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For Immediate Release
July, 01 2015, 01:00pm EDT
Contact:
Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder, (415) 235-6517, medea@codepink.org
CODEPINK Welcomes the Historic Re-opening of Embassies in the United States and Cuba
CODEPINK calls on Congress to do its part by lifting the embargo
WASHINGTON
The peace group CODEPINK welcomes the July 1 announcement about the historic re-opening of embassies in the United States and Cuba. We view the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between our nations as a crucial step forward to fully normalizing relations. However, despite this encouraging act of diplomacy, more work needs to be done, including lifting the travel ban and the embargo, and returning the Guantanamo Naval Base to the Cuban people.
Although an official US embassy will be housed in Havana with the American flag flying above its gate, American citizens still face restrictions that prohibit them from freely traveling to Cuba. Congress should ignore the few representatives who are opposed to normalization, and immediately pass the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act to allow Americans to travel to Cuba just as they are allowed to travel anywhere else in the world. This should be followed by the passage of the bill to lift the embargo, finally putting to rest the Helms Burton Act that codified the failed American policy of isolation and hostilities.
"The opening the embassies in Havana and Washington is a great and historic step, but everything that President Obama has done can be undone by the next president," said CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. "Congress must now step up and pass the needed legislation to finally put an end to the antiquated policies towards Cuba that have failed for 54 years."
CODEPINK also calls on the US government to close the prison in Guantanamo and return the Naval Base to the Cuban people.
CODEPINK will host a celebration in front of the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC at 5pmon the day of its official reopening.
CODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.
(818) 275-7232LATEST NEWS
‘A Constitutional Emergency’: Psychiatric Experts Say Congress Must Confront Mentally Unstable Trump
“We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it."
Apr 14, 2026
A group of four psychiatrists warned congressional leaders on Monday that US President Donald Trump has recently exhibited "every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis," presenting a "constitutional emergency" that demands immediate action from lawmakers and members of the administration.
In a letter to the top Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, the psychiatrists and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs—who helped organize the letter—pointed to Trump's recent genocidal threats to wipe out Iran's "whole civilization" and bomb the country "back to the stone ages" as examples of rhetoric that has "crossed a threshold."
"President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the 'Dark Triad' of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy," the letter states. "Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss."
The psychiatrists who signed the letter are James Gilligan, clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University; Prudence Gourguechon, former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and former vice president of the World Mental Health Coalition; Bandy Lee, president of the World Mental Health Coalition and former professor at Yale School of Medicine; and James Merikangas, clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at George Washington University.
The experts' letter came amid growing calls from congressional Democrats for Trump's removal from office, whether through the impeachment process or the pathways offered by the 25th Amendment.
The psychiatrists stop short of demanding Trump's immediate removal. Rather, they urge Congress to reestablish its constitutional authority over war in response to the president's unauthorized assault on Iran; convene "urgent consultations" with top administration officials to prevent Trump from escalating "toward catastrophe"; and "formally initiate consultation" with Vice President JD Vance and Cabinet members "regarding the president’s fitness for office under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment."
"We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it," the letter states. "A president who publicly threatens to destroy a foreign civilization, who launches a bombing campaign and then imposes a naval blockade without congressional authorization, and who shows every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis is not merely a political problem. He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one."
The letter was released days after Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to White House physician Sean Barbabella requesting an "immediate and comprehensive cognitive and neurological evaluation of President Donald Trump, along with full public disclosure of the findings," in response to his "increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming public statements," specifically regarding the war on Iran.
"This is plainly out of the realm of normal politics," Raskin wrote. "When the president of the United States threatens to extinguish a civilization on social media, rants about combat missions with children at the Easter Egg Roll, and drops profane tirades on Easter morning, we have indisputably entered the realm of profound medical difficulty and concern."
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Officials, said one observer, "are finally starting to call the terror ICE is inflicting on communities what it actually is: kidnapping."
Apr 14, 2026
Prosecutors in Minnesota are investigating whether some of the most infamous images of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities earlier this year actually captured a kidnapping, when US citizen ChongLy "Scott" Thao was filmed being taken from his home by federal agents in freezing temperatures, wearing only his underwear with a blanket wrapped around him.
Ramsey Country Attorney John Choi, whose jurisdiction covers Saint Paul, where Thao was arrested in January, said at a press conference Monday that he has requested information from the Department of Homeland Security about the man's arrest.
