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'It Has to Stop': Community Members Condemn ICE Arrests at Bus Stops After GOP Blocks Bill to Protect Kids
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said one Austin, Texas official.
Oct 02, 2026
Since Republicans in the US Senate this week blocked a bill to make school bus stops off-limits for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, community members in Pennsylvania and Austin, Texas have expressed outrage by arrests made in front of children—in at least one reported case, leaving a child abandoned as officers detained his mother.
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said José "Chito" Vela III, the mayor pro tempore of Austin, on social media late Thursday.
Vela made the comments as he posted a video that he said shows the aftermath of an ICE arrest at a school bus stop, with officers driving away with the mother of a 9-year-old boy who was left with other community members.
"They fucking took her," said one woman angrily as the child sat on the ground crying. "What the fuck are they going to do with the child now? ... Y'all have no fucking shame."
ICE arrested the mom of a 9-year-old at a school bus stop in Austin, leaving him alone and crying. The video has profanity and is heartbreaking to watch, but it shows the fear/pain of what happened.
This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop.
Video: Leonardo Pelaez on FB pic.twitter.com/F52rCjZwIF
— Mayor Pro Tem Chito Vela, III (@chitoforatx) October 2, 2026
Vela posted the video a day after Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced a bill aimed at stopping ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies from conducting enforcement operations at school bus stops.
In August, Murphy and many of his constituents were outraged when ICE arrested parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut—detaining them after their children boarded buses, leaving them without anyone to pick them up after school let out and giving the family no time to ensure their children would be cared for.
Murphy said on the Senate floor Wednesday that the bus stop arrests were part of an operation in which 118 people were detained in Connecticut. Federal data has shown that a majority of people being arrested by ICE, which is carrying out President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, have no criminal convictions.
“For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that school bus," said Murphy. "Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the school bus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the school bus, and when he got back from school that day and got off, his parent wasn't there. A 6-year-old feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on.”
The senator added that ICE has "blatantly lied" about its practice of carrying out arrests at school bus stops.
"When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said any claim that ICE targeted parents at a school bus stop is false," he said. "Then just days afterwards, we had the video evidence. This often happens—ICE says something didn't happen, and then we have the video proving that it did."
Also on Wednesday, about 75 community members gathered at the corner of Tremont Avenue and East Fornance Street in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where ICE reportedly detained three people in front of a group of children who were waiting for the school bus.
They called on Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and local officials to pass legislation to bar law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.
“When enforcement happens in places where families live their everyday lives, at bus stops, on streets, near schools, or in neighborhoods, the effects can reach beyond the person who is detained,” Jorge Liborio, 16, told WHYY. “It can affect children, parents, coworkers, friends, and entire communities.”
Jay Lee, an advocacy and civic engagement manager at the Woori Center, which provides resources for the area's large immigrant population, said that "attendance is falling" in local schools. Immigrants make up about 18% of Norristown's population.
Chalkbeat reported this week that nearly two years after Trump rescinded a policy that barred immigration enforcement in sensitive areas like schools and hospitals, school attendance dropped below 40% at one Indianapolis school when ICE was conducting operations in the city.
Two federal lawsuits challenging Trump's termination of the sensitive locations policy are ongoing.
On Wednesday, Murphy denounced Republicans for blocking his bill, pointing to Sen. Jim Banks' (R-Ind.) claim that it would create "sanctuary bus stops"—safe havens for immigrants who commit crimes.
"If we prohibit ICE from operating at school bus stops, you know what will happen?" said Banks. "All the illegals in the country will just hide out at bus stops, knowing that ICE isn’t allowed to touch them! Bus stops will become the most unsafe places in the country."
Murphy called Banks' objection "bizarre" and "dishonest."
"I did not anticipate that one of the arguments against this bill would be that it would lead to the development of ‘sanctuary bus stops,'" said the senator. "But what do we imagine here? People are going to live at bus stops? We're going to have encampments around bus stops of people who are here without documentation? I just think it's an example of how this whole debate has gone way off the rails. It is just fundamentally detached from the reality.”
In Austin, Vela said that "families pay the price" when ICE "chooses to use these tactics."
"This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop," said Vela. "We must demand accountability. We must demand better. Our children deserve better."
