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human rights
New York ICE Shooting Illustrates Deliberate Policy of Harm and Medical Neglect
It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people.
Oct 12, 2026
President Donald Trump’s ICE terror campaign against US cities reached a new height October 8 with the dangerous shooting of an unarmed Dominican man, with his 5-year-old child in the car, in a densely populated Manhattan neighborhood.
The incident adds to a growing scandal over inhumane ICE treatment of victims they harm. ICE agents have repeatedly interfered with or denied medical care for the victims they shoot. Patients have also been pulled out of hospitals prematurely against medical advice and without authorization of their doctors and other medical professionals.
California last year enacted a law that prohibits medical facilities from permitting federal agents without a valid search warrant or court order into private areas, including places where patients receive treatment or discuss health matters, the Los Angeles Times noted. The Minnesota Nurses Association is also pressing for public policies to bar ICE agents from being in rooms when patients are receiving care, and other community and patient protections.
Other states should follow and more is still needed. ICE must be held accountable, by law, for denying immediate medical care to anyone they harm, and it must be barred from removing them from any medical facility without specific medical consent and written authorization. National legislation would be best, but with a lawless administration in Washington, states should enact strict legislation to protect all patients as well as public safety.
Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck, apparently with an assault-style rifle, as seven rounds were blasted into his vehicle. ICE initially claimed they’d transported him to the hospital, a claim subsequently disproven by video. New York police officers, not ICE, transported Belgal to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. There, nurses provided “dignified care,” said their union, the New York State Nurses Association, despite an ICE presence in the hospital that “has an intimidating and harmful effect on all patients. ICE has no place on our streets or in our hospitals.”
After several hours, ICE agents pulled Belgal out of the hospital taking him to a Brooklyn jail, with a bullet still in his body, according to his lawyers. They said he was in pain, afraid for himself and deeply concerned for his unhurt but terrified 5-year-old son. There was no report that any medical staff had explicitly authorized or cleared him for such quick discharge against all medical ethics. He spent the night in a cell, not in a hospital bed despite still having a bullet in his body, an attorney said.
More than 24 hours later, Belgal was “still in pain,” Paige Austin of the nonprofit Make the Road New York, told a federal judge. “Although [Mr. Belgal] was initially hospitalized, it appears that ICE moved quickly to transfer him out of the hospital to an unknown location—raising grave concerns for his health and well-being,” his legal staff said in a court filing.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters. “ICE undermines public safety. This is an agency that should be abolished.” He later added, “Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.”
It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people — not targeting the “worst of the worst” they claimed, but anyone they racially profile as an enemy. Then they force the pain and physical harm they’ve caused on people against professional medical judgement. It’s what fascism looks like. As National Nurses United (NNU) repeated in August after one of its members, a Maine RN was kidnaped by ICE, “Since ICE began kidnapping Black and brown people and terrorizing our communities,” NNU has called it out as “an illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be promptly abolished.”
Belgal is far from the only person to whom ICE has shown disregard for their safety or health after being shot or otherwise harmed.
In September, a Venezuelan delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was shot by ICE agents in Austin, TX after an unmarked SUV—one that never activated its lights or siren—rammed his car as he said he was trying to pull over. After fleeing on foot, the agents shot him in the back.
He was taken to a hospital in San Antonio with a bullet in his back for four hours, apparently just given morphine, his attorney said, before being whisked away again by ICE and moved to a detention center in South Texas. At the facility, she said, “He was cold, asked for water (and) said he was in great pain, but he spent hours (there) even before he got an ibuprofen.” The bullet, that was close to his spine, remained lodged in his back for two weeks, before it was finally surgically removed after partial paralysis had set in. When he appeared in court, he was in a wheelchair.
“Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates have questioned whether Garcés Pérez received proper medical treatment and whether he was taken into custody before he could fully heal,” the Texas Tribune reported. Brian Elmore, a Global Emergency Medical fellow doctor, told The Tribune, “In somebody that isn’t detained, these patients would have close follow-up with their trauma surgery team and be discharged with pain medication. The problem with these patients is that they are often discharged in conditions where they receive inappropriate or absent medical care.”
Lack of proper medical care has been demonstrated throughout the ICE campaign. It was evident in the callous behavior of ICE agents who impeded medical personnel from seeking to reach Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in the moments after their fatal shootings by agents.
It was demonstrated in Los Angeles in 2025 during ICE presences in hospitals. In October 2025, journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias, who had been tracking ICE actions and posting them on TikTok, was wounded by an agent and taken to a downtown hospital, California Hospital Medical Center. ICE agents remained in his hospital room for nearly a week, a presence intimidating to nurses and patients, said Anne Caputo-Pearl, RN, a labor and delivery nurse and chief nurse representative for the California Nurses Association (CNA). He too was denied adequate medical treatment, including pain medication and physical therapy, while subsequently still in an ICE detention facility, said the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Three months earlier, ICE agents stayed around the clock in the hospital room of a Salvadoran detainee Milagro Solis-Portillo who had a medical emergency while being arrested. CNA President Sandy Reding, RN, who joined protesters at Glendale Memorial Hospital, said nurses and patients were frightened to see masked immigration agents in the hospital’s lobby. “Hospitals used to be a sanctuary place, and now they’re not,” she said. “And it seems like ICE has just been running rampant.”
