ICE agents now snatching migrants with open court cases; NYC officials, lawyers say it’s ‘utterly unlawful’

Federal agents patrol the halls of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

By Emma Seiwell | eseiwell@nydailynews.com |

New York Daily News July 3, 2025 at 6:50 AM EDT

In a sudden escalation in President Trump’s mass deportation efforts, ICE agents are snatching and detaining migrants with pending immigration court cases at lower Manhattan courthouses, a move which city officials and attorneys blasted as “utterly unlawful.”


In the past month, Department of Homeland Security attorneys have routinely moved to dismiss asylum seekers’ cases in court, in hopes that the judge will grant the dismissal, rendering those individuals’ asylum cases nonexistent and making them subject to expedited removal.

Federal agents have been seen sitting inside, or just outside of courtrooms, and staging themselves in the hallways to ambush and arrest these migrants as they step foot outside the courtroom.

More recently, ICE agents are detaining migrants regardless of whether the judge tossed their case or not, according to city Comptroller Brad Lander and several immigration attorneys.

“What’s happening now, is that people who clearly have status as asylum seekers, either a motion to dismiss is not being made or not being granted, they have pending asylum applications, the judge is granting them a hearing to present their credible fear,” Lander told reporters last week. “And nonetheless, ICE without any rationale whatsoever is disappearing with them. It is an utterly unlawful process.”Brad Lander arrives at the Ted Weiss Federal Building on Friday, June 20, 2025 in Manhattan, New York, to observe federal agents outside an immigration court. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

Lander said he observed asylum hearings at 290 Broadway on Thursday, including one case where the judge gave a Guatemalan woman another hearing for her case in February 2027.

“Nonetheless, in the hallway on her way out of the courtroom, masked ICE agents detained her,” he said. “When I ask, ‘Do you plan to produce them for the February 2027 hearing? Or are you processing them for deportation, of course they refuse to answer questions.”

Lander said he also watched two brothers break down crying in the courtroom, saying “they are certain they will be killed,” as their father had been, if they were to be deported back to Colombia.

Because the pair’s private immigration attorney was a no-show, the judge granted them another hearing in February 2027. ICE agents arrested them both anyway when they left the courtroom, Lander said.

“I can’t imagine what the legal ground here could be if they were not stripped of status,” Lander said. “They have status as asylum seekers. The federal government accepted their asylum applications and a federal immigration judge granted them a hearing on those asylum applications. So what grounds there could be for their arrest and removal, I have no idea. And I’m pretty sure the ICE agents who removed them have no idea, either.”A woman cries after her husband was detained by federal agents following an Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office hearing on June 4, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Benjamin Remy, an immigration attorney with New York Legal Assistance Group, has been at 26 Federal Plaza nearly every day since courthouse arrests began, giving legal advice to migrants on their way into court, and as they’re being hauled away by federal agents.

Remy and his NYLAG colleague, attorney Allison Cutler said they had previously seen federal agents detaining people whose cases had not been dismissed when courthouse arrests began in late May. For several weeks this appeared to be less common, but in the past week they said they have seen numerous people get detained despite having open cases.

“I tell these ICE guys, this really just boils down to getting people their day in court. The judge denies their case, that’s that. The judge grants their case, that’s that,” Remy told The News. “But people deserve to have that opportunity to go into court, present evidence, testify and let the chips fall where they may. And basically everyone we’re seeing detained is being robbed of that.”

Cutler, chimed in, emphasizing that asylum is a right.

“We are obligated under international law to hear asylum applications. If someone expresses fear of returning to their country, we must hear their asylum case,” she said. “The reason those laws were created was because of the holocaust, and the genocide, and so to avoid that again, this is what this government decided to do. And this administration is refusing to follow that.”

Those who are detained with open asylum cases will have to fight their case from detention, often in faraway states like Texas and Louisiana, where many are shipped off to, Cutler added.Federal authorities detain a man after attending a court hearing at immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road New York said she has seen judges write detailed written decisions denying the government’s motions to dismiss in some migrants’ cases, and still witnessed ICE detain them.

“We totally think that is not legal,” Austin said plainly. “It feels like they’re just grabbing people, snatching people, even the people that can’t be removed. They’re just trying to funnel them into this system.”

Austin noted that fighting a case from detention, often across the country, becomes logistically complicated.

“What are they supposed to do? Their families [are] in New York, right? They may have trouble affording counsel. It’s hard to gather evidence,” Austin said.

Data gathered by the American Immigration Council analyzing over 1.2 million deportation cases decided between 2007-2012 found that only 3% of detained migrants without legal representation avoided deportation, compared with 32% of detained migrants who had legal representation.Federal law enforcement officers detain a man at 26 Federal Plaza Tuesday, June 10, 2025 in the Manhattan, New York. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

As for migrants who were never detained, 78% with legal representation avoid deportation, versus only 15% for those without representation.