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1 in 5 Children in Lebanon Facing Daily Hunger Due to Israeli Assault: UNICEF
After more than six months, 329,000 people in Lebanon remain displaced from their homes by Israel's occupation, one-third of whom are children.
Sep 30, 2026
Israel's latest assault on Lebanon is inflicting widespread hunger, death, and injury on children across the country, according to a report out Wednesday from the United Nations Children's Fund.
Children go to bed hungry in at least one in five households, according to a survey conducted by UNICEF in July, while nearly a third are going without needed healthcare because their families are unable to afford it. Four in five households, the report says, have found it harder to afford basic necessities.
Nearly 17,000 people have been killed or injured since March. Among them are 261 children who've been killed and 1,056 who've been injured—and 12% of those injured now live with a disability.
Around 100,000 children are at risk of losing access to education. At least 436 schools have been damaged across the country, including 37 that were completely destroyed.
“Children and young people in Lebanon are being asked to bear a burden no child should have to carry,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Marcoluigi Corsi, who noted the report's finding that 770,000 children have suffered psychological distress over the past six months due to repeated exposure to violence, loss, and displacement.
Lebanon was already in the midst of an economic crisis that left many families poor. But the situation has grown markedly more severe since March, when Israel launched an ongoing occupation of southern Lebanon that has displaced more than 1.1 million people and unleashed punishing airstrikes across the country, including in densely populated civilian areas.
More than 329,000 of those displaced have yet to go home, and around one-third are children. Despite a ceasefire announced in April, Israeli officials have said that those ordered to leave their homes will not be allowed to return until they deem northern Israel "safe" from attacks by the militant group Hezbollah.
Israeli forces have systematically razed dozens of villages and farms in southern Lebanon, destroying tens of thousands of homes. As Al Jazeera reported earlier this week, Israel has predominantly demolished Shia villages while telling Christian villages they'll be spared so long as they stay neutral.
According to a June report by Amnesty International, about 6% of Lebanese territory is effectively under a "don't come back" order from Israel with residents barred indefinitely from returning home. Amnesty said the forced displacement and prevention of return in parts of southern Lebanon constitute unlawful transfer, a war crime.
Some Israeli leaders have discussed annexing the occupied portion of Lebanon and moving in Israeli settlers.
Earlier this week, Bezalel Smotrich—the Israeli finance minister who has overseen a historic surge of violent settlement expansion in the West Bank—said that he would "very much like to annex at least… up to the Litani [River] in Lebanon," extending the country's border into southern Lebanon.
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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“There was no school left,” said the father of a 6-year-old girl killed in the attack. “I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.”
Sep 30, 2026
Survivors, parents, and first responders provided harrowing firsthand accounts of the US bombing of an elementary school on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran as part of a new Drop Site News investigation demonstrating that the school had publicly operated as a civilian institution for more than a decade.
The report, published Wednesday, provides new eyewitness accounts from those who lost loved ones when US Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, which killed 120 children and dozens of others, and has been described as “one of the worst US war crimes since Vietnam.”
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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The United States Desperately Needs a Care Package
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society.
Sep 30, 2026
Every day in the United States, millions of people wake up and face a version of the same impossible arithmetic. They need to earn income. They also need to care for their children, their aging parents, a spouse or sibling with a disability, or themselves—especially when illness strikes. The market offers no solution to this equation. The government offers patchwork. And so families improvise—women in particular absorb the shortfall in unpaid labor, often at permanent cost to their earnings, their retirement security, and their own health.
This is not a private misfortune. It is a public failure, and an expensive one.
The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society. Children who receive attentive, high-quality care in their early years are more likely to become healthy, educated, productive adults. Workers who can take time to recover from illness or to be present at a family crisis return to their jobs more quickly and with greater stability. Caregivers who receive adequate support are less likely to exit the labor force permanently, less likely to fall into poverty in old age, and more likely to participate fully in economic and civic life. The benefits of care are not merely sentimental—they are measurable, and they are large.
