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new york times
New York Times Reveals 'More Targeted Version' of Trump Family Separation Policy
"The family separation policies of the first Trump administration were disastrous, and their resurgence cannot be tolerated," said one critic.
Aug 05, 2025
U.S. immigration authorities are once again separating children from their undocumented parents in "what appears to be a more targeted version of one of the most explosive policies" of President Donald Trump's first term, The New York Times revealed on Tuesday.
The Times "uncovered at least nine cases in which parents have been separated from their children after they refused to comply with deportation orders, according to internal government documents, case files, and interviews," wrote exposé author Hamed Aleaziz.
The practice is not as widespread as it was under the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, when the ACLU estimated that approximately 5,500 children—including some with physical and mental disabilities—were torn from their families.
"But the new cases suggest that the administration has decided to use family separation as a tool, at least in some instances, to persuade families to leave and to create a powerful deterrent for those who might come to the United States illegally," Aleaziz wrote.
The cruelty is the point. None of these #children will ever recover www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/u... #immigration #refugees
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— Regina Rae Weiss (@reginagroks.bsky.social) August 5, 2025 at 6:58 AM
Aleaziz highlighted the case of Evgeny and Evgeniia, who fled Russia with their 8-year-old son Maksim to seek political asylum in the United States.
Evgeniia said via an interpreter while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody that her family traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking an appointment through a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry if they registered using the glitch-plagued CBP One app.
However, Trump canceled that program on his first day of office, and the couple decided to present at a port of entry and request asylum. They were immediately detained. Then they were given a choice: leave the United States and return to Russia as a family, or remain in ICE custody while they pursued their asylum claim, but Maksim would be taken from them and placed in a shelter.
Fearing for their future in Russia, Evegeny and Evgeniia chose separation.
"A few days, right?" Maksim begged as he was taken away. "A few days?"
Evgeny replied, "Yes, yes, it will be just a few days."
That was on May 15.
Authorities later determined that risks faced by Evgeny and Evgeniia in Russia precluded their deportation. However, they remain in ICE detention—and Maksim in a foster home—pending the outcome of their asylum case.
"It's terrible, that's what I can say," Evgeniia told Aleaziz. "I wouldn't wish it even to an enemy. It's a constant grief and longing."
Responding to Aleaziz's article, Sarah Pierce, director of policy at the centrist think tank Third Way, wrote on the social media site Bluesky that "this administration is picking right back up where it left off with family separation—giving parents a 'binary choice' between imminent danger or surrendering their children."
The New York Immigration Coalition asserted on X that "the family separation policies of the first Trump administration were disastrous, and their resurgence cannot be tolerated."
U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Times that ICE "does not separate families," despite copious evidence to the contrary—including testimonials in Aleaziz's article and elsewhere.
"The parents had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and willfully choose to not comply," McLaughlin said of Evgeny and Evgeniia.
However, there have been many cases in which no such choice was offered. Last week, Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America and Diana Flórez of the Women's Refugee Commission said that "the extent of involuntary family separation is far greater than we expected," including "hundreds" of U.S. citizen children who have been separated from undocumented parents after their arrest.
In their recent analysis, Isacson and Flórez pointed to the new ICE's new Detained Parents Directive that they said "substantially weakens ICE's obligation to help parents facilitate reunification with their children before removal, which raises grave concerns that these involuntary separations are going to increase."
According to Isacson and Flórez:
In some cases, parents report to service providers that they are being removed without even getting a chance to communicate with their families at all. "They want to punish them for entering the United States, and they do it by targeting what they love the most—separating them from their families. It's not a coincidence; it's something that's been well-planned," said a social worker who works with deported families.
"It's a lie that they're giving them the choice to bring kids back with them," one social worker told the authors. "Every day, women arrive crying, but what can we do? I don't know how to help."
While several previous administrations used family separation for a variety of reasons including child endangerment, public safety, and national security, Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Times, "I'm not aware of ICE previously using family separation as a consequence for failure to comply."
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said his organization is once again investigating the legality of Trump's policy.
"That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated," Gelernt told the Times.
Despite the creation of a Family Reunification Task Force during the Biden administration, a December 2024 report published by Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School found that as many as 1,360 separated children had still not been reunited with their families.
On his first day in office, Trump canceled the task force. Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar" who oversaw family separation during the president's first term, has followed through on his vow to resume family separation.
Homan also said the Trump administration would "need to construct family facilities"—a euphemism for what critics call concentration camps, which have been used to imprison and even kill off officially undesired populations throughout U.S. history.
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The Cruelty and Speciousness of Bret Stephens' Denial of Genocide
Bret Stephens brings an unprecedented power over the editorial board at The New York Times because he is seen as the voice of the Israeli government-can-do-no-wrong domestic lobby.