Austin said she has seen many migrants decide to give up and self-deport just to avoid possible detention, despite being in the middle of a legal court process to obtain asylum.

“That includes a lot of people who remain scared to go to their country. So they’re saying, ‘I’m going to get deported, and then I’m going to flee again,'” Austin said.

When asked to explain why ICE agents are detaining migrants whose cases had not been dismissed, a DHS spokesperson did not address the question directly.

In a statement attributed to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, they stated that most “aliens” who “illegally” entered the U.S. in the past two years are subject to expedited removals.

“Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge,” the statement said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal as they always should have been.”

At Glastonbury, Left-Wing Politics Are Shocking Again. As Are Israeli Atrocities in Gaza.

June 30, 2025

Credit...Christopher James Hoare for The New York Times

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist


The notion that conservatism is “the new punk rock” has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.

This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don’t like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth.

Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump’s orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolized “overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said.” This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled “Heil Hitler.”

Increasingly, however, it’s the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in Gaza and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain’s Glastonbury music festival this weekend. The act’s singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.,” the Israel Defense Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticized Bob Vylan for “appalling hate speech” and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members’ visas.

The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticized it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their U.S. visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He’s said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn’t know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offenses.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. “What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. “The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul searching among British society,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It’s hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage.

I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They’ve witnessed Jews being attacked, demonized and ostracized in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas.

But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it’s not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverization of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel’s war in Gaza looks like to them.

Many of these people feel helpless watching a war that has created, as of January, the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. On social media, they’re seeing desperate Palestinians address them directly from the rubble. Some followed the teenage TikTok star Medo Halimy, who once went to high school in Texas and who made viral videos about his “tent life” before being killed in an Israeli airstrike. Maybe they’ve seen video of a sobbing, starving child eating sand. Hirsi Ali blames social media for creating a cultural movement against Israel: “The algorithm is the accelerant,” she wrote. She’s not entirely wrong, but she fails to consider Israel’s role in creating the content feeding that algorithm.

Editors’ Picks
36 Hours in Istanbul
Dana Carvey Calls His Biden Impression a ‘Delicate Thing’
What Makes Someone Cool? A New Study Offers Clues.



I’ve heard Israelis and their partisans mock pro-Palestinian activists as ignorant of the region’s history and geography. But many of these activists have developed an intimate familiarity with the intolerable misery of life in Gaza right now, a level of human suffering that Israel’s defenders too often wave away.
And they know how regularly attempts to protest this suffering, or even merely describe it, are dismissed as antisemitic incitement.

In a deeply disturbing article last week, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that I.D.F. soldiers have shot hungry Gazans as they rush toward aid distribution sites. Some soldiers apparently call these shootings “Operation Salted Fish,” after the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in his limitless cynicism, accused Haaretz of propagating an antisemitic “blood libel.”

An Israeli state that behaves this way is going to be reviled for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism. Clumsy attempts by Israel and its allies to stamp out this revulsion by throwing around accusations of bigotry only lend it the frisson of forbidden truth. That doesn’t justify the provocations of Bob Vylan or Kneecap; they meant to offend, and they did. Sometimes, however, radicalization is born in the gap between what people feel and what they feel they can say.

IN ONE CHART: IMMIGRATION ARRESTS INCREASE

 

Immigration arrests rose sharply after Trump took office. In May, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, met with immigration officials to set a target of 3,000 arrests a day. After that meeting, arrests rose sharply again:

Source: Deportation Data Project | Data is through June 10. | By The New York Times

Most arrests are in states with large immigrant populations, like Florida and Texas. But the pace is faster than it was last year in every state. See data from across the U.S.

How much is $3.3 trillion?

The National Debt Clock in New York, in April. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s domestic policy bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That number is so large that it’s difficult for most people to comprehend. Our writer Evan Gorelick did the math.

Say you start playing the lottery the day you’re born. If you somehow managed to win every game in every U.S. state, every single day — we’re talking everything from scratch-offs to Powerball jackpots — it would still take you around 75 years to rack up $3.3 trillion (assuming, of course, that you pay taxes on your winnings).

Here are five other ways to think about $3.3 trillion:

It’s enough to buy every piece of real estate in Manhattan — all 1.1 million residential and commercial properties — twice, based on recent valuations.

It’s more than the combined wealth of Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the next 18 richest people in the world.

If distributed evenly, it would be enough to give every U.S. household more than $25,000.

Broken into $100 bills, it would create a stack 2,200 miles high — far beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. Laid end to end, those bills could wrap around the Equator 128 times.