Yet the United States persistently underinvests in care and consistently treats it as a personal rather than a shared responsibility. We spend less than half of what comparable wealthy nations spend on early childhood programs as a share of GDP. We are the only high-income country without a national paid parental leave policy. Our system of support for elderly and disabled individuals is means-tested to the point of cruelty, requiring many families to exhaust their savings before receiving assistance and funneling care into nursing homes, even when home-based support would serve people better and cost less. The result is a care deficit that falls hardest on those least able to bear it: low-income families, workers in jobs without benefits, and the women who disproportionately provide unpaid care when public provision falls short.
The costs of this deficit are not borne equally. Research consistently documents that inadequate support for caregiving suppresses women’s labor force participation and depresses their lifetime earnings. Mothers who leave employment during their children’s early years—often because affordable care is simply unavailable—face lasting wage penalties that compound over careers and into retirement. Families caring for an elderly or disabled adult spend on average more than a quarter of their income on that care, a burden that falls with particular force on Black and Hispanic families, who have less accumulated wealth to draw upon. Children growing up in poverty face developmental disadvantages with lifelong consequences, yet more than one in four American children under seventeen are excluded from the full benefit of the primary federal child support program by restrictions that penalize the families who need help most.
These are not the inevitable features of a wealthy society. They are the results of specific policy choices—and they can be changed.
This week, as part of the Game Changers Webinar series, Nancy Folbre, Kate Bahn, Jaimie Worker, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons participated in this online discussion about how the "US Needs a Care Package" as they offered an overview of specific policy proposals for funding universal childcare, paid family leave, increased support for the elderly and disabled, and a guaranteed minimum income for children.
- YouTube
The Game Changers Care Package
Three bold, interconnected proposals—universal child care, paid family and medical leave plus long-term care support, and a monthly child allowance—would transform life for American families. Together, they form a coherent package that addresses caregiving at every stage of life: from infancy through old age. Other wealthy nations have already figured this out. It’s long past time the United States did too.
These proposals would work together to give families the flexibility they need. They build on policies that have already been put in place by individual states or experimented with at the federal level. They are game-changers because they are all conceived as free, universal benefits that would be funded by taxes on income from capital, rather than from labor. They all promise social benefits that far exceed their cost.
Other comparable nations have demonstrated this. Countries that have invested in universal child care, paid family leave, and adequate support for aging and disabled individuals have not sacrificed economic dynamism to do so. They have expanded women’s workforce participation, reduced child poverty, improved population health, and in many cases generated public returns that substantially exceed the cost of the investment. The evidence from states within the United States that have implemented paid family leave programs, expanded child care access, and shifted long-term care toward home- and community-based services confirms the same pattern: these policies pay for themselves in reduced poverty, improved health outcomes, and increased labor supply, while also producing something harder to measure but no less real—a reduction in the daily stress and insecurity that care gaps impose on ordinary families.
The three proposals developed in this Game Changers Care Package—universal child care, paid family and medical leave combined with expanded long-term care support, and a universal monthly child allowance—form a coherent response to this failure. They address caregiving across the full life course, from infancy through old age. They are designed to work together, with each reinforcing the others: affordable child care enables parents to work and earn; paid leave allows them to respond to family needs without permanent economic penalty; a child allowance provides a universal floor of support that no family falls below. Taken together, they represent not an expansion of welfare as it is conventionally understood, but a fundamental reorientation of how we value and support the work of care—recognizing it, at last, as the indispensable foundation of everything else the economy produces.
The time for modest adjustments has passed. The following pages make the case for something bolder.
Important synergies between the elements of this portfolio of proposed policies can
help overcome potential tensions between reducing child poverty, advancing gender equality, and rewarding family and community care provision in the U.S. Fully universal child care services address an immediate problem for parents of small children seeking to earn sufficient income to support their families and have long-run implications for women’s lifetime earnings trajectories. Paid family and medical leave, like home and community based long-term care for disabled individuals and the elderly, provides support for in-home care of dependents. A universal basic income for children in the U.S., which could also be referred to as a family allowance, builds on and expands current tax subsidies in ways that could dramatically reduce child poverty in the short run.
