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Relatives mourn over the body of Inas Khalil during her funeral in the West Bank village of Sinjil on 20 October. (Photo: Shadi Hatem / APA images)
A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.
"We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story," his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Al-Shaludi had been jailed by Israel three times since September 2012 for allegedly hurling stones and molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers and their property in Silwan, his neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli press is using this to cast al-Shaludi as a career criminal with a history of "anti-Jewish" violence.
According to his mother, al-Shaludi's metal health began to deteriorate after a three-week-long interrogation at the hands of the Shin Bet (Israel's secret police) in the Jerusalem Russian Compound jail, a notorious site of abuse and torture of Palestinians.
This context has of course been missing or buried in most US media accounts, of which there are many. Israel and Palestine-related news is currently saturated with headlines about a Palestinian man killing an Israeli baby.
Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.
The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel's merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.
According to the Ma'an News Agency, Jrad is the tenth person killed by unexploded Israeli munitions, most of which have yet to be cleared because the Israeli-imposed, Egypt-enforced blockade hampers access to the robotic and protective equipment needed to neutralize the leftover ordnance.
Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad's killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.
On Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.
Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.
Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.
Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.
Raed al-Jabari, a 35-year-old Palestinian father and husband, was not so lucky when he hit Israeli settlers with his car in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in late July. Al-Jabari insisted it was an accident and turned himself in to the police, reported Ma'an News Agency. But unlike the settler who killed Inas Khalil, al-Jabari was jailed for two months and ultimately died under suspicious circumstances.
Israeli authorities claim al-Jabari hanged himself in the bathroom at Israel's Eshel prison, but the autopsy suggests the man was tortured to death, according to Palestinian officials. Either way, the disparity in treatment of the settler who killed Khalil versus that of al-Jabari is the essence of Israel's apartheid regime that affords different, unequal rights to those under its rule.
Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour responded to the latest settler hit-and-run by filing a complaint with the UN Security Council, accusing "extremist terrorist settlers" of launching intentional hit-and-run attacks against Palestinians in recent months.
Indeed, settlers slamming their vehicles into Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a common occurrence that is routinely overlooked by the Israeli authorities as well as western media outlets.
In September, a six-year-old Palestinian girl was run over by a settler driver south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In August, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a settler vehicle in the southern West Bank, an act witnesses described as a deliberate attack. A week later, a 23-year-old Palestinian man was run over and killed by a settler vehicle in the central West Bank.
As far as this writer can tell, none of the perpetrators have been labeled "terrorists" nor have any been held accountable. But such is the nature of apartheid.
Meanwhile, Khalil's killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday's Jerusalem incident.
The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil's death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.
"The Palestinians are accusing an Israeli settler of running over two schoolgirls, killing one of them, and speeding away," reads the article's opening line.
In stark contrast, here is the opening sentence to the Associated Press article on the Jerusalem car crash: "A Palestinian motorist with a history of anti-Israel violence slammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people in what police called a terror attack."
On Thursday, 16 October, Israeli soldiers shot Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, in the chest at close range in Beit Laqiya, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Like Khalil's death, Badir's killing elicited a mere five sentences from the Associated Press.
The Israeli army excused the killing, saying its soldiers were simply responding to firebombs directed at their jeeps as they were leaving the village. Live fire, an Israeli army spokesperson said, was an appropriate response to stones and Molotov cocktails, a troubling narrative that went largely unchallenged in the US media outlets which bothered to report on Badir's death.
The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.
The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children's lives more than others.
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A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.
"We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story," his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Al-Shaludi had been jailed by Israel three times since September 2012 for allegedly hurling stones and molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers and their property in Silwan, his neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli press is using this to cast al-Shaludi as a career criminal with a history of "anti-Jewish" violence.
According to his mother, al-Shaludi's metal health began to deteriorate after a three-week-long interrogation at the hands of the Shin Bet (Israel's secret police) in the Jerusalem Russian Compound jail, a notorious site of abuse and torture of Palestinians.
This context has of course been missing or buried in most US media accounts, of which there are many. Israel and Palestine-related news is currently saturated with headlines about a Palestinian man killing an Israeli baby.
Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.
The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel's merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.