If you spent $1 every second without stopping, it would last more than 104,000 years. If you spent $1 million every day, it would last more than 9,000 years.

What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Really Means

Credit...Ad Nuis/Transworld, via Redux

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist


Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.

So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too.

I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.

My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening.


The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery.

There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

Editors’ Picks
Maybe It’s Not Just Aging. Maybe It’s Anemia.
Lauren Sánchez Bezos Commits to the Corset
7 Beaches With ‘Something More’ for the Fourth of July and Beyond



There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in Gaza exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”

To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.

There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.

Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

By David Gelles in New York; Somini Sengupta in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; and Brad Plumer in Washington. June 30, 2025

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.

The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.

The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.

China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own relative to its huge population. So it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.

The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.

While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.

Lack of New U.S. Sanctions Allows Russia to Replenish Its War Chest

President Trump has issued no new restrictions on Russia this year, in effect allowing Moscow to acquire the money and materials it needs in its conflict with Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s halting of new sanctions has created an opening for companies to funnel funds and components to President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times


By Aaron Krolik
July 2, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
The DealBook Newsletter Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them. Get it sent to your inbox.

Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force.

The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.

Sanctions became the center point of the Western-led effort to isolate the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The effort evolved into an international game of cat-and-mouse, as evasion schemes regularly sprang up around the world.

During his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. imposed thousands of so-called maintenance sanctions targeting new schemes. But this year, those actions have come to a standstill, according to a New York Times analysis of restrictions on trade, financial transactions and other activities connected to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Trump’s approach to economic statecraft is to impose pressure and get leverage and try to get the best deal possible,” said Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “For whatever reason, with Russia, he doesn’t want to have any leverage over Putin.”

The Biden administration placed, on average, over 170 new sanctions a month on entities linked to Russia from 2022 to 2024. The targets included oil and weapons production, tech procurement and banking.

In total, the Biden administration imposed more than 6,200 blocks on individuals, companies, vessels and aircraft linked to Russia. In Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, the United States ramped up pressure even further, issuing nearly three times the monthly average, according to a Times analysis of data from the Treasury Department.

The effects of that pressure are already beginning to erode. A Times review of trade records, online listings and corporate filings identified more than 130 companies in mainland China and Hong Kong that are advertising immediate sales of restricted computer chips to Russia. None of the companies is under sanctions.

Editors’ Picks
Dana Carvey Calls His Biden Impression a ‘Delicate Thing’
A British Summer Dessert That Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect
What to Know About Measles When Traveling



If one company is targeted with restrictions, many others are ready to take its place.

One of these firms, HK GST Limited, advertises chips essential to Russian cruise missiles, including the Kh-101, which was recently used in a strike on Kyiv that killed 10 civilians. The firm was incorporated in Hong Kong nine months ago, and its website was set up in February. An analysis of website hosting data, domain ownership, code patterns and contact details links the company to a network of four similar electronics distributors, including Singaporean-based ChipsX and Carbon Fiber Global, a high-performance drone part manufacturer based in China. All of these companies were set up within the last three years.

Replica Websites

Similar looking websites, often built with the same code and with the same addresses in the domain registries, suggest that the same players are spinning up new businesses to evade sanctions.

How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers

By Steven H. Woolf

Dr. Woolf is a physician and a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University.

After decades as a physician studying the factors that determine our risks of getting sick and how long we live, I am convinced that the actions of the Trump administration will cost lives. Researchers like me know the data. For years we have warned that Americans have shorter life expectancies and higher disease rates than people in other high-income countries.

Now, the poor health of Americans is about to get worse.

While Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s health secretary, makes a spectacle of his plans to make America healthier (a laudable goal), in actuality, the administration is kneecapping the very infrastructure that would make that feasible and is instead enacting policies that will compromise health.

The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated thousands of grants, including funding for pandemic prevention, and research grants related to cancer, vaccines and chronic diseases. The loss of research funding will delay medical discoveries. Though the agency publishes a weekly list of terminated grants, the full scope of funding cancellations has been obscured, especially at the National Institutes of Health, the major funder of medical research. A database created by Harvard researchers, Grant Watch, has helped to fill in the gaps.

Grants terminated by the Department of Health and Human Services

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention $5.8 billion

National Institutes of Health $3.2 billion

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminstration $543 mil.

Food and Drug Adminstration $3 mil.Administration for Children and Families $401k

Since President Trump has taken office, H.H.S. has cut over $9.5 billion in grant funding that had been approved but not yet distributed to programs and researchers.

