Since day one, our administration has had a clear mission: build a safer, more affordable city for working-class New Yorkers, and every day, we are delivering on that mission. Jobs are up, our streets are safer with crime down across the city every month this year, and we have a record 183,000 small businesses across the five boroughs — the highest ever in our city’s history.
Day after day, we are working to make sure New Yorkers have the opportunities to grow their businesses and service their city. That is why we have made record investments towards our Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprise Program — also known as M/WBEs — putting money back into communities that have been denied a fair shot for too long; and this year has been another record-breaking year for M/WBEs.
This past year, we awarded the highest number of city contracts to M/WBEs ever and set a record for M/WBE awards within our city agencies, awarding a total of $1.59 billion dollars to M/WBEs across the five boroughs — that is a 15 percent increase since Fiscal Year 2022, the first fiscal year of our administration. But behind each of these numbers is also a human story — sisters and brothers of color finally able open to their small businesses, support their families, and get ahead; small business owners with big dreams that want a fair shot to turn that dream into a reality; and so many more.
For too long, communities of color have been locked out of building wealth and have found it difficult to get their businesses off the ground. We cannot accept a city where people of color miss out on the chance to build wealth for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. That is why city government is leading the way with our M/WBE program and showing we can invest in communities of color, while simultaneously delivering a quality product for New Yorkers. We know that when we create the conditions for small businesses to succeed our entire city wins.
Our M/WBE program is supporting that young couple who is dreaming of building a small business, the mom-and-pop stores that mean so much to our neighborhoods and tapping into the talent we have in our communities that want to help build our economy and our city.
Three decades ago, Mayor David Dinkins made history by creating the city’s Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprise Program, and while we have achieved historic milestones within the program, we must set the bar even higher going forward. That is why, last week, we announced the creation of the M/WBE Advisory Council to help advance the administration’s historic progress on supporting minority- and women-owned businesses.
Under our administration, Black and Brown unemployment in New York City is at its lowest point in half a decade. We have narrowed this gap by delivering new opportunities to communities across the five boroughs that have been overlooked for far too long. Our administration understands that a job is what enables us to achieve the American Dream. That is why we have made historic investments in M/WBEs — working to connect New Yorkers to city contracts, career opportunities, and good-paying jobs. We are opening the doors of opportunity for communities across the five boroughs because working people deserve their fair share, and we are giving it to them.
Donald Trump is often described as unprecedented, but in winning a non-consecutive second term—thus occupying two numerical slots in the presidential order—he has a significant antecedent: Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president.
For more than a century, Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House during the postbellum period, enjoyed the distinction of being America’s only president to serve non-consecutive terms. With Trump’s reelection, that’s about to change—and one New Hampshire-based history buff has a unique perspective on that development: Cleveland’s grandson, George Cleveland. (Yes, grandson: born in 1952, George never met his famous grandpa, who served as president in the late 1800s and had children late in life.)
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In an interview, Cleveland, 72, told TIME about Grover’s unusual presidency and why he isn’t feeling great about Trump being compared to his grandfather.
TIME: Your grandfather Grover Cleveland is getting quite a lot of attention in the wake of Trump’s win. How does that feel, as a direct descendant?
CLEVELAND: Well, the thought has been brewing for a while. Although I never really considered we’d get to this point. I think the most unfortunate part is that the question “Who is the only non-consecutive president of the United States?” was one of the most popular Grover-related [trivia] questions. Now we’ve lost that. But he’s still the first.
That’s what Cleveland is best remembered for. Are there other aspects of his legacy that people should know him for?
Well, I don’t know how many people carry $1,000 bills in their wallet, but he’s on there. Beyond that, Grover was kind of a quiet president. He sat down and did the job, dealing with what was in front of him. I don’t think he had a really broad view of things ideologically, like Teddy Roosevelt a few years later. He just hunkered down to deal with, “What is the money problem?” The patronage system was certainly something he was violently opposed to and may have been one of the factors that caused him not to get reelected [in 1888].
It’s rare for presidents to mount a reelection campaign after being voted out of the White House. There must be some sort of defiance that Trump and Grover Cleveland share.
I think the motivation may have been different. Grover really… he… I’m trying to say this in a really not Trump-negative way. And right now that’s difficult for me [laughs].
Grover had work that he wanted to get finished and I don’t know if that was really the driving force behind Donald Trump. …
It sounds like you’re not a Trump guy.
That would be a safe thing to say.
So how do you feel that Grover Cleveland’s name is now invoked as being a predecessor to Trump?
I’ve gotten used to it now, but in the beginning I definitely wanted to reach for a Tums every time I heard it. It is what it is. Whether I like it or not, or anybody else likes it or not, Trump won the popular vote and he won the Electoral vote.
What have the last six months been like for you as it became increasingly clear that Trump might actually pull this off and people were invoking Grover’s name?
Well, I didn’t get overexcited about it because, I mean, I’m just a guy. Like it or not, presidential descendants have to get used to the fact that their predecessors’ names and acts are gonna be floated around under a 21st-century microscope, which sometimes is fair and sometimes is not.
There is a group, the Society of Presidential Descendants. We have an unwritten rule that we don’t really rag on other presidents. They were duly elected and some did what we now look at to be a great job, some were perhaps less than stellar.
That sounds like a fascinating group. Do you guys have conventions?
Oh, yeah! We don’t have a secret handshake yet, which I’ve been pushing for. But as I like to tell people, we sit around and talk about all the UFO papers that are hidden that we’ve seen.
You’re being serious?
[laughs] No. The subject has come up, once or twice. I will admit that.
Do you know who killed JFK?
[laughs] Yeah, but we can’t talk about that. No, but I believe the first reference to a UFO was made by Thomas Jefferson regarding something sighted in the sky over Louisiana. The modern presidential descendants are always being bugged about it.
Grover Cleveland was president in the 1880s and 1890s. People must find it hard to believe that his grandson is living today.
I think there’s only three living 19th century presidents’ grandchildren: me, my sister Frances, and believe it or not, John Tyler still has a grandson, Harrison, who’s alive. I never met Harrison. But I met his brother, Lyon, who was a good guy.
Do you think Trump knows who Grover Cleveland was?
He may now. He had to walk by his picture in the White House. If he was like a lot of other people who got Cleveland confused with Taft, because they were both big, portly guys, I don’t know [laughs].
What do you think was Grover Cleveland’s greatest accomplishment?
Oh, God. It was a lot of little things. He favored a large investment in the United States Navy—which turned out to be a real godsend when the First World War came to be. Our ships were way more modernized than many other places.
There are also aspects of Cleveland’s presidency that seem less flattering to his legacy. He expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act—
Ah, took the words right out of my mouth. I was reading something about all this immigration stuff, and I started reading about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and I said, “My God, this is barbaric!” You would like if your forebear was a little more tolerant and liberal in that area, but he wasn’t.
