President Trump’s plan to cleanse immigrants from US soil got a big boost this month when the Supreme Court gave a go-ahead to his order to end “Temporary Protective Status” (TPS). TPS is typically granted to non-citizens living in the US whose country of origin is in crisis, as was Haiti following the January 10, 2010 earthquake there. Now 350,000 Haitians will be deported.
Haitians are not alone in losing TPS protections. The complicated set of court rulings that led to the Supreme Court ending TPS for Haitians has also ended TPS for people living in the USA from Syria, Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. As of March 2025 TPS allowed 1.3 million people from 17 countries to remain in the USA while their countries of origin were in emergency status. 100,000 people with TPS status live in New York.
The Trump people claim that their first priority is to deport “the worst of the worst.” This is a lie. A report in the New York Times last week found that a majority of people arrested and accused of violating immigration laws had not been previously charged with a crime, while only 4 percent had been convicted of a violent crime. Withdrawal of TPS status, moreover, is an immediate crisis for the immigrant: even before a deportation hearing, they lose their work permit and are thus destitue. Moreover, According to a 2017 report, 94% of people with TPS were working; they were settled members of a community. And they served that community: during the Corona pandemic, some 130,000 “essential workers” had TPS status.
The people Trump wants to deport are our friends, our neighbors, our fellow workers. They are people in need. It should not be complicated to help people in need. Nor should it be complicated to stand up for them if Trump thugs come to take them away. Let’s do it. We are all Minneapolis.
SOME ILLUMINATING ESSAYS
Trump Is Waging War on Haitians
By Sasha Abramsky, The Nation [August 28, 2026]
---- Haitians in Springfield [Ohio] have been the center of some of the cruelest xenophobic behaviors of the Trump era. Perhaps you will remember the 2024 presidential campaign, during which JD Vance and Donald Trump made up false rumors about Haitians in the city “eating dogs and cats.” Trump doubled down on this outlandish claim during his televised debate with Kamala Harris; Vance admitted that the allegations were likely false but nevertheless went out of his way to justify his circulation of these slanderous allegations. Now the administration is unleashing the full force of ICE on this same community, launching what can only be described as an officially sanctioned pogrom against people whose offense seems mainly to be that they are members of a race and a nation that Trump regards with peculiar contempt and animus. … It goes without saying that the vast majority of the more than 300,000 Haitians Trump is targeting around the country are law-abiding members of society. Until the US Supreme Court’s hard-right majority allowed the administration to shred Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status, they were living and working in the country entirely legally, working in industries such as home healthcare and construction, in restaurants and warehouses. They had the required work permits and they had Social Security numbers. Now their papers have been deemed void, in a way not dissimilar to how German Jews were deprived of citizenship rights in the early years of Nazi rule; their status has been revoked, and they are being quite literally hunted by ICE, fitted with ankle monitors, or simply thrown into harsh detention centers. Many of them are being summarily flown back to Haiti—a country with a supposedly transitional government presided over by an unelected council, which has no democratic mandate and that exists largely in name only, its writ hardly present in many parts of the nation; afflicted with desperate poverty; and experiencing daily terror inflicted by some of the most violent gangs on earth—and left to fend for themselves however they can. [Read More]
End of Protected Status Puts Thousands of Somali Immigrants at Immediate Risk
By Jamila Osman, Truthout [August 28, 2026]
---- A court judge in Massachusetts lifted the administrative stay blocking the termination of Somalia’s temporary protected status (TPS) designation on August 14. The move puts thousands of Somalis in the U.S. at risk of immediate detention, deportation, loss of work authorization, and family separation. The initial termination was announced on January 13, 2026, by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who gave just 60 days’ notice before the designation would expire. Noem argued that: “Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status … allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interest. We are putting Americans first.” … On March 13, a federal district court in Boston issued an administrative stay blocking the termination from going into effect — a victory that would prove short-lived. In June, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe, a case challenging the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals, changed the legal landscape for TPS holders nationwide. [Read More]
