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The war on terror has continued to wreak havoc on Americans' civil liberties. Will this war at home ever be shut down?
The short answer is not anytime soon. But a conversation over its domestic costs has been sparked by new revelations about a surveillance state that has grown out of control, collecting massive amounts of data and tracking the online and phone activities of millions of Americans.
The leaks from former National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden have refocused attention on the domestic war on terror and infringements on civil liberties. Snowden and The Guardian have revealed that the U.S. government is collecting data from millions of Americans' phone calls; that the communications of Americans are routinely swept up even if the NSA targets foreigners; that the Obama administration continued a program until 2011 that collected e-mail records of Americans in bulk; and that a secret court has signed off on these programs.
In all, the leaks reveal that the war on terror at home continues to grind on, capturing in its dragnet millions of Americans and foreigners, many of them innocent of any crime. The war on terror has become institutionalized, and the domestic costs of this war continue to mount: privacy is being eroded; communications are being monitored; and dissent is being cracked down on. The primary targets of the domestic war on terror continue to be Muslims and Arabs, though it is now clear that the sweep of the domestic war has ensnared millions of other Americans. And there is no end in sight to this domestic juggernaut.
"The NSA revelations underscore the war-time footing of the administration, and of the previous administration as well," said Naureen Shah, an expert on U.S. counter-terrorism practices and the former acting director of Columbia University Law School's Human Rights Clinic. "The US approach to terrorism treats war as perpetual and boundless geographically, and also in terms of who can be targeted for surveillance [and] for prosecution."
How did we get here?
The story begins in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Individual acts of hate-crimes against Muslims, or those perceived to Muslim, dramatically accelerated. But it was the state that had the ability to do the most damage to Muslims and Arabs--and they did.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation led the way in tracking down, rounding up and detaining hundreds of Arab and South Asian Muslims in the U.S. They were thrown into jail, held on minor immigration violations and detained for questioning. Many were deported.
The U.S. government and its law enforcement agencies then instituted counter-terror policies that disproportionately impacted Muslims in America. One of these policies is the no-fly list, where people are arbitrarily thrown onto a list that prohibits them from freely traveling into and out of the U.S. Another was the National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, a government program that singled out non-citizen Muslim males for special registration in the U.S. immigration system. Many of those who registered, thinking it would put them on a path to citizenship, were instead deported. The program was dropped in April 2011.
And the other major iteration of the domestic "war on terror" is the use of surveillance and informants to keep tabs on the Muslim community wholescale. The FBI, for instance, has used a so-called "mosque outreach" program in California to keep tabs on Muslim leaders. From 2004-2008, FBI agents visited mosques to ostensibly collect reports on hate crimes, only to turn around and retain information on Muslims' religious beliefs, practices, travel and the location of mosques. The FBI has also used undercover informants. One of the more notorious cases involved a man named Craig Monteilh, who told The Guardian in 2012 that since 2006, he infiltrated mosques in southern California, pretended to be a convert and recorded conversations with Muslims.
Monteilh told The Guardian's Paul Harris that the FBI gave him the go-ahead to even have sex with a Muslim woman he was targeting. Eventually, Monteilh's rhetoric at mosques grew so extreme that members of the Orange County Muslim community reported him to the FBI, not knowing he was in fact working for them.
The story of Monteilh rings true throughout Muslim communities in the U.S, where informants have become a routine part of life.
"Sometimes at our 'know your rights' workshops, we'll be at a mosque and ask how many people in the room--either themselves or if they know someone--have been questioned by the FBI, and every single hand in the room will go up," said Diala Shamas, an attorney with the City University of New York School of Law's Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), which provides legal services to Muslim and other communities dealing with the domestic war on terror. "The impact [of the war on terror] has been disproportionately felt in one community, and that's the American Muslim community...The fact that this community is viewed as one that is not empowered, one that doesn't have political clout, and one that may be afraid to speak out given the climate of fear, allows these policies to continue. This very silencing breaks the system of checks and balances that our democracy relies on."