Grover Cleveland entered office as a bachelor, didn’t he? And married during his presidency?
Yes. The first two years of his presidency, his sister Rose Cleveland served as—you can’t really call it First Lady, most people refer to it as White House hostess. And, sidenote, she was the first LGBTQ+ person in that position.
Are you concerned about the direction the country is heading in?
Yes. The whole concept of Project 2025 just terrifies me. But, like I said, it’s what we asked for. Or at least over half the country. As with other presidents, like Grover Cleveland after his first term, if you don’t like it, vote him out. Of course, Trump can’t be voted back in, because you can’t do three terms.
One positive thing we can say for Grover Cleveland is he did accept the results of the 1888 election and left office willingly.
That’s right—and with dignity. And I don’t think they stole anything. At least, if they have, I haven’t found it yet. It must be in the same place where all the UFO papers are.
In December, Bridget Rochios, a nurse practitioner and midwife at the University of California, San Francisco, showed up to work wearing a keffiyeh.
Later, she and other co-workers started coming to work wearing “Free Palestine” pins, as well as hospital ID badges shaped like a watermelon, a pro-Palestine symbol.
Rochios, whose work includes addressing health disparities within reproductive health care, had been moved by reports of Israel’s targeting and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health care system, and started wearing the items as a show of solidarity with Palestinian women and babies, as well as her medical colleagues in Gaza.
Supervisors ordered Rochios and her colleagues to remove the pins, threatening them with suspension or termination. Most complied, but Rochios refused.
In April, she traveled to Gaza where she spent a month delivering babies at a maternity hospital in Rafah and the al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. She saw some of the many delivering mothers who have suffered under dire conditions in Gaza.
“The people who are really ‘unsafe’ are the women who I was supporting in labor as literally bombs were dropping.”
A week after she returned to the U.S., her supervisors at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, one of the graduate school and hospital system’s 10 campuses, placed Rochios on a three-month paid administrative leave for “insubordination.” Hersuspension was renewed in September after she again refused to remove her watermelon pin. She may still face further sanctions, including termination. University representatives have told her that several colleagues and patients said the pin made them feel “unsafe.”
“The people who are really ‘unsafe’ are the women who I was supporting in labor as literally bombs were dropping and shaking the walls of our hospital,” Rochios told The Intercept, recalling moments during Israel’s invasion of Rafah. “Women who have not had prenatal care at all; women who went to walk to the hospital in labor and have a baby, and then two hours later, walk back home to their tent where they did not have running water, where they don’t have enough food or hydration to breastfeed, no clean water, or money to buy formula for their kids.”
Medical professionals, especially those who have treated patients in Gaza’s and Lebanon’s hospitals over the past year, have spoken out about atrocities carried out by the Israeli military. Doing so at UCSF, one of the country’s most elite medical institutions, may come at a price.
Rochios is one of nine health care workers at UCSF who spoke with The Intercept about their experiences of censorship and punishment after speaking out about human rights for Palestinians as a part of their research and medical work.
UCSF declined to comment or respond to a detailed list of questions or multiple phone calls over the course of a week. A UCSF spokesperson said they were concerned that the accounts of UCSF employees were being “taken out of context.”
Rupa Marya, an internal medicine physician and lecturer at UCSF, is perhaps the most notable and vocal among those who have received pushback. In her social media posts in January, Marya, an expert in decolonial theory, questioned the impacts of Zionism as “a supremacist, racist ideology” on health care and drew immediate criticism from pro-Israel colleagues and Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener.
The university then published a statement across its social media accounts addressing the posts without naming Marya, disavowing her statements as “antisemitic attacks.” Wiener thanked UCSF for the statement. A flurry of online attacks against Marya followed, including racist and sexist attacks and threats of death and sexual violence. Wiener has continued to single out Marya on social media.
In September, Marya wrote a new post on social media that UCSF students were concerned that a first-year student from Israel may have served in the Israeli military in the prior year, then asked, “How do we address this in our professional ranks?”
The following month, the university placed her on paid leave and suspended her ability to practice medicine pending an investigation into the post. The university has since reinstated her ability to give clinical care, but she remains banned from campus, including the hospital where she worked.
“I wanted to protect people who have lost family members,” Marya said. “People are being murdered, doctors are being disappeared, hospitals are being bombed — you have this traumatized community in UCSF. I’ve been trying to give voice to the experience of the Muslim, Indigenous, Black, SWANA” — Southwest Asian and North African — “students who are afraid, like deeply afraid.”
The Center for Protest Law and Litigation, a First Amendment group, is assisting Marya in obtaining public records of possible communications about her social media posts between UCSF, Wiener, and the Helen Diller Family Foundation, the school’s largest donor that has in the past donated to pro-Israel propaganda groups. The center filed suit for the records after the university failed to produce documents after nine months of back and forth, during which the school claimed such records are exempt from freedom of information laws.
In a statement sent to The Intercept, Wiener said Marya’s social media posts “crossed a line,” accusing her of using “an antisemitic conspiracy theory targeting Jewish doctors” and an Israeli medical student. He said concerned UCSF faculty and students brought the January and October posts to his attention. “I then called out those posts as antisemitic, just as I have called out homophobic, transphobic, racist, and Islamophobic statements by various individuals,” he wrote.
Wiener, as a part of the legislature’s Jewish Caucus, previously targeted K-12 school districts for teaching history lessons that were critical of Israel, dismissing them as “bigoted, inaccurate, discriminatory, and deeply offensive anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda,” according to a January letter to state lawmakers. He decried the online threats against Marya, calling for an investigation.
UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion in San Francisco on April 8, 2024, left, and a devastated building at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City in the Gaza Strip on June 11, 2024. Photos: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images and Omar Al-Qatta/AFP via Getty Images
The school’s crackdown has been broad, targeting professors, doctors, and medical staff.
Doctors have had their lectures mentioning Gaza scrubbed from the internet or canceled outright. They have been accused of antisemitism and creating an unsafe work environment, and banned from lecturing entirely. Staffers, nurses, and students have been suspended for speaking out in solidarity or for acts as simple as wearing a watermelon pin or hanging a pro-Palestine symbol in their offices. Dozens of employees have criticized the ongoing silence from UCSF and its failure to condemn Israel’s war on Gaza, accusing the school of favoring pro-Israel views.
“This is really unprecedented where this university in particular has stepped in and taken such a strong stand in support of some speech and opposition to other speech,” said Dan Siegel, a longtime Bay Area civil rights attorney who is representing several UCSF employees facing discipline. “It’s really remarkable to me that there is so much content-based discrimination here.”
For the past 30 years, Siegel has represented faculty and staff across the UC system in employment and workplace issues. Before October 7, he had never seen such a widespread effort to punish employees for speaking out about a specific issue.
“Look, I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, but aren’t people made uncomfortable by 40,000 dead in Gaza?”
