out to the marches.”
Zapien was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico by family members, when she was just a year old. Her parents joined her six months later, by way of a dangerous crossing along the Arizona border.
Her story isn’t all that different from those of many other California Dreamers. She realized she was undocumented while she was in high school, and soon after realized she couldn’t receive financial assistance to attend her university of choice, University of California, Los Angeles. When DACA became a reality, Zapien was among the first students to benefit. She’s now on her last year at California State University, Fullerton, even as she juggles three jobs—accountant, a waitress, and intern at the Internal Revenue Service.
Despite her fear of deportation, Zapien believes that the immigrant rights movement in California is now the strongest it’s ever been.
Zapien graduates this May, and soon after her DACA permit will be up for renewal. But there isn’t much that she and others Dreamers can do now, other than hope that their status stays protected.
During his campaign, President Trump promised to end the program. But late last month, a day before he signed the travel ban executive order, he seemed to tone down his rhetoric during an interview. “I do have a big heart. We’re going to take care of everybody,” he said. “Where you have great people that are here that have done a good job, they should be far less worried.”
Dreamers like Zapien remain unconvinced, partly because the raids seem less targeted than officials suggest, and partly because among those who were caught in the latest raid was 54-year-old Manuel Mosqueda López. A Mexican national with no criminal record, Mosqueda López was at home early in the morning when five ICE agents asked him for papers, allegedly on the lookout for another man.
Palestinians Flee as Israeli Troops Push Into Gaza City
UN estimates suggest at least 650,000 people remain in Gaza City as Israel ramps up its offensive. (photo: Reuters)
Israel says its aim is to free hostages held by Hamas and defeat up to 3,000 fighters in what it describes as the group's "last stronghold", but the offensive has drawn widespread international condemnation.
The leaders of more than 20 major aid agencies, including Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that "the inhumanity of the situation in Gaza is unconscionable".
It comes a day after a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza - an allegation the Israeli government strongly denied.
Amid large-scale Israeli bombardment, Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry said al-Rantisi children's hospital in Gaza City was targeted in three separate Israeli attacks on Tuesday night, prompting around half its patients to leave.
A source at the hospital said there were no injuries but that air conditioning units, water tanks and solar panels were severely damaged.
"This hospital is the only specialist facility for children with cancer, kidney failure, and other life-threatening conditions," said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was looking into the reports.
The IDF announced on Wednesday morning that it had struck more than 150 targets across Gaza City in two days in support of its ground troops.
As part of its operations, the IDF is also reportedly utilising old military vehicles loaded with explosives that have been modified to be controlled remotely. They are being driven to Hamas positions and detonated, according to Israeli media.
Resident Nidal al-Sherbi told the BBC Arabic's Middle East Daily programme: "Last night was extremely difficult, with continuous explosions and shelling that lasted from night until dawn."
"Israeli vehicles advanced from Sheikh Radwan, Tal al-Hawa, and also from Shejaiya. It was a very, very frightening night."
For days - as Israel has ramped up strikes in and around the city - huge columns of Palestinians have streamed southwards in donkey carts, rickshaws, vehicles strapped high with belongings, and on foot.
Until now, they have been forced to flee down the main coastal road to an Israel-designated "humanitarian area" in al-Mawasi.
But on Wednesday, the IDF announced that it would temporarily open a second route for people to travel on - the central Salah al-Din road. It said the route would be open for 48 hours from 12:00 local time (10:00 BST).
Many Palestinians say they are unable to move south due to the rising costs associated with the journey. Some say renting a small truck now costs the equivalent of £660 ($900), while a tent for five people sells for about £880 ($1,200).
Aid groups, UN agencies and others say the "humanitarian area" they are expected to move to is heavily overcrowded and insufficient to support the roughly two million Palestinians who are expected to cram into it.
Some who followed the military's orders to evacuate to the zone say they found no space to pitch their tents and so returned north.
"Everyday leaflets are thrown at us ordering evacuation, while the Israeli army shells buildings in every direction," Munir Azzam, who is in northern Gaza, told the BBC. "But where can we go? We have no refuge in the South."
The IDF said on Tuesday that around 350,000 people had fled Gaza City, while the UN put the figure at 190,000 since August. Estimates suggest at least 650,000 remain.
