We speak with Palestinian activist Leqaa Kordia, who was freed on March 16 after spending more than a year in an ICE jail in Texas. She was arrested in 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to target student activists and others who advocated for Palestinian rights.

Kordia was born in the occupied West Bank and lives in New Jersey. She was arrested in 2024 during the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia University. The charges against her were dropped the next day, but she was detained in March 2025 by ICE during a routine immigration check-in. “It was supposed to be just a regular meeting with my lawyer [and the] ICE agents. It led to arrest,” says Kordia. “They took me in an unmarked car directly to the airport, and they had informed my lawyer that I’m going to upstate New York, but they took me to Texas instead.”

While in custody, Kordia experienced destitute conditions at the Prairieland Detention Center, including overcrowding, inedible food, inadequate medical care, broken facilities, negligence by guards and more. “The detention center conditions and the ICE agents’ methods brought to my mind a lot of bad memories from the West Bank,” she says.

Democrats and voting advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against President Trump’s sweeping new executive order to limit mail-in voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections. “This is clearly an attempt for the president to pick his own voters,” says Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who is legally challenging Trump’s order.

Voting rights experts have decried the order as an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to seize control of election administration from the states and Congress. It directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a “state citizenship list” and the U.S. Postal Service to mail ballots only to “verified” voters.

Legal expert David Cole speaks about the “blatantly illegal” U.S.-Israeli war on Iran: “The U.N. Charter absolutely prohibits one country from aggressively attacking another country, using force against another country, unless that country has attacked us — and Iran had not attacked us.”

President Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi amid reports of his growing frustration with her failure to prosecute his political enemies and her handling of the Epstein files.

Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general, was a Trump loyalist who openly heaped praise on the president and did away with the long-standing Department of Justice practice of maintaining political independence from the White House. “She came in and did the master’s bidding, and she did it poorly,” says David Cole, law professor at Georgetown University and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Her firing comes just months after a heated congressional hearing in which she refused to apologize to Epstein survivors for the DOJ’s failure to fully redact their names in released documents. Bondi was subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 14 to speak about her handling of the Epstein files. “The fact that she has now been run out of office does not mean that she is free of the obligation that every American citizen has to respond to a subpoena and answer questions under oath,” says Cole.

We speak with Sarit Michaeli from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem following the Knesset’s passage of a new law mandating death by hanging for Palestinians who are convicted of murdering Israelis. Jewish Israelis will not face the same punishment for similar crimes. The law, which further cements Israel’s apartheid system, has drawn condemnation from rights groups and other countries.

“This egregious, draconian law pretends to be somehow … grounded in some sort of objective criteria,” says Michaeli, B’Tselem’s international outreach director. “But essentially, it’s basically specifically written to apply only to Palestinians.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday about President Donald Trump’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Several justices seemed highly skeptical of the administration’s arguments, though a final ruling is not expected for months.

“I think the oral arguments went really well for our side,” says Aarti Kohli, the executive director of the Asian Law Caucus and co-counsel in the Supreme Court case.

We also speak with Norman Wong, a descendant of Wong Kim Ark, whose landmark 1898 Supreme Court case affirmed birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Citing the Bruce Springsteen song, Wong says that being “Born in the U.S.A.” means someone is part of the national community. “We need to stand as Americans together, regardless of color or religion or where we came from,” he says. “We haven’t always gotten it right with all the people here. But that doesn’t mean we should make it worse.”

President Donald Trump gave a primetime televised address Wednesday to discuss the war on Iran, his first since the United States and Israel launched attacks on February 28. Trump gave few clues about when or how the war could end, but he boasted about killing top Iranian leaders and degrading the country’s military. He threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Despite the grandiose claims, built on “lies and delusions,” Trump “did not add anything new,” says Iranian American scholar Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, who calls Trump’s shifting justifications an admission of “defeat in the war of narratives.”

We also speak with journalist Spencer Ackerman, who says the U.S. has already lost the war. “Iran has changed the entirety of this conflict,” he says. “It has pivoted this conflict onto its own territory and its own goals, and the United States does not have a military mechanism to redress that, primarily the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz.”