“Among the supporters of the Israeli government, this is a cynical and manipulative effort to limit debate,” he said. “They’ve promoted an atmosphere where you’re a student at the university or a patient at the hospital, and it becomes perfectly normalized for you to say or for someone to champion your saying, ‘I feel uncomfortable as a Jew because of people saying these things,” said Siegel, who is Jewish.
“Look, I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, but aren’t people made uncomfortable by 40,000 dead in Gaza or the efforts taking place in the West Bank to steal Palestinian land?” Siegel asked. “Those things make me feel uncomfortable — so now we’re all going to be censoring each other’s speech because it makes us uncomfortable, and that really can’t be the criteria for limiting speech.”
In late July, a group of House Republicans, including House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., told UCSF they would investigate allegations of antisemitism made by employees and patients at the institution. The members of Congress threatened to withhold all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid payments, from the school and health care system. Their investigation is a part of a larger partisan effort, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., targeting universities whose students and faculty have been vocal critics of Israel.
Three UCSF physicians have been banned from giving lectures after mentioning the negative health impacts of Israel’s war on Gaza or the apartheid health system in the Occupied Territories.
Jess Ghannam had received pushback for his scholarship in the past. In 2012, an attendee of one of his lectures about Gaza at UCSF called the police on him, saying they didn’t feel safe with him on campus, Ghannam recalled. Later that year, a student burst into tears and ran out of a lecture Ghannam was delivering at UC Davis and later filed a complaint alleging that Ghannam had created an unsafe learning environment. (UC Davis launched a formal investigation, which eventually saw the complaint dismissed.)
In his 25 years at the university, Ghannam never had any of his lectures canceled outright. He is a well-known speaker who has shared his research on the consequences of war on displaced communities, such as Palestinians, in many venues over the past two decades. And he helped establish mental health and medical clinics for Palestinians, interviewing Palestinian torture survivors who were incarcerated in Israeli prisons.
In September, he was scheduled to speak to first-year medical students, after a group of medical students had met with the university’s deans to push for more education around Palestine.
Student protesters outside of UC San Francisco’s Rutter Center call for the UC system to divest from investments in Israeli companies as the UC Board of Regents holds meetings inside the university, in San Francisco, on July 17, 2024. Photo: Thomas Sawano/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
Then, four days before the scheduled talk, Ghannam heard from the course instructor that his lecture was being canceled. The instructor said there wasn’t enough time to provide “wraparound services” for students, or peer support or support services, for those who may be distressed by the topic, Ghannam said.
Students responded with outrage. Ninety-five medical students signed a letter addressed to school officials, calling the cancellation “an act of intentional erasure of historical harms that continue to affect our communities and our profession” and alleging that it was part of “a pattern of suppression that seemingly targets any element of acknowledgement or advocacy for the health of Palestinians, despite UCSF’s claimed position as a bastion of social justice.” The students went on to host Ghannam independently, allowing him to give his lecture in front of about 100 people.
“That’s the clear message: You can’t talk about Palestine, you can’t talk about genocide.”
“If you talk about Palestine,” Ghannam said of his critics’ perspective, “if you talk about the health consequences of genocide, and the negative impact of genocide and settler colonialism, it’s OK to talk about it in any other people except Palestinians — and then if you do try to talk about it in the Palestinian context, we’re going to shut you down.”
“I mean, that’s the clear message: You can’t talk about Palestine, you can’t talk about genocide.”
Leigh Kimberg had a similar experience. Kimberg, a medical school professor, primary care doctor, and leader in the field of violence prevention and trauma-informed care, had lectured at UCSF’s continuing education program several times in the past decade.
In April, she gave a 50-minute lecture and dedicated six of those minutes to a discussion of the health of Palestinians in Gaza. She argued that you cannot speak on trauma-informed care without mentioning the genocide in Gaza and described the connections between the liberation of Black, Palestinian, and Jewish people. She also decried antisemitism during her lecture.
Still, the following month, administrators told Kimberg that they had received complaints from attendees who called her speech “biased and antisemitic,” which prompted the school to remove the recording of her talk from the school’s website. When she protested the video’s removal, she said the school barred her from giving lectures at the program.
The ban was lifted after multiple emails from Kimberg and Siegel, who is representing her, but she was told that her future talks must comply with the program’s rules. She also received pushback from her division at the school of medicine, where colleagues have referred to her as “inflammatory” or “not trauma-informed.”
Healthcare workers in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 2024, at the March for Gaza, part of a national day of action against the war. Photo: Leigh Kimberg
Kimberg began to speak out about Palestine publicly last October, and her Palestinian colleagues welcomed her perspective as a person of Jewish ancestry. Her grandparents had fled antisemitic violence in Poland and Lithuania, and three of her relatives died in the Holocaust. But her colleagues also cautioned her of the backlash to come.
“We do want to warn you that the second you advocate for Palestine, you will be called ‘antisemitic,’” Kimberg recalled from earlier conversations with Palestinian colleagues. “It doesn’t matter that you’re Jewish — in some ways, it will be worse — but you will definitely be called ‘antisemitic’ if you say anything to value Palestinian life.”
“And that has been my experience.”
Such discrimination is what led Keith Hansen, a former chief resident of surgery at UCSF, to conceal his Palestinian heritage throughout his career. As chief resident in the fall of 2023, Hansen would send daily emails to his co-workers at the trauma surgery department at San Francisco General Hospital, highlighting updates across their field. In one of those emails in October, as reports of Israeli strikes on hospitals in Gaza began to compile, he skipped the updates and instead asked his colleagues “to take a moment to acknowledge that doctors and surgeons and patients, just like us, were being bombed by the Israeli government.”
Hansen received positive feedback for the email from his co-workers, but in his monthly review to assess his performance as a resident, an attending physician referred to Hansen as “a polarizing figure” because of the email.
In May, as student activists continued to occupy a protest encampment at the school’s Parnassus Heights campus, Hansen gave a lecture as chief resident about his work in organ transplantation along with health inequities of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli occupation.
During the talk, he also disclosed his Palestinian heritage, something he had never done in his career. He shared that he was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugees, his mother from Ramallah and his father from Jenin. After running through data showing health disparities between Palestinians living under occupation and Israeli citizens, as well as the targeting of physicians in Gaza, he called on the university to do more to address such issues. He referenced other UCSF initiatives, such as fundraising to protect doctors and scholars in Afghanistan and Ukraine. He went on to call for an academic boycott of institutions “complicit in the genocide and medical apartheid.”
Following his talk, several colleagues lodged complaints against him that he was creating an unsafe working environment. The chair of his department also directed him and other speakers not to mention “anything political or anything that didn’t have to do with graduation.” At graduation, he said people he had previously gotten along with avoided him.
“Everyone kind of shows their true colors once they find out your background.”