We’re Getting Dangerously Used To ICE Abuse
By Sofia Leyba, Other Words [August 26, 2026]
---- No matter where you were born or how you feel about immigration, no government should have the power to kill or jail people with so little accountability. Jose Chajon-Raxon, an immigrant from Guatemala, died this August at Delaney Hall, a controversial ICE facility in New Jersey. His death marks more than 50 deaths in ICE custody since President Trump took office last year. Despite all the controversies, ICE keeps killing people — a sentence that should never feel normal. We should never find ourselves counting the days between deaths or waiting for the next headline. But somehow, we have. Earlier this year it was Renee Good, then Alex Pretti. This summer it was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Before them were Silviero Villegas Gonzalez and Ruben Ray Martinez. Those are only the names we know— many others will never make national news. … ICE continues carrying out operations with masked agents in unmarked vehicles, creating confusion and fear before a single word is spoken. Immigration officers have fired on at least 30 people since President Trump returned to office. Eight of those people were killed. Each time, the government tells us the agents acted in self-defense. Public statements quickly frame the victim as the threat. Witness testimony and video evidence often cast doubt on these accounts, but they still shift the focus away from the loss of human life and toward justifying why it happened. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are still being detained every month. [Read More]
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
This week we lost Dolly Parton, so the Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers will recall some of her life and work. There are dozens of her “greatest hits” play lists on line; here’s one of them. But Dolly’s role in American life, and in the lives of the 99%, transcended her music. One of her triumph’s was bringing the film “9 to 5” to life, raising up working women everywhere. In the wonderful documentary film, “9 to 5 is More Relevant than Ever,” Dolly and her co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin tell us how the film came together and how it was effective. We’ll add several articles here: In this essay, “Why 9 to 5 Still Resonates Today,” union organizer/initiator Karen Nussbaum speaks about the role of the film and the progress that women workers, especially clerical workers, have made. Jarek Paul Ervin looks at the lyrics of Dolly’s songs in “Dolly Parton Used Her Voice to Tell Working-Class Stories.” And The Nation magazine’s John Nichols writes how “Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister.” Thank you Dolly Parton, and RIP.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Climate Breakdown: Nepal Flash Flood and the Looming Extinction of the Himalayan Glaciers
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [August 28, 2026]
---- Climate change devastated towns and villages of Nepal on August 26 with enormous flash floods that were produced by a melting glacier. The size, speed and relentlessness of those monstrous waters shocked anyone who saw the videos. Hundreds are dead, likely thousands are missing. What is more frightening yet is that this flooding is only the beginning, since we are rapidly heating up the earth by burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum in such mass quantities that we’re putting 38.1 billion metric tons of the dangerous heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere every single year. The “nose” of a glacier near the border between Nepal and China broke off, falling with rocks into a river and blocking it briefly, after which the pent-up waters, added to by the massive glacier melt, surged down the valley. The likelihood is that the event was contributed to by global heating, and in any case global heating is causing substantial glacier melt that is set to accelerate. … There are about 200,000 glaciers in the world. High-mountain Asia hosts about 90,000 of them and most of these are of an intermediate size, according to Lander van Tricht, et al., writing in Nature Climate Change. As global heating from burning fossil fuels has accelerated during the past 80 years, we have begun seeing glaciers melt, in the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, with catastrophic effects. Right now, we are losing around 750 glaciers a year. We are already at roughly 1.2ºC (2.2ºF) above preindustrial norms. These authors tell us that if we go to 3ºC (5.4ºF) above preindustrial levels, toward which we are now rapidly heading, then by 2050 approximately 3,000 glaciers will be going extinct every year. That would be like all the glaciers in the European Alps evaporating in just one year. [Read More]
How the Media Sells Genocide
By Chris Hedges, Substack [August 24, 2026]
