policy

DAKAR, Senegal — In Miami, Daniela Fuentes styled hair for clients and performed in drag at a nightclub called Azúcar. She wore her blond wig in public and dressed as the woman she had known herself to be since adolescence in Cuba.

Now, more than 6,000 miles away in the Central African Republic, she wears men’s clothes, lowers her voice and tries not to draw attention to the breasts she developed after beginning hormone treatment as a teenager. As part of U.S. efforts to deport people to countries other than their own, authorities sent her Aug. 29 to a place where she has no ties and where advocacy groups have reported arbitrary detention, torture, and other rights violations of sexual and gender minorities.

“Everything is difficult here because I have to hide who I am,” said Fuentes, a 32-year-old transgender woman living on a compound she rarely leaves, sharing a room with four Cuban men also deported from the U.S. “I don’t know this place, the people or the language, and I have no idea what will happen to me.”

The Central African Republic — one of the world’s poorest countries, a place with a history of conflict that the U.S. State Department advises American travelers to avoid — is one of at least 12 African nations that signed agreements to accept “third-country” deportations, a policy the U.S. Supreme Court last month allowed to continue, at least temporarily.

In the Central African Republic — where transgender people have little to no legal protections and are marginalized in much of society — Fuentes dons her wig only in the privacy of her bathroom. She described disguising herself as protection, first in U.S. detention and now in a country she first heard of when she was already headed there on a deportation flight.

“My whole life, my whole identity, was taken away from me,” Fuentes said.

Public records say a judge ordered Fuentes to leave the U.S. but offer no other information. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not reply to emailed questions.

Tens of thousands of people have been deported to “third countries”

Fuentes’ compound in the capital, Bangui, is an apartment complex where the government houses male deportees.

Fuentes said she can leave but that officials have advised her and others to avoid it — they have no identification, which could lead to issues with the police. It also means they can’t work, she said, and she’s waiting on travel documents that would allow her to leave the country. The International Organization for Migration, an agency associated with the United Nations, has provided food, and the migrants say they’ve crowdsourced for donations to buy groceries.

The U.S. — via agreements often not made public — has deported about 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries that aren’t their own, the vast majority to Mexico, according to a tally by Third Country Deportation Watch, a partnership of Refugees International and Human Rights First. The U.S. has not released numbers or details.

From January 2025 to August 2026, more than 500 were sent to countries in Africa, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday — including at least 12 people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and were deported to places that criminalize same-sex relations or public same-sex romantic conduct. Some advocates say the number is likely higher.

“These are not bureaucratic errors or isolated incidents,” said Bridget Crawford, of the group Immigration Equality. “They are the predictable result of policies that purposefully abandon our legal and moral obligation to protect LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing persecution.”

The U.S. government says the policy is lawful and that receiving governments provide assurances deportees won’t be persecuted or tortured.

Daniela Fuentes says ICE detained her with men before deportation

Fuentes grew up in La Lisa, on Havana’s outskirts, and said she understood from childhood that she was different. She began living as a woman in adolescence and started taking hormones at 18.

She ran a salon from her home, coloring and cutting hair. She said she was harassed because of her gender identity and attacked at least twice, leaving scars on her arm and head. Police also questioned her about operating a private business, she said — though housefront businesses are common in the area.

In 2023, Fuentes sold her home and left amid a deepening economic crisis and a crackdown on dissent — even as Cuba, one of Latin America’s most progressive countries for LGBTQ+ rights, adopted new inclusion laws. Making her way to the U.S., she said, she presented as a man traveling through Central America; she believed it was safer.

After seven months in Mexico, she said, she entered the U.S. through Texas via CBP One, a President Joe Biden-era online appointment system that allowed migrants to live in the country for two years on humanitarian grounds. Then she went to Miami.

There, she began living openly as a woman again. She found work styling hair and performed at Azúcar. Though she lacked permanent legal status, Fuentes said Miami offered something she’d rarely experienced: the freedom to move through daily life as herself.

That ended when officers encountered her outside a motel. Fuentes said they learned she had missed an immigration court hearing in Texas. She said she asked that the case be moved to Florida but received no response.

Fuentes said she was taken into custody and later placed in immigration detention with men. Officials confiscated her wig and gave her a male detainee’s uniform, she said.

Such treatment is in line with a January 2025 executive order directing officials to exclude transgender women from women’s prisons and detention centers.

“When I learned that they were going to put me with men, I almost fainted,” Fuentes said.

Deportees said they boarded a flight without knowing the destination

Fuentes was held at two detention facilities in Florida, then transferred to Texas. When armed officers arrived there, she said, she suspected she was facing deportation, but they didn’t reveal she was being sent to Africa until about five hours into the flight.

Other deportees on the flight told AP they also weren’t told the destination until they were on the plane. Dozens have been sent to the Central African Republic, including an Iranian woman facing persecution in her home country and an Afghan whose brothers worked with the U.S. military.

Fuentes said she does not understand why she was sent to Africa rather than Cuba. She told AP she has no lawyer.

The U.S. does repatriate Cuban citizens, as part of agreements to resume deportation flights in 2023, despite tensions in relations between the countries. Charter flights have arrived in Havana regularly.

Yasmany Moreno, another Cuban deportee in Bangui, said that upon arriving, the group had no visas or documents establishing their legal status in the country. Officials spoke of providing assistance for 90 days, he said, but the deportees didn’t know what would happen afterward or where they would live.

Several told AP their longer-term status remained unclear and that U.S. authorities had taken their identity documents.

A policy officer at the Central African Republic’s Foreign Ministry said the deportees are in “good hands” and are being monitored by the International Organization for Migration. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The U.S. this year committed to $85 million in funding to IOM for Central African Republic operations including “assistance to migrants” and “community stabilization.”

IOM says migrants can seek asylum in the country, request assistance to return home or get help traveling to another place they’re authorized to enter. It referred questions about the deportees’ status and individual cases such as Fuentes’ to Central African Republic officials. A government spokesperson didn’t reply to phone calls and text messages seeking comment.

Human Rights Watch’s report says some people deported to third countries face detention, abuse and the prospect of persecution. Eswatini has held deportees in a maximum-security prison without charges. Equatorial Guinea has held them against their will at a hotel owned by the president’s family.

“Several of these African governments are not only complicit in U.S. abuses but have violated the human rights of these deported people themselves,” Michael Garcia Bochenek, of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Fuentes and other deportees say they can’t work, with most days spent at the compound

Fuentes said the Cuban men in her room know she is a woman and look out for her. She rarely feels safe enough to leave. Once, at a supermarket, workers pointed at her breasts and initially refused to sell her fruit, she said. Other people in Bangui have mocked her and pointed at her.

“My personal appearance is awful,” she said. “I look like a different human being.”

Moreno described restrictions on the group’s movements, saying officers accompanied them to the market and on occasional outings but restricted them from going out at night.

Fuentes and Moreno said they have no passports or other identification and cannot work. Most days, Fuentes remains at the compound, looking at her phone and waiting for travel documents.

She said Cuba has agreed to accept her return — a Cuban embassy document shows she is authorized.

But Fuentes said she hopes to seek asylum elsewhere, possibly Canada.

“The harassment and economic hardship that caused me to flee still remain,” she said.

Banchereau writes for the Associated Press. Jean Fernand Koena in Bangui, Central African Republic; Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis; and Cristiana Mesquita in Havana contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to review a Trump administration policy denying bond hearings for immigrants as the government carries out a sweeping crackdown.

The justices will consider whether immigrants who have been living in the U.S. have a right to a hearing to determine if they should remain detained while challenging their possible deportation.

