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Progressives Support Rep. Omar Against Bad Faith Attacks
50+ national progressive organizations and leaders released the following statement regarding bad faith attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar for comments earlier this week:
"Representative Ilhan Omar is facing a smear campaign for daring to name what few will: that all victims of war crimes deserve justice, regardless of who commits the crimes. As national progressive organizations and leaders devoted to upholding human rights everywhere and ensuring our democracy can flourish through freedom of speech, we support Rep. Omar and condemn these bad faith attacks.
WASHINGTON
50+ national progressive organizations and leaders released the following statement regarding bad faith attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar for comments earlier this week:
"Representative Ilhan Omar is facing a smear campaign for daring to name what few will: that all victims of war crimes deserve justice, regardless of who commits the crimes. As national progressive organizations and leaders devoted to upholding human rights everywhere and ensuring our democracy can flourish through freedom of speech, we support Rep. Omar and condemn these bad faith attacks.
"For too long, the United States and its allies have acted with impunity for the atrocities that they commit across the globe. Those who dare to violate Washington taboos and name this simple fact should be commended for their bravery. Instead, they are censored.
"Make no mistake: these attacks and intentional twisting of her words are designed not only to silence criticism of U.S. foreign policy, but to silence an outspoken woman of color. That this latest round of vilification is once again about Rep. Omar in particular is not a coincidence: the repeated targeting of Rep. Omar is rooted in sexism, racism, and anti-Muslim bigotry.
"It is no surprise that Rep. Omar's opponents would seize on any opportunity to once again attack one of Congress's leading progressive voices. The true shame is that many in her own party would buy in to such bad faith attacks.
"We join in solidarity with Rep. Omar and all who are willing to name the simple truth that the United States and its allies should be held accountable for their human rights violations. We urge all members of Congress, and Democratic leadership in particular, to stop falling for manufactured controversy. Fearless leadership for human rights everywhere should be commended, not condemned."
Organizations
Action Center on Race and the Economy
Adalah Justice Project
American Muslim Empowerment Network (AMEN)
Arab American Civic Council
Armenian-American Action Network
Ayada Leads
Center for International Policy
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)
Fellow Travelers
Freedom Forward
Friends of Human Rights
IfNotNow
Indivisible
Institute for Policy Studies - New Internationalism Project
Jetpac Resource Center
Jewish Voice for Peace Action
Jews for Racial & Economic Justice
Justice Democrats
MADRE
Masa Fund
MoveOn
MPower Change
National Iranian American Council
Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment
Revolving Door Project
Social Security Works
South Asian Americans Leading Together
The Feminist Front
UltraViolet
Win Without War
Working Families Party Individuals (Affiliations listed for identification purposes only)
Aneelah Afzali - Executive Director, American Muslim Empowerment Network (AMEN)
Iram Ali - Campaign Strategist
Sophia Armen - Co-Chair, The Feminist Front
Zahra Billoo - CAIR San Francisco Bay Area
Pam Campos-Palma - Director of Peace & Security, Working Families Party
John Cavanagh - Senior Advisor, Institute for Policy Studies
Joseph Cirincione - Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Hassan El-Tayyab - Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)
Richard (RJ) Eskow - The Zero Hour With RJ Eskow
Colin Hicks - Center for Popular Democracy / CPD Action
Marwa Janini - Arab American Association of New York
Wardah Khalid
Sana Qutubuddin - Indian American Muslim Council
Linda Sarsour - Co-founder, MPower Change, Until Freedom, Women's March
Azadeh Shahshahani - Legal & Advocacy Director, Project South. Past president, National Lawyers Guild.
Ilya Sheyman - Former Executive Director, MoveOn Political Action
Yasmine Taeb - Human rights lawyer and progressive strategist
Murshed Zaheed - Progressive Leader, Changemaker
Simone Zimmerman
Win Without War is a diverse network of activists and organizations working for a more peaceful, progressive U.S. foreign policy. We believe that by democratizing U.S. foreign policy and providing progressive alternatives, we can achieve more peaceful, just, and common sense policies that ensure that all people--regardless of race, nationality, gender, religion, or economic status--can find and take advantage of opportunity equally and feel secure.
LATEST NEWS
Trump Once Again Votes by Mail in Florida Election—But He Doesn't Think You Should
The president is pushing the Senate to pass new voting restrictions, including on mail-in ballots.