According to the Ma'an News Agency, Jrad is the tenth person killed by unexploded Israeli munitions, most of which have yet to be cleared because the Israeli-imposed, Egypt-enforced blockade hampers access to the robotic and protective equipment needed to neutralize the leftover ordnance.
Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad's killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.
On Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.
Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.
Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.
Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.
Raed al-Jabari, a 35-year-old Palestinian father and husband, was not so lucky when he hit Israeli settlers with his car in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in late July. Al-Jabari insisted it was an accident and turned himself in to the police, reported Ma'an News Agency. But unlike the settler who killed Inas Khalil, al-Jabari was jailed for two months and ultimately died under suspicious circumstances.
Israeli authorities claim al-Jabari hanged himself in the bathroom at Israel's Eshel prison, but the autopsy suggests the man was tortured to death, according to Palestinian officials. Either way, the disparity in treatment of the settler who killed Khalil versus that of al-Jabari is the essence of Israel's apartheid regime that affords different, unequal rights to those under its rule.
Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour responded to the latest settler hit-and-run by filing a complaint with the UN Security Council, accusing "extremist terrorist settlers" of launching intentional hit-and-run attacks against Palestinians in recent months.
Indeed, settlers slamming their vehicles into Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a common occurrence that is routinely overlooked by the Israeli authorities as well as western media outlets.
In September, a six-year-old Palestinian girl was run over by a settler driver south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In August, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a settler vehicle in the southern West Bank, an act witnesses described as a deliberate attack. A week later, a 23-year-old Palestinian man was run over and killed by a settler vehicle in the central West Bank.
As far as this writer can tell, none of the perpetrators have been labeled "terrorists" nor have any been held accountable. But such is the nature of apartheid.
Meanwhile, Khalil's killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday's Jerusalem incident.
The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil's death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.
"The Palestinians are accusing an Israeli settler of running over two schoolgirls, killing one of them, and speeding away," reads the article's opening line.
In stark contrast, here is the opening sentence to the Associated Press article on the Jerusalem car crash: "A Palestinian motorist with a history of anti-Israel violence slammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people in what police called a terror attack."
On Thursday, 16 October, Israeli soldiers shot Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, in the chest at close range in Beit Laqiya, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Like Khalil's death, Badir's killing elicited a mere five sentences from the Associated Press.
The Israeli army excused the killing, saying its soldiers were simply responding to firebombs directed at their jeeps as they were leaving the village. Live fire, an Israeli army spokesperson said, was an appropriate response to stones and Molotov cocktails, a troubling narrative that went largely unchallenged in the US media outlets which bothered to report on Badir's death.
The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.
The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children's lives more than others.
A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.
"We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story," his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Al-Shaludi had been jailed by Israel three times since September 2012 for allegedly hurling stones and molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers and their property in Silwan, his neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli press is using this to cast al-Shaludi as a career criminal with a history of "anti-Jewish" violence.
According to his mother, al-Shaludi's metal health began to deteriorate after a three-week-long interrogation at the hands of the Shin Bet (Israel's secret police) in the Jerusalem Russian Compound jail, a notorious site of abuse and torture of Palestinians.
This context has of course been missing or buried in most US media accounts, of which there are many. Israel and Palestine-related news is currently saturated with headlines about a Palestinian man killing an Israeli baby.
Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.
The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel's merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.
According to the Ma'an News Agency, Jrad is the tenth person killed by unexploded Israeli munitions, most of which have yet to be cleared because the Israeli-imposed, Egypt-enforced blockade hampers access to the robotic and protective equipment needed to neutralize the leftover ordnance.
Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad's killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.
On Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.
Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.
Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.
Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.
Raed al-Jabari, a 35-year-old Palestinian father and husband, was not so lucky when he hit Israeli settlers with his car in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in late July. Al-Jabari insisted it was an accident and turned himself in to the police, reported Ma'an News Agency. But unlike the settler who killed Inas Khalil, al-Jabari was jailed for two months and ultimately died under suspicious circumstances.
Israeli authorities claim al-Jabari hanged himself in the bathroom at Israel's Eshel prison, but the autopsy suggests the man was tortured to death, according to Palestinian officials. Either way, the disparity in treatment of the settler who killed Khalil versus that of al-Jabari is the essence of Israel's apartheid regime that affords different, unequal rights to those under its rule.
Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour responded to the latest settler hit-and-run by filing a complaint with the UN Security Council, accusing "extremist terrorist settlers" of launching intentional hit-and-run attacks against Palestinians in recent months.
Indeed, settlers slamming their vehicles into Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a common occurrence that is routinely overlooked by the Israeli authorities as well as western media outlets.
In September, a six-year-old Palestinian girl was run over by a settler driver south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In August, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a settler vehicle in the southern West Bank, an act witnesses described as a deliberate attack. A week later, a 23-year-old Palestinian man was run over and killed by a settler vehicle in the central West Bank.
As far as this writer can tell, none of the perpetrators have been labeled "terrorists" nor have any been held accountable. But such is the nature of apartheid.
Meanwhile, Khalil's killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday's Jerusalem incident.
The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil's death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.
"The Palestinians are accusing an Israeli settler of running over two schoolgirls, killing one of them, and speeding away," reads the article's opening line.
In stark contrast, here is the opening sentence to the Associated Press article on the Jerusalem car crash: "A Palestinian motorist with a history of anti-Israel violence slammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people in what police called a terror attack."
On Thursday, 16 October, Israeli soldiers shot Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, in the chest at close range in Beit Laqiya, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Like Khalil's death, Badir's killing elicited a mere five sentences from the Associated Press.
The Israeli army excused the killing, saying its soldiers were simply responding to firebombs directed at their jeeps as they were leaving the village. Live fire, an Israeli army spokesperson said, was an appropriate response to stones and Molotov cocktails, a troubling narrative that went largely unchallenged in the US media outlets which bothered to report on Badir's death.
The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.
The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children's lives more than others.
"They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law," the Minnesota progressive said of the Trump administration.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez on Thursday strongly condemned the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat allegedly trafficking cocaine off the coast of Venezuela as "lawless and reckless," while urging the White House to respect lawmakers' "clear constitutional authority on matters of war and peace."
"Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche," said Omar (D-Minn.), referring to President Donald Trump's day one executive order designating drug cartels including the Venezuela-based group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump—who reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat cartels abroad—said that Tuesday's US strike in international waters killed 11 people. The attack sparked fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US interventions over the past 200 years, and against a country that has suffered US meddling since the late 19th century.
"It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked," Omar cotended. "There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law."
Omar continued:
They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law. The US posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level. In Latin America, even right-wing presidents acknowledge this is true.
The congresswoman's remarks came on the same day that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated a pair of Ecuadorean drug gangs as terrorist organizations while visiting the South American nation. This, after Rubio said that US attacks on suspected drug traffickers "will happen again."
"Trump and Rubio's apparent solution" to the failed drug war, said Omar, is "to make it even more militarized," an effort that "is doomed to fail."
"Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes," she added.
Echoing critics including former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called Tuesday's strike a "summary execution," Ramirez (D-Ill.) said Thursday on social media that "Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale."
"From Iran to Venezuela, to DC, LA, and Chicago, Trump continues to abuse our military power, undermine the rule of law, and erode our constitutional boundaries in political spectacles," Ramirez added, referring to the president's ordering of strikes on Iran and National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, the nation's capital, and likely beyond.
"Presidents don't bomb first and ask questions later," Ramirez added. "Wannabe dictators do that."
"The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening!" said Florida Immigrant Coalition's deputy director.
Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open.
Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams—appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida—ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days.
However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."
Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, issued a brief but scathing dissent. He wrote that the majority "essentially ignores the burden borne by the defendants, pays only lip service to the abuse of discretion standard, engages in its own factfinding, declines to consider the district court's determination on irreparable harm, and performs its own balancing of the equities."
The 11th Circuit's ruling was cheered by the US Department of Homeland Security, Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared in a video that "Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we've always said, open for business."
Uthmeier's communications director, Jeremy Redfern, collected responses to the initial ruling by state and federal Democrats, and urged them to weigh in on social media. Florida state Sen. Shevrin "Shev" Jones (D-34) did, stressing that "cruelty is still cruelty."
In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
"Housing thousands of men in tents in the middle of a fragile ecosystem puts immense strain on Florida's source environment, but even more troublesome, it disregards human rights and our constitutional commitments," Bozzetto continued. "This is a place where hundreds of our neighbors were illegally held, were made invisible within government systems, and were subjected to inhumane heat and unbearable treatment. The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening! The only just solution is to shut this facility down and ensure that no facility like this opens in our state!"