The largest grant cuts were at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation's nerve center for tracking diseases and preventing premature deaths. The administration also gave out pink slips to some of the country's top epidemiologists and effectively ended C.D.C. programs on core issues ranging from chronic diseases and lead poisoning to reducing deaths from drug overdoses, maternal deaths, childhood injuries, smoking and more.

The administration cut over $4.6 billion in grants related to pandemic response, both for Covid and future pandemics. It laid off experts on imminent health threats, such as widespread transmission of bird flu to humans, leaving the country dangerously unprepared for the next emergency.

Mr. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the panel that produces the nation's vaccination guidelines, replaced them with multiple vaccine critics and cut $1.1 billion in funding for vaccinations, including support for a program that helps provide free shots for low-income children. High levels of vaccine coverage are important to maintain herd immunity, and making it harder to get vaccines could lead to a resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases.

Over 2,600 grants were terminated at the N.I.H., eliminating $3.2 billion in promised funds and threatening the nation's position as the world leader in biomedical research.

The administration claimed it was cutting N.I.H. funding to target research tied to "diversity, equity and inclusion" and "radical gender ideology." This included studies on reducing health disparities among people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ communities and efforts to lower pregnancy complications among minority women. (Mr. Trump's policy was recently ruled illegal by the courts.) But research in these targeted areas only accounts for around 7 percent of the total cuts.

Around $170 million in cuts were for studies of cancer, which remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives each year. Cuts in cancer research will cost lives by delaying the discovery of cures and better methods to slow cancer progression.

Over 170 grants were cut for research into H.I.V. prevention and treatments, threatening the 1.2 million Americans and almost 40 million people worldwide who are living with H.I.V.

Mr. Kennedy has promised to tackle the burden of chronic disease, but around 390 cut grants were for studies of the most prevalent chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and obesity.

The administration is cutting funding for training programs for the next generation of doctors and scientists by over $578 million, forcing many young people either to abandon their careers or pursue them overseas.

Other grants were caught in the terminations as well, including cuts to basic science research to understand the causes of diseases. Many researchers whose work has been terminated say they still don't know why their studies were targeted. (The N.I.H. has been directed not to cancel more research projects for now.)

Although approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, the administration canceled 129 grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The Trump administration made massive staffing cuts to the Administration for Children and Families and has closed down several offices that oversee Head Start, which since 1965 has been the government's flagship program to help low-income children. Head Start-funded preschools have reported delays in getting grant funding.

The damage done by slashing the nation’s research infrastructure — the loss of knowledge to save lives and the loss of scientific talent to other countries — will have lasting consequences. But torpedoing research is only one way the administration is putting our health at risk.


Sources: HHS TAGGS; Grant Watch
Note: Data as of June 29.

The administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all. Regulations to protect health and safety are being lifted. Experts who monitor health threats have been fired. Medical schools are threatened. Congress is poised to make huge cuts to Medicaid, which would leave millions of Americans without health care coverage and force closures of health clinics, many in rural areas.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending the status quo. There is plenty of waste and inefficiency to fix in health care and research, and fresh approaches can help. But dismembering health agencies won’t improve efficiency. Real change comes from streamlining programs to better serve the public, not from closing programs and walking away.

The ripple effects of the havoc at health agencies will eventually reach you. The air you breathe could become more polluted because the administration is permitting factories to resume emitting toxins. Your drinking water could contain lead because the administration is closing lead abatement programs. Bacterial contamination of your food may increase since food safety workers have been fired. There may be fewer primary care doctors in your community because the administration is cutting funding for training programs. Cutting-edge treatments may be unavailable because the N.I.H. has terminated clinical trials.



Out of the 356 drugs that were approved from 2010 to 2019 ...
N.I.H. funding contributed to 354 of them, totaling $187 billion.
Only 2 were privately funded.
Source: Cleary et al., JAMA (2023)


The logic is baffling. Even though the United States faces a mental health crisis, especially among youth, the Trump administration is slashing funding for programs on mental illness, addiction, domestic violence and suicide prevention. It’s no longer offering specialized support to L.G.B.T.Q. callers to the national suicide prevention hotline, and it’s cutting nearly 600 contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. It canceled funding for a desperately needed program that expanded the number of mental health professionals in our children’s schools, which had won bipartisan support in Congress after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children, but the administration has all but eliminated the injury prevention center working on efforts to prevent deaths from poisoning, car accidents and drownings.

Diseases that are preventable and rare in modern countries may now pose a threat in the United States. The measles outbreak is our first warning. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will increase if politicians like Mr. Kennedy continue to cast experts aside, roll back immunization guidelines and sow doubt about their safety.