By far the most extreme example of the pernicious targeting of American Muslims has been the New York Police Department's extensive program of surveillance, which began following the September 11 attacks and was exposed by the Associated Press. Instituted with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, the police's Intelligence Division has mapped Muslim-owned businesses, recorded innocuous conversations, infiltrated student groups and urged informants to bait Muslims into saying inflammatory things about violence.
Critics charge that the surveillance program is based on the unconstitutional notion that the more devoutly Muslim you are, the more likely a terrorist you are. In 2007, the NYPD released a controversial policy paper, with that notion at the heart of it. The paper charges that radicals are "incubated" at places like "mosques...cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores." The paper also states that you can pinpoint radicalization if a person begins to give up "cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes," wear "traditional Islamic clothing" or grow a beard and become involved in "social activism and community issues."
The NYPD has continued its program of surveillance, though a number of legal challenges have been lodged against it. One of the thrusts of a lawsuit that charges the police have violated federally-imposed guidelines on how to conduct religious or political surveillance is that "the program is interminable...[A] surveillance program of the sort that the NYPD conducts has no end. Its pervasive injurious effects must increase as people become more aware of the surveillance. This is the essence of a police state."
But the way the NYPD sees it, there's no reason for the surveillance to end--ever. In their eyes, as long as the war on terror continues, and as long as the threat of homegrown terrorism is ever present, the surveillance program is needed. In recent court filings, the NYPD pointed to the Boston bombings as well as a host of other local plots to justify why the judge should dismiss a lawsuit challenging the program. But the NYPD's justifications cite a number of plots that were created with the help of NYPD informants who baited and, critics would argue, entrapped young, struggling Muslims--many of whom had no way to actually carry out the plot they were charged with.
The use of informants to fuel alleged terror plots is part of the circular logic that justifies the perpetual war on terror domestically. Both the NYPD and the FBI point to the plots their informants concocted to show why they need to continue to be vigilant against terrorism--a vigilance they say necessitates mass surveillance.
There are also institutional reasons why the the NYPD and the FBI want the war on terror to continue. Thousands and thousands of jobs are at stake. Billions of dollars in counter-terrorism budgets are at stake, too. As Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, recently told AlterNet's Joshua Holland, "the reason we're seeing these really aggressive sting operations is the result of something of a bureaucratic evil. That is every year Congress allocates the FBI's budget, and they set the counter-terrorism budget at $3 billion...From the highest levels of the FBI, there's pressure to build counter-terrorism cases because they just received $3 billion from Congress and that pressure then flows down to the field offices."
But now it's not just Muslims who are being affected. As the NSA revelations have shown, the war on terror has metastasized into an all-encompassing dragnet affecting nearly every American. To critics of of the war on terror like CLEAR's Shamas, the NSA leaks prove that the executive branch's powers needs to be curbed.
"That these policies are still happening under the Obama administration is proof of what many have long observed, which is that the executive is not likely to reign itself in," she said. "It's institutionally not inclined to yield any discretion or gains that it's made, and it's institutionally inclined to try and continue to garner more power. That is the trajectory we're going to continue to see unless and until there is push back from communities and voters organizing - and from the courts if that doesn't work."
But the combination of a powerful and largely unaccountable executive branch and a compliant judiciary and Congress seems to indicate that until there's a massive movement against the war on terror at home, it will continue to grind on. Naureen Shah says the war at home won't end until two specific laws are changed.
"The Patriot Act, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force--these are pieces of legislation passed after 9/11 in response to a horrific attack on U.S. soil that gave the U.S. government unprecedented power that we've never really rolled back, more than 10 years on," said Shah. "We can expect the government to continue using these powers it has until we force it to relinquish those powers by changing the law."
Political revenge. Mass deportations. Project 2025. Unfathomable corruption. Attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Pardons for insurrectionists. An all-out assault on democracy. Republicans in Congress are scrambling to give Trump broad new powers to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit he doesn’t like by declaring it a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Trump has already begun filing lawsuits against news outlets that criticize him. At Common Dreams, we won’t back down, but we must get ready for whatever Trump and his thugs throw at us. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. By donating today, please help us fight the dangers of a second Trump presidency. |
The short answer is not anytime soon. But a conversation over its domestic costs has been sparked by new revelations about a surveillance state that has grown out of control, collecting massive amounts of data and tracking the online and phone activities of millions of Americans.