Solis-Portillo said she was repeatedly pressured by ICE to say she was well enough to leave, and was barred from speaking to family and attorneys until she complied. They ultimately transferred her to another hospital against her doctor’s orders and without explanation, her attorney said. Her case “violates established ethical and patient care standards not only for this individual, but also for the public health and safety,” CNA said.
It has long been obvious that ICE and other paramilitary federal’s cruel behavior is intentional. It is evident in the streets, where on behalf of the Trump administration federal agents have shot at some two dozen people, killing six of them. Not only has a single agent not been federally charged, but as Jonathan Blitzer writes in The New Yorker, the federal response is always to blame the victim.
Further the administration has arrested and prosecuted hundreds of protesters; in many cases where judges have dropped charges or juries acquitted them. One major case, known as the Minnesota 15, goes to trial October 20. They are being charged not with impeding ICE, but conspiracy to impede ICE in Minnesota, notes defendant Cal Robinet.
A policy of harm, disregard, and cruelty is abundantly apparent in 239 ICE concentration camp detention centers where the death toll has reached 59 during Trump’s second term due to deliberate substandard conditions, inadequate nutrition, and medical neglect. ICE has even stopped listing where detainees are being held in its online database to hide them from family members and legal counsel.
Stephen Miller, the architect of the campaign, put it bluntly after Renee Good was murdered while administration officials branded her a domestic terrorist. “To all ICE officers: You have immunity to perform your duties and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties,” he declared.
The history of fascist dictatorships is littered with sobering examples of what happens when there are not barriers against government medical abuses, either by law, or by the opposition of the medical establishment and its practitioners.
For the medical community, if actions are taken by ICE against their medical recommendation, doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians need to speak up in real time to advocate for their patients. Hospital administrators should support them, and say this patient was taken away against medical advice. They will have public support, and laws should be enacted to protect them against retaliation.
As the Trump administration continues to use its paramilitary forces and other federal police as an instrument to target communities of color and threaten violent repression on everyone who dissents, these policies will continue to escalate without more broad, forceful responses and protest.
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Trump's US Meets the Textbook Definition of an Oppressive Regime
The distinction between “oppressive regime” as a concept in a textbook and “oppressive regime” as the texture of ordinary life—for millions of people living in this country right now, citizens and noncitizens alike—has ceased to exist.
Oct 11, 2026
Political scientists have a fairly dry checklist for what makes a regime oppressive: It silences dissent, it turns state power against its own people, it treats international law as optional, and it punishes anyone—institution or individual—who tries to hold it accountable. Read as a list, it sounds abstract or like something that happens elsewhere, in a dictatorship in a Third World country maybe.
For Americans, such a definition no longer feels abstract anymore.
Let’s start with the silencing. Since the war on Gaza escalated, human rights groups and journalists have documented, for years now, a pattern of pro-Palestinian content—protest footage, on-the-ground reporting, even the straightforward accounting of civilian deaths—being throttled, flagged, or removed from major platforms. Meanwhile, incitement and dehumanizing rhetoric spreads with far less friction. Independent researchers have called it out repeatedly. Platforms deny doing it on purpose.
Regimes like this have ended before, usually because enough ordinary people refused to stop saying what they saw.
The silencing isn’t limited to algorithms, either. Last month, the White House revoked press credentials for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, physically barring their reporters from the building over what the president called unfavorable coverage. A federal judge has since ordered access temporarily restored, calling the move a likely violation of due process, but the message had already landed: Cover this administration the wrong way and you can be locked out of the room where the decisions get made. A press freedom advocate called it part of a broader pattern meant to intimidate journalists and deter critical reporting. When the people paid to tell the public the truth are the ones getting the door closed in their faces, “free press” starts to feel like a technicality rather than a guarantee.
Then there’s the gap between what the government does and what the country actually wants. This summer, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) forced a vote to strip billions in US military funding to Israel. This was no fringe gesture but a real floor fight that split both parties and forced members to go on the record. It lost. But the fact that it happened at all, that a sitting Republican congressman felt he had to make Washington answer for the money it kept sending regardless of what constituents were saying, is itself the story. Institutions are moving in one direction while public sentiment visibly pulls in another, and the institutions are winning anyway.
And there’s the reach outward. When the International Criminal Court issued warrants tied to the Gaza war, Washington didn’t argue the law. It sanctioned the court itself, freezing officials’ bank accounts, cutting off their email, warning American staff they’d be arrested for traveling home. A body created specifically to stand outside any one government’s control got treated like an adversary for doing its job. If that’s what happens to an international court, it’s not hard to imagine what happens to an ordinary citizen who speaks too loudly.
Actually, it’s not hard to imagine because it is happening on a daily basis, especially for those who protest the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Last month, Donna Ganger—the mother of Renee Good, a US citizen shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis in January—testified on Capitol Hill that she’s a registered Republican who voted for Donald Trump because she believed that these agents were there to protect citizens, not to treat her own family like the threat. She didn’t get an apology. “This is madness,” she concluded.
Every day, millions of people in America live the reality of a police state. They are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being detained by ICE, thrown into horrific holding centers, and sent back home to civil war or family abuse or even deportation to a third country they know nothing about. ICE has become something closer to a domestic enforcement arm than an immigration agency, and “wrong place, wrong time” is a real category of harm now, not a hypothetical one.
