“Congressional Republicans would rather risk a government shutdown than reverse course and preserve healthcare tax credits millions rely on," said one critic.
By Brett Wilkins
As the White House threatens mass layoffs of federal workers in the event of a looming GOP government shutdown, healthcare and consumer advocates warned Friday that millions of Americans would either lose insurance coverage or see their premiums spike—and some critics say that’s exactly what Republicans want.
On Wednesday, the White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to fire large numbers of employees if the government shuts down on October 1, a move that critics say OMB Director Russ Vought is using as leverage to force the hand of Senate Democrats who last week blocked advancement of a stopgap spending measure passed in the House.
Democrats are seeking to negotiate bipartisan legislation that includes an extension of subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, which are set to expire at the end of the year. Legislation introduced earlier this month by House and Senate Democratic leaders offered a short-term fix for keeping the government running while permanently extending ACA subsidies, reversing Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump on July 4, lifting the freeze on foreign aid, and restoring funding for public broadcasting.
“The president and Republican congressional leaders are doing nothing to address a looming, massive healthcare cost spike for more than 20 million people,” Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), said in a statement Friday. According to CBPP, that’ roughly the number of Americans who will be affected if the ACA’s premium tax credits are allowed to expire at the end of this year, which they will absent congressional action.
“This is how dictators and comic book archvillains behave.”
Taking aim at the measure proposed by GOP lawmakers that would keep the government running through November 21, Parrot—who decried the mass firing threat as “blatant extortion”—said that “Republicans are claiming their short-term continuing resolution is business as usual, but nothing about this moment is normal.”
Lawmakers introduced two dueling continuing resolutions earlier this month; both measures failed to pass. Congress must pass any continuing resolution by October 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to prevent a shutdown.
“The Trump administration is threatening to inflict massive harm on all of us unless Democrats in Congress surrender in the funding fight,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “A temporary lapse in funding does not provide grounds for an agency to fire federal workers indiscriminately—and really, this is just a threat to harm the public if Republicans don’t get their way.”
“This whole saga demonstrates exactly who is to blame for a shutdown: Trump and Republicans in Congress,” Gilbert added. “Instead of negotiating a funding deal in good faith like every White House and Congress in history has managed to do, Trump and Republicans are threatening the American people with ruin if they don’t get their way.”
“This is how dictators and comic book archvillains behave,” she said. “Congress must not back down in the face of this reprehensible and un-American threat against all of us.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) faced intense criticism in March for leading a small group of Democrats who helped end the last such standoff. At the time, he warned that a shutdown would be a “gift” allowing Republicans “to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.”
The evisceration of federal agencies—as pursued by the Trump administration and its so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—is a main objective of the far-right blueprint for a government overhaul known as Project 2025, whose executive policy section was authored by Vought.
Parrott noted that this time around, Republicans “have so far refused bipartisan negotiations to prevent families across the country already struggling to afford healthcare and other basics from taking this hit. Indeed, they have rejected bipartisan discussions on anything related to year-end spending bills, even as they need bipartisan support in the Senate to pass short- or long-term funding bills.”
“Congressional Republicans and the president need to come to the table with Democrats to reach a deal that prevents healthcare cost spikes for millions of people and ensures the administration can’t unilaterally or illegally undo parts of bipartisan funding laws simply because the president dislikes them,” Parrott added.
New polling published Wednesday by Impact Research shows that 72% of respondents want Congress to extend the healthcare tax credits, with 44% calling the issue “very important.” More than half of those polled said that lowering the cost of monthly health insurance premiums would provide the biggest relief to their monthly expenses.
“This latest polling clearly shows that Americans are demanding lower costs and affordable healthcare, yet Republicans in Congress continue to ignore them in favor of millionaires and billionaires,” Unrig Our Economy campaign director Leor Tal said in a statement.
“Congressional Republicans would rather risk a government shutdown than reverse course and preserve healthcare tax credits millions rely on,” Tal added. “We need our leaders to focus on lowering healthcare costs, not enriching the ultrawealthy.”
