Contributing Writers

The legendary journalist Bill Moyers has died at the age of 91. Moyers, whose long career included helping found the Peace Corps and serving as press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, was an award-winning champion of public television and independent media. We feature one of his numerous interviews on Democracy Now! where we discussed the history of public broadcasting in the United States and the powerful role of money in corporate media.

Democrat Pramila Jayapal is holding a series of “shadow hearings” in Congress on Trump’s immigration actions. Jayapal, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security and Enforcement, explains how Trump’s immigration crackdown has created a “Catch-22” for asylum seekers, who are being targeted for “expedited removal” at their own immigration hearings. “If you show up, you could get detained and deported.

Over 100 days have passed since the Trump administration’s unprecedented removal of more than 230 immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT. They were removed without any due process in the United States. Democracy Now! spoke with the loved ones of Andry Hernández Romero, a 33-year-old gay makeup artist and asylum seeker who was told he would be sent home to Venezuela, according to his mother. But instead, he was sent to CECOT, where reports of torture and abuse are rampant.

The Supreme Court has sided with South Carolina’s efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. Lower court rulings allowed Medicaid patients to sue over the state’s restrictions on Medicaid funding for their healthcare clinics, which the Supreme Court overturned in a 6-3 decision on Thursday.

As ICE increases its raids on immigrant communities, footage of the arrest of one man, Narciso Barranco, shows seven federal agents — all masked — pinning the 48-year-old gardener to the ground and repeatedly punching him in the head before pushing him into an unmarked vehicle. His son, Marine veteran Alejandro Barranco, recently visited him in an ICE detention center. “He looked beat up, he looked rough, he looked defeated. He was sad. It’s just not right,” he says.

President Donald Trump has returned to Washington after a NATO summit where leaders agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, more than doubling the current target of 2%. The increase comes after years of pressure from Trump, who accuses other countries in the military alliance of not spending enough.

The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against vaccinations, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrawing U.S. funding for the world’s preeminent international vaccine organization. The group — known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — is the world’s largest funder of life-saving vaccinations and says it has helped vaccinate more than 1.1 billion children in 78 lower-income countries, preventing nearly 19 million future deaths.

We speak with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary for New York mayor, the rise of Donald Trump, and the role of big money in politics. “This is the one thing that I agree with Donald Trump about: The economy is rigged — but it’s rigged against working-class people. And I think Mamdani understood that. He understood that people have got to want a change, but also they want affordability.

As ICE increases its raids on immigrant communities, footage of the arrest of one man, Narciso Barranco, shows seven federal agents — all masked — pinning the 48-year-old gardener to the ground and repeatedly punching him in the head before pushing him into an unmarked vehicle. His son, Marine veteran Alejandro Barranco, recently visited him in an ICE detention center. “He looked beat up, he looked rough, he looked defeated. He was sad. It’s just not right,” he says.

At the NATO summit in the Hague, almost all European nations reached an agreement to raise military spending to 5% of each county’s GDP. This comes as President Trump said the U.S. would not come to the defense of other NATO nations unless they hit 5% in military spending. “Trump wants to move towards a much, much more instrumental and crudely material, transactional politics,” says Richard Seymour, writer, broadcaster and activist.

In Gaza, at least 41 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since midnight, including more Palestinians targeted by Israeli forces while seeking food and humanitarian aid. This comes as UNICEF is warning Gaza is facing what amounts to a “man-made drought” with children at risk of dying from thirst due to Israel’s blockade. We go to Dr. Mark Brauner, an emergency medicine physician who is currently volunteering at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

History was made Tuesday night as democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani carried out a stunning upset and defeated Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. As the results became clear Tuesday night, Cuomo conceded and called Mamdani to congratulate him. The New York state assemblymember will now be the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City in November’s general election. “Tonight we made history,” Mamdani told supporters.

“You can’t, as the president, engage in strikes on a foreign country when there’s no imminent threat, without coming to Congress for authorization,” says Ro Khanna, Democratic congressmember and member of the House Armed Services Committee, criticizing President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites as “blatantly unconstitutional” and a clear instance of executive overreach.

Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary could determine the future of the most populous city in the United States. We speak to John Tarleton, editor-in-chief of the The Indypendent, about the race, which pits the young, progressive socialist Zohran Mamdani against Andrew Cuomo, an establishment Democrat and the former state governor who resigned in 2020 amid an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment.

Today’s mayoral primary in New York City features two very different frontrunners, the scandal-ridden former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and the young Democratic Socialist state assemblymember, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s ascendant grassroots campaign has taken the Democratic establishment by surprise. He last appeared on Democracy Now! in October, as he launched his campaign centered on bringing down the high cost-of-living for working-class New Yorkers.

U.S. President Donald Trump is touting a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran, despite what he said were violations of the deal by both sides shortly after he announced it. Trump said he was especially angry with Israel and urged the country to stand down as he faces mounting criticism over the prospect of another U.S. war in the Middle East.

Democracy Now! was there when Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil reunited with his family over the weekend after being released on bail by a federal judge Friday, ending his detention in a Louisiana ICE jail after more than 100 days. Khalil was seized by federal agents at his home in New York on March 8, with the Trump administration seeking to deport him even though he is a legal permanent resident with a green card and married to a U.S. citizen.

“Netanyahu’s purpose was to drag Trump in,” Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, says of the U.S. attack on Iran. Over the weekend, the U.S. directly joined the war between Israel and Iran when it bombed three nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, though it’s unclear how far the strikes have set back the Iranian nuclear program. Israel and the United States accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons, while Iran says its program is for civilian use.

After President Trump’s attack on Iran over the weekend, civil society leaders are organizing to demand an end to the violence. We speak with Iranian American scholar Kaveh Ehsani, associate professor of international studies at DePaul University in Chicago, who helped organize a petition against the war signed by more than 1,000 academics in the United States, Europe and Iran. “What this is doing is immiserating further the lives of ordinary people,” says Ehsani.

Israel and Iran continue to exchange fire, just days after the United States entered the war by bombing three key nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday. President Trump ordered the attack on the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan facilities without seeking congressional approval, in a move that could spread further violence across the Middle East. We speak with two Iranian scholars who have taken part in the country’s previous nuclear negotiations.

As New Yorkers head to the polls in the primaries for upcoming local elections, voters will have the chance to vote for not one, but up to five of their preferred candidates for mayor and other races. Ranked-choice voting is a relatively new system — introduced in New York following a referendum in 2019 — that has grown in popularity across the U.S.

A Columbia University graduate has been denied entry into the United States and deported following 12 hours of detention at the Los Angeles International Airport. Australian writer Alistair Kitchen says agents questioned him about his views on Israel and Palestine and downloaded the contents of his phone. “They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. I didn’t even make it into the queue for passport processing,” says Kitchen.

In a 6-3 decision on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youth, paving the way for other bans on trans healthcare to remain in effect in 24 other states. According to the ACLU, over 100,000 transgender people under the age of 18 now live in a state with a ban on their healthcare.

As Israeli warplanes continue to pummel Tehran and other parts of the country, President Trump has given mixed messages on whether the U.S. will join Israel’s war on Iran. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a message on Thursday that Trump will decide on direct U.S. involvement in the next two weeks. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after Trump met with his former advisor Steve Bannon, who has publicly warned against war with Iran. The U.S.