The leaks from former National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden have refocused attention on the domestic war on terror and infringements on civil liberties. Snowden and The Guardian have revealed that the U.S. government is collecting data from millions of Americans' phone calls; that the communications of Americans are routinely swept up even if the NSA targets foreigners; that the Obama administration continued a program until 2011 that collected e-mail records of Americans in bulk; and that a secret court has signed off on these programs.
In all, the leaks reveal that the war on terror at home continues to grind on, capturing in its dragnet millions of Americans and foreigners, many of them innocent of any crime. The war on terror has become institutionalized, and the domestic costs of this war continue to mount: privacy is being eroded; communications are being monitored; and dissent is being cracked down on. The primary targets of the domestic war on terror continue to be Muslims and Arabs, though it is now clear that the sweep of the domestic war has ensnared millions of other Americans. And there is no end in sight to this domestic juggernaut.
"The NSA revelations underscore the war-time footing of the administration, and of the previous administration as well," said Naureen Shah, an expert on U.S. counter-terrorism practices and the former acting director of Columbia University Law School's Human Rights Clinic. "The US approach to terrorism treats war as perpetual and boundless geographically, and also in terms of who can be targeted for surveillance [and] for prosecution."
How did we get here?
The story begins in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Individual acts of hate-crimes against Muslims, or those perceived to Muslim, dramatically accelerated. But it was the state that had the ability to do the most damage to Muslims and Arabs--and they did.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation led the way in tracking down, rounding up and detaining hundreds of Arab and South Asian Muslims in the U.S. They were thrown into jail, held on minor immigration violations and detained for questioning. Many were deported.
The U.S. government and its law enforcement agencies then instituted counter-terror policies that disproportionately impacted Muslims in America. One of these policies is the no-fly list, where people are arbitrarily thrown onto a list that prohibits them from freely traveling into and out of the U.S. Another was the National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, a government program that singled out non-citizen Muslim males for special registration in the U.S. immigration system. Many of those who registered, thinking it would put them on a path to citizenship, were instead deported. The program was dropped in April 2011.
And the other major iteration of the domestic "war on terror" is the use of surveillance and informants to keep tabs on the Muslim community wholescale. The FBI, for instance, has used a so-called "mosque outreach" program in California to keep tabs on Muslim leaders. From 2004-2008, FBI agents visited mosques to ostensibly collect reports on hate crimes, only to turn around and retain information on Muslims' religious beliefs, practices, travel and the location of mosques. The FBI has also used undercover informants. One of the more notorious cases involved a man named Craig Monteilh, who told The Guardian in 2012 that since 2006, he infiltrated mosques in southern California, pretended to be a convert and recorded conversations with Muslims.
Monteilh told The Guardian's Paul Harris that the FBI gave him the go-ahead to even have sex with a Muslim woman he was targeting. Eventually, Monteilh's rhetoric at mosques grew so extreme that members of the Orange County Muslim community reported him to the FBI, not knowing he was in fact working for them.
The story of Monteilh rings true throughout Muslim communities in the U.S, where informants have become a routine part of life.
"Sometimes at our 'know your rights' workshops, we'll be at a mosque and ask how many people in the room--either themselves or if they know someone--have been questioned by the FBI, and every single hand in the room will go up," said Diala Shamas, an attorney with the City University of New York School of Law's Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), which provides legal services to Muslim and other communities dealing with the domestic war on terror. "The impact [of the war on terror] has been disproportionately felt in one community, and that's the American Muslim community...The fact that this community is viewed as one that is not empowered, one that doesn't have political clout, and one that may be afraid to speak out given the climate of fear, allows these policies to continue. This very silencing breaks the system of checks and balances that our democracy relies on."