According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.
By Stephen Prager
Immigrant rights activists in Florida are expressing alarm as they have found themselves “unable to locate” more than 1,000 detainees who have been “administratively disappeared” from the state’s immigrant internment camp known as ”Alligator Alcatraz.”
Last week, the Miami Heraldreported that “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined” after the paper “obtained the names from two detainee rosters.”
The reporters found that around 800 of the people on the rosters do not appear on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Online Detainee Locator System, which provides publicly available information about the court status and locations of people who have been jailed by immigration enforcement. Another 450 had no location listed and instead merely instructed users to “Call ICE for details.”
The Herald also found that the vast majority of the detainees in the system did not have final orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges, which would be required for their deportation. Nevertheless, the detainees’ families and attorneys have been left unable to find them.
Detainees and other witnesses, including several members of Congress who visited in July, have described the conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz as horrific. The ramshackle tent camp was set up in a matter of days this summer in the Everglades to warehouse thousands of people detained by ICE, often without criminal charges or warrants, and with restricted access to attorneys.
While people in federal immigration facilities are typically able to be tracked through the system, the state-run Alligator Alcatraz works differently.
(Video: Democracy Now!)
Shirsho Dasgupta, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Herald, told Democracy Now! on Thursday that attorneys he’s spoken to often “don’t know who to call” to get in contact with their clients.
Operations at Alligator Alcatraz were briefly halted in August when a federal district judge ruled against the facility on environmental grounds. But that ruling was stayed by a federal appeals court just two weeks later, allowing operations to resume.
While the state of Florida runs the facility, it has requested and was promised reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was initially created to provide housing and other services to individuals released from ICE custody who were awaiting immigration court proceedings.
In a statement on Friday, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), which has also attempted to track the detainees, said that the Herald’s report shows what they “have been warning about for months,” that “those detained in this detention camp have effectively been administratively disappeared.”
FLIC said that the state of Florida has refused to confirm how many detainees are currently in Alligator Alcatraz and that, in addition to those not listed on the ICE locator tool, they have also seen people deported before scheduled bond hearings. The group also said it had “confirmed data showing Florida is lying when claiming those detained at the Everglades camp had final orders of removal.”
“Since this depraved torture camp funded with state FEMA funds reopened,” said Tessa Petit, FLIC’s executive director, “we have been unable to locate the fathers, brothers, friends, and sons that are caged there without due process in the ICE locator. Hospitalizations for severe medical incidents, which include cardiac incidents and surgeries, go unreported.”
Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at FLIC, said: “What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. It’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”
"Explosive weapons, designed for open battlefields, are increasingly being deployed in densely populated urban areas," the researchers found.
By Brad Reed
A new study has found that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from injuries inflicted by the Israeli military that are typically seen in soldiers on battlefields.
The study, which was published in the British Medical Journal on Thursday, found that explosive injuries to Gaza civilians accounted for two-thirds of injuries they studied, which it said was roughly the same percentage of explosive injuries suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In total, the study collected data from 78 healthcare workers employed across 22 different NGOs stationed in Gaza.
The report notes that this rate of explosive injuries is more than double the 31% typically suffered by civilian populations in war zones.
“The resulting injury profiles resembled those reported in combat settings among trained military personnel, highlighting the burden of trauma among civilians in Gaza,” the study explained. “Explosive weapons, designed for open battlefields, are increasingly being deployed in densely populated urban areas.”
The study also found a higher than average incidence of burn injuries among civilians in Gaza compared to other conflicts, with 30% of these burns extending “into muscle and bone, resulting in complex, high morbidity wounds with limited options for definitive care, consistent with the use of incendiary and fuel-air munitions.”
In addition to examining traumatic wounds, the researchers found that Gazans are suffering from a severe public health crisis with widespread incidences of infectious and chronic diseases, as well as thousands of instances of malnutrition. They said these conditions have come about due to “the systemic collapse of healthcare due to the blockade, fractured pathways, and loss of facilities” in Gaza.