More than 3,000 meatpacking workers in Greeley, Colorado, have been on strike since mid-March, the first major labor strike in the U.S. meatpacking industry since 1985. Workers at JBS USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Brazilian-based multinational JBS, are protesting unfair and dangerous labor conditions, including low wages, lack of personal protective gear and discrimination against its majority-immigrant workforce. “This company is one of the richest companies in the world, and the wage increases that they’re offering simply just don’t keep up with the economy and the high cost of living,” says Kim Cordova, president of the union that represents JBS workers in Greeley. “These workers literally feed America,” adds organizer Caitlyn Clark, director at the labor rights nonprofit Essential Workers for Democracy. “This is really a historic strike. These workers are standing up not just for their own plant, but the meatpacking industry as a whole.”

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday, we go to Palestine to speak to Reverend Munther Isaac, pastor of the Lutheran Church in Ramallah and director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, located in the city of Jesus Christ’s birth. This year’s Easter preparations come against the backdrop of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which many Christian nationalists in the U.S., including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are framing in extremist religious terms. Reverend Isaac calls the Christian Zionism espoused by Hegseth and others “a theology of war, of violence” and highlights the efforts of Pope Leo XIV, the U.S.-born head of the Catholic Church who has come out stridently against both the war and Hegseth’s rhetoric, to promote peace in the region.

Isaac also comments on Israeli authorities’ recent attempt to prevent the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday due to Israel’s ban on gatherings at religious sites during the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly granted access to the church following global backlash. But, “do we really need permission from an occupying authority?” asks Isaac. “Israel does not have sovereignty over, should not have sovereignty over Jerusalem. … We have been worshiping here for centuries, uninterrupted.”

We take a look at how war in the Middle East is impacting the environment in “one of the most water-stressed regions in the world,” with Kaveh Madani, the renowned U.N. scientist, former Iranian politician and recipient of the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize. Madani discusses threats to civil water infrastructure in the Gulf region, how the Strait of Hormuz crisis highlights consumer countries’ overreliance on oil and gas, and his prize-winning work on the global effects of “water bankruptcy.” Madani ties the antiwar and climate struggles together and calls for wider popular resistance to the long-term environmental harms of global warfare. “All the weapons that have been produced have had carbon footprints — the missiles that fly, the jets, the tanks that are burned, the oil fields that are being attacked and the gas fields that are being burned. All of these are producing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions,” he says. “They are going to impact us in the long term.”

Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has transformed from a “war of choice” to a “war of necessity” as Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz sparks a worldwide oil crisis. Vaez discusses President Donald Trump’s “mixed messages” about U.S. military strategy and warns that “mission creep” could set in if Trump refuses to “exit this war and accept that he hasn’t been able to achieve most of his strategic objectives.”

The Trump administration says the United States has struck 11,000 targets in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli war on the country began. Critics have questioned the accuracy of the Maven system, the artificial intelligence system used by the military to speed up the process of identifying targets.

“Imagine Google Earth for war, a map of war with white dots, infused with information like elevation, coordinate, what is precisely there, whether it’s friendly or foe,” says Katrina Manson, a reporter for Bloomberg News and author of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare.

The Pentagon launched Project Maven in 2017. Google was an initial partner, but the company pulled out after over 3,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the work. The big data firm Palantir then took over the project and has run it ever since.

A Russian tanker carrying around 700,000 barrels of crude oil has arrived in the port of Matanzas, Cuba, breaking the U.S. blockade imposed by President Trump three months ago. Fuel shortages in Cuba have caused dayslong blackouts and have brought all sectors of the country to the brink of collapse.

The White House is claiming the arrival of the Russian tanker, unimpeded by the United States, does not signal a “formal change in sanction policy,” and said U.S. decisions on shipments going forward would be made on a case-by-case basis.

“I think possibly what’s going on is that the administration has begun to worry that their effort to strangle the economy could push the economy over the edge and generate a mass migration crisis,” says William LeoGrande, professor of government at American University.