Aug 02, 2025
After the long-time skittish New York Times published a lengthy essay by the renowned genocide scholar, Prof. Omer Bartov of Brown University, titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar, I Know It When I see It,” the Palestinian-hater, Times columnist Bret Stephens, immediately jumped into the Netanyahu‑style rebuttal mode. His column was titled “No, Israel is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” His cruel and specious assertion, contradicted by many genocide scholars, was that if the Israeli regime was truly genocidal, they would have committed “hundreds of thousands of deaths” in Gaza instead of the mere 60,000 deaths reported by the Hamas‑run Health Ministry.
Get real, Mr. Stephens, the Israeli military has destroyed the lives of at least one out of four Palestinians there, or about half a million at least, from the daily bombing since October 7, 2023, of civilians and their infrastructure. Saturation aerial and artillery bombardments of 2.3 million defenseless Palestinians, also under constant sniper fire, crammed into an area the geographic size of Philadelphia. (See The Lancet, “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult But Essential”, my column “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount—Undermines Civic, Diplomatic, and Political Pressures” and my article in the August-September 2024 Capitol Hill Citizen). American doctors back from Gaza have repeatedly observed that almost all the survivors are sick, injured, or dying.
Seizing on the Hamas regime’s self‑interest in a low death count, to not arouse further the ire of the residents of Gaza against their lack of bomb shelters and other protections, Stephens constructs the usual fictions, reflecting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime, that Israel does not “deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.” [Former United Nations Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote of Israel under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”] Look at the reports by Times journalists from the area, see the pictures of the mass murder, the slaughter of babies, children, mothers, and fathers that comprise Netanyahu’s Palestinian holocaust.
Listen to the former Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s October 9, 2023 enforced declaration that Israeli demolition of Gaza would include “…no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Stephens is immovable. Over a year ago, he shockingly wrote that the Israeli military is not using enough force on the Palestinians.
And so indeed has the Israeli military targeted innocent families, journalists, and U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East staff. To quote Professor Bartov, “the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure—government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks…” Bartov grew up in Israel, served four years in the Israeli army, and knows the situation there in great detail.
Bret Stephens brings an unprecedented power over the editorial board at the Times because he is seen as the voice of the Israeli government-can-do-no-wrong domestic lobby inside the Times who is always ready to frivolously accuse anybody at the paper of antisemitism to shut them up or water down their content.
As Will Solomon reported July 25, 2025 in Counterpunch, Stephens is the “minder” of what is unacceptable criticism of the Israeli regime and has succeeded significantly in his censorship. If you wonder for example why it took the Times editorial board so long to condemn the Israeli regime’s starvation of Gazans, especially the most vulnerable infants and children ( See July 31 editorial and The New York Times July 27, 2025 opinion piece “The World Must See Gaza’s Starvation” by Mohammed Mansour), it is likely the climate of fear or weariness generated by Stephens.
Stephens is given remarkable latitude by the Times editors. His falsifications and antisemitic rage against Palestinian semites (see, “The Other Antisemitism” by Jim Zogby) escape his editors’ pen. He is given unusual space, including a recently concluded weekly column with Gail Collins, which replaced valuable editorial space, with repartees that had become shopworn over the years. He also is given special writing projects.
Consider his background. A former hard-line editor of The Jerusalem Post, then for years a warmongering columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Especially vicious against Palestinians and their supporters, Stephens came to the Times for a singular reason. The Times wanted a right-winger who did not like the new president, Donald Trump. What the Times got was a cunning censor of their journalistic integrity and editorial respect for the regular devastating reports the Times was getting from their own journalists operating out of Jerusalem. They were not allowed into Gaza to report independently on what was being done with U.S. tax dollars and the unconditional support from former U.S. President Joe Biden and now Trump.
Imagine, for example, the Times not writing an editorial following the Israeli booby-trapping of thousands of pagers in Lebanon. This was called a clear war crime by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
While the Times has published op-eds critical of Israeli aggressions, it has maintained a list of words and phrases that could not be used in its reporting, such as “genocide.” It has avoided doing features on the many Israeli human rights groups sharply taking Netanyahu to task, or groups in the U.S., such as the very active Veterans for Peace with 100 chapters around the U.S. By contrast the Times devoted extensive space to repeated false propaganda by the Israeli regime.
Even coverage of the omnipresent Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now requires dramatic nonviolent civil disobedience, as with the October 24, 2023 sit-in at Grand Central Station, to get into the Times pages.
Throughout the months since October 7, and the mysterious total collapse of the multitiered Israeli border security apparatus on the Gaza border, still denied an official investigation by its perpetrators, the defiant presence of Stephens persists, though it is being countered by the sickening pictures of skeletal, starving Palestinian infants. (A survey last year by a British civic association had 46% of Palestinian children wanting to die and 97% expecting to be killed.)
Credit Stephens with covering his self-designated, intimidating role of policing what should not be appearing by staff in the Times’editorial pages. In his column with Collins, he used humor and praise of Times reports and book reviews not connected with the Israeli domination of the Middle East. Recognizing a no-win situation for herself, Gail Collins agreed not to raise the Israeli-Palestine issue in any of the hundreds of columns she wrote with Stephens, who is disliked by many at the Times.