In an interview with The Guardian, study co-author Bilal Irfan, a bioethicist who conducts research at the University of Michigan, said that the research may be underestimating the severity of civilian suffering in Gaza simply because it only studied wounds of people who survived long enough to be taken in for medical treatment.
“This is data for the patients who made it to hospital and so survived,” he said. “We don’t even have a full profile of the serious injuries of those who died without any medical attention.”
The study describes this in more graphic terms, as it notes that its data “excludes the victims of high explosive weapons whose bodies were obliterated or rendered unrecognizable, those incinerated in fireballs, torn apart by aerial bombardment, or reduced to fragments in the epicenter of 2,000 pound munitions.”
Such excluded victims, the study continues, “never entered hospital records and thus remain absent from our body atlas of injuries. They are the disappeared: the thousands of missing people, many of them children, whose remains could not even be identified. Their absence is itself a reminder of the scale of destruction and the limits of what clinical data can ever capture.”
"You can expect to see more of this sort of fact-free, ethically-compromised indictment as Trump works through his enemies list," said one observer.
By Brett Wilkins
US President Donald Trump said Friday that the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is likely just the beginning of what critics are calling a “revenge tour” aimed at punishing perceived political enemies—especially officials who held the convicted felon accountable or tried to do so.
The president was asked by a reporter outside the White House in Washington, DC, “Now that James Comey has been indicted, who is the next person on your list in this retribution?”
Trump replied: “It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others. I mean, they’re corrupt. These were corrupt radical left Democrats.”
“Comey was essentially a Dem... he was worse than a Democrat,” Trump said of the former FBI director, who was a registered Republican for most of his adult life before leaving the party and becoming unaffiliated in 2016. “I would say the Democrats are better than Comey.”
“But there’ll be others,” the president reiterated. “That’s my opinion. They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history. What they’ve done is terrible. And so... frankly, I hope there are others [because] you can’t let this happen to a country.”
Comey was indicted Thursday by newly installed US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan—a former personal lawyer for Trump who has never prosecuted a case—for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing congressional proceedings related to testimony he delivered before a US Senate committee in 2020. He was charged despite career Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors finding insufficient evidence to pursue a case.
Attorney and author Lisa Needham wrote Friday that given that Halligan has “already proven more than willing to do whatever Trump says... you can expect to see more of this sort of fact-free, ethically-compromised indictment as Trump works through his enemies list.”
Trump pushed out Erik Siebert, Halligan’s predecessor, amid his refusal to indict Comey or file mortgage fraud charges against Democratic New York Attorney General Leticia James, who in 2022 filed a civil lawsuit against the then-former president, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization for business fraud. They were found liable for fraud and ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, although an appeals court later overturned the fine while upholding the fraud findings.
Last month, the DOJ subpoenaed James as part of a probe into whether she violated Trump’s civil rights by suing him, his sons, and his business.
Comey’s indictment followed mounting pressure from the president and his supporters for embattled US Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Comey, James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who as a House lawmaker managed Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020.
“There’s no separation between the Department of Justice and Trump’s desire for retribution,” Needham wrote. “However, because, as political science professor Mark Copelovitch puts it, ‘Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties,’ both Trump and Bondi are pretending that this is a run-of-the-mill prosecution as opposed to yet another stop on Trump’s vengeance tour.”
Other critics allege that, like some other recent administration moves, Comey’s indictment is part of an attempt to distract from the harms of Trump’s economic policies, his handling of the Epstein documents, and the corruption scandal involving “border czar” Tom Homan allegedly receiving a $50,000 cash bribe.
“The Department of Justice is in full cover-up mode,” Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—who managed Trump’s second House impeachment trial—said during a Friday morning interview on CNN. “They’re doing the bidding of President Trump with respect to Mr. Comey, they’re doing the bidding of President Trump with respect to covering up cases.”
“The administration started off by having Trump basically force out the US attorney for New York, another Republican, Danielle Sassoon, because she wouldn’t quash a grand jury indictment against [New York City Mayor Eric] Adams because he had become a political friend of Donald Trump’s,” Raskin continued.