All this under the banner of “Make America Healthy Again.” In a dangerous sleight of hand, Mr. Kennedy goes before cameras to make a big deal about food dyes and bizarre claims about autism while his department erases programs to address the nation’s leading chronic diseases. For example, smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. If this administration’s goal is truly to make America healthier, why has it effectively shuttered the nation’s top office on smoking? Mr. Kennedy rightly promotes the importance of healthy eating, but the administration is cutting funding for food assistance. He warns about the dangers of pesticides, but the administration is reportedly reconsidering a ban on asbestos and is moving quickly to relax other regulations meant to protect Americans from toxins.

Planned cuts by the Trump administration would defund research on the leading causes of death

cause of deathannual deathsprimarily researched byproposed funding cutHeart disease 681,000 National Institute on Body Systems* -39%
Chronic lower respiratory diseases 145,000
Diabetes 95,000
Cancer 613,000 National Cancer Institute -37%
Stroke 163,000 National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research* -40%
Alzheimer's 114,000 National Institute on Aging -40%
Drug overdoses 97,000 National Institute of Behavioral Health* -38%
Suicide 49,000
Covid, flu and pneumonia 95,000 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -36%
Sources: HHS.gov; CDC WONDER

Note: Annual deaths as of 2023. Proposed funding cut figures are based on the difference between 2025 and 2026 budget proposals. Institutes with asterisks are proposed consolidations of existing N.I.H. institutes.

Organizations like the American Medical Association are beginning to speak out, but their comments are largely restricted to specific issues such as Medicaid or immunization guidelines. The threat to the health of Americans is larger than one issue. It’s about more than Medicaid. It’s about more than vaccines. It’s about the totality of the administration’s agenda. It’s the cumulative effects of the entire basket of policies that put Americans at greatest risk.

Physicians like me know from the data that lives will be lost as a consequence. More than 6,000 health professionals (myself included) have warned the public about their concerns in an open letter. Yet institutions of all kinds seem to be cowering to Mr. Trump, afraid of being punished or prosecuted for questioning his wishes. The administration has defied the courts and gone after law firms and universities, and is unlikely to spare medicine. Just as it has pressured the media to alter the news, the government is now challenging medical journals to alter what they publish.

Times like these call on us to speak the truth. On matters of life and death, physicians like me have an added duty to warn patients and the public. People may feel that a shakeup in Washington is long overdue. But too many Americans, including our leaders, take their health for granted, assuming that the infrastructure to prevent disease and save their lives will always be there, that America will always lead the world in science and that systems to keep their children safe will always exist. None of this can be counted on, especially now.

Trump visits the new detention facility in the Fla Everglades designed to hold 5,000 undocumented immigrants.

While the Senate considered the budget reconciliation bill today, Trump visited the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades designed to hold 5,000 undocumented immigrants. The facility will cost $450 million a year, which will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Florida attorney general who came up with the plan gave it the name “Alligator Alcatraz,” a cutesy name for tents filled with cages for undocumented immigrants.

It was exactly a year ago today, on July 1, 2024, that the United States Supreme Court decided Donald J. Trump v. United States. The court’s majority overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

The Supreme Court had delayed issuing its decision in that case until the last possible moment, guaranteeing that Trump would not face trial in the two federal criminal cases pending against him, one charging him with willfully retaining national defense information by taking classified information with him when he left office, and the other for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

A year later, today provided a snapshot of what happens to a democracy when a president feels he can disregard the law.

Trump’s Education Department announced today it is withholding $6.8 billion in funding for K–12 schools that, by law, was supposed to be disbursed starting today. By law, the executive branch must disburse appropriations Congress has passed, but Trump and his officers have simply ignored the law, saying they believe it is unconstitutional. The Constitution provides that Congress alone has the power to write laws and charges the president with taking “Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

But it was at a press conference in Ochopee, Florida, today that Trump showed just how profoundly the immunity conferred on him a year ago is undermining democracy.

Trump continues to say he will arrest and deport U.S. citizens to third countries. On April 14, a microphone picked up Trump’s comment to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador that “homegrowns are next” after the undocumented immigrants Bukele was imprisoning for Trump. Today, Trump told reporters that “bad criminals” have migrated to the U.S., “but we also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time. People that whacked people over the head with a baseball bat from behind when they're not looking and kill them, people that knife you when you're walking down the street. They're not new to our country. They're old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too. You want to know the truth? So maybe that’ll be the next job that we'll work on together.”

He is also continuing to push the idea of attacking his political opponents. Today, Trump called for an investigation into Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary under President Joe Biden. He also threatened to arrest the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, if he doesn’t work with ICE agents to arrest migrants, although local and state governments have no legal obligation to work with federal immigration enforcement. Trump claimed—incorrectly—that Mamdani is a communist, and said that “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.” In fact, Mamdani is a naturalized citizen.