Mar 24, 2026
President Donald Trump has been escalating his push for the US Senate to pass sweeping legislation that would ban universal mail-in voting, spreading misinformation about mailed ballots, and slamming the system as "cheating"—but amid his efforts, he found time recently to cast his own ballot by mail for the latest time in Florida's special legislative election.
Voter records in Palm Beach County showed Trump cast his ballot by mail before early voting ended Sunday in state House and Senate races in Florida.
It's at least the second time that the president has voted by mail in Florida; he did so in 2020 as well.
“I can vote by mail," he told reporters at the time. "I’m allowed to.”
That same year, he aggressively promoted the baseless notion that voting by mail—a system long used in states run by both Republicans and Democrats, including Utah and Washington—would lead to election fraud.
Numerous US courts found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, in which more voters relied on voting by mail due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The president has said he aims only to prohibit universal mail-in voting rather than stopping individual voters from using mailed ballots; one of the new anti-voting rights bills he's proposed, the Make Elections Great Again Act, would prohibit universal mail voting and limit the system to a select few people by requiring voters to submit an application to receive a mail-in ballot.
Trump referred to voting by mail as "mail-in cheating" in Memphis on Monday, and said for the second time in a week that the US is "the only country that does mail-in voting."
Trump: It was brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that does mail in voting. I call it mail in cheating. pic.twitter.com/2bNmgoK6km
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 23, 2026
He made a similar comment last week when hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, whose country is one of dozens that allow voting by mail for some voters. Countries with universal mail-in voting include Canada, Iceland, Switzerland, and Germany.
Trump's use of mail-in voting led House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to denounce him as a "complete fraud" on Tuesday.
"Don’t ever believe a word he has to say about election integrity," said Jeffries.
Republican senators on Monday agreed to include portions of the SAVE America Act, a new version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, in a reconciliation bill that would also include funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bill passed in the House last month.
Under the SAVE America Act, photo ID would be required for all voters, including copies of a voter's ID with mail-in ballots.
"For voters who register by mail, the SAVE America Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to be delivered in person to an election office, effectively nullifying the benefits of mail registration," said the Bipartisan Policy Center last month.
Trump said last August that Democrats want mailed ballots to be available to voters because "it’s the only way they can get elected," despite the fact that such ballots are used by voters in both parties. He has also expressed confidence that Republicans "will never lose a race" if the GOP moves to restrict voting access.
Also on Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case from Mississippi regarding ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within the state's five-day grace period. The court's right-wing majority appeared poised to ban states from accepting ballots after Election Day.
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Trump State Dept. Accused of ‘Largest Fee Fraud in History’ of US Immigration System
An immigration researcher at the Cato Institute found that the Trump administration is "raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
Mar 24, 2026
The US State Department under President Donald Trump has been accused of stealing more than a billion dollars from immigrants and sponsors in what experts are calling “the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system.”
A report published last week by the Cato Institute, written by director of immigration studies David J. Bier, found that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security were receiving millions of applications from immigrants whom Trump has made ineligible for legal status and pocketing the fees without ever processing the requests.
"The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications," said Austin Kocher, a fellow at Immigration Lab and a professor at Newhouse and Syracuse University in a social media post breaking down the report on Monday. "No denials. No refunds. Just silence."
The report zeroes in on a series of policies signed by Trump and enacted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) head Joseph Edlow, which have collectively barred nationals from 92 countries from immigrating to the US.
One proclamation signed by Trump in December bans legal entry and most visas for the nationals of 40 nations—including Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and Haiti—based on nationality. A memo sent by Edlow extended the freeze to many USCIS immigration-benefit applications for people from targeted countries already living in the US, including work authorization and permanent residency filings
Another State Department policy bans visa applications from immigrants in 75 countries from being processed indefinitely, purportedly based on data showing that residents of those countries use welfare at disproportionately high rates.
These policies block more than 320,000 people abroad from entering the US and potentially as many as 561,000 potential permanent residents when those already living in the US are considered.
Although people from these countries are categorically denied immigrant visas and most other visa types under a series of travel bans signed by Trump, the government is still collecting fees for visas, work permits, and green cards.
The report cited evidence that the department has directed consular officers that they "should not counsel applicants or advise them" that they are subject to the bans when they come in for their interviews, because it "could be seen as pre-adjudication."
Upon revealing this directive last month, immigration attorney Curtis Morrison described it as a way that "embassies scam visa applicants subject to the travel ban out of fees."