----The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth. When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality. … The message is clear: Jewish lives matter. Palestinian lives do not. [Read More]
(Video) The Rise of Islamophobia in America
---- Peter Beinart speaks with Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America. [August 30, 2026]
[FB – Today’s discussion includes: Why anti-Muslim bigotry has become so prominent in America; The various ways American Muslims navigate Islamophobia; The different Islamophobic strategies employed against Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, and their different responses; Tensions between black and Muslim communities; and The difficulty of building coalitions between Muslims and Jews, given powerful Jewish organizations’ support of Israel.] [See the Program]
How Sliman Mansour and his colleagues built an art movement for Palestine
By Vera Tamari , Mondoweiss [August 26, 2026]
---- Hardly four years after the 1967 Six-Day War, I was stunned by the sudden appearance of a new group of visually striking and contextually strong paintings. The works were by a young artist from the West Bank town of Birzeit. There he stood on the side of the exhibition hall, a handsome, tall, red-haired man, talking humbly about his work. Perhaps few had heard of Sliman Mansour in those days, when he held his first solo exhibition at the East Jerusalem YMCA. But it was my first encounter with Sliman, with whom I would go on to build a long-standing friendship. We worked together alongside other artists to create a Palestinian art movement. The colorful, large oil canvases in that East Jerusalem exhibition portrayed large, built women in traditional embroidered Palestinian thobes. They stood defiantly in a frontal stance, their heavy feet solidly planted in the earth, their large working hands carrying the crops of the land. The figurative subjects gave Sliman’s works a certain edge, but his sensitive brushwork and vibrant color schemes revealed the high artistry he continued to develop, making him one of the most defining modernist Palestinian artists. Almost half a century since that first exhibition, Sliman Mansour passed away on August 24, 2026, at the age of 79. In those decades, Sliman was at the vanguard of the art movement and one of its central pillars. I[Read More]
MID-TERM ELECTIONS OR TRUMP COUP D’ÉTAT?
The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [August 26, 2026]
---- Our Supreme Court, which ruled on Monday to allow Donald Trump to move forward with one of his own illegal schemes. In an emergency decision, issued through the shadow docket, the Republican supermajority gave Trump permission to limit voting by mail in the upcoming midterm elections. In doing this, the six GOP justices well understand that the president is trying to give himself the ability to manipulate the vote. They’re not confused by his plan. They’re not being obtuse. They’re simply aiding and abetting Trump’s assault on democratic self-government. ...Even a late-game restoration of mail-in voting will allow Trump and the Republican justices to accomplish their central aim: to sow confusion, uncertainty, and distrust in mail-in voting. We are just over two months away from the election and a mere six or seven weeks away from the start of early voting in some states. The fact that I cannot tell you how mail-in voting will work accomplishes much of what Trump wants. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Postal Service Rule Could Bar Millions From Voting By Mail,” by Reid J. Epstein, New York Times [August 30, 2026] [Link[; and “Trump Is in Open Revolt Against the Constitution,” by Jamelle Bouie, New York Times [August 29, 2026] [Link]
THE US-ISRAEL WAR AGAINST IRAN
US public support for Iran war falls as Trump approval at record low: Poll
From Aljazeera [August 24, 2026]
---- Support in the United States for the war on Iran has fallen as President Donald Trump’s approval remains at a record low. Public backing for the war has dropped to its lowest level since the early stages of the conflict, with declining Republican support contributing to the shift, according to the poll released on Monday. Just 31 percent of Americans surveyed said they support US military action against Iran, down from 37 percent in March and 34 percent earlier this month. Support among Republican respondents fell to 69 percent, compared with 77 percent in March. The war is also continuing to weigh on Trump’s standing with the public, the poll suggests. For the second consecutive Reuters/Ipsos survey, 33 percent of respondents said they approved of Trump’s performance as president, matching the lowest approval rating recorded in the polling series across his first and second terms. [Read More]
Iran Caused Billions of Dollars in Damage to US Surveillance Infrastructure
By Kyle Anzalone, Antiwar.com [August 26, 2026]
