TV News LIES

The Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Omar Shakir, resigned effective on Monday after over almost a decade at the organization in protest of a top-level decision to shelve a report that characterized Israel’s decades-long campaign to deny Palestinians the right of return to their homes and land a “crime against humanity.”

The 43-page report formally underwent every step in Human Rights Watch’s internal review process, including evaluations by the divisions covering refugees, international justice, women and children’s rights, and the legal team over seven months. After that process was completed, incoming Executive Director Philippe Bolopion halted the report roughly two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4. Shakir was informed of the decision by a phone call.

The report, which cites interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and included fieldwork in refugee camps across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, connected the expulsions of 1948 all the way to the present moment with the emptying of the camps in Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. Shakir hoped that the report would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”

Bolopion’s decision came after a senior official at HRW raised concerns about the publication of the report. Shakir said in his resignation email that one senior leader told him it would be perceived as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”

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In February 2024, just over three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal cable intended for wider distribution among senior officials in the Biden administration that warned northern Gaza had turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” according to Reuters.

Lew and Hallett reportedly blocked the cable, which described the consequences of Israel’s assault in harrowing detail, because they believed it lacked balance.

The cable was drafted by U.S. Agency for International Development staffers and was based on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission by a small United Nations team that visited the area on January 31 and February 1, 2024.

I was part of that mission.

Northern Gaza had been under a total siege for over three months when we were eventually allowed to enter in January 2024. We moved through Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun.

What we found was an endless horizon of destruction. People were living under plastic sheeting or in the rubble of buildings. Schools had been destroyed. In parts of Beit Hanoun, the entire area had been depopulated and decimated. There was a deadly shortage of clean drinking water, food and access to healthcare.

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A federal judge issued a last minute reprieve on Feb. 2, blocking President Donald Trump's attempt to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants in the U.S.

The status, which allows about 350,000 Haitians to legally live and work in the United States, had been set to expire on Feb. 3. It includes about 30,000 Haitians in central Ohio and another 15,000 in Springfield.

U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia Ana Reyes issued a ruling postponing the effective date of the Trump Administration's cancellation of TPS for Haitians. The extension is a result of a case filed in July in that court.

The TPS status for Haitian immigrants previously was extended by a federal court from a Sept. 3, 2025, expiration date to Feb. 3. The status can be granted to immigrants from countries where there is ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, epidemics or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said immigration officers in Minneapolis would begin wearing body cameras “immediately," after the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens amid the Trump administration's deportation crackdown in the city.

Noem in a post on X said the decision came after speaking to the Trump administration's border czar Tom Homan, as well as other top immigration officials.

“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem said in a social media post. “As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country.”

President Donald Trump told reporters he would leave the move to Noem, adding that the cameras could help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

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U.S. District Judge Fred Biery on Jan. 31 ordered the release of Liam and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from the Dilley, Texas, immigration detention center. Biery previously ruled on Jan. 27 that the Minnesota preschooler or his father could not be deported.

The detention of Conejo and his son Liam garnered national attention, with many criticizing ICE after photos began circulating showing the blue bunny-hat-wearing 5-year-old being detained in the driveway of his home on Jan. 20.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children," Biery wrote in his order filed Jan. 31.

Biery's order continued: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned."

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While canceling Friday's hearing in which acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons was required to appear, a judge in Minnesota gave a scathing review of the agency.

In a court order Wednesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz listed 96 instances in 74 cases in which ICE had violated court orders this month.

"This list should give pause to anyone -- no matter his or her political beliefs -- who cares about the rule of law," Schiltz said in the court order. "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence."

The judge added that future noncompliance could lead to court-ordered “personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials.”

The hearing was canceled because Ecuadorian national Juan Tobay Robles, the petitioner in the case, was released from a Minnesota immigration detention center on Tuesday.

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