Gaza's health ministry said on Wednesday that 98 people had been killed and 385 injured by Israeli fire in the past 24 hours. Another four people had died from malnutrition, taking the total number of malnutrition-related deaths since a UN-backed body declared famine in Gaza City in late August to 154, it added.
Meanwhile, families of the 48 remaining hostages held by Hamas - 20 of whom are believed to be alive - protested near Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem on Tuesday and Wednesday, arguing that the offensive would endanger their loved ones.
"All day long, you boast about killing and destruction," said Macabit Mayer, aunt of hostages Gali and Ziv Berman. "Bringing down buildings in Gaza - who are you bringing these buildings down on?"
Pope Leo XIV meanwhile said conditions for Palestinians in Gaza were "unacceptable" and repeated his call for a ceasefire.
"I am deeply close to the Palestinian people of Gaza, who continue to live in fear and under unacceptable conditions, forced yet again to leave their land," he told his weekly audience at the Vatican.
Elsewhere, the European Union's main executive body, the European Commission, proposed imposing sanctions on Israel over its conduct during the Gaza war and its decision to advance the E1 settlement project, which would effectively divide the occupied West Bank in two.
The proposal includes suspending some trade-related provisions of the EU's association agreement with Israel, as well as sanctions on "extremist ministers" in the Israeli government and violent Israeli settlers. The settlements are illegal under international law.
Israel has warned the EU not to impose the measures, which do not currently have sufficient support from member states to pass.
Among the findings of the UN commission of inquiry's report which concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza was that Israeli security forces had perpetrated sexual and gender-based violence, directly targeted children with the intention to kill them, and carried out a "systemic and widespread attack" on religious, cultural and education sites.
Israel's foreign ministry said it categorically rejected the report, denouncing it as "distorted and false".
Israel launched its war in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 65,062 people have been killed in Israeli attacks since then, almost half of them women and children, according to Gaza's health ministry.
With famine having already been declared in Gaza City by a UN-backed food security body, the UN has warned that an intensification of the offensive will push civilians into "even deeper catastrophe".
An Average Week in 2024: Three Environmental Defenders Murdered or Disappeared
People gather for a protest against the disappearance of Mapuche leader and environmental defender Julia Chuñil in front of La Moneda Palace on April 8 in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Anadolu)
The mining industry is the sector linked to the most attacks against people trying to protect the environment and their homelands.
They never returned.
As president of her Indigenous Mapuche community, Chuñil had led efforts to recover ancestral Mapuche lands and defend the evergreen Valdivian forest, rapidly being replaced by timber industry plantations. That made her a target and the subject of repeated harassment from a local businessman. More than one attempt was made on her life before she vanished.
Chuñil is one of 146 environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year, according to a new report from the watchdog group Global Witness.
Environmental defenders are people peacefully acting to protect their homelands and other ecosystems from pollution, degradation and destruction. Since Global Witness began tracking annual deaths in 2012, more than 2,253 environmental defenders have been murdered or disappeared. Many of the victims opposed extractive industries, such as mining, logging and industrial agriculture, or had challenged systemic issues like organized crime and land theft.
“What all of these attacks have in common is that they are intended to silence the voice of territorial and environmental defenders,” said the report’s lead author, Laura Furones.
For the third year in a row, Colombia had the largest share of reported attacks, with 48 cases, down from 79 in 2023.
Guatemala (20), Mexico (19), Brazil (12) and the Philippines (8) followed, with Guatemala recording the largest toll per capita. Killings there increased fivefold from 2023, largely due to a surge in crime linked to land grabs and environmental exploitation.
“Decades of corrupt deals between political and corporate interests in Guatemala have enabled widespread exploitation of the country’s natural resources,” the report said.
The overall number of attacks dropped from 196 in 2023, but Global Witness warned the decline doesn’t mean the world is safer for defenders.
“The gathering of information continues to be a challenge,” said Furones, senior advisor to the land and environmental defenders campaign at Global Witness.
Global Witness works with local civil society organizations to independently verify reported attacks. But failing justice systems, armed conflict and the remote locations where many attacks take place make it difficult to establish details of the assaults. Perversely, the more repressive a government is, and the more likely reprisals are, the more likely attacks are to go unreported.
Africa’s nine murders and Asia’s 16 last year are likely an undercount, the researchers said.