The case will test a key pillar of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Most appeals courts to have considered the issue have found that it violates federal law to detain immigrants, including those living in the U.S. illegally, without a bond hearing. Those decisions conflict with rulings by the 5th and 8th circuits, which held that immigrants accused of illegally entering and remaining in the U.S. must be detained while their deportation cases are pending.

The high court agreed to hear the case of Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a citizen of Brazil. Authorities say he entered the United States illegally two decades ago and applied for asylum in 2016. He sought a bond hearing after an immigration judge determined that his detention was mandatory following his September 2025 arrest.

He has never been charged or convicted of a crime, his attorneys said. The court is expected to hear the case in the coming months.

President Trump’s administration had urged the high court to take up a different but related case that involves the broader constitutional implications of the new policy.

Attorneys from the Republican administration argue the circuits’ split is “disrupting the orderly administration of immigration law.” They say the nation’s courts have been inundated with thousands of petitions filed by immigrants challenging the government’s legal interpretation.

“The result is an unworkable patchwork of inconsistent immigration enforcement, where aliens present without admission are subject to mandatory detention in some circuits but are entitled to bond hearings and often released in others,” lawyers for the administration wrote.

The plaintiffs are immigrants represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says hundreds of district court judges have joined most circuits in rejecting the Trump administration’s new reading of the statutes. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say the administration is trying to deny bond hearings for immigrants apprehended anywhere in the U.S. — no matter how long they’ve lived in the country — rather than limiting the restriction to noncitizens stopped at the border.

“Millions of noncitizens could be affected by the government’s new interpretation,” ACLU attorneys wrote.

The Trump administration says its new mandatory detention policy is legal under a 1996 immigration law. The policy change departs from the practices of prior administrations, which typically allowed most noncitizens without criminal records to request a bond hearing if they were arrested away from the border.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

The case is the latest dispute over US President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case focused on the Trump administration’s policy requiring millions of undocumented immigrants to remain in detention while they fight deportation.

The case, accepted on Thursday by the justices, is the latest dispute over US President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown to reach the nation’s highest court.

At issue is whether migrants already living in the US have a legal right to a hearing where a judge can decide whether they should be released on bond from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention while their deportation cases are pending.

In July 2025, the administration introduced new guidance directing federal immigration authorities to detain undocumented immigrants without a bond hearing for the duration of their deportation proceedings, which can last for years.

The new policy, which has divided lower courts, reverses a decades-old interpretation that allowed some immigrants in the US to be released while their cases were pending in immigration court, according to Reuters news agency.

Most US federal appeals courts have ruled that immigrants cannot be detained without a bond hearing. But the 5th and 8th US Circuit Courts of Appeals have found that immigrants accused of illegally entering and remaining in the country must remain detained while their deportation cases proceed.

Trump administration attorneys told the Associated Press the split is “disrupting the orderly administration of immigration law”.

“The result is an unworkable patchwork of inconsistent immigration enforcement, where aliens present without admission are subject to mandatory detention in some circuits but are entitled to bond hearings and often released in others,” the lawyers wrote.

Millions could be affected

The Supreme Court case stems from a 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling involving Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian national who entered the US around 2004 or 2005.

Immigration officers arrested him in September 2025 while he was driving to work in the US state of Massachusetts. He was initially denied a bond hearing under the administration’s policy but was later released on bond, according to court documents cited by Reuters.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing the plaintiffs, told the Associated Press the Trump administration is trying to deny bond hearings for immigrants apprehended within the US rather than limiting the restriction to noncitizens stopped at the border.

“Millions of noncitizens could be affected by the government’s new interpretation,” ACLU attorneys wrote.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on Monday, when its new term starts.

TA419 hackers used deceptive tactics, impersonating real figures like a former White House AI official

Chinese hackers have been impersonating artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the United States, including a former government official, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.

The report, released on Thursday, found that in July, a China-aligned hacking group called TA419 targeted a slate of US policy experts by impersonating prominent figures, including Lynne Edwards Parker, the former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The hackers, who had been operating since April 2025, first sent otherwise harmless-looking emails intended to engage a target, such as requests to join an “AI Policy Advisory Committee”, and, once they responded, the target would be sent to a fake login page designed to steal their credentials.

The targets included policy experts at think tanks, defence contractors, universities and law firms in both the US and Japan.

The report used a technique that creates a fake browser pop-up window inside a legitimate webpage that mimics an authentic-looking sign-in prompt to deceive victims and make it harder for them to realise they are handing over their information to hackers.

Proofpoint did not specifically name the targets hacked, but the Reuters news agency was able to confirm at least one of them as Alex Engler, a former White House official who now heads the Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy.

Engler told Reuters that he got one of the emails, but after checking with industry colleagues, he discovered that he had received the email from an impersonator.

In February, the same group was behind the impersonation of a “prominent” Anthropic employee in efforts to target AI policy experts. The cybersecurity firm behind the report believes that the group will continue to target think tanks and other policy experts and will continue to use the identity of real-world experts to do it.

Parker did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Sept. 30, 2026 9:17 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is removing Syria from a list of countries that are not allowed to purchase or import U.S. weaponry, a step that is part of a monthslong process of easing sanctions on the new government in Damascus and its leaders.

In a notice published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the State Department said it was amending its International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, so that Syria no longer was among the nations subject to a policy of denial for licenses and other approvals needed for the sale of U.S. weapons and munitions.

The change effective Thursday means that arms sales requests from Syria will now be considered on a case-by-case basis.

President Donald Trump acted last year to ease economic sanctions on Syria that had been in place for decades during now-ousted President Bashar Assad’s rule. In August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio rescinded Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, helping paving the way for the latest step in drawing closer to the current government.

The State Department has also announced plans to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. It has been closed for 14 years.

With Syria’s removal from the ITAR blacklist, only seven countries remain subject to the policy of denial for licenses for U.S. arms exports: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and Venezuela.

Syria’s interim president, former rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, overthrew the Assad government nearly two years ago and has embarked on a policy of change that has impressed the Trump administration. His moves have led to hopes of eventual stability in a country that was wracked by civil war and the Islamic State insurgency that engulfed northeast and western Iraq for years.

Wednesday’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq may mean that the Syrian government plays a greater role in preventing an IS resurgence.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Trump’s administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The apparent 6-3 order halts a lower-court decision. It requires the government to give migrants a chance to object before they are sent to countries to which they have no ties.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.

The Trump administration said the lower-court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries last week.

The justices have sided with the administration once before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year.

The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to issue a sweeping block and other questions the government deems appropriate.

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, including Liberia and Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.

Trump’s Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can’t be returned to their homelands or their native countries won’t accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.

But some migrants have nevertheless found themselves imprisoned in countries they’d never heard of before their arrivals. Others also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.

The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Under a light rain on Sunday at the Australian ambassador’s residence in Washington, CNN hosted its third annual tennis tournament, the Kangaroo Cup, pitting Beltway journalists against administration officials. The event aims to inject some levity into an historically adversarial relationship, reminding both sides of the spirit of the game. Themed drinks and tennis whites set the tone.

White House officials played with grace. But the mood this year was altogether different down Pennsylvania Avenue. Despite a federal judge demanding the administration reverse course on President Trump’s punitive actions toward his disfavored news outlets — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — he has refused to resume full access to the storied cable news channel, dismissing its reporters as “fake news.”

It is only the latest attack on press freedom by a president whose drive to punish critics and exert influence over the media appears to be growing.

During last week’s lavish state visit for Xi Jinping, Trump praised China for having “the friendliest press corps” and dismissed their repression of speech, despite the World Press Freedom Index ranking China among the world’s worst offenders — at the bottom of the list, alongside North Korea and Eritrea — for restrictions on journalists.