“Who is the United States? Who gave you the authorization to say how much oil is going into Cuba or not? This is illegal,” adds Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist with Belly of the Beast.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments this week on the constitutionality of President Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship. An executive order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office, declares children born to parents without permanent legal status would no longer be automatically granted citizenship.

The policy “is deeply illegal, unconstitutional and morally wrong,” says Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. The ACLU is representing all children targeted by Trump’s executive order in a class-action lawsuit. Wofsy says roughly 5 million U.S.-born children would be affected by the order over the next 20 years.

As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran enters its second month, President Donald Trump has said he wants “to take the oil” and seize Kharg Island, Iran’s key export hub in the Persian Gulf. President Trump’s comments come as 3,500 U.S. troops began arriving in the region on Friday, with The Washington Post reporting that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of potential ground combat in Iran. According to a consortium of human rights groups in Iran, nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians, including at least 217 children, have been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. Iranian scholar Ali Kadivar says the increased targeting of residential areas, schools and hospitals in recent days shows that regime change is no longer the main goal, if it ever was. “These recent attacks on civilian infrastructure makes the war look more like a war on Iran as a nation-state,” says Kadivar, fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an associate professor at Boston College.

We speak with journalist Lylla Younes in Beirut as Israel vows to expand its invasion of Lebanon and occupy much of the country. This comes as an Israeli strike targeted a marked press car in southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing Ali Shoeib of Al-Manar TV, reporter Fatima Ftouni of Al Mayadeen TV, and her brother, freelance cameraman Mohamed Ftouni. Israel’s military said it had targeted Shoeib, accusing him of being a Hezbollah intelligence operative, without providing evidence. The World Health Organization says nine paramedics were also killed Saturday in five separate Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, bringing the total number of health workers killed by Israel in March to 51.

Such brazen killings are an attempt by Israel “to break the will of a people in a moment of deep vulnerability,” says Younes.

New York police say they foiled an assassination attempt against Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani. She describes the terror of finding out about the plot and why it reflects the “impunity” with which Zionist groups have targeted pro-Palestine voices.

“It really made me feel even more vulnerable than I already do as a Palestinian activist,” says Kiswani, co-founder of the group Within Our Lifetime.

A New Jersey man, Alexander Heifler, has been arrested and charged with plotting to firebomb Kiswani’s home in Brooklyn. Investigators say Heifler was a member of the JDL 613 Brotherhood, a New Jersey-based group founded in 2024 that describes itself as a revival of the Jewish Defense League, a pro-Israel group designated by the FBI as a terrorist organization.

“It’s truly shocking, what they’ve been able to get away with,” Kiswani says of extreme Zionist groups like the Jewish Defense League. “It’s just been ignored for far too long, so it’s good to finally have some accountability.”

One of the largest No Kings protests on Saturday took place in New York City, where tens of thousands marched to protest the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and more. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was in the streets and spoke to many demonstrators.

An estimated 8 million people took part in anti-Trump protests across the United States on Saturday as part of the No Kings movement, with the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown animating many participants. One of the largest rallies took place in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, where federal immigration agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. Rally speakers included Congressmember Ilhan Omar, Governor Tim Walz, Senator Bernie Sanders, actor and activist Jane Fonda and others, as well as a performance by Bruce Springsteen. We air highlights from the rally.

The 30th anniversary celebration of Democracy Now!, held in New York City’s historic Riverside Church this week, featured live performances and appearances from writers and musicians including Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. The musical performances were kicked off by singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra and their band Hurray for the Riff Raff, performing the Puerto Rico-inspired anthem “Pa’lante.”

Juries in California and New Mexico have found the tech giants Alphabet and Meta liable for knowingly causing harm to children and teens who used their social media platforms. Over the course of the trials, documents revealed that tech companies were well aware of the addictive properties of their social media products and exploited these properties to increase their profits. “They take advantage of the undeveloped frontal cortex of young people and their emotional need for validation by showing them things, not that they want to see, but what they can’t look away from,” says attorney Matthew P. Bergman, who represented the plaintiffs in the California case. Youth advocate Zamaan Qureshi, who testified in the New Mexico case against Meta, says the verdicts indicate that “Meta’s house of cards is falling, and it is absolutely clear that they will be held accountable.”