"There are many facts we don't know yet, but there's one that we do know. And that is that Mr. Thao is and has been an American citizen. There's not a dispute over that," Sheriff Bob Fletcher said at the press conference.
The officials said they are investigating whether the agents could face criminal charges for kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived without a warrant at the home Thao shares with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year-old grandson on January 18 and forced their way in, brandishing their guns at the family as they handcuffed Thao.
They did not allow Thao's daughter-in-law to get proof of his citizenship. The 56-year-old has been a US citizen for decades after his mother fled Laos in the 1970s.
“We believe there was no legitimate legal reason for the federal agents to enter that home, it was not supported by probable cause,” said Choi.
Without giving him a chance to get dressed, the agents then hauled Thao out of his home into the 14°F temperatures as his neighbors yelled and blew whistles at the officers, demanding his release.
ICE arrest of US CITIZEN probed as kidnapping
ChongLy ‘Scott’ Thao seized Jan 18 — agents smash down door, drag him out at gunpoint in underwear
'Potential case of kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment' — officials pic.twitter.com/alsaq46bAz
— RT (@RT_com) April 14, 2026
They drove him around for nearly an hour before arriving at a remote area and demanding that he get out of the car and show his ID—which he hadn't been allowed to bring. They determined he was a US citizen with no criminal record and drove him back home.
Fletcher said federal agents switched the license plates of the vehicle used during the arrest, violating Minnesota law and leaving authorities with no knowledge of the identities of the officers who arrested Thao.
"There's no dispute that he was taken out of his house, forcibly taken out of his home, and driven around," said Fletcher at the press conference. "Is that good law enforcement, to take an American citizen out of their home and drive them around aimlessly, trying to determine what they can tell them?'"
One observer said the officials "are finally starting to call the terror ICE is inflicting on communities what it actually is: kidnapping."
"If regular people did this, they’d be in prison," they said. "So why aren’t the agents?"
In keeping with the Trump administration's response to widespread condemnation of its immigration crackdown and the conduct of its federal agents, DHS told The New York Times that Choi's investigation into the arrest was “a political stunt to demonize ICE law enforcement.”
The agency has claimed the officers were looking for two convicted sex offenders, one of whom has reportedly been in state prison since 2024.
Choi said Monday that there is no evidence the federal agents had a judicial warrant to enter Thao's home. The arrest took place days before a whistleblower group reported on an ICE memo which claimed that according to the DHS Office of the General Counsel, "the US Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants" in order to enter a home to make an arrest.
Legal experts have said the memo directly contradicts the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
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The attack was announced hours after Trump threatened Iranian vessels near the Strait of Hormuz with "the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea."
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The US military on Monday attacked a vessel in the eastern Pacific accused, without evidence, of engaging in "narco-trafficking operations." The strike killed at least two people and brought the known death toll from the Trump administration's lawless boat-bombing spree in international waters to more than 170.
As has been its custom since the boat bombings began last September, US Southern Command posted an unclassified video clip of the attack on social media. SOUTHCOM described the bombing as "a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," but did not provide any evidence against the boat's operators.
Monday's deadly strike came days after the April 11 US bombings of two other boats in the eastern Pacific, attacks that killed at least five people. United Nations experts and human rights organizations have condemned the bombings in international waters as extrajudicial killings and murder—and argued those ordering and carrying out the attacks should be prosecuted for homicide.
"More murder," The Intercept's Nick Turse wrote in response to Monday's boat bombing.
Hours before SOUTHCOM announced the latest strike, Turse reported that the Trump administration is "waging a pressure campaign against the leading inter-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into illegal US attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean."
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said Monday that it is "funny how the Trump administration is very happy to continue to post snuff films of these lawless killings but not defend the legal merits of these strikes."
Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held a hearing during which experts testified to the illegality of the boat strikes.
“The administration’s desire to play imperial superpower in the region cannot be a reason to completely displace the foundations of international law," Angelo Guisado, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the commission.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump threatened to expand his administration's illegal boat-bombing spree to Iranian vessels that "come anywhere close" to the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that the president ordered over the weekend.
Trump wrote on social media that Iranian vessels seen approaching the blockade "will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea."
"It is quick and brutal," the president added.
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