---- NBC News reports that multiple US officials have revealed Iran had caused “unprecedented damage” to US intelligence gathering facilities across the Middle East. “Iranian missile and drone attacks have inflicted damage on US intelligence posts and surveillance hardware in the [region] that is more extensive than any destruction [US] spy agencies have endured,” the outlet explained, adding that the damage will “cost billions of dollars to repair.” The four US officials who spoke with NBC News explained it was the costliest damage ever to CIA infrastructure. The article does not mention to what extent the damage set back the CIA’s intelligence collection capabilities in the Middle East. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Qusra is Just a Warning: Israel’s Blueprint for the West Bank
By Ramzy BaroudAugust 28, 2026
---- If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus. The story of the future of the West Bank begins here. While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians. Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba. The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities and expelling their inhabitants. The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank. … While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades. The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps alone. Now, back to Qusra. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israel is cementing its Control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem while the World is Distracted,” by Martin Kear, The Conversation [August 28, 2026] [Link]; and “IDF Sources Say West Bank Policing Plan Meant to Let Settlers Build Freely,” Ha’aretz [Israel] [August 23, 2026] [Link];
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Ukraine and Our Wildly Reckless Flirtation With a Nuclear War
By Matt Bivens, The Nation [August 26, 2026]
---- By late 2022, Ukraine had rallied, with Western backing, and Russia’s invasion had wavered. The war was only several months old, but it already appeared that Russians might be abruptly routed. Which was terrifying—because US intelligence intercepts made clear that, long before they’d allow that, the Russians would use battlefield nuclear weapons against CIA-Ukrainian positions. That October, President Joe Biden admitted to rich campaign donors that we were flirting with “Armageddon,” and hadn’t been this close to it since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. His comments were spun then as not supported by any particular intel, just the president spitballing. But that was not true. Two years later, The New York Times offered a report based on 18 months of interviews “with administration officials, diplomats…and military officials who recounted the depth of their fear in those weeks” [emphasis mine] that Russia, on the ropes, was about to use nuclear weapons. … America and Russia have hundreds of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, poised for launch after just several minutes of consideration. France and Britain, who have been startlingly bellicose against Russia of late, also have nuclear weapons. For the first time in the lifetime of most of us, there are also no remaining US-Russian arms control agreements: They’ve all either been torn up or allowed to expire. And nuclear war games consistently show that once even a single nuclear weapon is used in anger, it’s very hard to prevent an inevitable, rapid escalation into full-on nuclear war. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Growing Rumble. Politics--alas--is what we need
By Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years [August 30, 2026]
---- It’s been harder than usual for me to write these past few days, and that’s because the glacier collapse and subsequent calamity along the Tibet-Nepal border hit very hard. As it happens, I’ve stood in that border crossing where you’ve watched the giant wave obliterate…everything in a split second. I’d spent weeks in the high, dry, cold of Buddhist Tibet, and then crossed into the lush humid chaos of Hindu Nepal, and so I can summon up some sense of what it must have been like, and of the people who died almost before panic could grip them. More, I knew it was coming. Not on that day, of course, but I’d been in Tibet twenty years ago partly to report on what we already knew was an enormous threat: the fallout from the rapid melt on what is sometimes called Earth’s Third Pole. The danger of these collapses, and the blocked lakes they can create, were well-known to scientists; they happen often, but usually in unpopulated valleys. … I And this is just one glacier of perhaps 50,000 across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. My point is: there is infinitely more damage to be done, or to put it another way there is infinitely more damage we might still be able to forestall. And that’s what should concern us. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/”THE WAR ON TERROR”
(Video) Meet Prairieland Protester Autumn Hill: How Her “Act of Solidarity” Became a 50-Year Prison Sentence
From Democracy Now! [August 25, 2026]