Five times in the last two months, the president has sneered at and insulted female reporters, mocking their appearance or dismissing their credentials.

He has declined to name a successor for his former press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, whose final news conference, on Aug. 27, was one of only a handful of briefings held throughout the summer. His administration launched its own streaming service last week, called Trump TV, in an attempt to circumvent traditional cable news. And on Monday, he posted renderings of the White House briefing room reconverted to its former use as a presidential pool and spa.

Trump’s escalating attacks on the press come just weeks before the midterm elections, as former officials and election experts warn the administration could seek to undermine confidence in the results. They also come at a precarious moment for public trust in the media, with more Americans saying limits on the press can be justified to combat misinformation.

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month found that 73% of Americans regard a free press as “very” or “extremely” important to society. Yet the country remains deeply divided over whether journalists should be barred from reporting “inaccurate” information, with a majority, 53%, supporting limits in some circumstances — even if it means the government itself would have the final say in determining what is true.

Trump’s attempt to bar three outlets from the White House grounds came just three days after the Pew poll was released.

“Plenty of presidents have complained about the press before. And presidents have restricted certain forms of press access or press action during wartime,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. “In the moment — and especially afterward — Americans condemned this as antithetical to the constitutional protections for press freedom and the national commitment to an open democracy.

“What I find most striking about Trump’s press action is that he has made it unabashedly personal,” Kastor added. “He doesn’t like the way media outlets are covering him, so he is going to punish them.”

President Nixon famously limited White House access for the Washington Post over its coverage of the Watergate scandal. But he never attempted to bar press credentials completely — and ultimately authorized the conversion of the pool facility into the briefing room that exists today.

Other presidents have jostled with the press. President Obama was accused of limiting access to independent photojournalists, and famously favored nontraditional media outlets at the advent of the social media age. President George W. Bush limited his personal interactions with the press and curtailed access to government records.

Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, once stated he “deplored” the “putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.”

Yet, “it is however an evil for which there is no remedy,” he also said. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Trump’s particular style — as a showman and his own spokesman — makes his relationship with the media innately personal, said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.”

“Presidents almost always feel that bad press is a feature of their staff’s poor communication of their policies — not that the policies themselves are unpopular or ill-advised,” Rudalevige said.

“Since President Trump does so much of his communication, though, this deflection is less available,” he added, and “thus the problem is with the press itself, not the policy or its purveyor.”

CNN’s legal fight continues, even after securing temporary reprieve from a judicial restraining order. So does the Associated Press’ lawsuit over the administration’s effort last year to punish the wire service for refusing to adopt Trump’s preferred name, “Gulf of America,” for the internationally recognized Gulf of Mexico.

While he keeps losing in court on 1st Amendment grounds, the president keeps testing new limits, looking for what will stick.

On the tennis court Sunday, at least, his administration won.

Accra, Ghana – The Africa Space Expo (ASPEX), which closed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, last week, was not designed as a showcase for rockets and astronauts. Organisers presented it instead as a marketplace for space applications in food security, climate resilience, territorial monitoring, connectivity and maritime security, bringing start-ups, project labs and investors together to move ideas from demonstration to deployment.

The event also produced several concrete agreements. The Ivory Coast signed the Artemis Accords, becoming the 75th signatory of the agreement on space exploration and development, while Angola signed a letter of intent on space cooperation with the United Arab Emirates.

But beyond the agreements, the expo highlighted a question that is becoming harder to avoid: Can Africa move from using space technology to building more of it itself?

Ghana offers a clear illustration of both the progress and the gap.

Ghana’s ambitions in space and nuclear science date back to its early years of independence. In 1961, President Kwame Nkrumah’s government initiated a nuclear reactor project in Accra. Two years later, the government established the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission through an act of Parliament with a mandate covering the peaceful applications of nuclear energy.

The reactor project was shelved after Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, but the institution he helped establish remains the parent body of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI).

Joseph Tandoh, director of the GSSTI, traces Ghana’s more recent space programme to a partnership with South Africa.

“Ghana became a partner through South Africa,” he told Al Jazeera. “Through that project, we were able to reconstruct the old satellite antenna at Kuntunse into a radio telescope.”

Through its partnership with South Africa on radio astronomy, Ghana converted a redundant 32-metre (105ft) antenna at Kuntunse into a functioning radio telescope. Ghana became the first of South Africa’s eight African Square Kilometre Array partner countries to complete the conversion, and the telescope was launched in August 2017.

Ghana’s National Space Policy was approved by the cabinet in 2022 and launched in 2024. The government approved the establishment of a Ghana Space Agency in 2025, beginning the process of creating a dedicated national institution for the sector.

The institutional framework is taking shape. The harder question is how Ghana moves from using space technology to developing and building more of it itself.

What Ghana is already doing

At the GSSTI, that transition is already under way.

Tandoh told Al Jazeera GEOMAIZE, a partnership between the GSSTI and VITO, the Flemish Institute for Technological Research in Belgium, has demonstrated how satellite data can be applied to Ghanaian agriculture.

The project monitored crop health and developed algorithms to classify crops. Ghana is also expanding its use of Earth observation data and artificial intelligence for crop monitoring and yield prediction.

But predicting yields has proved more difficult. Tandoh said the model’s accuracy fell short of expectations, largely because many Ghanaian farmers practise smallholder mixed cropping and satellite soil-moisture data are too coarse to capture differences between small farms.

A follow-up project supported by the French embassy and international research partners, is now working to improve the estimates.

The GSSTI has also used satellite data to track forest loss linked to mining and is working with partners in Nigeria on a digital twin to simulate coastal erosion at Keta and Agavedzi. Japanese cooperation has provided technical training while the French government supported work on space legislation that produced a draft now being reviewed by the attorney general.

“We always say that Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute becoming an agency is to position Ghana in a way that we will not only be users of the technology but we will also contribute to designing, developing and building our own tools,” Tandoh said.

The funding wall

Victor Tagborloh founded Galaxy Aerospace Ghana in 2020. Two years later, his team launched a high-altitude balloon into near space, capturing images of Ghana’s geography with clearance from national security and airport authorities.

The company has since designed mini-rockets for the GSSTI, trained young people in space robotics and artificial intelligence and pushed for the introduction of Starlink in Ghana in 2024.

But Tagborloh said the company has yet to secure an investor, six years after it was founded.

Galaxy’s longer-term plans include a space university on 33,000 hectares (82,000 acres) that it has secured at Apam in Ghana’s Central Region as well as a ground station that would give the country greater capacity to monitor floods, mining activity and coastal erosion.

The company is seeking investors for the ground station and a geospatial intelligence platform. Tagborloh said the curriculum is ready and the land is available. What is missing is the capital to turn those plans into infrastructure.

He also argued that Ghana’s position near the equator could provide an advantage for launching spacecraft, potentially reducing the fuel required to reach orbit. Several other African countries share similar geography.

But Tagborloh’s ambition goes beyond launching rockets. He wants Ghana to develop more of the infrastructure and expertise needed to build its own space capabilities.

Who is building the industry?

Bright Atsu Sogbey, president of the Africa Development Council and a senior research engineer at the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, argued that the private sector cannot build the industry alone.

“Borrowed technology cannot be sustainable,” Sogbey told Al Jazeera. “The state must be in the driver’s seat, using the natural resources we have to ensure that, in partnership with the private sector, we can have laboratories and manufacturing hubs for the space industry.”

He pointed to South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, which have established space laboratories and manufactured test satellites. Ghana, he said, still lacks the state-backed laboratories and manufacturing hubs needed to produce more of its own components rather than importing them.