Today Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman of the New York Times reported that a former FBI agent, Jared Wise, who was charged with telling the January 6, 2021, rioters storming the Capitol to kill police officers, is working with the task force in the Justice Department set up as a way for President Trump to seek retribution against his political enemies.

Once a new system of detention facilities and ICE agents is established and the idea that a Republican president can legitimately attack his political opponents is accepted, a police state will be in place.

Grover Norquist: the solution to societal ills is tax cuts,

Grover Norquist, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation’s social safety net while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years.

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out.

After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge

The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?

In Tehran on Tuesday, the morning of a cease-fire with Israel.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Roger Cohen
Reporting from Dubai
June 29, 2025
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.

Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.

“For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,” said Ms. Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. “I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women’s rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn’t catch the real spies.”

Those spies, mainly from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran’s highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called “a golden opportunity for change.” That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the United States briefly joined.

The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran’s national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah’s death would “end the conflict.” The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on.

Image
Holding photos of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and his predecessor in Tehran in April.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

It does so despite the collapse of its “axis of resistance” that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies.

Yet Mr. Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. “The Islamic Republic won,” he said in a video broadcast on Thursday from a secret location, laying to rest rumors of his demise.

His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power.

“To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic’s survival is always a victory,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
Revolution at a Crossroads

Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident.

President Pezeshkian appears to favor a liberalizing makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of “an opportunity to change our views on governance.”

Image
President Masoud Pezeshkian at a protest in Tehran this month after U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favor strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system.

Mr. Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed “to achieve anything significant.” But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on Thursday that the country’s nuclear facilities had sustained “significant and serious damage.”

Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the “color revolutions” that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr. Khamenei and his entourage.
Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the United States have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country’s single most powerful institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Guards number 150,000 to 190,000 members, Ms. Vakil said. With control over vast swaths of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government’s survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar al-Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall last year.

Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas.
Image
Members of Basij paramilitary forces marching at a parade in Tehran in January.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. “The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”

This weakness appears deep. The “victory” claimed by Mr. Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence.

“I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei’s priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear program, the missile program and armed proxies, all now in shreds,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations under secretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader.

“Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,” Mr. Feltman recalled. “His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”
Paranoia, Institutionalized

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr. Khamenei’s predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. It was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important.
Image
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the current supreme leader's predecessor, blessing a crowd in Tehran in 1979.Credit...Michel Lipchitz/Associated Press

The Islamic Republic’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power.

War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion. The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Ayatollah Khomeini drank from “the poison chalice,” as he put it, and accepted an end to the war.

The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in light of U.S. military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall.

“The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimization that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,” Ms. Vakil said.

All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalized. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country’s profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured.

At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than two million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s liberalizing Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote.

Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed.

Image
An image from social media showing a protest in western Iran in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab. The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that aging clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder.

The government’s ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it.

So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed.

“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management.

“But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favor stability,” he added.

A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Gulf States, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr. Khamenei, but out a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity.

“For now, I don’t see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,” said Mr. Feltman. “But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programs.”
Iran at an Impasse

Ms. Saberi’s hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents’ home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it.

Image
Roxana Saberi, a dual Iranian and American citizen, was incarcerated for 100 days in Tehran in 2009.Credit...Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, “would be a one-way ticket.” But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures.

“Iran’s in our heart, it’s in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,” she said. “My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.”


Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.

U.N. Inspector Says Iran Could Be Enriching Fuel Again in a ‘Matter of Months’

The assessment widens the divide with President Trump, who has claimed that Tehran has given up its nuclear ambitions after a U.S. attack.

An analysis by Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the U.S. attack in Iran is consistent with reports that the strike set back the Iranian nuclear program by only a few months.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

By David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager
Reporting from Washington
June 29, 2025


The chief United Nations nuclear inspector has widened the divide with the Trump administration over how severely the United States set back Iran’s nuclear program, declaring that it could be enriching uranium in a “matter of months” even as President Trump repeated his claim that Tehran had lost interest in the effort.

“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview with CBS News that aired on Sunday.

He said that when the United States dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s two uranium enrichment centers, the damage was “severe” but not “total.” In previous interviews, he said he believed that all of the more than 18,000 centrifuges, buried in underground enrichment halls, had been destroyed or damaged and knocked out of operation.

But Mr. Grossi’s analysis — one that several European intelligence agencies share — is consistent with a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that was widely reported on last week. That report estimated that the strike set back the Iranian nuclear program by only a few months. The C.I.A. director said later in the week that the Iranian program had been severely damaged, and the U.S. intelligence agencies were continuing to assess the strike.