Advancing these policies in concert leads to a more complicated picture than choosing to prioritize one or the other (especially in terms of funding details) but it is more likely to help us achieve important common goals.[1] All three policy proposals emphasize the public-good argument for financing, and refer, where relevant, to social-cost-benefit analysis. Public expenditures on care provision are often interpreted as a drag on economic growth because growth is defined almost entirely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (the final value of all goods and services purchased in a country), and investment is defined in ways that largely exclude investments in the production, development, and maintenance of human capabilities.[2]
Policy issues vital to the care economy extend well beyond the three proposals here, inviting collaboration with other game-changing policy groups. The two most direct overlaps lie with the health care working group, and the labor working group. Out of respect for an initial division of labor we have omitted consideration of the health care system as a whole, policies regarding job flexibility, penalties for part-time employment, and rights to remote access to employment from home.
Note: The author is grateful for the assistance of Kate Bahn, Jennifer Glass, James Heintz, Julie Kashen, Katherine Moos, Laura Valle-Gutierrez and Jaimie Worker
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'Monstrous' US Deportation Hearings for Children Who 'Have No One' Shock Consciences
"Don't ever get immune to the inhumanity and dehumanization of what the Trump/Miller project is doing to children and families," said one advocate.
Sep 29, 2026
"We cannot allow this evil to continue," said one commentator after reading a CNN reporter's description of an immigration court hearing in Harlingen, Texas on Monday, where children as young as 3 appeared without legal representation and were asked by a judge whether they wanted a "voluntary" departure from the US or a deportation order.
The hearing, attended by Priscilla Alvarez of CNN, was one of many that are taking place in the US as President Donald Trump pushes to fast-track deportations with abruptly scheduled asylum interviews and court appearances, as the administration also sharply curtails the legal representation that's available to children.
There is no requirement for children, like the 1,883 who were being held by the US Health and Human Services (HHS) Department last month, to have an attorney throughout the asylum process, during which they are expected to present evidence that they have a credible fear of returning to their home country and should be granted asylum in the US.
But Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, told CNN that before the group lost a $200 million contract in July when the administration allowed it to lapse, it was practically unheard of for children to appear in court without legal representation.
“Before, under our contract, it was mandatory to enter into representation if a child was moving forward to the pleading stage while in detention. You’d never have a child in detention being ordered removed without representation,” said Aber, whose group subcontracted with 100 legal service providers to help advocate for more than 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children, including those who were detained while trying to cross the US-Mexico border without their parents and others who were sent to detention when their family members were arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As family members and guardians face new vetting requirements to have their children released back into their custody from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at HHS, children are increasingly being pushed into immigration court hearings without anyone to help them determine how to advocate for themselves.
A 13-year-old Honduran boy identified as Angel appeared in court Monday without a lawyer and was asked by a judge if there was a reason he couldn't return to his home country, which faces a displacement crisis due to violence, poverty, and climate disasters.
“My mom and almost my entire family are here. It’s too dangerous to go back," said Angel.
The judge told him he did not qualify for asylum and asked the 13-year-old to make a choice: a promise of a $3,000 stipend from the Department of Homeland Security to return to Honduras without his mother and family, or a deportation order.
“I don’t know,” Angel said before beginning to cry. “I have no one. I have nothing.”
The judge gave Angel a deportation order and said he had 30 days to appeal it.
The proceedings were observed virtually by an attorney from the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), which was given a $20 million contract last month by ORR, ostensibly to provide legal services to children facing immigration hearings and asylum interviews.
The lawyer did not speak on behalf of Angel or any of the other children who were facing the judge, and attorneys and advocates have said in court filings that USCRI lawyers have either not shown up to hearings or have not spoken in defense of children facing deportation. USCRI did not respond to a request for comment from CNN regarding that claim.
One advocate told CNN that the fast-tracked deportation proceedings are "a complete violation of due process for a child."
“The kids who are unrepresented, they can’t read the form, much less figure out how to file it. And if they don’t put an asylum claim in, the judges are ordering their removal,” they said. “No one is asking a single question—who will you go to? Will you be safe?”
The hearing took place as Margaret Wurth, senior adviser at the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), warned of the "anguish" the Trump administration is causing for families and children across the US as the number of people deported by Trump reaches 540,000.
HRW spoke to one Haitian man named Pierre, who had been living in Florida with his wife and son, who was born in the US. Pierre had protections under Temporary Protected Status, but Trump ended the program for Haitians, and the US Supreme Court upheld that decision in June.