“There’s that term — ‘liberal except for Palestine’ or ‘humanitarian except for Palestine’ — and a lot of people as soon as they hear you’re Palestinian just change their entire view of you,” Hansen said. “And it has changed my relationship — I mean, there were people at graduation who didn’t talk to me, who I had known for years and always got along with really well. Everyone kind of shows their true colors once they find out your background.”
At the same time, pro-Israel speakers have been invited to campus while Palestinian voices have been opposed. Among those speakers were Elan Carr, a U.S. Army veteran and CEO of the Israeli American Council, an influential pro-Israel lobbying and advocacy group. UCSF’s Office of Diversity and Outreach invited him to speak during May’s Jewish American Heritage Month.
Nearly 100 faculty, medical workers, and students wrote to the diversity office, protesting Carr’s talk, citing his role at a counterprotest against student encampments at UCLA that turned violent a month earlier, as well as his endorsement of transphobic comments on social media. Carr’s speech on “the persistence of anti-Zionism, anti-Israel discrimination, and campus antisemitism” went on as planned.
The same office declined to sponsor and publicize an official screening of documentary “Israelism,” which was hosted by the school’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. The film centers on the advocacy of anti-Zionist Jewish activists.
Some staffers havebeen disciplined for a speech act as quiet as wearing a pin.
Shortly after October 7, Rosita, a nurse at UCSF who gave only her first name out of fear of being doxxed by pro-Israel activists, started hand-making watermelon pins for her co-workers to attach to their hospital ID cards, green glittery resin disks with a small rubber watermelon glued on top.
A slice of the fruit has been a symbol of Palestinian liberation since the 1980s, when Palestinian artists started to use the depictions of the watermelon, with its red flesh, green rind, and black seeds, as a way to circumvent an Israeli ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag in Gaza and the West Bank. Rosita passed her pins out to interested colleagues at work and to others during pro-Palestine protests.
A watermelon pin attached to a UCSF employee ID card. Photo: Bridget Rochios
In a relatively uniform work environment such as a hospital floor or clinic, custom badge pins are typical ways for medical workers to express themselves. At UCSF, such displays are often political, with many wearing pins that advocate for LGBTQ rights or the Black Lives Matter movement. In the past, UCSF even gave away its own uterus pins meant to affirm reproductive rights, said Rosita, who also helped found the school’s faculty and staff pro-Palestinian group.
“I can tell what type of person you are by the pins that you have on your badge,” she said. “So it’s a sense of pride and solidarity and acknowledgment.”
In all, Rosita said she has made and given away 500 pins. And while many workers received compliments from colleagues and patients, those who wore the pins started to get approached by their managers, telling them the pins were antisemitic and ordering them to remove them under threat of suspension or termination.
In September, Rosita’s manager called her in for a “counseling” session where she was told to remove the pin because a staff member said it made them feel “uncomfortable.” She refused and responded with an email, calling the manager’s request “discrimination and denial of the Palestinian people.”
“My niece is Palestinian,” she wrote in the email. “She is 10 years old. She enjoys collecting Polly Pockets and does jujitsu on Saturdays, studies Arabic on Sundays.”
“She exists!” Rosita added. “I wear the watermelon because she exists!”
Rosita, who is Rochios’s union steward and has been representing her in disciplinary hearings, said she worried she would be met with similar punishment.
Another staff member faced similar pushback for displaying pro-Palestine symbols. A researcher at UCSF, who declined to give their name due to fear of workplace retaliation, was told by supervisors to remove a sign from their office that said “Queer as in Free Palestine” with a red and pink triangle. The staff member, who is queer, said the sign was meant to express solidarity between the LGBTQ community and Palestinians. They noted that their Mexican LGBTQ flag had been accepted. Leading up to the ban, the researcher had received an online death threat for displaying the symbol, and one community member confronted them inside their office, accusing them of supporting Hamas.
The school told them the red triangle was a Nazi symbol that is being used to promote violence against Jewish people. The ban remains on the staff member’s employee file. Since reporting the death threat, the school has yet to offer a safety plan for the staff member, who as a result has been working remotely since September.
“It’s been really tough. I’ve had to take time off, my mental and physical health is just shot at this point from the stress and anxiety, not knowing whether I’m going to lose my job,” they said.
“My mental and physical health is just shot at this point from the stress and anxiety, not knowing whether I’m going to lose my job.”
Another staffer received a notice of intent to fire her just for discussing accusations lodged against them with colleagues. In January, UCSF therapist Denise Caramagno quote tweeted, to her modest following of 500 users on X, the school’s public rebuke of Marya with the following: “@UCSF is coordinating an attack on its own faculty of color who are asking legitimate questions about social determinants of health. This is a violation of academic speech. How are we to achieve health equity if we cannot ask important questions about systems of supremacy?”
Several months later in May, Caramagno’s supervisor sent an email, flagging that a physician at UCSF sent a complaint about Caramagno’s post to school officials and a complaint officer in the diversity office, calling the tweet antisemitic and questioning Caramagno’s ability to “offer psychological support to Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff.”
Medical workers stage a die-in at San Francisco city hall on January 8, 2024. Photo: John Avalos
Over the past decade, Caramagno helped build the school’s CARE program, which provides resources and support to those on campus who have experienced discrimination, harassment, or abuse. As the co-director, she had remained the point of contact for students to reach out to confidentially and become a trusted source of support to students during difficult moments, including amid protests during the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. She’s regularly called out systemic racism as a part of her role.
“When I see what’s happening in Palestine, it just looks like the most extreme form of racism,” Caramagno said, referring to the genocide in Gaza. “We’re a public health care system, so when we see the dismantling of the public health care system [in Gaza], we have an obligation to call that out.”
While the complaint did not lead to any discipline, she was barred from serving as a point of contact for individuals with reports of antisemitism.
In June, her supervisors caught wind that Caramagno had shared the email from her supervisor that included the complaint with close friends and colleagues, seeking guidance and support on how to proceed. Supervisors told her that she was not allowed to share the email, which they considered confidential. Caramagno and her attorney, Siegel, insist the email was not confidential, which she dismissed as “defamatory.” Even so, by August she was suspended and then received notice of the school’s intent to fire her. She is barred from campus and from contacting her clients.
“I’m a trained clinician in this; I know the laws about confidentiality,” Caramagno said. “I know I had never breached confidentiality, and I never will.”
Last week, a group of faculty staff and students, including Kimberg and Ghannam, gathered for the first session of the UC People’s Tribunal, a group that aims to hold UC leaders accountable for the school system’s complicity with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.
In addition to the violent crackdown on student encampments across the UC system last spring, school leaders have long shown a pro-Israel bias in their longstanding opposition to attempts by student and faculty groups to join academic boycotts of institutions with ties to Israel. The tactic is part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which aims to achieve Palestinian statehood.