As Bier explained:
To immigrate to the United States or to obtain authorization to work or travel internationally, noncitizens must usually pay a fee to have their applications processed. USCIS’s immigration fee revenues were nearly $7 billion, and the Consular Affairs budget was about $6 billion.
The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a US citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust status from temporary to permanent residence. That application takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.
Bier estimated that more than 2 million applications were affected by the bans, with fees coming primarily from work permit filings and permanent residency or immigrant visa applications.
He explained that these fees are difficult to track precisely because the government does not publish detailed statistics on them. He was also forced to rely on out-of-date fee statistics from 2023-24 because the Trump administration "has simply stopped publishing most statistics."
That said, Bier noted that the numbers are most likely to “understate reality” because they include only those who likely had their requests processed in the past year, not those whose processing was delayed by backlogs.
Of the more than $1 billion in fees the Trump administration would have collected for services it never rendered, data from previous years suggested that about $543 million came from Cuban immigrants, who filed about 935,000 applications during the period under review.
The next highest were Venezuelans, who paid an estimated $138 million in fees. Iranians, Haitians, and Afghans were also among the nationalities with the highest numbers of unprocessed applications.
The Trump administration has used high-profile instances of fraud committed by members of immigrant groups, such as Somalis in Minneapolis, to cast aspersions upon entire nationalities and target them for immigration bans and attacks by federal law enforcement.
However, as Bier explained before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, based on the findings of a Cato report, "immigrants aren't to blame" for most welfare fraud, accounting for just 5% of it, 31% less per capita than native-born US citizens.
He argued that the Department of Homeland Security "isn't anti-fraud" but instead "openly carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system... raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
"DHS and State can deny anyone who fails to make their case. Instead, this administration is pocketing thousands of dollars from hardworking Americans and their relatives, including spouses and minor children of US citizens, and then not even looking at their applications," he said. "This is a scam. This is fraud."
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'Mind-Blowing Corruption': Traders Placed Massive Bets Minutes Before Trump Post on Iran
"Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?" asked US Sen. Chris Murphy.
Mar 24, 2026
Just minutes before US President Donald Trump momentarily boosted the stock market—and sent oil prices tumbling—with his disputed Monday announcement of peace talks with Iran, unknown traders loaded up on positions that allowed them to profit from the resulting movement in equities and commodities.
The Financial Times reported that "roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands between 6:49 am and 6:50 am New York time on Monday, just a quarter of an hour ahead of the US president’s post on Truth Social that there had in recent days been 'productive conversations' with Tehran to end the war in Iran."
FT added that the notional value of those trades was $580 million.
"Trading volumes for Brent and WTI leapt at the same time, 27 seconds before 6:50 am," the newspaper reported. "Futures tracking the S&P 500 share index jumped in price moments after the oil trade, with volumes also rising significantly during that timeframe. It was not known whether one entity or several entities were behind Monday’s trades."
An unnamed trader at a "major hedge fund" told FT that "my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal."
"It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front-run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk," the trader said. "Somebody just got a lot richer.”
A BBC review of market data similarly found that "traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil contracts just minutes before" Trump's announcement of talks with Iran. Iranian officials publicly denied that they are negotiating with the Trump administration, and Iran's top lawmaker accused the US president of peddling "fake news" in an attempt to "manipulate the financial and oil markets."
The suspiciously timed bets ahead of the US president's post heightened concerns that Trump administration insiders are illegally trading on—and profiting massively from—nonpublic knowledge.
Responding to a report that $1.5 billion worth of S&P 500 futures was purchased just five minutes before Trump's Monday announcement, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked: "Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?"
"This is corruption," the senator wrote. "Mind-blowing corruption."
Last week, Murphy joined US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in unveiling legislation that would ban prediction markets on "government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome."
The bill came on the heels of suspiciously timed, highly profitable bets related to US military actions in Venezuela and Iran.
The Guardian reported Monday that several newly created accounts on the online prediction platform Polymarket "laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts."
Researcher Ben Yorke told the newspaper that the accounts—which are anonymous—"definitely" look like "someone with some degree of inside info."
The Guardian noted that "online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading—both because they bought their positions at market price, and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets."
According to Yorke, "Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading."
The Trump White House insisted Monday that any suggestion of insider trading "is baseless and irresponsible reporting."
“The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge," said White House spokesperson Kush Desai.
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