Pierre was detained at a routine check-in with ICE, which told him his work permit had expired. He said he had a pending asylum case and had applied to renew his work permit on time, but was taken to two different detention centers before being sent back to Haiti.
“I worked so that he could grow up without the fear, violence, and uncertainty that I had known in Haiti,” Pierre told HRW. “I did not get to hug my son. My wife is now alone with the rent, the bills, and our child. She tells me that he still waits for me and asks whether I will be there when he comes home from school.”
Dylan Williams, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy, called the immigration hearing that was described on Monday as "monstrous."
"A society that allows this is deeply sick," he said.
Another observer wondered how proceedings like the ones described by CNN are going forward in courtrooms across the country without judges "rage-quitting," and labor advocate Charles Idelson called on Americans to not "normalize" the treatment of immigrant children by Trump and his top officials, including Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller.
"Don't ever get immune to the inhumanity and dehumanization of what the Trump/Miller project is doing to children and families," he said.
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UN Experts Say US War Crimes Likely in Iran School, Sports Complex Massacres
The report points to statements by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that signaled the "deprioritization of civilian harm mitigation and of compliance with international law."
Sep 17, 2026
Human rights experts who led a United Nations fact-finding mission in Iran are set to submit their findings to the UN Human Rights Council that the United States likely committed war crimes in the early days of the US-Israeli war there.
The experts examined evidence regarding two airstrikes that killed at least 178 civilians, including 120 children, according to Iranian authorities—the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab and an attack on a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd, both of which took place on February 28.
The report notes that the Pentagon has not released findings of its own investigation into the Minab school bombing and the US has not accepted responsibility for the attack, although Reuters reported on an internal probe that found US forces were likely behind the strike.
Despite the lack of a response from the US to the fact-finding mission's requests for information, the experts said they found "reasonable grounds to believe that the US committed the war crime of launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects."
The report pointed to the Trump administration's "deprioritization of civilian harm mitigation and of compliance with IHL [international humanitarian law], expressed through public statements by senior US leadership, including the president and the secretary of defense."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said early in the war that the US would dispense with “stupid rules of engagement”—which are meant to protect civilians under international law—and said US forces would rain "death and destruction from the sky all day long."
The Pentagon also relied on "outdated targeting data" when deciding to bomb the school in Minab, which was clearly identified as a school for young children, said the report.
"The mission considers that the United States' failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence," reads the report. "Rather, the US directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen."
More than 150 people were killed in the attack, including 120 children.
The experts also said the sports complex and residential area in Lamerd on February 28 were "clearly identifiable" as civilian targets, and that the weapon used in the attack—Lockheed Martin-manufactured Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) that disperse tungsten pellets over a wide area—show that the strike "constituted an indiscriminate attack in violation of the principle of distinction" between civilians and military targets.
The missiles, said the experts, "could not be directed at a specific military objective and their effects on civilians and civilian objects could not be limited as required by IHL. The US was under the IHL obligation to employ weapons systems and ammunition that satisfied these requirements."
The UN team said 22 civilians were killed in the attack in Lamerd, including four schoolchildren and a two-year-old girl who was killed while playing in front of her home.
US Central Command has denied responsibility for the attack, but top US officials in March boasted that the military had "made history" by using the PrSM for the first time in the war.
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Children Among at Least 21 Killed as Gaza Building Damaged by Israel's US-Backed Assault Collapses
"Today’s tragedy underscores the grave risks faced by families living in these structures and the urgent need for safer alternatives," said one UN official.
Sep 16, 2026
Nearly three years of Israeli bombardment in Gaza have left tens of thousands of Palestinians with no choice but to live in an estimated 2,000 buildings that have been severely damaged, and the danger of such precarious living conditions was starkly illustrated early Wednesday morning when an apartment building in Gaza City collapsed, killing at least 21 people and trapping dozens beneath rubble.
Rescuers reported that at least eight children were among those killed when the bombed-out building fell down onto adjacent tents that were also housing forcibly displaced Palestinians.
More than 10 families had been living in the building, which had four apartments on each floor and became even more vulnerable to collapse as damp autumn weather arrived in recent weeks.