The Defense Intelligence Agency report appeared to focus on the enrichment process at the sites where the GBU-57 bunker-busters, among the most powerful in the U.S. arsenal, were used. Later analysis by outside groups suggested that the biggest loss for Iran might have been the destruction of facilities to turn that fuel into a weapon. In particular, damage to a laboratory under construction in the nuclear complex outside the ancient city of Isfahan, which is intended to convert enriched uranium into a metal, may prove a major bottleneck in Iran’s ability to convert highly enriched uranium into the metal that is needed to produce a weapon.

Rebuilding that capability, other experts have said, could take years. And much depends on whether Iran throws out I.A.E.A. inspectors — who remained in Tehran throughout the conflict with Israel earlier this month — or whether it decides to conduct its work in the open. Either way, it could be bombed again, as Mr. Trump has said in recent days he is quite willing to do.

5 takeaways from the Diddy trial as jury deliberates to reach a verdict

People try to get a view and record and photograph Sean "Diddy" Combs’ family as they leave the courthouse at the end of Friday. Jury deliberations are expected to being Monday. (Aristide Economopoulos/for The Washington Post)


From the cult of celebrity to the complexities of coercion, several themes emerged during seven weeks of testimony in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s sex-trafficking case.


By Anne Branigin and
Shayna Jacobs


NEW YORK — Jury deliberations have begun in the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the music producer turned modern-day Gatsby whose federal racketeering and sex-trafficking case has drawn global attention since it began on May 12.

Combs, 55, faces one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. If convicted on the most serious of these charges, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Tracking Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s lawsuits

Sean “Diddy” Combs has faced more than 70 sexual assault lawsuits since November 2023. His federal trial over charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking began May 12. Follow live updates, and see a breakdown of the prosecution and defense’s closing arguments as well as the witnesses, lawyers and more.

Diddy’s family is in the public eye. Could they influence the jury?
June 24, 2025

Outside the courtroom, the trial became a global source of fascination, with the courthouse swarmed by tourists and TikTokers, survivors of sexual abuse and “Free Puff” proponents. The proceedings were crashed by a heckler and Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Combs’s mother, Janice, and his adult children maintained a steady show of support.

Who’s in Diddy’s sex trafficking trial: The witnesses, lawyers and more
May 23, 2025

As we await the verdict in Diddy's criminal sex trafficking trial, here's what happens before the jury announces their decision. 

In closing arguments, prosecutors argued that Combs was a man who “would not take no for an answer,” relying on power, violence, fear and an inner circle of employees to carry out alleged crimes. To be found guilty of racketeering conspiracy, Judge Arun Subramanian said Combs needed to conspire to commit two illegal acts from a list of eight categories, including distributing drugs for his many “freak-off” parties. Two former girlfriends of Combs, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and a single mother testifying under the court-approved alias “Jane,” claimed they were coerced into having sex with male escorts and plied with drugs at these parties, which were sometimes filmed.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial recap: Prosecution’s closing arguments detail sex-...
June 26, 2025

Ventura, Jane and the escorts were willing participants in these meticulously organized sexual activities, the defense team argued. Lead defense attorney Marc Agnifilo said in his closing arguments that prosecutors overreached by applying racketeering conspiracy, “one of the most serious, complicated, comprehensive statutes on the books,” to what was essentially “personal-use drugs and threesomes.”

How charges against Diddy stack up to testimony in the government’s case
June 26, 2025


What we learned investigating dozens of lawsuits against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
May 7, 2025


Beyond the specific charges in the case, certain themes have emerged from 28 days of testimony. Here’s what to know:

1
A life revolving around freak-offs

Endless sexting, flight bookings, hotel arrangements, candles, baby oil, drugs, meals. Testimony and evidence shown ad nauseam at this trial reveal just how extraordinary and involved Sean “Diddy” Combs’s sex life was and how central it was to his existence.

Combs and his staff prepared extensively for his freak-offs — which sometimes took the hip-hop mogul away from his regular life for days at a time.

Planning these encounters was a group effort, requiring Combs, his staff and his girlfriends to book male escorts, procure drugs and stock up hotel rooms to ensure Combs would be happy and undisturbed for the duration. Prosecutors revealed that federal agents found around 900 bottles of lubricant in his Los Angeles mansion alone, and that he had freak-off supplies in his hotel room when he was arrested in New York in September.

All of it points to a person completely preoccupied with a particular sexual fantasy and the women who would play their part in it.

The defense has characterized Combs as a swinger, voyeur and homemade porn enthusiast. “I’m under the impression this is a popular thing nowadays,” Combs’s lawyer Agnifilo said during closing arguments.