What does it mean to raise a child in a country where simply existing in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong moment carries risk? Where even a global court gets its accounts frozen for trying to hold power accountable?
It’s a strange kind of irony that at the United Nations last month, Trump denounced “the fanatical Iranian regime” for spreading “carnage and chaos” and called for its “complete economic isolation” over how it treats its own people. He’s not wrong that repression deserves condemnation. He’s just describing, almost point for point, the pattern playing out here at home—press outlets barred from covering their own government, citizens shot by agents meant to protect them, and dissent treated as the threat rather than the right.
The distinction between “oppressive regime” as a concept in a textbook and “oppressive regime” as the texture of ordinary life—for millions of people living in this country right now, citizens and noncitizens alike—has ceased to exist. Describing the disappearance of that distinction—calmly, specifically, without exaggeration—feels like the first form of resistance available to someone who isn’t a lawyer, a lawmaker, or a judge.
Regimes like this have ended before, usually because enough ordinary people refused to stop saying what they saw. That’s the piece I want to hold onto, even on the days when fear wins out.
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The International Criminal Court Is Under Attack
If the attack from Putin's Russia and the US Trump administration succeeds, it will produce a disaster not only for the rule of law, but for the cause of human rights.
Oct 10, 2026
On October 9, only hours after the announcement of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a former judge on the International Criminal Court, the Trump administration imposed its latest sanctions on the global judicial body. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate.”
When the ICC became operational in 2002, it represented a major breakthrough for the human rights groups that had campaigned for it. The new organization had the mandate to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and, after 2018, the crime of aggression. Once nations ratified the ICC’s authorizing document, the Rome Statute, they took responsibility for arresting these individuals and submitting them to the court for trial. Designed to complement, rather than to replace, national criminal justice systems, the ICC could prosecute cases only when countries were unwilling or unable to do so. A total of 125 countries―nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations―have ratified the Rome Statute.
Since its founding, the ICC (headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands) has acted to hold individual perpetrators accountable for the world’s gravest atrocities. Its actions included opening 34 cases (some with more than one suspect), holding 17 different investigations across four continents, issuing 61 arrest warrants, and, thus far, issuing 13 convictions and four acquittals.
Nevertheless, the campaign against the ICC is having a serious impact. In late July, thanks to US government pressure, Venezuela and Chad announced their withdrawal from the court’s Rome Statute.From its inception, however, US officials were wary of the ICC.
In the United States, President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, but refused to present it to the US Senate for ratification, warning that it had “significant flaws,” including the inability to “protect US officials.” His successor, George W. Bush, “unsigned” the treaty in 2002 and signed US legislation authorizing military force to liberate any American nationals it held for crimes. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he denounced the ICC before the United Nations General Assembly and imposed economic sanctions and visa restrictions on top ICC officials for any effort to investigate the behavior of US personnel in Afghanistan.
Russian officials, too, soon realized that enforcement of international law threatened them. Although, initially, the Russian government signed the Rome Statute and participated constructively in the ICC, it withdrew its signature after Ukraine appealed to the ICC in 2014 and 2015 to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The ICC did initiate a preliminary inquiry that, after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 and Russia’s murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in Bucha, expanded into a formal investigation. In 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children.
Denying any wrongdoing in Bucha, the Russian government also dismissed the charge of kidnapping as “outrageous.” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, threatened a Russian hypersonic missile attack upon the ICC headquarters.
Meanwhile, the assault on the ICC escalated. Although US President Joseph Biden scrapped Trump’s sanctions on the court and authorized sharing information with it during investigations of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, he and numerous officials of other nations denounced the ICC’s November 2024 war crimes arrest warrant for top Israeli officials. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assailed what he called “the antisemitic decision” of the ICC and said that Israel refused to comply with it.
With Trump’s reelection, the campaign to destroy the ICC went into high gear. In February 2025, he imposed sanctions on the ICC prosecutor. That August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, labeling the court “a national security threat,” added ICC judges to the sanctions list. In late 2025, a top Trump administration official told Reuters that there was “growing concern” that “the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them.” That was “unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.” The ICC, he said, had been informed that, unless it amended its founding document to ensure that it would not investigate the Republican president and his top officials, new, very punishing US sanctions would be imposed on the court.
The Russian government also ramped up its attack. In December 2025, a Russian court, retaliating for the ICC’s arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova, convicted the ICC prosecutor and eight ICC judges, in absentia, of “unlawful prosecution,” sentencing them to terms of imprisonment ranging from three and a half to 15 years.
In July 2026, Rubio announced what the US State Department called “a sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to US sovereignty.” It would “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate” and destroy the court “brick by brick.” That August, imposing additional sanctions on court officials, Rubio proclaimed “our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court.” Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on Latin American and Caribbean governments to sever their ties with the ICC.
Many observers, of course, were appalled by the Trump administration’s behavior. The European Union immediately expressed its backing for the ICC, while Germany’s foreign minister declared that the court made the world “safer and more just.” In a biting article, Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that “the administration’s real goal is to secure impunity for war crimes.”
Nevertheless, the campaign against the ICC is having a serious impact. In late July, thanks to US government pressure, Venezuela and Chad announced their withdrawal from the court’s Rome Statute. The number of withdrawals now stands at five, including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The latter three are ruled by military juntas allied with Russia.
As the Nobel committee warned when announcing the Peace Prize, the “judges and institutions of international law are under political attack.”