“So what we see is the complete politicization of the Department of Justice,” he added. “But we’re in the midst of trying to get this information with apparently real crimes and we’ve got a strong bipartisan majority saying stop the cover-up of the Epstein files, just go ahead and release them.”
"The suggestion that Tony Blair—a key architect of the disastrous Iraq occupation and an apologist for Israel's war crimes—should take control of Gaza is insane and obscene."
By Jessica Corbett
Amid reporting this week that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair could head a postwar transitional authority in the Gaza Strip, with support from US President Donald Trump, critics of the proposal are blasting the ex-Labour Party leader as a war criminal.
“It’s the war criminal in chief now planning to assist in ethnic cleansing and persecution. After his successes in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Lindsey German, convenor of the UK’s Stop the War Coalition, said on social media Friday, sharing a BBCarticle about the development.
While serving as prime minister from 1997 to 2007, Blair played a key part in the US-led War on Terror, sending British troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the 72-year-old has never faced formal charges for war crimes, critics from the UK to the Middle East and beyond have long argued that he should “be sitting in The Hague on trial” for his role in the illegal invasion.
As The Guardiannoted Thursday: “After stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he took on the role of Middle East envoy until 2015, and he enjoys a high standing with many Gulf leaders. But Blair is bitterly resented by many Palestinians—who see him as having impeded their efforts to attain statehood—and more broadly across the region for his role in backing the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.”
“The Palestinian people have the same right as all people to determine their own future, free from foreign interference or occupation.”
Blair began working on a postwar proposal just months after Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023 and met with Trump at the White House in August. In response to The Guardian‘s report that the president “is backing” a plan for Blair to lead the proposed Gaza International Transitional Authority, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakissaid: “War criminals are proposing a war criminal as head of.... Gaza. It would be precious comedy if it were not so tragic.”
Scottish historian William Dalrymple—co-host of the podcast Empire, whose recent episodes have focused on Gaza—quipped, “Given Blair’s superb record in the Middle East, what could possibly go wrong?“’
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest US Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, said in a statement: “The suggestion that Tony Blair—a key architect of the disastrous Iraq occupation and an apologist for Israel’s war crimes—should take control of Gaza is insane and obscene. The Trump administration should reject this neo-colonial proposal, which insults the people of the region and threatens to spark more conflict.”
“Palestinians do not need a British war criminal to govern them. They need freedom, justice, and an end to the decades of brutal occupation and apartheid. Any attempt to impose outside Western leadership on Gaza after the genocide would almost certainly lead to more disaster,” he added. “The Palestinian people have the same right as all people to determine their own future, free from foreign interference or occupation.”
Chandni Desai, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto working on a book titled Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism, pointed to the UK’s control of Palestine in the 20th century.
“The UK ‘recognizes’ the state of Palestine—but is the British Mandate back?” Desai said. “Tony Blair, who helped kill a million Iraqis, is now the US’ pick to ‘manage’ Gaza. The empire never left. Gaza doesn’t need a colonial viceroy, its people want liberation and self-determination.”
Abdullah Omar, a 24-year-old Palestinian who has been documenting his experience “trying to survive the genocide” on social media, similarly wrote: “Tony Blair, who killed a million Iraqis. He is the one America wants to appoint to manage the Gaza Strip.”
"Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there too," said Monica Moreta-Galarza. "I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me."
By Stephen Prager
In the latest display of brutality by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a video that has gone viral on social media shows a plainclothes ICE agent hurling an Ecuadorian asylum-seeker, Monica Moreta-Galarza, to the ground at an immigration courthouse in New York City following the arrest of her husband in front of their two children.
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agent has been relieved of his duties while his conduct is investigated.
The incident was captured by multiple reporters on the scene Thursday. A video posted by Elaad Eliahu of the conservative Timcast News network shows Moreta-Galarza’s husband—who had appeared for a court hearing with his family as part of their legal application for asylum—being wrestled away from his family by several masked agents as he attempts to cling to them. After ripping him away, three agents are shown dragging him out the door.