Combs watches as his defense lawyer Teny Geragos cross-examines witness Special Agent DeLeassa Penland, who presented records related to alleged freak-offs. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)

2
The complexities of coercion

Both Ventura and Jane said they followed a freak-off “script” laid out by the hip-hop impresario, who they say gave them drugs such as ecstasy and GHB, which made them more compliant while also keeping them awake. Both testified that a freak-off wouldn’t end until Combs decided. Both told Combs they found the experiences degrading and shameful, but they said they ultimately felt compelled to participate because of the love they felt for him — and the specific ways he manipulated them.

Ventura alleged years of brutal physical abuse surrounding the freak-offs. Jane said Combs discouraged her from using condoms with men she had sex with and alleged that Combs once forced her to perform oral sex on a man immediately after a physical fight in which he gave her a black eye and welts.

Some aspects of their stories feel novel, even challenging, when compared with traditional notions of sex trafficking and its imagery of desperate, vulnerable women unwittingly ending up in isolated sexual servitude while trying to escape poverty or war-torn countries. Theirs was a world of red carpets, designer bags and yacht trips. Combs’s defense pointed out that both women not only expressed enthusiasm for the sex encounters, but seemingly also had the means and opportunity to leave.

The jury in Combs’s criminal trial will be tasked with picking through these details and deeper issues of intent and consent when determining whether the defendant made these women, through force, fraud or coercion, participate in commercial sexual encounters across two decades.

Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and Combs appear at the Met Gala in 2015. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

3
Sean Combs’s cult of celebrity

Several witnesses at this trial who were part of Combs’s inner circle have expressed a cultlike adoration of the Bad Boy Records founder, crediting him with opening up their worlds and uplifting them. Former assistant George Kaplan described Combs as “a god among men” on the stand — even as he said he was horrified to witness Combs’s violence. Others painted a picture of a charismatic figure as capable of breaking people down as he was building them up.

Working for Combs meant being available for him at all hours, according to the testimony of his former staff. One former assistant, using court-approved alias “Mia,” said she once had to stay up for five days without sleep. Another former assistant, Capricorn Clark, said she was hooked up to a lie-detector test in a “dilapidated” building for five consecutive days to test her loyalty. “He used to say that he wants us to move like SEAL Team Six,” former assistant Brendan Paul said of his boss’s lofty expectations.

Combs’s duality was especially apparent to his ex-girlfriends. Ventura, who described being a “fan” of his music, recalled how special she felt receiving personal attention from this larger-than-life figure when she was an emerging pop star. But after signing a 10-album contract with Bad Boy Records, Ventura felt Combs stifled her career, forcing her to record “hundreds” of songs that were never released and, ultimately, making marathon-length freak-offs her “job.”

Janice Combs is dressing for the courtroom drama
June 17, 2025

4
Payoffs and nondisclosure agreements

During the trial it emerged that Sean “Diddy” Combs paid $100,000 to obtain what he thought was the only copy of a 2016 video showing him beating Ventura in a hotel hallway, according to the testimony of Eddy Garcia, a hotel security worker. When a copy of the original footage was released by CNN last year, it ignited outrage and shifted public opinion. Garcia also testified that he signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the deal.

It was also revealed that Combs paid $20 million to Ventura to settle her explosive 2023 sex-trafficking lawsuit, which spurred federal investigators to begin looking into the music producer.

And Ventura’s friend Kerry Morgan testified that she was paid $30,000 and signed an NDA after Combs allegedly assaulted her at Ventura’s Hollywood Hills home in 2018.

Prosecutors also argued that Combs entered into a $10,000 per month “love contract” with Jane after she started pushing back about their “hotel nights,” or freak-offs. Text messages show that when she later brought up the exploitive nature of their relationship, Combs responded by telling her to remember her beautiful home and smile (per his wishes, Combs also paid for her veneers).

Combs listens as his lawyer Marc Agnifilo makes his closing arguments on Friday. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)

5
The trappings of wealth

The sordid repeatedly sidled up to the sumptuous throughout the 28 days of testimony: Combs’s drugs supply was kept at the ready in either a Louis Vuitton or Gucci pouch, members of his entourage noted. He had residences in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and the tony enclave of Alpine, New Jersey, where he kept safes stuffed with cash, jewelry and guns. Freak-offs were held within the rarefied confines of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the L’Hermitage and the Mandarin Oriental, among other luxury addresses. Combs frequently traveled by private jet.

Combs’s wealth — his fortune previously hovered around $300 million — was also on display in the courtroom. He has built a remarkably large team of high-profile attorneys from white-shoe firms, who have fought fiercely on his behalf. Alexandra Shapiro, for instance, is one of the country’s top appellate lawyers. As his team argues his innocence, they’re also simultaneously paving the way for an appeal, should Combs be convicted.