If the attack succeeds, it will produce a disaster not only for the rule of law, but for the cause of human rights.
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UN Says Trump-Hegseth Livestream of Execution Would Breach ‘Absolute Prohibition of Torture’
"The world’s supposedly greatest (or formerly greatest) democracy has arrived at a horrific new moral nadir," said one columnist of the plan to livestream the killing by firing squad of Nidal Hasan.
Oct 09, 2026
As rights advocates across the US expressed horror at the Trump administration's confirmed plans to publicly broadcast the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former military psychiatrist who was convicted of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, the top United Nations human rights expert warned that the public state killing would violate international laws prohibiting torture.
“The livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture,” the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) told Agence France-Presse Friday.
As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the US Army announced that Hasan would be executed by firing squad at Fort Hood on December 3, with the Trump administration inviting the public to watch the shooting via livestream.
The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council in June that all capital punishment must be abolished worldwide, as "severe physical pain and psychological distress are an inherent part of the design and implementation" of the practice.
The OHCHR has particularly spoken out against public executions, such as those that have been carried out in Afghanistan and Iran.
Public killings by the state "constitute a form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment," the office has said.
"This planned livestreamed execution says it all about what is happening in America today, opening the window ever wider on the Trump administration’s moral vacuity and its paucity of human decency."
Should the livestream go forward, Hasan's execution will be the first public state-sanctioned killing in the US in 90 years, according to Michael L. Radelet, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, an expert on capital punishment.
Rainey Bethea, a Black man, was hanged in Kentucky in 1936 after reportedly confessing to the killing of a white woman. He was never charged with murder. Thousands of people attended his execution outside a courthouse.
As Edmarverson A. Santos wrote at the independent research platform Diplomacy & Law, the Trump administration's proposed execution livestream "raises substantial concerns under international human rights law."
"The UN Human Rights Committee expressly interprets Article 7 of the [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights] as prohibiting public executions and considers executions conducted in violation of that provision to constitute arbitrary deprivations of life under Article 6," wrote Santos. "A government-sponsored livestream accessible to the general public could fall within that interpretation, particularly where the condemned person's death is deliberately displayed as part of the state's punitive message."
"Hasan's conviction for intentional murder and the presidential approval of his death sentence do not independently establish the legality of publicly broadcasting his execution," Santos added.
Paul Daley, a columnist for The Guardian Australia, wrote Thursday that the planned livestream—and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's statement that the execution will be made viewable to all to show that "there’s serious consequences for these types of things"—amounted to "state-sanctioned killing as entertainment."
"The world’s supposedly greatest (or formerly greatest) democracy has arrived at a horrific new moral nadir," wrote Daley. "This represents a significant lurch in the US from civilization towards savagery... And this planned livestreamed execution says it all about what is happening in America today, opening the window ever wider on the Trump administration’s moral vacuity and its paucity of human decency."
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How 'Never Again' Lost Meaning in Gaza
Three years of impunity, of unprosecuted genocide, reveal that the value of human life is being measured on a sliding scale; that it is weighed based on race, geography, and political utility.
Oct 09, 2026
Looking across the devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip, where surviving generations now carry the permanent physical and psychological scars of war, the ultimate indictment of our era is damning: The world watched the horror unfold in real time, possessed all the legal, political, and institutional mechanisms to stop it, and did nothing.
For months, then years, the catastrophe in Gaza tested the fabric of international law, the integrity of global governance, and the moral conscience of humanity. From the halls of the United Nations to the high courts of The Hague, what followed was not information failure, but a shameful surrender of political and moral will.
Rarely does history deliver such swift and scathing hindsight. Three years after October 7, 2023, the real horror of Gaza is that this barbarity was never hidden; it was broadcast live in high definition to a global audience that watched, debated, proceduralized, and allowed it to continue.
There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act.
Israel’s war on Palestinians continues uninterrupted. Despite having the influence to halt the crisis, major international powers have not intervened, allowing the regime and its colonizers to increase their violence across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
As time lifts the fog of war, the systemic breakdown of global institutions and governments becomes unmistakably apparent. The world failed to stop the genocide in Gaza not because it lacked awareness or warning. It faltered because the “rules-based” international order (aka Western order) is structurally and morally bankrupt, paralyzed by complicity, cowardice, and double standards.
The war exposed international humanitarian law as a selective tool of the West—applied swiftly to some, but suspended when it inconveniences the powerful. Governments that traditionally postured as champions of human rights have prioritized strategic alignments over universal legal and humanitarian obligations.
During the initial months of the onslaught, as the number killed rose into the tens of thousands and entire neighborhoods were flattened with their residents inside, global diplomats did what they do best: Use bureaucratic delays to stall for time.
While hospitals were besieged and children underwent amputations without anesthesia, on blood-soaked floors, the UN Security Council degenerated into a theater of deadlock. The world’s premier body for collective security rendered global consensus impotent and buckled under superpower threats.
Repeated resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire were either vetoed or watered down into toothless rhetoric. Meanwhile, international courts meticulously deliberated over the legal nuances of genocide while graves multiplied and atrocities continued uninterrupted.
Today, as the International Court of Justice unhurriedly considers its final ruling on South Africa’s 2023 genocide case against Israel, tangible memories of Palestine are being erased; centuries of history, culture, and ancestral lineages are being obliterated. For Palestine, justice delayed is not justice denied; it is genocide completed.