Stephens is immovable. Over a year ago, he shockingly wrote that the Israeli military is not using enough force on the Palestinians. He refuses to disavow the most racist, vicious descriptions of Palestinians over the years by high Israeli government officials. He refuses to support opening Gaza to foreign journalists, including Israeli journalists. He even declines to support the airlifting of amputated and horribly burned Palestinian children to ready and able hospitals in the U.S.
The New York Times does not fear Donald Trump. But it does fear or is very wary of the smiling, internal censorious presence of this AIPAC clone and the attention he demands because of the forces he represents. The editorial board and Times management need to reject this affront to the freedom of its journalists and the paper’s institutional integrity.
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Why Is So Much of Corporate Media Caving to Trump?
A new ranking of the 35 largest media conglomerates finds a systemic failure to protect democracy against authoritarianism.
Jul 31, 2025
The rules of authoritarianism are pretty simple: Do as the leader says... or else.
This lopsided power equation runs counter to the checks and balances that are baked into the DNA of any healthy democracy. The early framers of American democracy understood this, which is why they codified the basic rights to free expression and an independent press as checks against power.
Free Press this week released the inaugural Media Capitulation Index to examine how this information ecosystem is fairing nearly 250 years later. This sweeping investigation analyzes and rates the independence of America’s 35 largest media companies, including the many conglomerates that have recently caved to pressure from an authoritarian and corrupt Trump administration.
I led the investigation, produced the performance-based ratings of these companies, and authored the report, A More Perfect Media: Saving America’s Fourth Estate from Billionaires, Broligarchy, and Trump, which accompanies the index.
We need to examine the systemic failures that have led us to this point and understand how such accumulation of power and wealth makes it next to impossible for these media giants to fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of the Fourth Estate.
The findings are sobering. After digging into the many failures of America’s hyper-commercialized media system, we present a series of recommendations to help dig the United States out of the authoritarian quicksand into which we're sinking, and build toward a more independent, democratic, diverse, and free press.
This work is crucial at a time when some of the most dominant news media companies empires including Disney (which owns ABC), Paramount (CBS) and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN) are capitulating and compromising in the face of this administration’s political extortion and thuggery. In addition, The New York Times is becoming increasingly “vulnerable” to pressure from the White House. In many ways it's a vulnerability of its own making. As we report, the newspaper's “ill-advised attempt at both-sides objectivity [has the Times] routinely normalizing the most extreme elements of Trumpism.”
The index also investigates the questionable and often lucrative government entanglements of billionaire media owners like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk.
In evaluating the 35 companies, Free Press found that media owners capitulated to the current White House in four principal ways:
- Through payments to U.S. President Donald Trump in the form of legal settlements, production contracts, campaign contributions, and other donations;
- By rolling back prior commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in hiring and community outreach;
- Through editorial manipulation and censorship: pressuring their newsrooms to soften criticism of the administration, firing staff, and even pulling content that might anger the president; and
- By attempting to curry favor with the president during inaugural ceremonies, private dinners at Mar-a-Lago, and meetings in the White House.
Fulfilling the Social Compact
This small cartel of billionaire- and equity-fund-controlled conglomerates determines much of what Americans read, see, and hear. Their coverage and amplification too often sets the agenda around nation-defining political issues. Through a history of mergers and acquisitions, these companies have consolidated their control over public discourse.
Our founders sought to protect the U.S. press from government meddling so that reporters and publishers could act as reliable checks against tyranny and other political corruption. But it’s up to the media to exercise these freedoms. Many modern-day media owners, instead, have put their pursuit of power and profits over First Amendment principles.
I can’t imagine that the drafters of the Constitution foresaw a time when so much control over information would fall into the hands of so few. We need to examine the systemic failures that have led us to this point and understand how such accumulation of power and wealth makes it next to impossible for these media giants to fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of the Fourth Estate.
I spoke with former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who later wrote the Free Press project was a “thorough new examination of how well—or poorly—the American press is doing that core mission. And why it’s mostly failing.”
Each conglomerate in the Media Capitulation Index is ranked on a scale from “independent” to “propaganda.” The report analyzes the root causes driving commercial media’s inability to defend democracy at a time of spreading domestic and international authoritarianism.
Who Owns the Media Owners?
As I was writing, researching, and creating these materials, many people asked me: “Who owns the media?” The Media Capitulation Index helps answer that question, but it also raises an even more essential (and disturbing) one: “Who owns the media owners?”
The report that accompanies the index reveals the systemic problems behind the media’s failure to meet this moment. But it concludes on a more hopeful note, outlining steps people can take to make “a more perfect media” for everyone. These include fully funding public media and independent, local-accountability journalism; restoring and strengthening media-ownership limits; and emboldening the Federal Communication Commission’s and Federal Trade Commission’s role in stopping media mergers that harm the public interest.
We will continue to update the index, capturing both instances of media capitulation and examples where media stand up to this extortionate regime. It’s hoped that this structural critique of our current media system will help instill in more media outlets the courage needed to challenge a bullying and power-hungry president.
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