“Enough of the talk shop,” Sogbey said. “The next expo should see African satellites assembled on this continent and launching capability for African satellites.”

Engineer Daniel Aboagye, CEO of African Progressive Research and Innovations, said the change must also begin in education.

“With how technology is advancing, Africa must introduce space science into its education systems,” Aboagye told Al Jazeera. “We cannot continue to be consumers of technology we do not understand.”

Kwadwo Dwomo II, CEO of COMCENT Ghana, works on agritech systems that depend on satellite data. He also called for greater government investment in the sector.

Ghana is home to a small cluster of companies, including Galaxy Aerospace, Xavier Space Solutions and Ayeji Aerospace, working in areas such as satellite technology, Earth observation and geospatial services.

Galaxy Aerospace confirmed to Al Jazeera that it was unable to participate in this year’s expo. The company said it hopes to participate in the next expo.

A continental project

The challenge facing Ghana is shared across much of Africa: moving from using space technology to developing and building more of it locally while overcoming limited investment, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

ASPEX was designed in part to address that gap.

The African Space Agency, headquartered in Egypt, is intended to provide a continental framework for cooperation while the expo aims to connect investors with African start-ups, researchers and space projects.

But the distance between the ambitions presented at the expo and the resources available to engineers trying to turn them into businesses remains substantial.

For Tandoh, Ghana’s immediate priority is to build the application layer: a satellite-data processing hub capable of serving ministries across government before the country moves further into designing and launching its own satellites.

“Space cuts across all the ministries,” he told Al Jazeera. “We should be able to build and validate our own tools first.”

For Tagborloh, the timeline is more urgent.

“We shouldn’t wait for tomorrow,” he told Al Jazeera. “Whatever decision we have to take, especially for human resource capital in the space industry, it has to be now.”

Ghana has the policy. It has engineers, research institutions and companies trying to build a space industry. What it does not yet have is the capital and manufacturing capacity to turn those capabilities into a domestic industry.

“We have the team, the knowledge, the research and the technical know-how,” Tagborloh told Al Jazeera. “We just need funds.”

Under a policy set to take effect Sunday, the U.S. government could strip young immigrants of their status as unaccompanied minors, causing them to lose special protections when they apply for asylum and making them more likely to be deported.

The plan is laid out in an internal memorandum sent May 31 by John Lafferty, chief of the asylum division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and detailed in subsequent guidance, both obtained by The Times. The shift in policy involves when federal officials determine whether a young migrant is an unaccompanied minor.

According to the memos, an asylum officer with USCIS will have to assess whether the individual at the time of filing for asylum lacked lawful immigration status, was younger than 18 and had no parent or legal guardian in the United States available to provide care and physical custody.

Unaccompanied minors who are in federal custody are often released to sponsors in the United States such as a parent or close relative and could be living with them at the time they file their application — meaning that many may not be considered to be unaccompanied minors under this new policy. From October 2018 to May 2019, more than 46,000 minors were released to sponsors, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

If the children are found no longer to be unaccompanied minors, they will not be entitled to certain special protections, including an asylum interview with a USCIS officer instead of having to make their case in an immigration court setting.

“USCIS continues to take actions to ensure that we carry out our duties in a manner that is fully in line with the letter of the law,” agency spokeswoman Jessica Collins said in a statement. “Ultimately, Congress must reform the law to address the underlying issues fueling the border crisis and encouraging unaccompanied minors to make the dangerous journey to the United States.”

In recent years, USCIS officers have considered an asylum applicant to be an unaccompanied minor if that was what Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection agents had determined when they first had contact with the migrant.

Under this new policy, which rescinds an Obama-era memorandum, USCIS officers will independently determine whether an individual was an unaccompanied minor when they filed their application.

USCIS is “basically relitigating whether or not a child at the time of filing was an unaccompanied minor or not,” said John Amaya, who served as the counselor to the director of USCIS from 2014 to 2015.

Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said that the new policy could potentially have “a profound effect on the children’s ability to seek asylum.”

“The asylum officer interview is a much less adversarial process that is thought to give the child a better and more comfortable setting,” she said.

U.S. border patrol agents attend to a minor who had just swam across the Rio Grande River from Mexico to Del Rio, Texas.

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Federal asylum officers have been rushing to process as many unaccompanied minor applications as possible before the change takes effect Sunday, USCIS personnel told The Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect against professional retaliation.

The change is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to make it more difficult for immigrants, including children, to seek asylum.

It comes during a week in which the acting head of CBP announced his resignation amid reports that his agency held some 300 children in unsanitary conditions in a remote Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas. A photograph showing the bodies of a father and his nearly 2-year-old daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande along the border also has gone viral in recent days.

Migrant deaths have continued along the border this year with the number crossing illegally surging to nearly 600,000, more than half of them families.

Federal asylum officers themselves have criticized Trump, saying his policies are putting people, including children, at risk.

On Wednesday, a union representing officers filed a brief in support of a lawsuit against a Trump policy forcing asylum seekers back to Mexico to await their court proceedings in the United States. The policy “abandons our tradition of providing a safe haven to the persecuted and violates our international and domestic legal obligations,” the brief states.

USCIS acting Director Ken Cuccinelli, an anti-immigration hard-liner who often casts doubt on asylum seekers as engaging in fraud, slammed his own employees, saying the brief was “an attempt by the union to score short-term political points.”

Michael Knowles, president of the union, told The Times his members were “taking the risk” because “we’re being asked to do things that are wrong, as a matter of conscience, and our training as federal employees.”

The policy taking effect Sunday reverts to procedures implemented under the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. At that time, asylum officers made “independent factual inquiries” to determine whether individuals filing applications met the criteria to be designated as unaccompanied minors and were thus under the jurisdiction of USCIS.

Ur Jaddou, a chief counsel to USCIS under President Obama, said that new procedures in 2013 allowing USCIS to adopt prior determinations made by ICE and CBP were implemented because “it was a waste of time and confusing” for USCIS to make a decision on unaccompanied minor status after one was made by other DHS branches.

“This new memo goes backward,” Jaddou said.

Lafferty, who wrote the memo, presented the change as one in keeping with a October 2018 decision by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals. The decision dealt with whether USCIS or an immigration judge has initial jurisdiction over the asylum application of an individual who was previously determined to be an unaccompanied minor but had turned 18 before filing their application. The board held that the immigration judge has jurisdiction to determine that the individual no longer qualified as a minor at the time of filing.

The new procedures may put legal clinics that work with these minors in a tough position. Patricia Ortiz, program director for the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, said some of their clients are released from federal custody very close to their 18th birthday, and attorneys may not have enough time to file their application before they become adults.

Unaccompanied minors are currently exempt from the standing one-year deadline to file asylum applications. Ortiz worries that if her clients are no longer considered to be unaccompanied minors, the fact they have not applied within one year would jeopardize their applications. She said some don’t apply within a year because they don’t have the support necessary to complete an application or may only be comfortable disclosing asylum facts after months of therapy.

Once they are no longer able to have their cases heard by asylum officers, she said, children could be kept in legal limbo with the rest of those whose cases are backlogged in immigration court. This wait could make it more difficult for them to give testimony that helps their cases.

“Children forget,” she said. “They forget details; they forget what happened.”

Miller reported from Los Angeles and O’Toole from Washington.

LAS VEGAS — Susan Gonzalez plans to pay off her credit card now that she no longer needs to pay taxes on the dollar bills that she stashes away at the end of long shifts pouring beers and mixing cocktails in a smoky sports bar.

Thanks to President Trump, “there’s more money in our pockets,” the registered Republican said. The Iran war might have spiked gas prices, but Gonzalez is still confident that the U.S. economy is getting stronger.