---- “I’m absolutely being imprisoned for a political agenda,” activist Autumn Hill tells Democracy Now! in a phone call from Texas’s Johnson County Correctional Facility, where the 30-year-old trans woman is serving a 50-year prison sentence for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE jail last July. Hill is one of nine protesters convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an “antifa terror cell.” In an interview with Rolling Stone writer Jack Crosbie, Hill says that she had no intention of committing violence at the protest, which ended when a police officer was shot and wounded by a fellow protester who says he fired in self-defense. No other injuries were reported, and Hill says she had already left when the shooting occurred. … For prosecutors pushing the overly broad and poorly substantiated idea that anti-fascist organizing against the Trump administration is violent and dangerous, the Prairieland case was a “gold mine,” says Crosbie. “There’s no real burden of proof. They can just say that you’re ‘antifa,’ and that becomes sort of gospel, according to the government.” [See the Program]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) As Meta Agrees to $17B Settlement, Now Is the Time to Regulate AI Before It’s Too Late
From Democracy Now! [August 27, 2026]
---- Prosecutors across 47 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories have announced a groundbreaking legal settlement with technology giant Meta over accusations that the social media company deliberately designed addictive products they knew to be harmful to children. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is set to pay at least $12 billion and up to $17.1 billion in financial penalties, in addition to implementing design changes for underage users. “This is the least they can do to prevent harms that have metastasized and have already caused suicides … [but] we cannot be relying on fines, or certainly even on litigation, after harms have already transpired. What we need are rules of the road. And we need rules that go to the root cause of the business model,” says Amba Kak, the co-executive director of AI Now Institute, who joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on tech policy and regulation. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “A Giant “Grandmother” Tree Sparked a New Struggle to Block Trump’s Border Wall,” by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [August 27, 2026] [Link]; and “Homeless in America,” by Eve Ottenberg, Counterpunch [August 25, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?
An interview with historian Ned Blackhawk on the United States’ contested founding.
By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation [August 24, 2026]
---- If the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has demonstrated anything, it would be that the United States remains profoundly divided over how to narrate its origin story. While some triumphantly celebrate it, others point to the country’s long history of exclusions and violence. Then there is a third perspective: Even as the US has failed to keep its promises, they can still be fulfilled over time. Which of these views is correct? Few scholars are better suited to answer this question than Ned Blackhawk, whose celebrated book The Rediscovery of America has redefined American history by portraying Native peoples not as marginal victims of conquest but as active participants in the continent’s political history. The Nation interviewed Blackhawk to discuss his views of the US founding, his thinking about American constitutional law as it concerns tribal sovereignty, and the reasons why he believes the study of American history needs a new theoretical framework. [Read More]
James Lawson Was the Civil Rights Movement’s Drill Sergeant
By Chris Maisano, Jacobin [August 28, 2026]
[FB – This is a review of Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love by Reverend James Lawson Jr and Emily Yellin.]
---- The civil rights movement’s nonviolence was a moral commitment and a strategic calculation of how the movement could best exert power. No practitioner of that nonviolence was more effective and disciplined than Rev. James Lawson. Lawson deserves to be remembered as one of the black freedom movement’s greatest leaders. Those who knew and worked with him, as well as anyone who has delved beneath the surface of the movement’s history, understand just how important a figure he was. No less of an authority than Martin Luther King Jr himself considered Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” A Methodist minister whose Christian faith was thoroughly suffused with Gandhian principles, he trained a veritable army of activists in the philosophy, strategy, and tactics of nonviolent direct action. He had a hand in every major Southern civil rights campaign from 1958, when he moved to Nashville to begin his movement work, through the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that claimed King’s life. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and was a central figure in the city’s labor and progressive movements until his death in 2024, at the age of ninety-five. For Lawson, the problem with violence was not that it was too revolutionary, but that it was not revolutionary enough to change a society whose fundamental organizing principle is violence. [Link].