“Environmental defenders across Africa play a vital role, often at great risk to their own safety or lives,” said Peter Frederick Gilbey, communications lead at Hub Cymru Africa, a group that supports African civil society.
“The obstacles to monitoring defenders, from conflict to shrinking civic space and fear of retaliation by corrupt law enforcement, vigilantes or in conflict zones, are very real, and often mean attacks go unseen or unreported,” he added.
Global Witness said the vast majority of reported attacks, 82 percent, occurred in Latin America.
Like Chuñil, around a third of victims were Indigenous—an alarming figure given that they are only 6 percent of the global population.
Nega Pataxó, a spiritual leader for the Indigenous Pataxó people and professor in Brazil’s Potiraguá region, was one of them. She spent years fighting alongside her brother to recover and protect their people’s land in Brazil’s Potiraguá region.
Pataxó didn’t know when she woke the morning of Jan. 21, 2024, that more than 200 farmers—members of a group dedicated to removing Indigenous peoples from their lands—were coordinating a violent assault on WhatsApp. That afternoon, dozens of pickup trucks surrounded Pataxó people and gunmen opened fire.
A video circulating on social media after the shooting showed the attackers celebrating the killing. To date, no one has been held accountable for Pataxó’s death.
Neither the Chilean nor Brazilian embassies in Washington, D.C., responded to requests for comment.
Beyond the Killings
The report also said that non-deadly attacks on environmental defenders persist: threats, sexual violence, online harassment and stigmatization, like labeling defenders as “anti-development” or “communists.”
Lawsuits aimed at bleeding defenders of resources and cowing them into silence are also common, the report said. And criminalization is increasing.
In July last year, a Cambodian court found 10 environmental activists guilty of “plotting” against the government. Three were also found guilty of “insulting the king.” The activists, who work for the youth-led environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia, had uncovered corrupt natural resource deals, including exports of sand to Singapore and fake hydroelectric dams.
A year before their sentencing, the organization received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, for defending ecosystems in one of the most repressive countries in the world. Five of the activists are now serving six- to eight-year prison terms, four others are in hiding or in exile and Spanish activist Alex Gonzalez-Davidson was deported and banned from returning.
Gonzalez-Davidson said the primary goal of Cambodia’s environmental destruction—from extreme deforestation rates to intensive mining and the privatization of national park land—has been “to enrich the tiny elite that rules over the country.”
The Hun family has dominated Cambodia’s political system for decades, with human rights groups criticizing the government for political violence, manipulated elections and widespread corruption.
“The five in jail had been successful at exposing and stopping some of these corrupt schemes,” Gonzalez-Davidson said. “This caused those in power to lose access to very profitable cash cows, so the regime retaliated by using the puppet judiciary to sentence them to lengthy jail terms.”
The Cambodian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.
Human rights groups have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate environmental crimes in Cambodia, alleging there have been more than 100 incidents of forced evictions, murders, violence and illegal imprisonment of land activists. Lawyer Richard J. Rogers, who drafted that request, said of the Mother Nature activists: “It is the Cambodian government that has been terrorizing its own people for decades, not these brave young environmental defenders.”
Standing up to Extractive Industries
On Sept. 14, 2024, Juan López, 46, was leaving church when bullets ripped through his car, killing him.
A year earlier, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights told the Honduran government to take immediate action to protect López, who had faced death threats for his opposition to a large open-pit iron oxide mine. The mine and its petroleum coke power plant and an iron oxide pelletizing plant threatened water sources for dozens of communities.
Honduran prosecutors charged three people in connection with López’s killing, but no charges have been filed against the “intellectual perpetrators of the crime,” according to a letter sent by U.S. lawmakers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week, urging the U.S. Department of State to press Honduras on the issue.
The Honduran embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment. There is no indication the mine owner was involved in Lopez’s death.
The mining industry was linked to the largest share of attacks last year, with 29, followed by logging and agribusiness. Deadly attacks were driven by conflicts over infrastructure projects like roads and dams, as well as over poaching.
“Rising demand for food, fuel and commodities has seen land grabs surge for benefiting industries like mining, logging, agribusiness and infrastructure projects,” the report said.