The Jackpot Bar & Grill, located about 4 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, is in the heart of Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Susie Lee is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican candidate Marty O’Donnell. The state has the highest concentration of tipped workers in the country because its economy is driven by the hospitality and tourism industries, making Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy a critical part of his party’s midterm pitch here.

The question for Nevada voters is whether they’re seeing more benefit from lower taxes or more pain from the country’s economic troubles, such as energy costs and declining tourism.

Lee’s district is a top target for the Republican Party in its fight to maintain control of the House. With a mix of working-class and high-income neighborhoods, it’s the most competitive of Nevada’s four congressional seats. In 2024, both Lee and Trump won the district.

Lee has held the seat since 2019, campaigning as a moderate and highlighting her bipartisan record. O’Donnell, a composer known for his work on the “Halo” video game series, became his party’s nominee this year with help from Trump and a $3 million personal loan.

The race has caught the attention of Trump-aligned super PACs. Safety and Affordability, an offshoot of MAGA Inc., committed this month to spending almost $3.2 million on advertising to help O’Donnell, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The total effectively matches the $3.1 million O’Donnell’s campaign has already spent on advertising reservations through November.

The heavy commitment puts pro-O’Donnell forces ahead by more than $1 million in the ad spending race in the district, where Lee’s campaign has spent $2.9 million and the Democratic House leadership super PAC House Majority Fund has put in $2.3 million.

Nevada is the birthplace of ‘no tax on tips’

Trump first announced his policy proposal at a June 2024 campaign event in Nevada, and he has repeatedly said that he was inspired by a Las Vegas server who suggested the idea.

“So we’re eating, and this beautiful young lady walks over, and I said, ‘How are you doing, everything good?’” Trump said in August. “‘Sir, they’re taxing me to death.’ I said, ‘Really? What are they taxing?’ ‘They’re taxing my tips. Sir, they should have no tax on tips.’”

The proposal was included in a sweeping package of tax breaks, social-services cuts and immigration enforcement that Trump signed into law last year.

O’Donnell has centered his attack against Lee for her vote against that bill.

“When she had an opportunity to vote for things that would actually help the people of the district, she said no,” O’Donnell told The Associated Press.

Lee attributed her vote to what she says were harmful and unpopular policies in the package. She also noted that the “no tax on tips” part of the legislation expires at the end of 2028.

“More importantly, they came at the cost of cutting Medicaid and SNAP and healthcare,” Lee told the AP at a recent canvassing launch in Las Vegas.

She and other Nevada Democrats support a separate proposal that would make permanent “no tax on tips” while also fixing what they say are issues with the current policy.

Slump in tourism lessens ‘no tax on tips’ impact

Lee said the tax cut isn’t helping because tourism is falling off.

“When people are feeling the pinch at home all across this country, the first thing they cut is their trip to Vegas,” Lee said.

Nevada’s tourism fell 7.5% from 2024 to 2025, according to Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO and President Steve Hill. Las Vegas hosted the Super Bowl and the second annual Formula 1 Grand Prix in 2024.

At a recent economic forum, Hill said high rollers are continuing to visit the city but lower-income visitors are not. The number of international visitors has also dropped significantly, especially Canadians who watched Trump feud with their country over trade and other issues.

O’Donnell said Las Vegas tourism is on the “comeback.” He said Trump’s tariffs served as a necessary way to negotiate with countries “that have been absolutely ripping us off.”

The composer blames the high cost of living on Democrats. He recently told a crowd at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas that one good job used to be enough to raise a family, buy a house and “live a comfortable, fulfilling life while getting ahead.”

“Somewhere along the way, that deal got broken,” he said. “Now many need two incomes just to tread water, and we’re still digging our way out of Biden’s inflation crisis.”

Nevada’s powerful labor unions are backing Lee

While O’Donnell has help from Republicans’ national war chest, Lee has the support of the political powerhouse that is the Culinary Workers Union, representing 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada.

Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge said the current “no tax on tips” policy brings some relief but is “deeply flawed.” A married couple filing jointly can deduct only up to $25,000 of their tipped income, Pappageorge said. The policy also does not apply to automatic gratuities that are charged to large parties, he said. Lee and other Nevada Democrats want to fix that, he said.

“There’s a history of our Democrats here fighting for fair taxation,” Pappageorge said.

On a recent weekend in Lee’s district about 50 days before the election, members from the Culinary Union, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations knocked on voters’ doors, hoping to sway those still undecided.

Paul Peterman, president of the local chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers, wearing a blue union T-shirt, a lanyard and shorts, walked to union households, carrying flyers supporting Lee and other Democrats. He asked a resident who he planned to vote for. “All Republican,” said the man, hidden behind his screen door. Peterman asked if he could leave a non-Republican flyer, and the man said, “No.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Peterman said as the door closed.

At the next door, the voter identified as an independent but said he’d vote for Lee. A voter at another house said who he plans to vote for was private. Nobody answered at the next few doors.

Peterman has been canvassing these neighborhoods for years, describing it as important union work.

“It sends a message that we’re all united, and you also need every hand on deck, too, to be successful in what you want to achieve,” Peterman said.

Hill and Beaumont write for the Associated Press.

The annual general debate of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) starts on Tuesday morning in New York amid dire circumstances. Besides traffic gridlock and overpriced hotel rates, cavalcades of motorcades and successive dignitaries delivering calibrated speeches, this session will hear Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s last speech on the state of the UN.

Guterres headed the UN for 10 years, and during that time, he repeatedly failed to defend it when it came under attack. He passes on his post at the top of a world organisation on the verge of financial collapse and more marginalised than ever before.

Paradoxically, Guterres has the United States, the host government of the UN, and its mercurial president, Donald Trump, to thank for this dismal state of affairs.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration withdrew from dozens of UN agencies and organs and, in an extraordinary move, ceased all payments of its dues to the regular and peacekeeping budgets of the UN. But these drastic policy decisions did not spring out of nowhere. Trump’s unhappiness with the UN is multifaceted, and his decision to stop fulfilling Washington’s legally binding financial obligation may well be the logical culmination of decades-long US policy.

In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration accused the UN of being a third-world, anti-US forum. To compel the organisation to better serve its interests and under the guise of the ubiquitous need for reform, which all secretaries-general fell for, the US started to withhold a share of its assessed contribution, which accounted for a quarter of the regular budget and a third of the peacekeeping budget back then.

By 1987, the US relaxed its payment withholding policy, but the precedent was set. Washington continued to use the threat of withholding payment to maintain its grip on an organisation it viewed and continues to view as a vehicle serving its national interests rather than a multilateral agent serving the whole of humanity.

Ever since the Reagan years, the US has kept the UN on a short financial leash, and to this day, has been deliberately accruing arrears. It currently owes an estimated $4.2bn – that is equivalent to 120 percent of the regular UN budget for 2026.

Trump has readily embraced this policy of financial blackmail. His administration has slow-walked mandatory payments, although earlier this month it paid $827m towards its outstanding dues so it could preserve its voting rights in the UNGA.

The president’s ambivalent view of the UN may be rooted in a lesser-known detail. In 2001, Trump, then a real estate developer, lobbied then Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be awarded the billion-dollar renovation project of the UN headquarters, but he did not get his way. That was probably not forgotten.

But just like during the Reagan years, there is another major factor driving Trump’s assault on the UN: US congressional politics. As Israel faced growing backlash at the UN for its genocide in Gaza, pressure from the Israeli lobby in Washington mounted. The Iron Dome diplomatic cover the US provided to Israel in the UN Security Council (UNSC) was no longer sufficient.