By far the most extreme example of the pernicious targeting of American Muslims has been the New York Police Department's extensive program of surveillance, which began following the September 11 attacks and was exposed by the Associated Press. Instituted with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, the police's Intelligence Division has mapped Muslim-owned businesses, recorded innocuous conversations, infiltrated student groups and urged informants to bait Muslims into saying inflammatory things about violence.
Critics charge that the surveillance program is based on the unconstitutional notion that the more devoutly Muslim you are, the more likely a terrorist you are. In 2007, the NYPD released a controversial policy paper, with that notion at the heart of it. The paper charges that radicals are "incubated" at places like "mosques...cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores." The paper also states that you can pinpoint radicalization if a person begins to give up "cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes," wear "traditional Islamic clothing" or grow a beard and become involved in "social activism and community issues."
The NYPD has continued its program of surveillance, though a number of legal challenges have been lodged against it. One of the thrusts of a lawsuit that charges the police have violated federally-imposed guidelines on how to conduct religious or political surveillance is that "the program is interminable...[A] surveillance program of the sort that the NYPD conducts has no end. Its pervasive injurious effects must increase as people become more aware of the surveillance. This is the essence of a police state."
But the way the NYPD sees it, there's no reason for the surveillance to end--ever. In their eyes, as long as the war on terror continues, and as long as the threat of homegrown terrorism is ever present, the surveillance program is needed. In recent court filings, the NYPD pointed to the Boston bombings as well as a host of other local plots to justify why the judge should dismiss a lawsuit challenging the program. But the NYPD's justifications cite a number of plots that were created with the help of NYPD informants who baited and, critics would argue, entrapped young, struggling Muslims--many of whom had no way to actually carry out the plot they were charged with.
The use of informants to fuel alleged terror plots is part of the circular logic that justifies the perpetual war on terror domestically. Both the NYPD and the FBI point to the plots their informants concocted to show why they need to continue to be vigilant against terrorism--a vigilance they say necessitates mass surveillance.
There are also institutional reasons why the the NYPD and the FBI want the war on terror to continue. Thousands and thousands of jobs are at stake. Billions of dollars in counter-terrorism budgets are at stake, too. As Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, recently told AlterNet's Joshua Holland, "the reason we're seeing these really aggressive sting operations is the result of something of a bureaucratic evil. That is every year Congress allocates the FBI's budget, and they set the counter-terrorism budget at $3 billion...From the highest levels of the FBI, there's pressure to build counter-terrorism cases because they just received $3 billion from Congress and that pressure then flows down to the field offices."
But now it's not just Muslims who are being affected. As the NSA revelations have shown, the war on terror has metastasized into an all-encompassing dragnet affecting nearly every American. To critics of of the war on terror like CLEAR's Shamas, the NSA leaks prove that the executive branch's powers needs to be curbed.
"That these policies are still happening under the Obama administration is proof of what many have long observed, which is that the executive is not likely to reign itself in," she said. "It's institutionally not inclined to yield any discretion or gains that it's made, and it's institutionally inclined to try and continue to garner more power. That is the trajectory we're going to continue to see unless and until there is push back from communities and voters organizing - and from the courts if that doesn't work."
But the combination of a powerful and largely unaccountable executive branch and a compliant judiciary and Congress seems to indicate that until there's a massive movement against the war on terror at home, it will continue to grind on. Naureen Shah says the war at home won't end until two specific laws are changed.
"The Patriot Act, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force--these are pieces of legislation passed after 9/11 in response to a horrific attack on U.S. soil that gave the U.S. government unprecedented power that we've never really rolled back, more than 10 years on," said Shah. "We can expect the government to continue using these powers it has until we force it to relinquish those powers by changing the law."
The short answer is not anytime soon. But a conversation over its domestic costs has been sparked by new revelations about a surveillance state that has grown out of control, collecting massive amounts of data and tracking the online and phone activities of millions of Americans.
The leaks from former National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden have refocused attention on the domestic war on terror and infringements on civil liberties. Snowden and The Guardian have revealed that the U.S. government is collecting data from millions of Americans' phone calls; that the communications of Americans are routinely swept up even if the NSA targets foreigners; that the Obama administration continued a program until 2011 that collected e-mail records of Americans in bulk; and that a secret court has signed off on these programs.