A spokesperson for the industry group International Council on Mining and Metals said protecting and respecting human rights is a “core commitment” for its members and that the group recognizes the “vital role that human rights defenders and environmental advocates play, often in very difficult circumstances. Threats, violence or reprisals against them are unacceptable.”
The group added that all ICMM members must implement principles that include conducting human rights due diligence, consulting meaningfully with affected communities and providing effective grievance mechanisms. Last year, ICMM added guidance aimed at helping companies “identify and mitigate risks to defenders and others who may be affected by their operations, while promoting transparency and accountability,” the spokesperson said.
Often, the soy, beef, timber, minerals, oil and other resources extracted by industries linked to killings are exported to high-consuming countries such as the United States.
Caught in a Battleground
Some defenders are trapped between the interests of legalized extractive industries and violent criminal groups, both vying for control of local resources.
Mining companies, oil firms and drug trafficking groups have all sought to invade rural communities in Colombia’s Putumayo region, one of the country’s most dangerous.
“We’ve found ourselves caught in a battleground where control over land and resources is the goal,” local leader Jani Silva told Global Witness.
Silva helped establish Colombia’s first protected peasant reserves. For her advocacy, she has faced death threats and assassination attempts for over a decade, having to relocate multiple times. At the root of communities’ struggles, she said, is “gaining rights to our land and protecting everything within it.”
In an open letter, Silva said her work isn’t only about defending local communities, but that there is “an immense responsibility on our shoulders because everyone breathes the oxygen that our forests and wetlands produce.”
“When there are threats to our territory,” she added, “it is not just our community that is endangered, but the entire world.”
Silva is one of more than 10,000 Colombian human rights defenders receiving government protection because of threats and attacks. Yet this is not enough, Global Witness said. Colombia has had the highest number of tracked murders of environmental defenders since 2012, and only 31 percent of human rights defenders requesting protection have received it.
Of the 48 defenders killed in Colombia last year, 13 were from the Nasa community, with six of them acting as Indigenous guards defending their territory due to the lack of state protection.
The Colombian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.
Protecting Earth’s Most Biodiverse Places
On Nigeria’s southwest coast, the ancient Cross River rainforest is a refuge for endangered wildlife, including forest elephants, gorillas and pygmy hippopotami. It’s also home to the Ekuri community of Indigenous Nkukorli peoples, who have lived sustainably in the forest for generations.
British colonization led to intensive resource extraction, a problem that has escalated in recent decades. Ekuri leaders took a stand in 1997, creating a community-led, award-winning conservation model that divided the forest into protected zones and areas for sustainable logging.
Their success was cut short when the state government imposed a logging moratorium that cut off the Ekuri’s revenue stream from sustainable timber sales, funnelling the timber trade toward criminal groups. In the ensuing years, the government reversed the moratorium, and legal and illegal loggers have ravaged the forest: 11 percent of the region’s tree cover has been lost as of 2024, with about 40 percent of the Ekuri community’s forest destroyed since 2018, according to the Global Witness report.
People who speak out against loggers face violence and criminalization, Global Witness said. When Ekuri eco-guards confiscated equipment of loggers operating on their lands without permission, company representatives and 30 armed state security forces descended on the community, opening fire, according to a 2023 submission to United Nations human rights experts.
“There’s a huge level of conspiracy in the logging operation. Most of the concessions and permits are fake,” Ekuri activist Odey Oyama told Global Witness.
In recent months, Oyama tried to stop illegal loggers from moving stolen timber from the forest. In January, he was arrested by more than 40 armed police officers and charged with promoting inter-communal war—a crime that carries a potential life sentence. In April, the charges were dismissed for lacking an evidentiary basis.
The Nigerian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.
China, the United States, Japan and European countries are the largest consumers of illegal timber. Just under a third of last year’s attacks on environmental defenders were associated with organized crime.
Leaving Defenders More Isolated
Global Witness pointed to “alarming shifts” in environmental and human rights policy around the world, including recent U.S. government actions.
The Trump administration has pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, scaled back reporting on human rights abuses, including on abuses against Indigenous peoples and has gutted programs that combat drug-trafficking groups enriching themselves through environmental crimes.
“These shifts undermine the potential for decisive and transformational action to protect our planet and those who defend it,” the report said. “They leave defenders more isolated and vulnerable to attack than ever.”
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