By 2025, two years into the genocidal campaign, Guterres’s tepid and overdue criticisms of Israeli policies, critical UNGA resolutions and scathing reports by special rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council – including Francesca Albanese, whom Washington placed under sanctions in violation of its host country obligations – became too much for Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US Congress.

In the 1980s, Washington deemed the UN a third-world anti-US forum; today, it is deemed anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. The US’s blind and unconditional support for Israel has brought it growing isolation at the UN, as has its decision to launch a war of aggression against Iran.

Against the backdrop of these developments, the selection of the next secretary-general is dominating the behind-the-scenes agenda. Guterres’s lacklustre tenure at the helm of an organisation on the verge of financial bankruptcy and political demise will soon be forgotten. But what should be remembered is that his appeasement policy vis-a-vis Washington since the first Trump administration has evidently failed.

The new secretary-general will inherit the modus vivendi under which all secretaries-general since Javier Perez de Cuellar have had to operate — chronic cash flow problems due to US arrears.

That should motivate the new UN leadership to consider an overhaul of how the UN budget is put together and how member states’ contributions are allocated. Leaving the power of the purse in Washington’s hands is a self-inflicted perpetual wound that could prove lethal for the organisation.

Another fundamental question is whether the UN would be better off had its headquarters not been in the US. For too long, Washington has seen the UN either as a vector of its national interests or in adversarial terms. It has even used its position as a host to exclude world leaders it has viewed as hostile or undesirable, such as PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and today Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Evidently, those are decisions only the UNGA can take. But a secretary-general with foresight and political backbone ought to provide views and leadership on those seminal questions to save the organisation from further marginalisation and possible demise.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

PHOENIX — Former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, a longtime Republican lawmaker from Arizona who shaped landmark water policies in the U.S. West and guided the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has died. He was 84.

Kyl died Wednesday night from a neurological disorder, said Gordon James, a communications professional who is a longtime friend of the Kyl family. Kyl had withdrawn from public life in December 2025 after announcing he had been diagnosed with dementia.

Kyl spent almost three decades in Congress, serving in both chambers, and watched his party undergo a drastic transformation, with his career spanning Ronald Reagan’s presidency to President Trump’s first term.

Former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who considered Kyl a mentor, described the former senator in a February 2025 interview with the Associated Press as a true statesman and a “workhorse” among Washington, D.C.’s “showhorses.”

“If you saw him on the plane, he was sitting in the aisle, in coach, and he was reading,” Ducey said. “And he was reading potential bills or Senate business.”

Kyl returns briefly to Senate to fill McCain seat

Kyl rose to a leadership position during his last full term in the Senate, when his Republican colleagues selected him as minority whip. After retiring from politics in 2013 and becoming a lobbyist, Kyl returned to Congress briefly in 2018, when Ducey appointed him to fill the vacancy left by the late U.S. Sen. John McCain.

His appointment drew high praise from Trump, who said he was looking forward to working with “the extraordinary senator.” Kyl stayed for less than four months before rejoining lobbying firm Covington and Burling.

“At the federal level, and I regret to say that this is the case, but probably a lot of my better achievements were in preventing bad things from happening (rather) than forcing good things to happen,” Kyl said in a 2012 conversation with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Lawyer with expertise in water gets elected

Kyl was born in Oakland, Nebraska, on April 25, 1942, and grew up in a rural farming district in Iowa that his father represented in the U.S. House. At 18, he headed southwest to attend the University of Arizona, where he met his wife, Caryll, and earned a law degree.

Before being elected for the first of his four terms in the House in 1987, Kyl was a key participant in shaping Arizona’s 1980 groundwater code as a lawyer representing a large water utility. The first-of-its-kind code created a regulatory framework for managing groundwater in the drought-stricken state, largely centering on the state’s population centers, including Phoenix and Tucson.

In 2004, Kyl authored legislation that provided one of the largest tribal water rights settlements, which, after a decades-long battle, gave the Gila River Indian Community enough water to fill nearly 313,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools annually. Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who later served as majority leader, called Kyl’s work ethic “legendary” in a 2012 floor speech and said Kyl had labored mostly behind the scenes for 15 years to advance the settlement.

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I was in a position to be the catalyst,” Kyl told the Phoenix New Times in a 2006 interview. “There wasn’t anybody else who could do that water deal. And it had to be done.”

Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy takes its name from him. Its director, Sarah Porter, said Kyl was generous with his time and an effective member of the state’s congressional delegation who took a practical approach to water policy. “He’s always sort of cared about the public good and been able to think about, ‘What will this mean for the generations to come?’” Porter said, adding that Kyl remained “quite a dynamo” until recent years, as his wife battled health problems.

‘Giant’ in the Senate kept Republican caucus together

Ducey said Kyl was a “giant” in the Senate, further describing him as serious, engaging, forthright and thoughtful. His biggest impacts, Ducey said, came from the way he kept the Republican caucus together in opposition to Obamacare and his staunch support of Israel.

Kyl also backed legislation to authorize construction of a fence stretching hundreds of miles along the U.S.-Mexico border. He later joined with Democrats to support a bill that would provide a path to citizenship and temporary guest-worker status for those in the U.S. without authorization. The proposal ultimately failed.

As a lobbyist, Kyl helped guide the confirmation of Trump-picked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kyl returned to the halls of Congress in 2018, he was known as Kavanaugh’s chief Sherpa — an informal but widely known term for a nominee’s guide to the political tundra in the Senate.

In a statement disclosing his dementia diagnosis, Kyl harkened back to the words of Reagan, when the former president revealed his own Alzheimer’s diagnosis and said he was starting a journey that would lead him to the end of his life.

Kyl said he shared Reagan’s confidence for Arizona and the nation’s future, and that despite his diagnosis, he was a “very fortunate man.”

Billeaud writes for the Associated Press. Former Associated Press writer Sejal Govindarao contributed to this report.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The Trump administration has announced that it will impose travel bans on officials it claims are responsible for discrimination against whites and other minority groups in South Africa.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday he would revoke U.S. visas or reject visa applications from foreign nationals found to be responsible for, or complicit in, enacting or enforcing laws and policies that allow for uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination and the incitement of violence against minority ethnic and racial groups in South Africa.

“The United States will not allow such behavior to go unchecked,” Rubio said in a statement. “These actions directly undermine peace, economic stability, and the rule of law, and they are incompatible with the pillars of America’s foreign policy.”

The South African government has strongly rejected U.S. allegations of discrimination against whites, calling the claims made by the administration since President Trump returned to office last year baseless and a result of misinformation.

It’s the latest U.S. move to sanction South Africa

Rubio did not identify any officials who would be targeted with the travel restrictions, though a lobby group for minority whites in South Africa has previously called for the U.S. to sanction officials of the African National Congress party, the party of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the largest in South Africa’s Parliament.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to sanction South Africa over its claims that whites, and especially the Afrikaner group, are being discriminated against by their Black-led government. Afrikaners are descended from mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who first came to South Africa in the 17th century. They were at the heart of South Africa’s previous apartheid system of racial segregation.

There are approximately 4.5 million white people in South Africa’s population of 62 million, which also includes whites with British or other heritage.

The Trump administration casts South Africa as anti-white

The U.S. has cited a contentious South African law that allows for the expropriation of unused private land without compensation in some circumstances, affirmative action policies that advance opportunities for Blacks and others, and a small number of violent crimes against white farmers as evidence of a larger anti-white stance in South Africa.

The Trump administration has also strongly criticized South Africa’s move to accuse U.S. ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, in a highly emotive case at the United Nations’ top court. Israel vehemently denies that allegation.