In all, the leaks reveal that the war on terror at home continues to grind on, capturing in its dragnet millions of Americans and foreigners, many of them innocent of any crime. The war on terror has become institutionalized, and the domestic costs of this war continue to mount: privacy is being eroded; communications are being monitored; and dissent is being cracked down on. The primary targets of the domestic war on terror continue to be Muslims and Arabs, though it is now clear that the sweep of the domestic war has ensnared millions of other Americans. And there is no end in sight to this domestic juggernaut.
"The NSA revelations underscore the war-time footing of the administration, and of the previous administration as well," said Naureen Shah, an expert on U.S. counter-terrorism practices and the former acting director of Columbia University Law School's Human Rights Clinic. "The US approach to terrorism treats war as perpetual and boundless geographically, and also in terms of who can be targeted for surveillance [and] for prosecution."
How did we get here?
The story begins in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Individual acts of hate-crimes against Muslims, or those perceived to Muslim, dramatically accelerated. But it was the state that had the ability to do the most damage to Muslims and Arabs--and they did.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation led the way in tracking down, rounding up and detaining hundreds of Arab and South Asian Muslims in the U.S. They were thrown into jail, held on minor immigration violations and detained for questioning. Many were deported.
The U.S. government and its law enforcement agencies then instituted counter-terror policies that disproportionately impacted Muslims in America. One of these policies is the no-fly list, where people are arbitrarily thrown onto a list that prohibits them from freely traveling into and out of the U.S. Another was the National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, a government program that singled out non-citizen Muslim males for special registration in the U.S. immigration system. Many of those who registered, thinking it would put them on a path to citizenship, were instead deported. The program was dropped in April 2011.
And the other major iteration of the domestic "war on terror" is the use of surveillance and informants to keep tabs on the Muslim community wholescale. The FBI, for instance, has used a so-called "mosque outreach" program in California to keep tabs on Muslim leaders. From 2004-2008, FBI agents visited mosques to ostensibly collect reports on hate crimes, only to turn around and retain information on Muslims' religious beliefs, practices, travel and the location of mosques. The FBI has also used undercover informants. One of the more notorious cases involved a man named Craig Monteilh, who told The Guardian in 2012 that since 2006, he infiltrated mosques in southern California, pretended to be a convert and recorded conversations with Muslims.
Monteilh told The Guardian's Paul Harris that the FBI gave him the go-ahead to even have sex with a Muslim woman he was targeting. Eventually, Monteilh's rhetoric at mosques grew so extreme that members of the Orange County Muslim community reported him to the FBI, not knowing he was in fact working for them.
The story of Monteilh rings true throughout Muslim communities in the U.S, where informants have become a routine part of life.
"Sometimes at our 'know your rights' workshops, we'll be at a mosque and ask how many people in the room--either themselves or if they know someone--have been questioned by the FBI, and every single hand in the room will go up," said Diala Shamas, an attorney with the City University of New York School of Law's Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), which provides legal services to Muslim and other communities dealing with the domestic war on terror. "The impact [of the war on terror] has been disproportionately felt in one community, and that's the American Muslim community...The fact that this community is viewed as one that is not empowered, one that doesn't have political clout, and one that may be afraid to speak out given the climate of fear, allows these policies to continue. This very silencing breaks the system of checks and balances that our democracy relies on."
By far the most extreme example of the pernicious targeting of American Muslims has been the New York Police Department's extensive program of surveillance, which began following the September 11 attacks and was exposed by the Associated Press. Instituted with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, the police's Intelligence Division has mapped Muslim-owned businesses, recorded innocuous conversations, infiltrated student groups and urged informants to bait Muslims into saying inflammatory things about violence.