The People’s group, which presented the tribunal charges at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, focused on the UC’s investments in Israeli companies and the other activities of UCSF’s largest private donor, the Diller family. A collection of foundations created by the Bay Area real estate billionaire Sanford Diller, who died in 2018, gave a massive $1 billion to the school in 2017 and 2018, after giving $150 million over the previous 15 years.
Facade of the UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center in San Francisco on April 28, 2023. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
The foundations, named for Diller’s late wife Helen, also donated $100,000 in 2016 to the Canary Mission, a group that aims to blacklist students and professors at universities who are found to be critical of Israel. Once an individual is listed on the Canary Mission site, a flood of cyberbullying messages often follow in an attempt to ruin the person’s reputation. The site has a profile for Ghannam and Marya, accusing both of supporting terrorism and antisemitism. Ghannam jokingly called himself one of the site’s “inaugural” members, or a “first-gen Canary Mission.” The group also recently celebrated Marya’s suspension on social media.
In 2016, the Diller Foundation also donated $25,000 to Regavim, an Israeli NGO that sues Palestinians who try to build homes in the occupied West Bank; $100,000 to Reservists on Duty, a group that pays for Israeli reserve soldiers to travel to U.S. universities to work with students on projects that challenge BDS; and $25,000 to Turning Point USA “for US campus efforts against BDS.” And the foundation has donated to Islamophobic groups American Freedom Law Center and Stop Islamization of America, along with American right-wing conservative groups, Project Veritas and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Jackie Safier, Sanford Diller’s daughter, who now runs the Diller Foundation, has dismissed connections between the foundation and the far-right Zionist and conservative groups in the U.S. and Israel. Given the foundation’s close ties with UCSF, however, faculty and staff who have faced punishment for their pro-Palestine speech have questioned whether the relationship was a factor.
“You can’t walk anywhere at UCSF without seeing Helen Diller’s name somewhere,” Ghannam said. “The foundation’s name is in the front of UCSF, the main entrance, they’ve endowed chairs and faculty positions.”
Ghannam had hoped to travel to Gaza to assist patients there during this past year, but has been barred due to Israeli travel restrictions into the territory for individuals with Palestinian ancestry. He instead has been forced to watch the conflict from afar, doing what he can with organizing at UCSF, while Israeli strikes kill people he’s close with.
“There’s this awesomeness of feeling the solidarity; people are finally understanding Palestine in ways that they never understood before,” Ghannam said. “But at the same time, the amount of fucking grief and pain that I feel every day with knowing that my colleagues have been killed, that all clinics that we helped build and all the programs we help build and all of the people whose kids I’ve seen grown up over the years and get married — they’re all dead, so there’s this profound sense of grief and guilt.”
Rochios speaking with Al Jazeera for an interview aired on May 26, 2024. Screenshot: Al Jazeera
Rochios’s advocacy on the health inequality experienced by Palestinians in Gaza began by speaking out at home, both at the workplace and at rallies in the Bay Area. When Rochios, who was allowed to travel to Gaza, was working in Rafah in April, she began to share what she was witnessing on television news for outlets such as Al Jazeera.
“While the West seems to not give any weight or validation to Palestinian reporters on the ground, these health care workers have become the journalists, the storytellers, all this information, and it became very clear to me to that it was my duty to try and be a voice to that,” she said.
UCSF escalated its punishment against Rochios this week, moving her from a paid suspension to three days unpaid. She will be allowed to return to work for the first time since June on November 21, but was again ordered not to wear her keffiyeh or watermelon badge. If she continues to wear the items, the school said, she would be in violation of UCSF’s PRIDE policies and Principles of Community, which are among several codes meant to reinforce diversity and inclusion within the institution. She expects to be fired, given the climate of repression she and her colleagues have experienced at UCSF.
Through conversations with colleagues in the OBGYN department at the nearby city-run San Francisco General Hospital, Rochios knows that this outcome is not the norm in her profession, even within the same city. Unlike at UCSF, the hospital workers have been able to display their support for Palestine, with some openly wearing sweatshirts that read “Healthcare workers for Palestine.”
“I’ve become such a pariah in this way within UCSF,” she said. “Whereas it exists without issue in a sister hospital in the same city.”
(NewsNation) — The trial for Jose Ibarra, the man accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, could be ending soon.
Prosecutors say they only need half a day more, and the defense says it only plans to call a few witnesses themselves — including Jose Ibarra’s brothers, Diego and Argenis. Diego and Argenis Ibarra, who, like Jose are Venezuelan citizens, have been in federal custody since February on charges they had fake green cards.
The defense was instructed to bring the brothers to Athens, Georgia one full day ahead of schedule.
Tuesday marks the third day of the trial. Over the previous two days, the prosecution has called 19 witnesses. Riley’s roommates, police officers and FBI agents all testified.
On Monday, police showed body camera footage of the moment they first made contact with Jose Ibarra. Police said they noticed scratches and cuts all over his arms. In video footage from the police, Jose Ibarra was not able to explain where those injuries came from.
Prosecutors say these are clear defensive wounds from when Riley was fighting for her life.
A technological analysis of Riley’s watch revealed the exact moment the 22-year-old stopped dead in her tracks before launching an emergency call to police that was abruptly hung up.
An FBI agent said in court Monday that GPS location data from Jose Ibarra’s phone puts him in an identical spot as Riley at the exact moment she died.
Defense attorneys for Jose Ibarra continue to say it’s still possible someone else might be responsible for the crime. The defense team pointed to the fact that Jose Ibarra and his brothers, who lived together in a one-bedroom apartment near the crime scene, shared clothes like hats and jackets that have been seen on surveillance videos.
Jose Ibarra is charged with murder, kidnapping, aggravated assault, battery and tampering with evidence. If convicted, faces the possibility of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The 26-year-old has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Riley was reported missing on Feb. 22 when she didn’t return home from a run. Investigators later discovered her body in a forested area on the University of Georgia campus. UGA police arrested Jose Ibarra the next day.
The Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. ET with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. Questions will focus on the agency’s preparedness and response to recent disasters, including Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
NewsNation will stream the event live here.
A FEMA worker was fired earlier this month after she directed others helping hurricane survivors not to go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Donald Trump, according to the agency’s leader.
“This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation,” Criswell said in a statement at the time. “This was reprehensible.”
The fired employee, Marn’i Washington, is accused of telling her survivor assistance team not to go to Florida homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Washington told NewsNation she believes she’s being used as a scapegoat for a common agency practice.
The instruction to avoid certain houses with certain campaign signs came from her direct superior based on previous team encounters, Washington said, adding that “safety precautions are not politically driven.”
Several recent hostile encounters happened at homes with Trump campaign signs, she said.
“I’m being framed. There’s no violation of the Hatch Act,” Washington said. “I was simply following orders.”