Three years of impunity, of unprosecuted genocide, reveal that the value of human life is being measured on a sliding scale; that it is weighed based on race, geography, and political utility.
In retrospect, these procedural and administrative delays look less like structural gridlock and more like an active cover-up. Every month spent debating the semantics of humanitarian corridors or compliance with international law gave carte blanche to Israel’s military onslaught.
The harshest criticism of the last three years falls on Western powers. Governments that never tire of lecturing the world on human rights, rules-based order, and international jurisprudence performed moral gymnastics to justify the unjustifiable.
We watched as world leaders converged on Israel with blank checks of allegiance, supplying an uninterrupted stream of munitions that reduced universities, schools, hospitals, markets, bookstores, bakeries, places of worship, and apartment blocks to rubble.
While publicly wringing their hands, in private, these same leaders approved the weapon shipments. And, in a cruel theatrical act of humanitarian absolution, they authorized the aerial dropping of meager sacks of flour into the very zones in Gaza they helped leave in ruins.
Failure was not restricted to the halls of power; the entire mainstream media landscape failed alongside it. For months, reporters on the ground in Gaza—those who were not among the hundreds systematically targeted and killed—fought to pierce a wall of severe censorship and dehumanization.
In the West, corporate media tied itself in knots trying to sanitize language in order to obscure Israel’s direct responsibility for the ongoing violence. Outlets downplayed Palestinian deaths by using passive language like "died" to treat mass casualties as collateral damage, all while elevating voices that defended the legitimacy of the war.
The public response, however, revealed a deeper fracture. Millions marched in cities worldwide, launching one of the largest sustained anti-war mobilizations in a generation. Yet, the disconnect between the governed and the governing remained absolute. Western democracies proved entirely immune to the moral demands of their own citizens.
The silence of the last three years has been deafening. There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act.
Allowing genocide to go unpunished creates a dangerous precedent for global security. If international law and justice are buried in the rubble of Gaza, the global community will ultimately be digging its own grave.
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Haitian Resolve and the Limits of Resilience
We are a people who will fight for our survival and dignity, but there is also a limit to our resilience. The Trump administration's attacks have not only threatened our physical safety, they are also working to destroy our sense of psychological safety.
Oct 08, 2026
Over the summer, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration free rein to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, along with hundreds of thousands of TPS holders from other countries, limiting the accountability any administration will have for making determinations about TPS for the foreseeable future.
Last month, a young pre-med college student named Pierre Damas Bel from Springfield, Ohio was found dead, by an apparent suicide. He was suffering depression brought on by the termination of TPS and being forced to wear an Immigration and Custom Enforcement-issued ankle bracelet.
What happened to Damas Bel represents the real human cost of these inhumane policies. But sadly, I don’t believe we have reached the nadir of this administration’s cruelty.
Those of us who have more legal protections against these violent policies must be resolute in speaking out, and finding ways to shield Haitians and other TPS holders from their cruelty.
Haitians have been here before.
For centuries, we’ve witnessed a similar pattern of using Haitian immigrants as political scapegoats. Haitians know all too well what it feels like to be targeted, and as a result we live with the collective trauma of being treated as less than human.
When I arrived in 1984, I encountered hatred fueled by ignorance, misinformation, and xenophobia. I was bullied relentlessly. I was called "Boat People," "HBO" (Haitian Body Odor), "f***ing Haitian," and "HIV carrier." I was physically assaulted on my way to and from school. Those experiences taught me, at a very young age, how quickly stereotypes and lies can strip someone of their dignity and sense of belonging.
Fast forward to 2024, I would never have imagined hearing a former president utter the words: "They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the pets," during a presidential debate. At the time, many people dismissed those comments as absurd, entertaining, or inconsequential. I could not.
As a 52-year-old father of two teenage boys, I wasn't amused. I was triggered. Those words reopened wounds I had buried for decades and forced me to relive the trauma I experienced as a newly arrived Haitian immigrant in New York City.
But by 2024, I was no longer afraid for myself. I was afraid for my sons, who had grown up embracing their Haitian heritage with pride and confidence. I wondered what these renewed attacks on Haitians would mean for them. Would they become targets of ridicule or violence? Would they feel pressured to hide a core part of who they are? Would they experience the same fear and isolation that defined so much of my youth?
Those questions kept me awake at night. Eventually, they compelled me to have "the talk" with my boys. For the first time, I shared the painful experiences I had buried for decades. We discussed what they were seeing and hearing in their social circles, and I tried to prepare them to navigate a climate where hateful rhetoric can quickly lead to real-life consequences. It was a conversation I had hoped I would never have to have. However, it reminded me that every generation must remain vigilant in confronting prejudice and defending the human rights and dignity of those who come after us.
The psychological ramifications of TPS' end have reverberated across the Haitian community in devastating ways. There are those who have already been deported and face an unsafe future, those of us who exist on bated breath, and then there are people like Damas Bel whose mental health has been shattered by the indignity of it all.
When I feel dejected and afraid for my community, I try to remember the Haitian Day of Outrage in 1990 when an estimated 50,000-150,000 Haitians and allies marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, shutting down Lower Manhattan. We were protesting against the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) discriminatory designation of Haitians as a high-risk group for HIV/AIDS and its policy of banning Haitian Americans from donating blood. The policy was rooted in racism rather than science, and fueled dangerous stereotypes. That historic demonstration played a significant role in pressuring the FDA to eventually reverse its position.