"There are approximately 400 buildings at risk of collapse," Alessandro Mrakic, head of the United Nations Development Program's Gaza office, told Reuters. "And we know that these buildings will collapse, especially now with the upcoming winter."
Rescuers reported hearing people calling out beneath the rubble, but the search-and-rescue operation has been made more difficult by a lack of machinery, Mrakic said.
Heavy machinery is among many items that Israeli authorities restrict from entering Gaza, claiming that they'll be used by Hamas.
"There are actually people are digging with their bare hands," Mrakic told Reuters. "We need to prepare [for more deaths]."
Adequate tents and mobile homes are also blocked from entering Gaza, reported Drop Site News, contributing to families' reliance on severely damaged buildings for shelter.
When asked by The Guardian whether they were afraid to live in the building, survivors of the collapse said: “Yes, we are afraid, but where can we go? This is better than staying out on the street.”
At least 25 people were confirmed as injured and hospitalized on Wednesday.
"Across Gaza, people are living in hundreds of damaged structures assessed as unsafe, for lack of better options," said Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories. "Today’s tragedy underscores the grave risks faced by families living in these structures and the urgent need for safer alternatives. No one should have to risk their life simply to find a safe place to shelter."
"I call for urgent approvals for the entry of heavy machinery, specialized equipment, engine oil and fuel needed for search-and-rescue operations," said Alakbarov. "Tents, tarpaulins, and other nonfood items must also reach the most vulnerable communities in the next four weeks. Every possible effort must be made to save lives, protect people from further harm, and provide families with safer places to live. Every minute counts."
Videos and images circulating on social media showed rescue workers desperately trying to pull people from the rubble, and the spokesperson for Gaza's Civil Defense, Mahmoud Basal, carrying a child wrapped in a scarf stained with blood.
At least 20 people, mostly women and children, have been killed after a six-story residential building collapsed in Gaza City.
Extensive efforts are underway to rescue dozens of civilians missing under the rubble of the building, which had previously been damaged by Israeli… pic.twitter.com/gqHSgfKUEp
— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) September 16, 2026
More than 90% of housing units in Gaza have been destroyed by Israel since October 2023, when it began its assault on Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, including thousands of children, journalists, healthcare workers, and humanitarian workers—while Israel and its allies, including the US government, have persisted in claiming the military operation is targeting Hamas fighters.
Attacks have continued in Gaza despite a ceasefire that was brokered last October, and families have become increasingly desperate to find housing after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to take over 70% of Gaza in violation of the ceasefire deal.
The building collapse came as it was reported that the Trump administration was preparing to send Israel tens of thousands of 2,000-pound bombs.
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Trump Treasury Would Strip Tax Refunds From Hundreds of Thousands of American Kids, Researchers Warn
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities experts said the move “would harm people who are immigrants and their families, including many US citizen children, who are critical to the nation’s future prosperity.”
Sep 14, 2026
Hundreds of thousands of US citizen children could lose access to key benefits as part of a Trump administration proposal to strip tax credit refunds away from immigrant families, including those with legal status.
In August, the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed rules redefining four tax credits—the adoption tax credit, child tax credit (CTC), American opportunity tax credit, and earned income tax credit (EITC)—as "federal public benefits" under a decades-old welfare reform law, meaning that certain groups of noncitizens, not considered "qualified aliens," would be ineligible to claim refunds from them.
Among them are undocumented immigrants, but also many people with temporary nonimmigrant visas, as well as holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
According to the Treasury and IRS, the average refunded benefit among all taxpayers whose claims contain at least one of the affected credits is $3,656.
Reporting on the proposal last month, CNBC described it as an effort to "use the nation’s financial safety net as a way to implement stricter immigration policy" and noted that low-income recipients, who are less likely to have large income tax bills to refund, would be hit the hardest.
In a policy brief published on Monday, a group of experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)—director of federal tax policy Kris Cox, vice president for immigration policy Shelby Gonzales, deputy director of federal tax policy Samantha Jacoby, and senior research analyst Claire Zippel—examined the likely effects of the policy.
They estimated that the proposal would take away access to the refundable portion of the CTC and/or the EITC for 1 million people in affected families, including US citizens and people with lawful immigration statuses.