"Lastly, it is imperative that we as a nation uphold the balance of powers that this country was founded on," she added. "That is what makes this country special! Calling judges who rule against you 'activists' flies in the face of our democracy. It is a huge tell that AG Uthmeier expressed this as a 'win for President Trump's agenda,' as if the courts were to serve as political weapons. This demonstrates the clear partisan games they are playing with people's lives and with our democracy."
While Alligator Alcatraz has drawn widespread criticism for the conditions in which detainees are held, the suit is based on the government's failure to follow a law that requires an environmental review, given the facility's proximity to surrounding wetlands.
In response to the ruling, Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that "this is a heartbreaking blow to America's Everglades and every living creature there, but the case isn't even close to over."
The report found that seven of America's biggest healthcare companies have collectively dodged $34 billion in taxes as a result of Trump's 2017 tax law while making patient care worse.
President Donald Trump's tax policies have allowed the healthcare industry to rake in "sick profits" by avoiding tens of billions of dollars in taxes and lowering the quality of care for patients, according to a report out Wednesday.
The report, by the advocacy groups Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst, found that "seven of America's biggest healthcare corporations have dodged over $34 billion in collective taxes since the enactment of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that Republicans recently succeeded in extending."
The study examined four health insurance companies—Centene, Cigna, Elevance (formerly Anthem), and Humana; two for-profit hospital chains—HCA Holdings and Universal Health Services; and the CVS Healthcare pharmacy conglomerate.
It found that these companies' average profits increased by 75%, from around $21 billion before the tax bill to about $35 billion afterward, and yet their federal tax rate was about the same.
This was primarily due to the 2017 law's slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a change that was cheered on by the healthcare industry and continued with this year's GOP tax legislation. The legislation also loosened many tax loopholes and made it easier to move profits to offshore tax shelters.
The report found that Cigna, for instance, saved an estimated $181 million in taxes on the $2.5 billion it held in offshore accounts before the law took effect.
The law's supporters, including those in the healthcare industry, argued that lowering corporate taxes would allow companies to increase wages and provide better services to patients. But the report found that "healthcare corporations failed to use their tax savings to lower costs for customers or meaningfully boost worker pay."
Instead, they used those windfalls primarily to increase shareholder payouts through stock buybacks and dividends and to give fat bonuses to their top executives.
Stock buybacks increased by 42% after the law passed, with Centene purchasing an astonishing average of 20 times more of its own shares in the years following its enactment than in the years before. During the first seven years of the law, dividends for shareholders increased by 133% to an average of $5.6 billion.
Pay for the seven companies' half-dozen top executives increased by a combined $100 million, 42%, on average. This is compared to the $14,000 pay increase that the average employee at these companies received over the same period, which is a much more modest increase of 24%.
And contrary to claims that lower taxes would allow companies to improve coverage or patient care, the opposite has occurred.
While data is scarce, the rate of denied insurance claims is believed to have risen since the law went into effect.
The four major insurers' Medicare Advantage plans were found to frequently deny claims improperly. In the case of Centene, 93% of its denials for prior authorizations were overturned once patients appealed them, which indicates that they may have been improper. The others were not much better: 86% of Cigna's denials were overturned, along with 71% for Elevance/Anthem, and 65% for Humana.
The report said that such high rates of denials being overturned raise "questions about whether Medicare Advantage plans are complying with their coverage obligations or just reflexively saying 'no' in the hopes there will be no appeal."
Salespeople for the Cigna-owned company EviCore, which insurers hire to review claims, have even boasted that they help companies reduce their costs by increasing denials by 15%, part of a model that ProPublica has called the "denials for dollars business." Their investigation in 2024 found that insurers have used EviCore to evaluate whether to pay for coverage for over 100 million people.
And while paying tens of millions to their executives, both HCA and Universal Health Services—which each saved around $5.5 billion from Trump's tax law—have been repeatedly accused of overbilling patients while treating them in horrendous conditions.
"Congress should demand both more in tax revenue and better patient care from these highly profitable corporations," Americans for Tax Fairness said in a statement. "Healthcare corporation profitability should not come before quality of patient care. In healthcare, more than almost any other industry, the search for ever higher earnings threatens the wellbeing and lives of the American people."