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A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the over the past 24 hours. Here’s today’s news:
U.S. PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION AND NEW CONGRESS
President-elect Trump yesterday confirmed his intention to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to assist in carrying out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Charlie Savage and Michael Gold report for the New York Times.
Trump has begun receiving intelligence briefings since shortly after the election, U.S. officials said. Ellen Nakashima and Tyler Pager report for the Washington Post.
Trump yesterday selected a former Wisconsin congressman and Fox Business host, Sean Duffy, to lead the Transportation Department. Mark Walker reports for the New York Times.
Trump is calling some senators directly to lobby for former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s confirmation as Attorney General, according to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND). However, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said Gaetz is facing an “uphill climb,” with nearly a dozen GOP senators refusing to commit to confirming him. Juliegrace Brufke and Hans Nichols report for Axios; Anthony Adragna and Ursula Perano report for POLITICO.
The House Ethics Committee is expected to meet Wednesday for a possible vote on whether to release its report on Gaetz, sources say. Andrew Solender reports for Axios.
Two women testified to the House Ethics Committee that Gaetz paid them for sex, their lawyer told the Washington Post. Jacqueline Alemany, Liz Goodwin, and Perry Stein report.
TRUMP LEGAL MATTERS
The Georgia Court of Appeals yesterday announced it canceled next month’s scheduled arguments in Trump’s Georgia federal prosecution over conspiring to corrupt the 2020 election results. Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein report for POLITICO.
A Manhattan judge yesterday delayed Steve Bannon’s fraud prosecution in state court, pushing the trial back to Feb. 25, 2025. Trump previously pardoned Bannon on similar charges in federal proceedings. Colin Moynihan reports for the New York Times.
U.S. ELECTIONS
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yesterday that election officials must stop counting incorrectly dated mail-in ballots, a major victory for Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who holds a narrow advantage over Sen. Bob Casey (D) ahead of an expected recount. Colby Itkowitz reports for the Washington Post.
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR
U.K. media reports that Ukraine fired U.S. long-range missiles inside Russia for the first time today andstrucka military facility in Bryansk, citing the Russian defense ministry. Ukraine’s military confirmed that it had struck an ammunition warehouse in Bryansk, but did not confirm which weapon was used. BBC News reports.
The United Kingdom is expected to give Ukraine Storm Shadow missiles to strike inside Russia, following President Biden’s policy change. Dan Sabbagh, Andrew Roth, Pjotr Sauer, and Jessica Elgot report for the Guardian.
Russian President Vladimir Putin today signed into law a revised nuclear doctrine saying any massive aerial attack on Russia could trigger a nuclear response. AP News reports.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR
A large convoy of trucks carrying aid to Gaza was “violently looted” while traveling through the territory, with drivers forced to unload supplies at gunpoint, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) said yesterday. It was not immediately clear who was responsible. Hiba Yazbek and Erika Solomon report for the New York Times.
Organized gangs stealing Gaza aid supplies are operating freely in areas controlled by the Israeli military, aid group officials and witnesses say. An internal U.N. memo concluded the gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the IDF. Claire Parker, Loveday Morris, Hajar Harb, Miriam Berger, and Hazem Balousha report for the Washington Post.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — U.S. RESPONSE
The Biden administration imposed sanctions on Israel’s largest settlement development organization “involved in settlement and illegal outpost development in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said yesterday. Jennifer Hansler reports for CNN.
A group of at least 20 White House staffers criticized the Biden administration for failing to follow through on its Gaza aid demands in a letter seen by POLITICO. Joseph Gedeon, Robbie Gramer, and Eric Bazail-Eimil report.
The United States yesterday warned Turkey against hosting Hamas leadership. Simon Lewis and Daphne Psaledakis report for Reuters.
The U.S. Senate will vote tomorrow on legislation filed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would block some arms sales to Israel. The legislation is not expected to pass. Patricia Zengerle reports for Reuters.
ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE
U.N. Security Council members yesterday called for a significant increase in aid to Gaza, with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield saying Washington is “closely watching” Israel’s efforts to address the situation. Daphne Psaledakis and Patricia Zengerle report for Reuters.
Norway will ask the U.N. General Assembly to request an International Court of Justice ruling clarifying whether Israel is violating international law by “prevent[ing] the UN, international humanitarian organization and states from providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians.” Patrick Wintour reports for the Guardian.
ISRAEL-HEZBOLLAH WAR
Biden’s senior adviser Amos Hochstein will meet with Lebanese officials today to discuss a possible ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war, after both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government agreed to a U.S.-drafted proposal. Maya Gebeily, Laila Bassam, and Timour Azhari report for Reuters.
ISRAEL-IRAN CONFLICT
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that last month’s Israeli strikes on Iranian military facilities damaged a “specific component” of Iran’s nuclear program. The Washington Post reports.
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS
The death toll of Sudan’s war is significantly higher than previously reported, according to a new report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group. Kalkidan Yibeltal and Basillioh Rukanga report for BBC News.
Russia yesterday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the war between Sudan’s military and paramilitary forces and supply of aid to the region. U.K. Foreign Minister David Lammy, who chaired the meeting, called the veto a “disgrace.” Edith M. Lederer reports for AP News.
A Hong Kong court today sentenced 45 pro-democracy leaders to prison terms of up to 10 years over “conspiracy to commit subversion.” Shibani Mahtani reports for the Washington Post.
The U.N. will restart Haiti aid flights tomorrow, following a week-long hiatus after gangs hit three commercial planes with gunfire. Harold Isaac and Ralph Tedy Erol report for Reuters.
Two “critical” undersea cables in the Baltic sea connecting Finland with Germany and Lithuania with Sweden were severed yesterday, presumably by sabotage, Germany’s defense minister said. Miranda Bryant reports for the Guardian.
Turkish strikes in northeast Syria have cut water to more than one million people over the past 5 years, according to data collated by the BBC World Service. Namak Khoshnaw, Christopher Giles, and Saphora Smith report for BBC News.
U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Biden pledged a record $4 billion contribution to the World Bank’s International Development Association fund during a G20 summit session, a senior official said yesterday. David Lawder and Andrea Shalal report for Reuters.
A Russian man has been extradited from South Korea to the United States over charges related to a ransomware gang that allegedly extorted more than $16 million from victims, U.S. prosecutors said yesterday. Sean Lyngaas reports for CNN.
OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) yesterday sued the federal government for information about how authorities might quickly deport people from the United States. Maria Sacchetti reports for the Washington Post.
Biden yesterday condemned Saturday’s neo-Nazi march in Ohio’s capital, with White House spokesman Andrew Bates saying Biden “abhors the hateful poison of Nazism, Antisemitism, and racism.” Maham Javaid reports for the Washington Post.
A Senate panel overseeing technology issues will today hold a hearing on Chinese hacking incidents, including the recent large-scale hack of telecommunications companies. David Shepardson reports for Reuters.