While the proposed rule estimates that between 200,000 and 700,000 taxpayers would become ineligible, the researchers said this understated the potential impact because it only included the tax filers themselves, without noting that their family members would also be hurt.
Using immigration status data from the Department of Homeland Security, the researchers said they determined that "the rule would take access to refundable credits away from hundreds of thousands of US citizen children if both parents—or their parent, for single-parent families—have an immigration status that is not a 'qualified' status."
"For 30 years, no administration, Democratic or Republican, has treated refundable tax credits this way," the researchers said. "The proposed rule includes a misguided reinterpretation of a 1996 law that created restrictive immigration-related eligibility standards for 'federal public benefits,' taking away access to basic needs programs from many immigrants with lawful statuses."
"The Trump administration is seeking to apply those same immigration-related restrictions—which require people to have a 'qualified' immigration status—to the refunded portion of certain tax credits," they continued. "This contradicts both the clear reading of the statutory text and congressional intent, which Congress has demonstrated by legislating on immigrant eligibility for tax credits several times since the 1996 law, most recently in 2025."
They noted that the new policy follows other efforts by the administration to restrict access to other programs for families with immigrants, including Head Start, child welfare services, and health services, all of which are being challenged in court.
Many of the people who'd be barred from receiving the credit refunds, the researchers said, are especially vulnerable, including:
- Children granted special immigrant juvenile status, who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected by one or both parents;
- Survivors of serious criminal activity who have cooperated with law enforcement;
- People with DACA and TPS; and
- Many others who are living and working lawfully in the United States.
"Taking away these tax credits would harm people who are immigrants and their families, including many US citizen children, who are critical to the nation’s future prosperity," the researchers said, pointing to studies linking additional income from tax credits with improved health, education, employment, and earnings."
"People who are immigrants and their families contribute to our communities and nation in immeasurable ways," they concluded. "These restrictions on tax credits create a higher effective tax rate for people who are filing their taxes solely based on their immigration status."
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Muslim Children Should Not Carry the Burden of the 9/11 Attacks
Every child should learn about the devastating consequences of hatred, extremism, and violence, but no child should be made to feel responsible for those events simply because they share a faith with the perpetrators.
Sep 10, 2026
Muslim children were not born carrying the weight of 9/11. Society placed it on their shoulders. It is time for us to take it off.
As a child, I was called a "camel queen" by my teachers. Years later, while I was pregnant, a college professor looked at my stomach and joked in front of the whole class that I might have a "bomb" under there.
He was talking about my unborn child.
What has stayed with me all these years is not only the cruelty of the remark. It was where it happened. The comment came from a professor, in a classroom, an environment that should have been a place of learning, respect, and safety.
I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.
In that moment, I was not seen as a student, a mother-to-be, or a human being. I was seen through the lens of a vicious stereotype.
That moment taught me something I have never forgotten: Anti-Muslim prejudice is not always loud or obvious. Sometimes it appears as a joke. Sometimes it appears as an assumption. Sometimes it appears in the expectation that Muslims must constantly prove that they are not what others fear they might be.
My experience is not unique. In May, a 12-year-old Muslim student in Connecticut was reportedly subjected to repeated harassment and called anti-Muslim names. In a sign of the times, the Danbury Police Department searched the family’s home for weapons after allegations were made against the student.
In a 2025 survey of Muslims, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), found, “Forty-seven percent of Muslim families with school-aged children report having a child who faced religious-based bullying in the past year, compared with 23% among the general public.”
Like many Muslim children, I learned early what it felt like to be viewed as different, foreign, or less worthy. Those experiences leave scars that are difficult to explain to people who have never lived them.
Today, I see those same burdens carried by Muslim students.
I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.
They wonder whether classmates will look at them and make jokes.
They wonder whether they will be expected to condemn atrocities they had nothing to do with.
No child should have to carry that burden.
This week, the organization I work for issued its Back to School Resource Guide for 2026-2027, which I authored. The guide gives teachers tips on how to discuss challenging topics with students, including providing comprehensive lesson plans that address the 9/11 attacks, specifically the victims and families impacted; the aftermath of the attacks, such as the war in Afghanistan; changes in national security; and the rise of hate crimes and discrimination against American Muslim communities.