South Africa asks the U.S. to respect its sovereignty

South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said Wednesday that some of the domestic policies that the U.S. had branded as discriminatory were designed to address the injustices of apartheid and hundreds of years of colonial rule before that, when Black people were stripped of their rights.

“South Africa respects that the United States may hold differing views on certain policy measures and their implementation. … The people of South Africa likewise respect the right of the American people to develop legislation that addresses their own circumstances,” Lamola said in a statement. “We expect that the same respect will be accorded to the people of South Africa, as the principle of sovereignty requires.”

The U.S. says more sanctions will follow

The U.S. has enforced a series of other sanctions against South Africa during Trump’s second term for purported anti-white and anti-American policies. They include barring South African officials from meetings of the Group of 20 economic bloc this year in the U.S., and phasing out aid for South Africa’s HIV treatment program.

The U.S. has also launched a refugee program for Afrikaners and other whites, claiming baselessly that they are victims of a humanitarian emergency in South Africa.

The U.S. says the sanctions are because South Africa has not changed its policies, and warned of more to follow.

“This visa restriction policy is only the first step in a series of escalatory measures that will show America’s firm resolve in this matter,” the official U.S. Ambassador to South Africa account posted on X, referring to Rubio’s visa announcement.

Imray writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

It remains illegal in California for a school district to force teachers and other staff to alert parents about their child’s gender identity, but parents must be told when they ask about it, a judge ruled Tuesday in a widely watched case dealing with parental rights.

San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael Sachs, weighing both state law and a Supreme Court order, rejected an attempt by the Chino Valley Unified School District to reinstate its mandatory parent-notification policy.

“There is no requirement that the school district, on its own, after learning of transgender issues, contact parents and let the parents know of them,” Sachs said in court. At the same time, “in the event a parent makes an affirmative inquiry of a minor child regarding their status, whether transgender or not, that will trigger an obligation by the school district to respond.”

Under the Chino Valley policy, approved in July 2023, a school would have to notify parents of any request by a student “to use pronouns that do not align with the student’s biological sex or gender listed on the student’s birth certificate or other official records.” The same notification rules applied to the use of bathrooms or participation in sports.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately challenged that policy in court and it was put on hold. In October 2024, Sachs had ruled that most of the policy was discriminatory — and therefore illegal — because it singled out a group of students for treatment that was different than the treatment of other students.

As an example, he cited the possibility that a student would come out confidentially to a school counselor — and then that counselor would immediately be required to alert the parents, even against the student’s wishes.

A policy that could result in mandated actions by a school employee continues to conflict with the intent of a 2025 California law that barred a school system from forcing teachers to tell parents about a student’s gender, Sachs concluded.

“That’s inappropriate and it’s still inappropriate,” Sachs said Tuesday.

New rules, new rulings

What has changed in the legal landscape, he added, is what happens when a parent requests information about their child’s gender status or sexual orientation or any number of other issues affecting that child.

Trial court rulings — affirmed by a Supreme Court majority in March — said that parents have the right to demand information about their child’s gender identity at school. School staff cannot lie to parents — including matters that a student wishes to conceal from their parents.

Attorney Emily Rae, representing Chino Valley, said Sachs was correct to acknowledge that parents had the right to information about their child, but that his ruling did not go nearly far enough — and that parent notification should be mandatory statewide.

Chino Valley also has a separate pending court challenge to the 2025 California law, contending it is at odds with the direction of the Supreme Court, which should take precedence.

Dept. Attorney General Delbert Tran, representing the state, declined to be interviewed Tuesday, but in his exchanges with Sachs, it was clear that he saw the ruling as about as much of a win as would be possible, given the Supreme Court’s recent directives.

He also said that supporters of parent-notification policies misstate or misunderstand the parent-teacher relationship that exists in practice and under state law. Parents, he said, have the legal right to observe classes and meet with teachers, and the expectation is that teachers will communicate freely and often with parents about a child’s needs and progress.

Chino Valley champions its view of parent rights

Chino Valley, a school district of 26,000 students in San Bernardino County, has adopted and defended a series of policies favored by parent activists, religious conservatives and President Trump under the leadership of school board President Sonja Shaw, a Republican currently running for the office of state superintendent of public instruction.

Under her leadership, the school system has taken a stand for a flag-ban policy in schools and classrooms, widely viewed as targeting gay pride flags; for removing school library books with passages deemed to be sexually obscene, and for working to ban trans athletes from girls sports and girls locker rooms.

Shaw attended Tuesday’s hearing and criticized Sachs’ reasoning.

“When he talks about a parent has a right to know now only if they ask, how do you know you’re being lied to or secrets being kept?,” Shaw said after the hearing. “That absolutely makes no sense.”

Shaw said the judge should have done “what’s right: Upheld parents’ constitutional right to the upbringing of their own child.”

In anticipation of Sachs’ ruling against the original policy, the Chino Valley school board revised the policy, expanding it to all students. Under the current policy, if any student “requests a change to their official or unofficial records, parents/guardians shall be notified to ensure that parents/guardians are informed and involved in all aspects of their child’s education.”

In other words, if a straight male student named William suddenly decided he wanted to be referred to as Robert on the class roll sheet — an official record — his parents would be notified.

In 2024, Sachs accepted this version of notification because students were not singled out for different treatment on the basis of their gender.

That form of the policy remains in effect.

Since that time, Shaw said, the district has been “transparent” with parents regarding important issues in the lives of their children. And Tuesday’s ruling would not change that.

Moving forward, she added, the district could assertively ask parents if they want to be informed about their child’s gender issues and that permission — if given — would continue to apply as the student proceeds through grade school.

Gavin Newsom, the California governor who loves to heckle Donald Trump and talk about the “big swings” he’s taken at policy while in office, is now a lame duck.

Within a few short months, he will be termed out of office and return to being a regular citizen, if not an average one. Newsom’s presidential ambitions are stronger than ever, and there’s virtually no list of Democratic hopefuls that doesn’t include his name near the top.

But 2028 is a long way away, about a millennium in political time. Newsom has a tough road ahead to not just stay relevant, but also to forge a difficult path between keeping a national profile as a Trump-attacking defender of democracy and not getting pummeled (or worse, ignored) when he loses the safety and power of his elected office.

Our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak take a look at what the next few months, and the next year, may have in store after the governor becomes simply Mr. Newsom.

Chabria: Newsom is making the most of his last leg in office. Recently, he went on an election jaunt through the South, visiting the Carolinas and Alabama to help campaign and raise money in those states.

It is not his first out-of-state trip to lend a hand in campaigns, but likely one of his last as governor. He wouldn’t be the first elected official to have a gap year (or years) before being elected to the Oval Office — Ronald Reagan had more than five years off between being governor of California and winning the presidency — but it’s definitely a disadvantage.

How much do you think being out of office hurts Newsom?

Barabak: Loyal readers of this column — thanks, we appreciate both of you! — know I’ve long looked askance at our gallivanting governor and his extracurricular, eyes-on-2028 activities. I understand that preening and politicking is way more fun and ego-enhancing than the minutiae of government in Sacramento. At the same time, I’m old-fashioned enough to think a person should do the job taxpayers are paying them to do.

But, as you note, that will be a moot point soon enough.

I’m not certain being out of office will be all that great a hindrance. In fact, I think it offers advantages, the main one being Newsom’s freedom to devote his full time and energies to running for president.

You mention Reagan; I don’t think it’s an accident he made two failed tries for the White House while serving in Sacramento. Pete Wilson also attempted the leap from the state Capitol to Washington, and failed badly.

It’s tough to do both.