The Library of Congress notified lawmakers of “cyber breach” of its IT systems, saying an adversary had accessed email communications between January and September. Lisa Mascaro reports for AP News.
For those of us with an old-fashioned commitment to justice, science, and common decency, the 2024 U.S. election was a lot of dark things. But one thing it wasn’t? A referendum on climate action or environmental protection.
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It’s true that President-Elect Donald Trump prefers golf courses and MAGA merch to national parks and wildlife; he’s a noted climate change denier and shameless booster of dirty fossil fuels. It’s also true that those character flaws weren’t the same ones that got him reelected.
There’s no denying that Trump’s next nine holes at the White House will be an ugly obstacle to saving the planet. But the silver lining is this: When it comes to the climate and extinction crises, the American people overwhelmingly want action.
The reality is that sustaining a livable climate, breathable air, and drinkable water is still a political winner, despite the billions of dollars constantly being spent by private interests to greenwash killer technologies and tear down regulations. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, two-thirds of Americans think corporations aren’t doing enough to curb climate change. At least 80% want to help endangered species and wild places. In a country where so much is decided on the strength of a paper-thin margin, including who occupies the White House, those numbers are a powerful signal that the vast majority are asking for a stable planet with abundant wildlife.
During his campaign, Trump distanced himself from the extremist Project 2025—a radical Christian nationalist proposal that aims to gut environmental laws, along with other dangerous moves like giving unprecedented authority to the president, abolishing the Department of Education, and quashing civil rights and science—as soon as he understood how unpopular it was. It remains unpopular today. Now that he’s won the presidency, though, with both houses of Congress under GOP domination, Trump has less to gain personally by keeping the extremists at arm’s length. And for him, personal gain is where the buck stops.
In the face of this, those of us clamoring for action on climate and extinction can’t throw up our hands in despair. We have a brief window of time to avert the worst scenarios, and for the next four years we’ll face antagonists at the top. That means we have to fight from the bottom, the middle, and all sides.
In the next two months, President Biden can help shore us up against ruin by filling all 47 current judicial vacancies in district and appellate courts. For decades, a top priority of Republicans has been to shift the judiciary to the hard right; this reached its zenith in Trump’s first term and left us a court system stacked with zealots and a corrupt Supreme Court that no longer heeds the will or welfare of the people.
Democrats need to respond with equal force to rebuild the integrity of our third branch of government by appointing judges who accept science and the rule of law. So far Biden has done relatively well filling vacancies; he needs to finish the job, and fast.
Next, after Inauguration Day, states and public-interest groups must redouble their efforts to beat back the deregulatory agenda. States are the natural first line of resistance to bad policy emanating from the Trump White House—a bulwark, in this embattled moment, against a federal government essentially bent on self-immolation.
Much can be done by states and cities to get rid of fossil fuels and speed up the shift to clean energy. In red states not disposed to resistance, individuals, neighborhoods and towns will have to rise up from the grassroots and insist on progress. Being involved is now a moral imperative, and it’s important to work toward local wins like getting cities to adopt green energy and vehicle procurement policies, move building codes quickly toward zero pollution, or expand green spaces—the list of possible actions is long. (And as soon as you can, ditch that gas car, too.)
During Trump’s first term, the hundreds of lawsuits launched against his attacks on the successful programs that protect our climate and health had an 80% success rate. And although he’s coming into this round armed with a blueprint for annihilation, dismantling longstanding rules involves red tape—and time. A full-court press in the judicial system is more important than ever to minimize the damage.
All states should ramp up electric vehicle sales rapidly, as California is doing, and resist industry attempts to fast-track more oil and gas development on federal lands and waters. Trump would like to sacrifice every last publicly owned acre to oil and gas extraction; states must oppose this. They can do so by reviewing each new proposal for legal compliance and heading to court to enforce the law—and the people who live in those states need to support those efforts.
As Trump seeks to free polluters from government restraint, states should legislate to hold them accountable, passing laws like Vermon’s Climate Superfund bill. In 2024 Vermont became the first state to enact legislation requiring large fossil fuel producers to pay a fee for the harms caused by their oil, gas and coal. New York’s bill is awaiting the governor’s signature by year’s end; California should pass its own bill, which stalled in the state Senate this summer, promptly in the next session. Climate Superfund legislation complements the lawsuits that have already been filed by states and local governments to force fossil fuel polluters to pay for the damage off which they profit so handsomely—critical lawsuits that must be continued.
State public utility commissions—the bodies that regulate monopoly utilities—can prohibit those utilities from building new fossil gas plants to fulfill the skyrocketing demands of AI and data centers. Unfortunately, utilities like Dominion in Virginia, Duke Energy in North Carolina, and AEP in Ohio all plan to build new gas plants. But we the people can do something about it: Customers and community groups can get involved as public commenters and challenge the rate hikes being imposed on them to pay for those polluting plants.
States should also develop more rooftop, community solar, and other responsible renewable sources through state and municipal programs and laws. Net energy metering—a policy that allows rooftop-solar owners to sell self-produced energy back to the grid—has helped rooftop solar flourish across the country, but these programs have come under attack in California and North Carolina and need to be defended. (Florida successfully rescued its program.)
During the first half of Trump’s first term, the GOP held both chambers of Congress—as it will in Trump’s next term, at least until 2026. Despite that congressional control, it failed in its efforts to cut down the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, all of which play a major role in addressing the climate crisis. Republican members of Congress will renew their assault on these fundamental laws in the coming term, so protecting them needs to be a top Democrat priority—and all of us, whether our representatives in Congress are red or blue, need to voice our personal opposition to any weakening of our safety nets.
Climate activists have begun to expand their reach, allying with social-justice, public-health, labor, and civil-rights groups. But that reach should really have no limit at all: Every one of us has a stake in survival. Mass mobilization is inevitable as almost every year is hotter than the one before and we’re battered by storm after storm and fire after fire.
Why not make it happen now, while we still have so much to save?
On April 2, 1870, two years before the 1872 U.S. presidential election, a letter to the editor of the New York Herald appeared in its pages, announcing a campaign for the presidency against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. The letter was signed by Victoria Woodhull.
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Woodhull, who had been born poor in an Ohio frontier settlement, embodied the ethos of America, a try-anything country with radical individualism at its heart. Despite a childhood mired in poverty and dictated by physically abusive parents, she went on to co-found a successful brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870, making a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, profits which she later used to launch a newspaper. The paper’s progressive contributors wrote essays and articles proposing changes that would gain traction decades later, such as the abolition of the death penalty and welfare for the poor. But the most improbable aspect among an abundance of improbabilities in Woodhull’s life was this single fact: she was a woman.