In another video, Moreta-Galarza is seen tearfully pleading in Spanish with one of the ICE agents, who is wearing a blue flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and no mask. He is shown repeatedly shouting “adios” at her, telling her to leave. When she moves toward him, he quickly grabs her and flings her across the room, through a crowd of photographers, and into the opposite wall. He then grabs her again and pushes her to the ground.
After she rises to her feet, the agent shoves Moreta-Galarza into the arms of security guards who escort her from the building.
Though Eliahu’s post described the man arrested as an “illegal alien,” ProPublica‘s Till Eckert, who was at the scene and spoke with Moreta-Galarza after the fact, reported that she “was seeking asylum with her family,” which is legal under US law.
The incident occurred at 26 Federal Plaza, a federal building that houses an immigration courthouse and a makeshift detention facility in which migrants have been shown to be living in wretched conditions recently. Last week, over 70 demonstrators, including several state lawmakers, were arrested during a protest at the facility.
“For the past two weeks, I’ve been going to the same New York City immigration courthouse,” Eckert said. “Nearly every time, I see ICE agents arresting immigrants. Today, a woman was slammed to the ground after begging officials not to take her husband away.”
Eckert reported that Moreta-Galarza’s injuries from the encounter required her to go to the hospital, where she has since been discharged.
The arrest is part of an increasing trend under the second Trump administration of immigrants being detained, often violently, while attempting to follow the legal process by appearing in court for immigration hearings.
As Statelinereported in August, ICE has increasingly been using a new, “unexpected legal tactic” to lure immigrants: “Rather than pursue a deportation case, it is convincing judges to dismiss immigrants’ cases—thus depriving the immigrants of protection from arrest and detention—then taking them into custody.” While some are undocumented entrants, many of those snatched up in these courthouse arrests are legal applicants for asylum.
Eckert explained that “these sorts of actions were outside the norm historically for ICE agents.”
“Yet under Trump’s second term, immigration courts have shifted from being seen as relatively safe venues into places where immigrants face the risk of surveillance, arrest, and sometimes even violence,” he said.
While the Trump administration often describes those arrested by ICE as “the worst of the worst,” immigration data as of September 7 showed just over 70% of those currently detained have no criminal convictions. On Friday, The Guardianreported that a plurality of people currently in ICE custody have not even been charged with crimes.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) said that Moreta-Galarza “fled to my office for safety after she was assaulted by this [ICE] agent in an egregious act of excessive force.”
In a recorded interview after the incident, Goldman said his office would “continue to follow this particular story because it is just one example of too many where we have these secret police officers who are attacking our communities with excessive violence, excessive force, and they just think that they can do it with impunity because nobody is holding them accountable.”
Social media users later identified another video outside the same court in August, which appeared to show the same ICE agent forcibly prying a crying young girl away from her father as he is arrested and his family watched in tears.
In a statement provided to CBS News on Friday, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, called the agent’s conduct toward Moreta-Galarza “unacceptable.”
“Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” she said.
New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who has been arrested twice at the facility—once in June while escorting an immigrant out of his court hearing and again last week while protesting the facility—expressed outrage at the treatment of Moreta-Galarza and her family.
“An ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital,” Lander said. “Seconds earlier, her husband had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention.”
“Every day, masked ICE agents are acting violently against our neighbors, illegally abducting them, holding them in cruel and inhumane conditions. Treating them as less-than-human and not deserving due process,” Lander continued. “We will not stop bearing witness, stop condemning them, or stop doing all we can to stand up to this lawless behavior.”
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York,calledthe agent’s behavior “sickening,” and said, “the fact that Mayor [Eric] Adams has rolled out the red carpet for ICE is a stain on our city.”
After being discharged from the hospital, Moreta-Galarza spoke about her experience to reporters.
“Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there too,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”
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While Trump bulldozes his way to enforce his anti-crime agenda, American cities are slowly becoming under military rule as we continue to lose our human rights and democracy.
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials.
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