Contributing Writers

A group of veterans and their allies have entered their third week of a “Fast for Gaza” outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City. The group is calling for an end to arms sales to Israel and of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. We hear from multiple hunger strikers on their decisions to join the planned 40-day action and why they are pressuring the U.N. in particular.

We get an update on the case of former Columbia University student protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil from Baher Azmy, a member of Khalil’s legal team at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Khalil has been detained in Louisiana for nearly three months, in what Azmy calls one of “our immigration gulags.” Khalil’s legal team is now challenging the State Department’s determination that his presence in the United States harms the country’s foreign policy interests.

President Trump has signed a new travel ban barring citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States. The ban applies to Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and the Republic of Congo. The Trump administration is calling some of the countries “terrorist safe havens” and citing high visa overstay rates for others.

The Trump administration has tapped Palantir — the notorious data-mining firm co-founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel — to compile information on people in the United States for a “master database,” creating an easy way to cross-reference sensitive data from tax records, immigration records and more. Palantir also has a $30 million contract with ICE to provide almost real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements as the agency seeks to arrest 3,000 people a day.

The new book Empire of AI by longtime technology reporter Karen Hao unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment.

As Gaza faces over three months of Israeli blockade, a group of 12 activists is sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. The Madleen ship was launched by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and initially planned to sail from Malta last month, but the group’s ship was damaged in a drone attack. The new mission includes the renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who speaks with Democracy Now! live from the Madleen.

Officials in Gaza say over 100 Palestinians have been killed during recent Israeli attacks on people waiting at aid sites. An additional 500 are wounded. Following the series of deadly attacks, the shadowy U.S.-Israeli humanitarian aid operation is shutting down for a day, and Israel’s military warned Palestinians that roads leading to the aid distribution centers will be considered “combat zones.

The Trump administration has tapped Palantir — the notorious data-mining firm co-founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel — to compile information on people in the United States for a “master database,” creating an easy way to cross-reference sensitive data from tax records, immigration records and more. Palantir also has a $30 million contract with ICE to provide almost real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements as the agency seeks to arrest 3,000 people a day.

President Donald Trump is pushing Republican senators to back his “big, beautiful bill,” which includes new funding to carry out his mass deportation agenda by hiring additional ICE officers and adding detention space. ICE has already signed new agreements with jails around the country for additional capacity, and confirmed nine deaths in custody since Trump took office. “It really feels like a paradigm-shifting moment,” says Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah.

Protests over ICE raids are continuing across the United States as agents arrest immigrants at courthouses, from their workplaces, on the way to school and more. Immigration and human rights advocate Adriana Jasso with Unión del Barrio describes protests that met a massive raid in San Diego at a popular restaurant, the targeting of farmworkers, and how her organization has been conducting ICE patrols to alert the community.

As the Trump administration vows to escalate its targeting of immigrants to 3,000 arrests a day, and the Supreme Court rules it can proceed with stripping some 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela of their legal status, we get an update from Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “It is the biggest mass delegalization in modern history of people who followed every single rule that the U.S. government asked of them,” says Jozef.

It’s graduation season in the United States, and many brave students are taking the opportunity to demonstrate support for Palestinian rights despite an ongoing campus crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. We play excerpts from commencement and graduation addresses at MIT and Harvard and are joined by a student who spoke at Harvard Divinity School’s graduation ceremony.

A massacre of dozens of starving Palestinians waiting for aid occurred at a site operated by the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation over the weekend. It is exactly what many observers warned about when they expressed skepticism over the U.S.- and Israel-backed aid scheme. “It’s not a real organization,” says Eyad Amawi, a coordinator for local NGOs based in Gaza who accuses the Israeli military of using the slow trickle of aid it allows into southern Gaza “as a tool to increase suffering.

Health officials and witnesses in Gaza say at least 31 people were killed Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire on crowds headed to an Israeli-controlled aid distribution point near Rafah. Over 170 people were wounded. Israel denied responsibility. Dr. Victoria Rose, a volunteer surgeon in Gaza who treated some of the massacre’s survivors, decries the ongoing violence of the Israeli military upon the besieged territory’s civilian population.

We get an update on ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel from former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. The latest proposal, mediated by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, “walks back the commitment for a permanent ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal and allowing in of humanitarian aid.” It’s a bad deal for the Palestinians that will allow Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza, says Levy.

President Donald Trump has signed a wave of pardons for people convicted of fraud, including a Virginia sheriff who took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and a reality TV couple who evaded millions in taxes after defrauding banks. Last month, Trump pardoned a Florida healthcare executive convicted of tax evasion for stealing nearly $11 million in payroll taxes from the paychecks of doctors and nurses.

President Donald Trump has vowed to go to the Supreme Court to keep his tariffs in place after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw a court temporarily reinstate the measures, soon after two courts blocked most of the tariffs, saying Trump overstepped his presidential authority. Trump has been infuriated by the legal challenges and lashed out on social media against the Federalist Society and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo.

We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”
“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C.

“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.

President Donald Trump has signed a wave of pardons for people convicted of fraud, including a Virginia sheriff who took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and a reality TV couple who evaded millions in taxes after defrauding banks. Last month, Trump pardoned a Florida healthcare executive convicted of tax evasion for stealing nearly $11 million in payroll taxes from the paychecks of doctors and nurses.

President Donald Trump has vowed to go to the Supreme Court to keep his tariffs in place after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw a court temporarily reinstate the measures, soon after two courts blocked most of the tariffs, saying Trump overstepped his presidential authority. Trump has been infuriated by the legal challenges and lashed out on social media against the Federalist Society and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo.

We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”
“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C.

“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.