TV News LIES

Four US-based rights groups sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for its sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In a statement, the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute called the sanctions "blatantly illegal". 

They said they are being forced "to curtail a wide range of human rights and legal work in violation of... First and Fifth Amendment rights under the US Constitution and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act", given that anyone who appears to associate with ICC cases or officials could now face legal repercussions.

Just days after he assumed power in late January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to sanction the ICC over its investigations into top Israeli officials.

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RAMALLAH: Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli occupation forces, have attacked the village of Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah.

Amin Abu Aliya, the head of the Al-Mughayyir Village Council, said that settlers attacked Palestinian farmers in the eastern plain area and local residents confronted the attackers.

Abu Aliya added that Israeli forces entered the village to provide protection for the settlers and detained two young men, Alaa and Hani Abu Aliya.

The forces also fired tear gas, with no injuries reported.

Al-Mughayyir, along with surrounding villages and towns northeast of Ramallah, has been subjected to continued attacks by colonists, alongside ongoing raids by Israeli occupation forces.

According to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, Israeli forces and settlers carried out 2,256 attacks against Palestinians, their lands and property during July. Israeli forces carried out 1,458 of the attacks, while settlers carried out 798.

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It is early on a Sunday morning, and you are awoken by armed police officers banging on your door. They hand you a letter: the state will freeze your assets for a further six months, denying you access to your own bank accounts because they disagree with the anti-genocide stance you have publicly expressed.

The letter cites a tweet you posted several months ago, in which you criticised the Israeli and US bombardment of Iran. It cites the fact that you have shared an interview with a pro-Palestine activist and an article written by an academic historian on social media. These actions are proof, the letter explains, that you have failed to renounce your "pro-jihadist" convictions.

It sounds like something out of the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel, but for Elias d'Imzalene, a French anti-genocide activist and founding member of the pro-Palestinian organisation Urgence Palestine, it has become real life.

The crime of which d'Imzalene is accused - and for which his freedoms have been restricted and his assets frozen for more than a year - is not so much a thoughtcrime, to use George Orwell's term, as a wordcrime.

In September 2024, at an anti-genocide demonstration in Paris, he used the Arabic word intifada to refer to the global non-violent uprising against Israel's occupation of Palestine that is still taking place regularly in cities all around the world.

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Gerson Turcios didn’t recognise the men standing next to a couple of dark SUVs outside his house one July afternoon last year. He figured they were lost and approached to see if he could help. A slim 23-year-old with short dark hair and big brown eyes, Turcios had just finished work mowing lawns in the pretty town of Rhinebeck, in New York’s Hudson Valley. The men asked if he knew someone called Jimmy – he did, but Jimmy hadn’t lived in the small, white weatherboard house with Turcios, his brother and his brother’s girlfriend for a while.

The men noted Turcios’s accent and asked where he was from. Turcios didn’t answer, so one took out his phone and snapped a photograph. The next thing Turcios knew, he was in handcuffs in the back of one of the SUVs and on his way to an ICE processing centre in Newburgh, New York, then on to a detention centre.

Mass deportation has been the defining mission of Donald Trump’s second presidency. In the year since he took office, ICE – United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement – has deported nearly a quarter of a million people from inside the US (half a million including from its borders) as part of an immigration crackdown. These forceful apprehensions, which have in some cases resulted in fatal shootings of potential deportees and bystanders, have resulted in protests – and sparked international outrage. Behind the statistics, though, are stories of hope and perseverance; of young immigrants who risked everything crossing rivers and deserts to build lives, start businesses and put down roots in communities that are now fighting to keep them.

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America's two largest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, are reporting a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue over the spring as immigration detention closes in on record levels.

Those revenues announced Thursday do not include net proceeds of $1.6 billion made by CoreCivic after the recent sale of four of their facilities to the Department of Homeland Security. Patrick Swindle, CoreCivic's President and CEO, told investors on an earnings call that that works out to an average rate of $307,000 per bed.

The earnings — from April through June of this year — come as the U.S. is holding almost 66,000 people in immigration detention, nearing record levels not seen since January, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center. Both companies say they're also finding other revenue opportunities, like ankle monitors for Haitian immigrants who recently lost their protected immigration status.

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A dramatic increase in immigration enforcement at US airports has reportedly placed the airline industry at odds with the Trump administration as workers decline to help federal officials arrest their targets – many of whom have pending applications for visas, asylum or green cards.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) – both part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – have expanded their collaboration to make as many as three dozen daily arrests at US airports last month, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Some of the people who have been taken into federal immigration custody include a former au pair, an asylum seeker with sickle cell anemia who uses a wheelchair, and women who are married to US citizens and in the process of applying for lawful permanent residency, according to the New York Times.

“It’s not people with criminal records,” said Ghassan Shamieh, a San Francisco-based immigration lawyer who had four clients detained at airports over 10 days. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”

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