The purpose of educational resources that address bias and inclusion is not to rewrite history or erase the tragedy of September 11. Muslims, like millions of other Americans, mourned the victims of al Qaeda’s vicious attacks. We condemned the perpetrators then, and we continue to condemn them today.
The purpose is much simpler: to help ensure that students can learn about difficult moments in history without becoming targets themselves.
Every child should be able to learn about 9/11. Every child should learn about the devastating consequences of hatred, extremism, and violence. But no child should be made to feel responsible for those events simply because they share a faith with the people who hijacked it.
I am no longer the little girl being mocked on the playground by teachers. I am no longer the college student sitting in a classroom while a professor jokes about my unborn child. But children today face many of the same assumptions.
Our children deserve better than that. They deserve classrooms where they are seen as students, not suspects. They deserve the freedom to learn about history without being associated with its worst actors. And they deserve a future in which their identity is not treated as a source of suspicion.
Most of all, they deserve to be children, free from the burden of defending themselves against crimes they did not commit.
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As Congress Fails to Take Action on AI, AFT and Microsoft Reach 'First-of-Its-Kind' Deal to Protect Kids
Teachers, said one union leader, "forged a hard-fought, ironclad privacy agreement... because no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work."
Sep 09, 2026
The advocacy group Fairplay on Wednesday applauded education union leaders for spearheading efforts to ensure students and teachers in the US are protected by safety and privacy standards as artificial intelligence companies push for their products to be used in schools.
But the organization's executive director, Josh Golin, emphasized that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) "should never have been in this position in the first place," and Congress and states should have already passed legislation to create "industry-wide standards that are enforceable through attorneys general and a private right of action."
"With our elected leaders failing to live up to their responsibilities, we are left with an agreement that places an unfair burden on schools and doesn't do enough to keep kids safe," said Golin.
The deal reached Wednesday was between AFT, UFT, and Microsoft, so it will pertain only to the Silicon Valley giant's AI products.
It includes 10 "legally enforceable protections," reported Politico, including a commitment from Microsoft not to use student or teacher data to train AI models, except in narrow "safety and security" circumstances.
Other requirements of the deal include:
- Microsoft can only collect, process, or store data that is strictly necessary to deliver an educational product;
- All covered data, including every prompt, response, file, and AI-generated output, belongs exclusively to the school and students;
- All tools support educators and students and do not replace human judgment; and
- The company and schools must be transparent with families about how AI is being used.
AFT said the "first-of-its-kind" agreement came after months of painstaking negotiations "in the absence of any meaningful federal and state rules governing artificial intelligence in schools."
The deal was announced on the same day that Jacob Coxon, a researcher at AI firm Anthropic, resigned in protest of an industry that he said is pushing to build "superhuman systems" without guardrails.
He told The Wall Street Journal he was "worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”
Coxon's warning intensified calls for Congress to pass legislation to rein in AI, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) proposed moratorium on AI data centers and his bill, introduced with Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), to ban artificial superintelligence.
Bipartisan legislation has also failed to pass.
More than 80% of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI, according to one recent NBC poll, and President Donald Trump has joined the industry in pushing to block states from passing their own regulations.
Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, said the unions had "forged a hard-fought, ironclad privacy agreement with real teeth that protects students and families, because no one else, including the federal government, has stepped up to do the real work."
“We can get angrier and angrier, or we can act decisively; anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list," said Weingarten.
Golin emphasized that the deal "elides the most important question of all: Should student-facing AI products be used in schools at all?"
"There is no evidence that AI products are effective teaching tools for children and growing evidence that they undermine learning and create a number of risks for kids," said Golin. "That’s why Fairplay and its network of experts are calling on schools to implement a five-year pause on all [generative] AI products until it can be determined whether those products are safe for young people and beneficial to their education."
“We hope this agreement does not fool schools into thinking that GenAI products are safe and effective for use with schoolchildren or hoodwink policymakers into thinking legislation restricting AI use in schools is not needed," he added. "It also places the burden on schools to execute and enforce the contract, which they are not in a position to do, and which should be the job of regulators."
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