Critics charge that the surveillance program is based on the unconstitutional notion that the more devoutly Muslim you are, the more likely a terrorist you are. In 2007, the NYPD released a controversial policy paper, with that notion at the heart of it. The paper charges that radicals are "incubated" at places like "mosques...cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores." The paper also states that you can pinpoint radicalization if a person begins to give up "cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes," wear "traditional Islamic clothing" or grow a beard and become involved in "social activism and community issues."
The NYPD has continued its program of surveillance, though a number of legal challenges have been lodged against it. One of the thrusts of a lawsuit that charges the police have violated federally-imposed guidelines on how to conduct religious or political surveillance is that "the program is interminable...[A] surveillance program of the sort that the NYPD conducts has no end. Its pervasive injurious effects must increase as people become more aware of the surveillance. This is the essence of a police state."
But the way the NYPD sees it, there's no reason for the surveillance to end--ever. In their eyes, as long as the war on terror continues, and as long as the threat of homegrown terrorism is ever present, the surveillance program is needed. In recent court filings, the NYPD pointed to the Boston bombings as well as a host of other local plots to justify why the judge should dismiss a lawsuit challenging the program. But the NYPD's justifications cite a number of plots that were created with the help of NYPD informants who baited and, critics would argue, entrapped young, struggling Muslims--many of whom had no way to actually carry out the plot they were charged with.
The use of informants to fuel alleged terror plots is part of the circular logic that justifies the perpetual war on terror domestically. Both the NYPD and the FBI point to the plots their informants concocted to show why they need to continue to be vigilant against terrorism--a vigilance they say necessitates mass surveillance.
There are also institutional reasons why the the NYPD and the FBI want the war on terror to continue. Thousands and thousands of jobs are at stake. Billions of dollars in counter-terrorism budgets are at stake, too. As Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, recently told AlterNet's Joshua Holland, "the reason we're seeing these really aggressive sting operations is the result of something of a bureaucratic evil. That is every year Congress allocates the FBI's budget, and they set the counter-terrorism budget at $3 billion...From the highest levels of the FBI, there's pressure to build counter-terrorism cases because they just received $3 billion from Congress and that pressure then flows down to the field offices."
But now it's not just Muslims who are being affected. As the NSA revelations have shown, the war on terror has metastasized into an all-encompassing dragnet affecting nearly every American. To critics of of the war on terror like CLEAR's Shamas, the NSA leaks prove that the executive branch's powers needs to be curbed.
"That these policies are still happening under the Obama administration is proof of what many have long observed, which is that the executive is not likely to reign itself in," she said. "It's institutionally not inclined to yield any discretion or gains that it's made, and it's institutionally inclined to try and continue to garner more power. That is the trajectory we're going to continue to see unless and until there is push back from communities and voters organizing - and from the courts if that doesn't work."
But the combination of a powerful and largely unaccountable executive branch and a compliant judiciary and Congress seems to indicate that until there's a massive movement against the war on terror at home, it will continue to grind on. Naureen Shah says the war at home won't end until two specific laws are changed.
"The Patriot Act, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force--these are pieces of legislation passed after 9/11 in response to a horrific attack on U.S. soil that gave the U.S. government unprecedented power that we've never really rolled back, more than 10 years on," said Shah. "We can expect the government to continue using these powers it has until we force it to relinquish those powers by changing the law."
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies," said Ocasio-Cortez.
"It's corruption in plain sight."
That's how U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described congressional colleagues who support Republican-authored legislation that immigrant rights advocates warn is a right-wing power grab under the guise of public safety.
The Laken Riley Act—named after a young woman murdered last year by a Venezuelan man who, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), entered the United States illegally—was passed by a vote of 263-156 in the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon. Forty-six Democrats and every Republican present voted "yes." That was a near-identical tally to the 264-159 vote on a previous version of the bill passed earlier this month.
Senate lawmakers passed the bill on Monday, with 12 Democrats joining 52 Republicans in voting for the measure, which, among other things, expands mandatory federal detention of undocumented immigrants who are accused of even relatively minor crimes. With the House's Wednesday vote, the Laken Riley Act is set to be the first bill signed into law since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Speaking on the House floor on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said:
I want the American people to know, with eyes wide open, what is inside this bill because we stand here just two days after President Trump gave unconditional pardons to violent criminals who attacked our nation's Capitol on January 6th, and these are the people who want you to believe, who want us to believe that they're trying to quote unquote "keep criminals off the streets," when they are opening the floodgates...