That memory reminds me that we are a people who will fight for our survival and dignity, but there is also a limit to our resilience. These attacks have not only threatened our physical safety, they are also working to destroy our sense of psychological safety.
We must ask ourselves how we can protect young Haitians like Damas Bel, and all those made vulnerable by the Trump administration and its far-right MAGA supporters. Those of us who have more legal protections against these violent policies must be resolute in speaking out, and finding ways to shield Haitians and other TPS holders from their cruelty.
The best way to know what you can do to stand in solidarity with these communities is to first connect with local organizations taking decisive steps to protect and stand with those who are in the bullseye of the current administration’s attempts to strip all of us of our rights and dignity.
Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, where I work as a case manager and community organizer, is one of these organizations. We know that people power is the only thing that will protect us. We are using every tool at our disposal to provide care and safety for our community.
Here are some ways that you can join us in supporting Haitian and all TPS holders.
Actions you can take TODAY:
- Call your Senators or email them to urge them to vote yes on S. 4814 to extend TPS for Haitians until 2029;
- Call your US House representatives and demand that they sign the discharge petition and support The Dream and Promise Act (H.R. 1589) which would provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders, and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) holders; and
- Get involved with court accompaniment programs, mutual aid networks, and your local rapid response networks in support and defense of immigrant communities in your neighborhood.
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Democrats Risk Losing If They Ignore Voters’ Demands on Foreign Policy
Democrats should embrace three foreign policy commitments that are morally overdue and broadly popular nationwide: ending the Iran war, cutting the Pentagon budget and abolishing ICE, and ending support for Israel and other governments that violate humans rights.
Oct 07, 2026
The idea that US voters don’t care about foreign policy is over. From Michigan to Florida to Colorado, Democratic Party primary candidates’ positions on war, military spending, and support for Israel have propelled victories alongside progressive policies on healthcare and the economy.
The message of “Babies, Not Bombs”—a promise to spend taxpayer money to nurture lives instead of ending them—has become a rallying cry well beyond the New York campaign where it originated.
To win the midterms and offer real leadership beyond 2026, Democrats must pay attention to this momentum and the foreign policy concerns of voters across the political spectrum. Donald Trump secured the presidency in 2024 partly by winning over voters, including independents and Democrats, with his promise to “stop wars” not start them.
Democrats don’t need to invent a new coalition to win in November. They need to represent the one that already exists.
While Trump has shattered this promise by waging a disastrous, illegal war in Iran and attacking or threatening more than 10 other countries, Democrats must learn from their mistakes—and the president’s.
To win in November and deliver the change people want, Democrats should embrace three foreign policy commitments that are morally overdue and broadly popular nationwide.
The first commitment is ending the war on Iran and the endless wars that have defined US foreign policy since 2001.
Trump’s war on Iran is among the most unpopular in US history. Polling shows nearly 60% of adults oppose it, including 90% of Democrats, 63% of independents, and 22% of Republicans.
Voters have watched the conflict drive up gas and grocery prices while killing, injuring, and displacing people on a staggering scale, and risking greater global economic devastation. The war has added to the trillions of dollars wasted by the post-September 11, 2001 wars, which could have funded urgent domestic needs.
The second commitment is cutting the Pentagon budget and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). President Trump has requested a $1.57 trillion military budget for the 2027 fiscal year, including money for the Iran war. This would be the largest in US history, and around a 50% increase over already bloated spending.
Opposition to Trump’s budget request is profound: 65% overall and 87% among Democrats.
There’s similar outrage over Trump’s militarization of US streets as people see ICE’s brutal effects on immigrant neighbors. “Abolish ICE” has become a clarion call nationwide because of the agency’s responsibility for multiple deaths, mass raids, and documented abuses in detention centers.
Nearly three-quarters of Democrats, half of independents, and a quarter of Republicans support abolishing ICE. The Democratic National Committee, in August, passed a resolution calling for abolishing ICE.
Democrats should listen to voters and oppose warmongering abroad and a hyper-militarized immigration crackdown at home as two faces of the same problem.
The third commitment is ending support for Israel and other governments responsible for serious human rights violations. While stopping military backing for Israel was once a radical position, it’s increasingly the Democratic—and national—mainstream given the dramatic decline in support for Israel amid a live-streamed genocide propelled by US arms and tax dollars.
Across the political spectrum, the death toll of more than 73,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children, has transformed public opinion.
The country’s existing “Leahy Laws” bar US funding for foreign military forces that commit human rights abuses. Another Democratic National Committee resolution calls for full enforcement of the Leahy Laws, giving Democrats a legally grounded position: Apply the standard consistently—to Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, or any other government implicated in human rights violations.
None of these are fringe positions. They are where a majority of the country and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic base already stand.
What’s missing is a party willing to campaign on these stances plainly and courageously, rather than treating foreign policy as a black box best left to the whims of an unelected, out-of-touch Washington, DC elite.
Democrats don’t need to invent a new coalition to win in November. They need to represent the one that already exists: People across the political spectrum exhausted by endless war, appalled by a bloated military budget squeezing out domestic needs, and angry about seeing their taxes underwrite human rights abuses at home and abroad.
A foreign policy platform built on these three commitments isn’t just good policy. It’s a winning one.