Drop Site News's Jeremy Scahill joins Democracy Now! to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including President Donald Trump's lies about U.S. strategy and negotiations with Iran, possible avenues of U.S. escalation and what Scahill has learned about Iranian strategy in conversations with Iranian officials. “They want to cause enough pain to the world economy … [so] that any nation that thinks of attacking Iran again is going to do so knowing that these are the consequences,” he explains.

Millions of people are expected to take to the streets this Saturday in opposition to the Trump administration in the third iteration of the nationwide No Kings protest movement. Ahead of the thousands of No Kings demonstrations scheduled not only across the country, but also around the world, we speak to one of the organizers behind the campaign, Leah Greenberg of Indivisible. “People are coming out in every state, in every county, collectively, and saying, 'Enough.' We are going to stand against illegal war abroad. We are going to stand against secret police at home,” Greenberg says.

Over 2,000 people packed into the historic Riverside Church in New York on Monday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Democracy Now! The acclaimed singer, songwriter and artist Michael Stipe performed his song “No Time for Love Like Now,” accompanied by musician and producer Aaron Dessner, a founding member of The National. Dessner has also closely collaborated with Taylor Swift, co-producing several of her albums.

“This evening feels like a clarion call, a voice of courage, of optimism and resilience and community in the face of system collapse,” said Stipe, former lead singer of R.E.M.

Watch the entire event here.

United Nations expert Francesca Albanese’s latest report warns that Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent” and that “torture has effectively become state policy” since October 2023.

Of all the investigations Albanese has carried out, “this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people,” says Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory since 2022.

This comes as Israeli forces reportedly tortured a Palestinian toddler earlier this month, by using a cigarette to burn one of the child’s legs and a nail to puncture the other, in order to coerce a confession from his father.

Democracy Now! is joined by Ryan Schwank, an ICE whistleblower who has been speaking out about how the agency drastically slashed its training standards for new officers. Schwank worked as an ICE lawyer and legal instructor in Georgia until he resigned last month.

Schwank says he received secretive orders to teach ICE trainees to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.

He also speaks about how violent arrest tactics by ICE agents, like those seen in Minneapolis, should only be employed in certain circumstances: “Those things should only be done as an act of necessity, when it’s the choice between the public’s safety and the use of force on the individual.”

The U.S. is threatening to intensify its bombardment of Iran as the country’s leadership rejects a 15-point U.S. proposal to end the war. Iran has issued a number of demands, including recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Since the war began, Iran has largely blocked ships from passing through the critical strait, causing a global crisis as the prices of oil, natural gas and fertilizer soar.

“We’re not just talking about potential spikes in food prices … but also potentially key shortages in the commodities that are necessary to produce food, like fertilizers,” says Adam Hanieh, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Many of the countries that are going to be most potentially impacted by this are already in conditions of famine or near famine.”

Democracy Now! celebrated its 30th anniversary Monday at the historic Riverside Church in New York. The night ended with Patti Smith performing her anthemic hit “People Have the Power,” joined on stage by Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Hurray for the Riff Raff, the National’s Aaron Dessner and more.

Watch the entire event here.

Over 2,000 people packed into the historic Riverside Church in New York on Monday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Democracy Now! The program included a reading by legendary singer Patti Smith from her new memoir Bread of Angels, in which she remembered the U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2003 while trying to protect Palestinian homes from destruction. Corrie inspired Smith’s song “Peaceable Kingdom,” which she performed alongside Tony Shanahan on guitar and her daughter Jesse Smith on piano.

As the United States mobilizes thousands more troops for deployment to the Middle East, we speak with retired U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Wes Bryant, who criticizes the “bloodthirst” of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Bryant led the Pentagon office for civilian harm assessment from 2024 to 2025, before the unit was dissolved under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The “wholly illegal war” has been “carried out recklessly from the start and with little regard for the innocent,” Bryant tells Democracy Now! “Pete Hegseth has already directed the committing of war crimes. And unfortunately, our senior military leadership is bending the knee and carrying out whatever he tells them to do.”