In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and... sent out for deportation without a day in court, without a moment to assert their right, and without a moment to assert the privilege of innocent until proven guilty without being found guilty of a crime they will be rounded up, that is what is inside this bill, a fundamental suspension of a core American value, and that is why I rise to oppose it.
"You may wonder why so many of our friends across the aisle who care so deeply about the rule of law happen to be so desperate to pass this bill," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "Look no further than the price tag of this bill, $83 billion. [Lawmakers] know that it can't be paid for. They know that the capacity is not there, and you know what will be there? Private prison companies are going to get flooded with money."
"Look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies who receive this kind of money and look at the votes on this bill," she added. "It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful. It is absolutely shameful."
The congresswoman's comments came two days after Trump reversed a 2021 executive order issued by former Democratic President Joe Biden meant to phase out U.S. Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. Despite Biden's order, more than 90% of people held by ICE in July 2023 were locked up in for-profit facilities, which are rife with serious human rights abuses, according to the ACLU and other advocacy groups.
Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Hill opinion contributor, recently called the Laken Riley Act "a sweetheart deal for the private prison industry."
"Private prison executives look poised to pull off a multibillion-dollar cash grab at taxpayer expense via a cynical ploy to capitalize on the tragic death of a Georgia nursing student," he warned.
Shares in private prison stocks, which had been languishing for much of 2024, have soared since Trump's victory in November, with GeoGroup surging more than 127% since Election Day and competitor CoreCivic up over 63%.
Responding to reporting that ICE is preparing to more than double its detention capacity by opening 18 new facilities, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said on social media Wednesday: "That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies. They are salivating."
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked from a final vote a Republican bill that, according to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, made clear that under newly sworn-in President Donald Trump, "it will be a golden age, but for the extreme, anti-choice movement."
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering, and adds more legal risk for doctors on something that is already illegal," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the chamber's floor before senators voted 52-47 along party lines, short of the 60 votes needed to advance the so-called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 6) to a final vote.
Introduced by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), S. 6 would "prohibit a healthcare practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion," under the threat of fines and up to five years in prison. Healthcare professionals and rights advocates have condemned the legislation as deeply misleading.
"So much of the hard-right's anti-choice agenda is pushed, frankly, by people who have little to no understanding of what women go through when they are pregnant," said Schumer. "The scenario targeted by this bill is one of the most heartbreaking moments that a woman could ever encounter, the agonizing choice of having to end care when serious and rare complications arise in pregnancy. And at that moment of agony, this bill cruelly substitutes the judgment of qualified medical professionals, and the wishes of millions of families, and allows ultraright ideology to dictate what they do."
After honoring Cecile Richards, a longtime Planned Parenthood leader who died earlier this week, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Wednesday that "of all the bills that we could be voting on—lowering the cost of healthcare, expanding childcare, helping our families—it's an absolute disgrace that Republicans are spending their first week in power attacking women, criminalizing doctors, and lying about abortion."
"This isn't how abortion works; Republicans know it," stressed Murray, a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "All babies are already protected under the law, regardless of the circumstance of their birth. Doctors already have a legal obligation to provide appropriate medical care. And we already know this sham bill from Republicans is not going anywhere."
"Last time we voted down this bill, I actually spoke about something Republicans refuse to acknowledge in this debate: the struggles, the struggles of a pregnant woman, who has received tragic news that her baby had a fatal medical condition and would not be able to survive, and who were able to make the choice that was right for their family," she noted. "But now, here we are, already hearing stories of women who were denied that choice by extreme Republican abortion bans."
Wednesday's vote fell on the 52nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that affirmed abortion rights nationwide—until it was reversed by right-wing justices in 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, which provoked a fresh wave of state-level restrictions on reproductive freedom.