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With the Trial of 'Ulm5' Activists, Germany Looks More and More Like a Police State
The trial of five Palestinian rights activists, now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Oct 02, 2026
Germany is a country with a long and complex relationship to authoritarianism. It is also of course the country that gave birth to the most evil political regime, Nazism, in the modern era.
The Allies agreed on the denazification of Germany as a goal after the end of World War II, but the general consensus is that it wasn’t a success. Some high-ranking Nazis were put on trial and sentenced to death, others were removed from public positions, but the majority of Nazis were reintegrated into postwar German society and even landed high-ranking positions.
Now, Germany is again displaying worrying signs of authoritarianism, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. However, Germany’s love affair with authoritarian rule runs deeper than the current surge of the AfD. Its legal and judicial system has become notorious for its restrictions on freedom of speech and its penchant for framing dissent “not as a democratic expression but as a threat to public order.”
The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law.
The Ulm5 trial underway in Stuttgart, and now approaching its final stage, has exposed for all to see not only Germany’s increasingly neofascist playbook for silencing dissent but complicity in Israel’s genocide.
In the early hours of September 8, 2025, five young pro-Palestinian activists broke into the German branch of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in Ulm, southern Germany. Once inside, they broke windows and destroyed furniture and technical equipment. They also sprayed slogans on the walls, such as “Free Palestine” and “Germany finances, Israel bombs.” No one was injured in the attack, and the activists not only remained on site but called the police themselves and waited to be arrested.
Since their arrest, the five activists—Daniel Tatlow-Devally (an Irish citizen), Leandra Rollo (a Spanish-Argentinian citizen), Crow Tricks and Zo Hailu (British citizens), and Vi Kovarbasic (a German citizen)—have been held in separate prisons and under highly degrading conditions. They are subjected to solitary confinement conditions lasting 23 hours a day, with just a couple of very short family visits per month. Irish politicians who visited Daniel Tatlow-Devally in prison were shocked by what they witnessed.
The Ulm5 activists are being treated like terrorists; in fact, they are being treated in a similar fashion as were the kidnappers, bank robbers, and murderers of the militant “Red Army Faction” group during their arrest in the 1970s. It is thus no coincidence that the trial of the Ulm5 activists is being held at Stuttgart-Stammheim, the very venue where the terrorist trials of the 1970s were held.
The defense team of Ulm5 has asked repeatedly why the trial is being held at high-security Stuttgart-Stammheim courthouse when the five defendants merely caused property damage without anyone being hurt, but no answer has been provided. Yet the answer is clear. It’s because German authorities treat Palestine solidarity as support for terrorism. In the eyes of current German laws, especially in connection with the long-standing political assertion that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état,” the genocidal party must, by necessity, be protected and those who protest against its crimes must, by extension, be treated as nothing more than criminals or plain terrorists.
Conveniently enough, the Ulm5 pro-Palestinian activists are being charged under Section 129 of the German Criminal Law, which is directed toward ordinary organized crime and criminalizes “whosoever forms an organization, the objectives or activities of which are directed toward the commission of crimes, or whoever participates in such an organization as a member, recruits for it, or supports it.” Section 129 has two components. Subsection (a) is labeled “forming terrorist organizations” and applies to “whosoever forms an organization whose aims or activities are directed at the commission of murder… or genocide… or crime against humanity… or a war crime;” subsection (b) is directed toward any person or organization whose aim is to cause “serious physical or mental harm to another person;” commit offenses against the environment; and commit offenses under the provisions of the Weapons of War Act.
If anything, 129a applies to Israel for carrying out genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Israel’s crimes against Palestinians have been well documented by scores of international bodies and international human rights organizations while many Holocaust scholars, including Israeli organizations, have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza should be treated as a case of genocide. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also committed crimes against humanity on October 7, according to international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
Charging the Ulm5 pro-Palestine activists under Criminal Code Section 129 is a criminal act in itself by the German authorities. It shows that Germany is unwilling to tolerate any dissent or protest and will employ the repressive apparatus of the state to the possible maximum extent in order accomplish this goal. Indeed, this is not the first time that Criminal Code Section 129 has been used to suppress protests. A nationwide raid was carried out in May 2023 against the climate change protest group “Last Generation” after, ironically enough, the parliamentary body of the AfD had called on the Federal Government to examine the conditions for a ban on the organization, alleging that it was in violation of the constitutional order. And in March 2025 German public prosecutors filed charges against five members of the group for “forming a criminal organization.”
In Berlin alone, more than 3,000 climate activists have been sentenced over the past few years, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Both climate activists and pro-Palestinian activists are being thoroughly pursued in Germany by its police state. Marginalized groups in cities like Berlin and elsewhere are also feeling “the politics of extreme policing,” as Berlin-based journalist and author Hanno Hauenstein put it.
The grotesque Ulm5 trial has multiple critical hearings scheduled for the month of October (the trial is slated to end in January 2027) as prosecutors seek to convict the young activists with being members of a criminal organization, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. The defendants are always handcuffed when they walk into the courtroom and are held in a bullet-proof glass cage.