Trapped in a system that oppressed her gender in every conceivable way, Woodhull forged her success with novelty, enterprise, courage, and determination in what became a rags-to-riches story that intersected predominantly with men, among whom were Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Frederick Douglass, and the Prince of Wales. In a time when political ambitions were believed to be only a male prerogative, she faced down restrictions that almost always crushed those had by women. With a combination of pragmatism, imagination, and expert guile, she engineered an unprecedented meeting in front of a congressional committee to appeal to them directly on behalf of a woman’s right to vote. She formed a third political party whose coalition included laborers, abolitionists, spiritualists, and suffragists and whose agenda proposed an overhaul of the U.S. government, including a one-term presidency, an eight-hour workday, national public education, and the establishment of an international tribunal to settle international disputes.
That women were not allowed to hold political office or vote didn’t present an obstacle to Woodhull’s presidential campaign. “I anticipate criticism,” she said, then added, “[but] they cannot roll back the rising tide of reform. The world moves.”
The world moved slower than had been wished for: it took another 48 years for women to be granted the right to vote.
One hundred and four years after that, a question persists: what will it take for America to elect a woman president, assuming she is fundamentally able?
Kamala Harris’ failure to win the presidential election is being explained differently by different people. Some say it had to do with timing: had President Biden bowed out sooner, there could have been other candidates in the race; at the very least, Harris would have been given more time to make her case to the voters. Though Trump’s racist messaging resonated with a substantial number of people, Harris’ defeat cannot simply be reduced to the color of her skin, though it undeniably played a significant role in the decisions of voters. And it wasn’t just about class, the economy, or securing the borders and illegal immigrants. Rather, it was in part about how American men and women perceive these issues through the lens of their gendered experience.
One might ask how much of the Democratic Party’s failure had to do with ignoring what both sexes believe should be the gender of power? The stereotypical masculine traits conveyed as strength of leadership are often prized over what can be safely assumed to be feminine traits of compromise. Because ambition in a woman was considered unsavory, Victoria Woodhull insisted that she was no more than a vessel through which an otherworldly inspiration was acting for a greater good. That ploy made little difference when she announced her intention to run for the presidency: she managed to offend not just men but women, some within the suffrage movement. Similarly, 120 years later, when Bill Clinton was President and Hilary Clinton suggested that her ambitions extended beyond the traditional role of First Lady, the public’s reaction was so adverse that she was pressured into a public relations cookie bake-off with her Republican counterpart, Barbara Bush. Whether women hold other women to a higher standard than men is debatable but, despite—or, perhaps, because of—the effort to reposition Hilary Clinton among voters as a non-threatening candidate, she lost to Donald Trump. She was smart and capable. She was also irritating to some women voters, many of whom granted immunity to the willfully ignorant and morally insolvent Donald Trump.
How men and women perceive a woman in a position of leadership and in possession of political power is far from clear-cut. Kamala Harris was right to recognize that a glass ceiling strategy doesn’t necessarily win converts. She and her party constantly reminded them that Trump was a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and at best, a misogynist proud to have appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. And yet while many people did vote to overturn abortion bans in their states, they did not necessarily vote for Harris, who performed worse than other women democrats or people of color.
Did the women who defected to the republican ticket believe that Harris wasn’t the right person to lead the country—or that women in general are incapable of meeting the demands of being President?
What of the men? To the 19th century America male, Victoria Woodhull represented a new kind of femaleness that meant the death of a certain type of maleness. The backlash unleashed attempts by the press to discredit her and resulted in a wrongful jail sentence. Trump’s strategy of convincing men—young men especially—of a type of woman punishing them for just for being men, is not without precedent. He returns to the White House thanks in large part to 54% of male voters.
The “why’s” of Harris’ resounding and swift defeat will be put to rest when the end of dismantling its reasons gives way to constructing a new beginning. Victoria Woodhull knew that it was impossible for her to actually become President. Her campaign had a single purpose: to challenge Americans to consider whether a woman could lead a country. Since Woodhull’s death in 1927, some 85 countries—from Western democracies to military dictatorships—have answered that question in the affirmative by choosing women as their leaders. For America, however, Woodhull’s challenge remains unanswered.
Just over a year into Donald Trump’s first term as President, immigration agents raided a meat processing plant in Bean Station, Tennessee, arresting 104 workers. It was the largest worksite raid in a decade. Two months later, 114 were arrested at a large-scale nursery in Sandusky, Ohio. The next year, immigration agents raided poultry plants in six towns in central Mississippi, arresting 680 workers in one day.
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When Trump comes back to office in January, he plans to bring back the raids, after President Biden largely put a stop to such enforcement tactics.
“Worksite operations have to happen,” Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his incoming “border czar,” said on “Fox and Friends” last week.
Worksite raids generate headlines and TV news stories, but the operations don’t lead to a significant number of deportations, according to those familiar with such operations. “They are flashy, they are disruptive, they are controversial—therefore, I would expect them” during the second Trump Administration, says John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama Administration. “But from a numbers perspective, they are not going to materially increase the count.”
Trump won the election after repeatedly promising on the campaign trail to launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, one that would remove millions of people from the country. Trump confirmed Monday on social media that he was prepared to declare a national emergency and use the military to help beef up his mass deportation program.
Deporting people is challenging and requires time and resources. During Trump’s first term, deportations peaked in the 2019 budget year, when the federal authorities removed about 347,000 people.
To further boost those numbers, the Trump administration may decide to address the backlog of some 3 million cases in the immigration courts by convincing Congress to fund more immigration judges. Or they could hire more agents to locate hundreds of thousands of people still in the U.S. who have already been ordered removed by a judge, says Sandweg.
Worksite raids are expensive, resource-intensive operations that are likely to be less effective in boosting that number, experts say.
Eric Ruark, director of research for NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reducing both legal and illegal immigration levels, says “worksite enforcement is essential” to dealing with illegal immigration. “It also sends a message to people who might want to come that there’s not going to be the opportunity to work in the United States because they don’t have authorization,” Ruark says. (Homan has also argued that worksite raids are an effective way to find victims of sexual trafficking and forced labor.)
Ruark predicts that reviving of workplace raids will prompt a collision within the Republican Party, as pro-business Republicans are likely to see the raids as undermining the economy. “You’re going to see pushback,” Ruark says. “The only thing standing in the way of carrying out his campaign promises would be opposition within his own party.”
Michelle Lapointe, legal director for the American Immigration Council, which opposes Trump’s immigration plans, agrees that the raids are about sending a message. “Part of the strategy is to terrorize people—and these worksite raids do exactly that,” she says.
After the raid in eastern Tennessee in April 2018, workers sued in court and claimed officers with Homeland Security Investigations and the Internal Revenue Service had illegally singled them out for arrest based on their appearance. A court approved a $1 million settlement. Some workers were also granted legal status as part of the settlement terms. The meat processing plant in Bean Station is still operating.
Lapointe says her organization is preparing to defend workers if worksite raids ramp up again under Trump. “They promised to carry these out again and we take them at their word, unfortunately,” she says.