"It's no accident that congressional Republicans used the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a watershed case for liberty, equality, and bodily autonomy, to vote on a bill that perpetuates myths about abortion care, shames the people who seek that care, and vilifies those who provide it," said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, in a statement.
"A majority of the electorate continues to support abortion rights and access," she noted. "Americans have seen the results of the Supreme Court's unjust and callous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade—from abortion bans forcing people to travel across state lines to access the care they need to pregnant people being denied care and even dying to an exodus of doctors that is exacerbating the existing maternal health crisis we face—and they reject restrictive abortion policies. That's why anti-abortion advocates must rely on disinformation like this bill to further their extreme agenda."
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, also highlighted the country's sweeping healthcare crisis in her Wednesday statement about Republicans' failed bill.
"This bill is deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people, and the doctors and nurses who provide their care," she said. "At a time when we are facing a national abortion access crisis, lawmakers should be focused on how to bring more care to the communities they serve, not spending their time spreading misinformation, criminalizing doctors, and inserting themselves further into medical decisions made by healthcare professionals."
"This bill is not based in any reality of how medical care works," she added, "and it's wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise."
As the GOP works to restrict reproductive rights, advocacy groups are determined to fight back. All* Above All marked the Roe anniversary by releasing an Abortion Justice Playbook that the organization's president, Nourbese Flint, said "is our blueprint for a future where abortion access is equitable, universal, and free from discrimination."
"This wasn't an accident. The far-right members of the Israeli government wanted to render Gaza unlivable with the aim of forcing 2 million Palestinians to flee (forever)," said one human rights leader.
Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are returning home after a cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel went into effect Sunday, halting 15 months of war that local health officials say killed over 46,000 people. But for many, there are no homes to return to.
Footage of Gaza shows what once were houses, shops, and other buildings severely damaged or completely reduced to gray rubble.
One Gaza resident, Islam Dahliz, told The New York Times that he and his brother and father set out to find their family home—a once spacious two-story dwelling in Rafah—almost as soon as the cease-fire went into effect. What they found instead was unrecognizable.
"It took us a few minutes to accept that this pile of rubble was our home," said Dahliz. The house had been built by Dahliz's father, Abed Dahliz, in the 1970s.
"I was shocked when I saw my entire life—everything I worked for—flattened to the ground," said Abed Dahliz, according to the Times. "The home I spent so many years building, pouring my savings into, is gone."
Versions of this story are playing out all around Gaza. All told, roughly 90% of the population across Gaza was displaced from their homes, many multiple times, according to the United Nations.
"The images emerging from Gaza are haunting. This is a site where Palestinian captives were forced to strip, their clothes left behind among the ruins as a reminder of what Israeli soldiers did," wrote Assal Rad, a scholar of modern Iran, on X. Rad's post is accompanied by a video of a man showing a strip of land covered in clothes. In the video, the man says that the clothes are from Palestinians who were arrested by Israeli forces after they stormed areas in northern Gaza, like the Kamal Adwan Hospital.
In response to reporting of Gazans returning home to destruction, Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote: "This wasn't an accident. The far-right members of the Israeli government wanted to render Gaza unlivable with the aim of forcing two million Palestinians to flee (forever), "
Human Rights Watch, which late last year issued a report accusing Israel of committing "acts of genocide" by depriving Palestinians of water access in Gaza, wrote in November 2024 that "the destruction [in Gaza] is so substantial that it indicates the intention to permanently displace many people."
A preliminary U.N. satellite imagery analysis found that as of December 1, 2024, 60,000 structures in Gaza have been destroyed. The total number of damaged or destroyed structures constitutes roughly 69% of the total structures in the enclave, according to the analysis. A separate U.N. estimate published in January found that 92% of homes have been destroyed or damaged.
The footage coming out of Gaza underscores how long it will take for Palestinians to reconstruct their communities. The cease-fire deal that went into effect Sunday includes three phrases, the third of which is supposed to entail reconstruction of Gaza. Dima Toukan, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, told NPR that it's important to note the last phase could be a long way off, and could possibly never happen at all.