This is an image straight out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. Or perhaps what one might have expected to see with the AfD in power. But it’s all quite revealing of how far contemporary Germany has gone into becoming once again a police state. And if this state of affairs has become again “normal” in mainstream German society, it is nonetheless an utterly disgraceful situation for the rest of Europe. The treatment of the Ulm5 young activists is in clear violation of European human rights law, as the defense lawyer of one of the accused young activists has already argued, and using the Criminal Code 129 to target protest movements and activists is plain fascism.
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'Inhumane, Barbaric, Torturous': Christa Pike Survives Twice-Botched Execution in Tennessee
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
Oct 01, 2026
The botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on Wednesday night was met with disgust and outrage by death penalty opponents who have long argued that not only is murder by the state morally wrong, but the government's inability to carry out such punishments humanely has been shown time and time again to result in horrific human rights violations and barbaric scenes of cruelty inside the nation's prison walls.
Pike, sentenced to death in Tennessee over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, survived two otherwise lethal injections of pentobarbital on Wednesday while strapped to a gurney by prison officials at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
"Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution," said Pike's attorneys—Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason from the TN Office of the Post Conviction Defender, and Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen from Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee—in a statement late Wednesday.
"We take no pleasure in being right," her lawyer's continued, "but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy. Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed as to her condition."
Pike's legal team said she remained alive after two rounds of the lethal injection, with witnesses reporting confusion after the first dose resulted in Pike raising her head to speak to those who administered the drug and falling into a deep sleep, but audibly snoring and still alive, after the second.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
It was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, reports The New York Times. According to the newspaper:
The apparent failure came after dueling court rulings delayed the execution of [Pike] by about nine hours. The state had raced to go ahead with the execution before the day ended and to avoid having to reschedule.
In a pair of emergency legal filings, Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital, the lethal drug, had been administered, Ms. Pike had not lost consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.
The execution of Pike, who court records show was subject to pervasive abuse throughout her childhood and was only 18 years old when she carried out the brutal crime, had been put on hold earlier Wednesday only to be reinstated by the US Supreme Court later in the day.
Amnesty International USA condemned the treatment of Pike and called for an end to all capital punishment in the United States.
"Tennessee’s botched attempt to execute Christa Pike, as witnessed by her attorneys, demonstrates why the death penalty truly is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment," the group said. "All execution methods are inhumane and unacceptable. The death penalty must be abolished, everywhere."
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced after the botched execution that the state’s other remaining execution for 2026 would be put on hold and ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” in the attempted killing of Pike.
Pike, said human rights advocate Evad HaAm, "survived a completed lethal-injection attempt. That is not a stay. It is a botched execution."
While Pike's current medical status and chance for survival remain unknown, further attempts by the state to kill her, he argued, "would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."
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UN Experts Demand End to Trump's Third-Country Deportations
Countries the US has entered into deals with "lack the capacity to protect the rights of migrants sent there by wealthy nations seeking to shirk their international obligations."
Sep 29, 2026
Two dozen United Nations human rights experts on Monday demanded that the Trump administration end its deportation of immigrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, to countries to which they have no connection—a practice that has set off "a cascade of human rights violations," according to the experts.
Advisers to the UN Human Rights Council sent a communication to the US and the 35 countries President Donald Trump has struck deportation deals with—agreements that the White House has spent at least $40 million on, according to a congressional report released earlier this year.
“These migrants are being transferred to countries or territories with which they have no ties, which can be a traumatizing and isolating experience that compounds harms already suffered, which triggered their fleeing to the US in the first place," said the experts. "Others are sent to places where they risk further violence or discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or human rights advocacy.”
Critics have warned that the arrangements appear to be aimed at circumventing US laws that prohibit Trump from refoulement—sending people back to the countries they fled when they sought asylum in the US. Some of the countries Trump has struck deals with have ultimately sent asylum-seekers back to their home countries, according to The Guardian.
Deported people have also faced violence and the threat of torture in the third countries they've been sent to. As Common Dreams reported last week, Ahmed Soliman, an Egyptian national, and Samson Birhane, who is from Eritrea, were being detained in "an overcrowded police cell, in inhumane conditions" in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea—one of several countries Trump has struck deals with despite its record of human rights abuses.
Amnesty International warned the two men are at risk of being tortured.
The countries Trump is sending people to, said the 24 experts on Monday, "lack the capacity to protect the rights of migrants sent there by wealthy nations seeking to shirk their international obligations."
"The harms caused by this US government scheme are no longer hypothetical," they said. "For migrants in situations of particular vulnerability, the consequences can be deadly.”
About 20,000 people have been taken by bus to Mexico, while more than 5,000 have been flown to countries across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. About a third of the deals have been struck with African nations.
"The harms caused by this US government scheme are no longer hypothetical. For migrants in situations of particular vulnerability, the consequences can be deadly.”
The UN experts released their statement days after the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the administration must give migrants “a meaningful opportunity” to appeal the government's plan to send them to a country they have never lived in.
Last Thursday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency application with the US Supreme Court, seeking authorization to continue the third-country deportations as they have been carried out, with "assurances" from governments that people sent by the US will not face persecution or torture. Sauer claimed the removals are “an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens," but numerous people sent to third countries have had no criminal records.
Also last week, Sen. Tim Kaine filed several privileged resolutions to compel the Trump administration to release assessments of countries with which it has made deportation deals.
"Through third-country deportations, the Trump administration is stripping people of due process, disappearing them, and sending them to countries all over the world where they risk further harm," said Amnesty International USA on Monday. "The US government must end this cruel practice."
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