Markwayne Mullin was sworn in Tuesday as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi Noem, who was ousted earlier this month. Mullin has served as senator for Oklahoma since 2023 following a decade in the House of Representatives. He joins the Trump administration amid a partial government shutdown, with Democrats demanding reforms to immigration enforcement before fully funding DHS.

“This agency of terror needs to be dismantled,” says Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois. “And whether it is Mullin, whether it is Noem, whether it’s Tom Homan, that agency is dangerous, and every American should say, 'Enough is enough.'”

Ramirez also comments on the birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court, the U.S. fuel blockade against Cuba and more.

The partial government shutdown over funding for the Department of Homeland Security has caused major staffing shortages within the Transportation Security Administration, an agency under DHS that handles airport security procedures created in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. TSA officers have not been paid for over a month, leading to hundreds of resignations and leaves of absence. As airports are hit with significant delays, Cameron Cochems, the vice president of a union representing thousands of fellow TSA workers, urges travelers to use their time waiting to call their elected representatives “to fund the TSA so we can get our paychecks and we can get back to work.”

To fill staffing shortages, DHS has deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports. This comes as ICE is under fire for a hiring surge with minimal vetting and training for new officers. “It really feels like they’re a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. Our officers, they’re not getting paid, and having people that come in that are getting paid just feels like an insult,” says Cochems, who adds that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party is to eliminate union protections and privatize the TSA.

Democracy Now! celebrated its 30th anniversary at the historic Riverside Church in New York City with live performances by guests including musician Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen performed his new song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and spoke about his upcoming tour, which begins in Minneapolis next week. Watch the full event here.

Democracy Now! celebrated its 30th anniversary at the historic Riverside Church in New York City with live performances by guests including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. Mosab Abu Toha read his poem “Under the Rubble” and spoke about his experience surviving Israel’s genocide of Gaza, which killed 30 members of his extended family. Watch the full event here.

“This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region.” Daniel Levy of the U.S./Middle East Project says that U.S. involvement in the ongoing war on Iran is being driven by Israel’s expansionist ambitions in the Middle East. “Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here.” Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, also provides analysis of current U.S., Israeli and Iranian wartime strategy, as well as potential ceasefire negotiations and Israel’s settler and soldier-backed ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank. “I think this will ultimately end very badly for Israel and generate tremendous blowback. But in the meantime, it is again the Palestinians bearing the brunt.”

With thousands more U.S. Marines headed to the Middle East and President Trump reportedly considering a ground invasion of Iran, we speak with Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, who says his organization has received a massive increase in inquiries from soldiers seeking to submit conscientious objector applications. Prysner cites a “shift in consciousness” among young people in the United States, spurred by the Gaza genocide. “And the military is made up of young people in the United States.”

We look at how Europe is responding to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran as President Trump denounces NATO allies for not joining the war. International affairs scholar Nathalie Tocci, speaking to Democracy Now! from Italy, criticizes Europe’s “ambiguous” response to the war on Iran as most of the continent has refused to condemn it. “We were the ones that were for multilateralism, for international law, and that ambiguity is basically another nail in the coffin of our credibility.”

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has now entered its fourth week. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces is being felt worldwide, as shipments of oil, natural gas and fertilizer have been drastically curtailed. A fifth of the world’s oil supply transits through the strait, and the price of oil is up by about 50% since the war began in late February.

On Saturday evening, President Trump threatened Iran on social media, saying he would “obliterate their various power plants, starting with the biggest one first,” if the Strait of Hormuz was not fully reopened within 48 hours. He later extended his deadline by five days following Iranian threats to destroy essential infrastructure, including energy and water systems, across the Gulf. Iran has denied reports of direct or indirect talks with the U.S.

If Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and “hold Washington to ransom,” it will have significant leverage, says Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In a strategic analysis, Iran right now is in the dominant position.”