As Dan Schnur, a former Wilson strategist, once put it, “There aren’t any direct flights from Sacramento to Manchester” — New Hampshire traditionally being home to the first primary — “and you can’t run the state from a cellphone at O’Hare” airport.

So I don’t think exiting office will necessarily hurt Newsom. But I’m highly dubious of his presidential prospects nonetheless. You?

Chabria: This is definitely a wide-open race, with, I suspect, contenders not yet on any lists. It’s way too early to know if Newsom will make it in the primary, but I do think he’s positioning himself in a way that differentiates him from some of the folks he may run against.

Socialism is the right’s boogeyman, framed as a peril to democracy full of death panels and welfare fraud. More than one presidential aspirant has shied away from the label for fear of supposedly losing middle-ground voters or being dragged through the “communist” muck that MAGA media such as Fox News love to sling.

In a recent PBS interview, though, Newsom didn’t disavow some democratic socialist ideas, such as Medicare for all, pointing out that California has long had a powerful progressive faction and many of the ideas considered radical for the right are run of the mill here — and potentially popular across the country.

Newsom seems to be embracing some of those lefty stances, especially ones about affordability and opportunity. While affordability is going to be everyone’s platform, pairing it with big-swing policy like universal health insurance might appeal to voters tired of words without action.

It’s a smart lane, embracing MAGA’s labels instead of defending against them, with policies even middle-ground voters might appreciate in these increasing desperate days when ground beef averages nearly $7 a pound and coffee costs more than booze.

Barabak: While I’m skeptical the words “socialism” and “communism” are the talisman that President Trump and other Republicans believe, warding off what could be a dreadful midterm election for the GOP, I still believe the connotation — wacky, lefty policies — has potency among a not-insignificant slice of the electorate.

November’s election is going to be a referendum on Trump, as Newsom himself frequently says. The fight for the Democratic nomination is a contest of a whole other order.

We agree that no fellow Democrat is going to cede the $7-a-pound affordability argument to Newsom. But to offer some differentiation, many will doubtless portray him as being a bit too out there, especially when they start making the electability argument.

And that’s not to mention what awaits him if Newsom were to emerge as the Democratic nominee. (Fun fact: In 1988, it was a Democratic primary opponent, Al Gore, who first criticized Michael Dukakis over Massachusetts’ prison-furlough program. Republicans then seized upon the issue and used it as a bludgeon, to Dukakis’ great detriment, in the fall campaign.)

In a way, it’s interesting we’re even having this discussion about whether Newsom is too far left. There are parts of his record — his chummy ties to Silicon Valley, his light regulatory stance toward data centers, his making nice with the likes of Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, that make some Democrats question whether he’s too far right.

Chabria: It’s true that Newsom is more centrist than progressive, and equally true that most of America misses that point.

I think there is a version of the next election, though, where the Democratic Party has its own Tea Party moment, when a populist faction wanting social change carries power.

Call it the anti-Trump swing, the search for a Democrat who seems authentic and pugilistic. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker fit this mold.

Everything we know about elections and electability really is up for grabs in this new age of technology and billionaire influence, and the vein of frustration within the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party is only growing stronger because of it. If Republicans do lose out in the midterms — and I am not convinced they will — it changes the calculation on everything, including how far left the average independent voter may swing in the face of an economically crushing oligarchy.

But I would be remiss if I did not say this: Fears that Trump will interfere with the midterms or the next presidential election are justified. Even though things have calmed a bit — there is less talk of agents of some sort at polls — he is pursuing policies and pushing propaganda that could harm a fair election.

We need to safeguard elections, otherwise candidates don’t matter.

Barabak: We 100% agree on that. Candidates, and the campaigns they wage, matter only if elections are free and fairly conducted and all sides —looking at you, President Trump — acknowledge and abide by the outcome.

I wouldn’t, however, infer too much from the outcome in November. For many voters, it will be a chance to vent — about inflation, an unpopular war, Trump’s brazen money-grubbing, his blatant disinterest in the lives and livelihoods of struggling Americans and anything else that’s causing an irritating rash under their collars. That’s why it seems more likely than not Democrats will at least win control of the House.

But midterm results are notoriously unreliable barometers of the presidential election that follows. To give just a few examples, Republicans walloped Democrats in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections and yet Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each won reelection just two years later. In 2022, Democrats fared surprisingly well in the midterm election, and in 2024, well … you know what happened.

Chabria: I don’t think America has a past political moment that can be compared to this one. By nearly every independent measure, the United States is closer to an autocracy than we’ve ever been. We’ve lost the respect and trust of our allies, and a political party that has the support of only about 30% of citizens is reshaping our social and civic life under white nationalist principles.

We are in a high-stakes moment, and the next election won’t be a decision between Democrats and Republicans, but between democracy and something else. The sad truth is that in 2024, more Americans did not vote at all than voted for Trump. About 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot, and Trump received only 49.8% of those votes.

The next Democratic nominee can come with whatever message they want, but if Democrats don’t vote, their candidates don’t win. So for Newsom, or whoever the nominee is, the first victory may be the nomination — but the real test will be turning out the vote.

Barabak: It’s a long way — about a millennium, as you said — from here to November 2028. I agree, though, on the importance of not sitting out this or any election, for that matter. I recollect a button I once saw in a shop on Elm Street, the main drag through, yes, downtown Manchester! It read: “Didn’t vote? Don’t bitch.”

That pretty well sums it up.

The reporter may have misheard the comment, or maybe the person being quoted actually said it, or something odd happened in the editing process.

Whatever: This is what appeared in the Feb. 20, 1985 edition of the Oakland Tribune, quoting a UC Berkeley professor about a protest against immigration sweeps in the Bay Area.

“This probably won’t stop the Iron Ass [federal government] from making raids in the Eastbay.”

“Iron Ass” is how someone might hear the acronym INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the forerunner to ICE.

And now, 40 years on, it fits right into the kind of angry, derisory language many Americans use for the present-day hammer-handed operations of federal immigration officers, around the country, especially here in California.

California has always been — and that’s a couple of centuries of “always” — at the fulcrum of the immigration-deportation seesaw in the U.S., with national policies yo-yoing between kicking workers out and inviting them in. Consider the foreign-born who joined the Gold Rush, the Chinese railroad workers, and still and always the Latino population along the long, wide international border.

That underlies the name of a new exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento, “Help Wanted/Leave Now!” about the “revolving door” of programs and practices that have alternately enticed and expelled workers, legal and undocumented.

The U.S. border with Mexico represents a political borderline but it cannot sever many decades of complicated history and culture. And it’s left us with endless paradoxes and contradictions of who belongs where, with the U.S. government shifting to and fro on deciding and enforcing that, depending on the American economy, and American politics.

Sean Manwaring is curator of the exhibit. “We have historically recruited foreign workers who set down roots, become members of the community, and then, when there’s an economic downturn or it becomes politically expedient, it’s kind of a revolving door.”

The endless argument is that undocumented immigrants, who work for less because of their needs and their vulnerability, take jobs that Americans will, or that Americans won’t do. Something else Americans won’t do: pay higher prices for food, 90 years ago or now.

Last year, the Kansas City Federal Reserve bank, one of 12 regional Feds, noted on its website, “Historically, the supply of U.S.-born farm workers has not been sufficient to meet demand for farm jobs at the going wage rate, contributing to a largely foreign-born workforce.” Even the H-2A legal process for hiring seasonal foreign workers “would likely be more expensive than employing undocumented workers.”

A 1924 immigration law that created the Border Patrol also revealingly put it under the control of the federal labor department. Cheaper Mexican workers had been welcomed during World War I, and were still coming north more casually back then, even as a U.S. labor group was beginning to agitate for organizing American migrant farmworkers.

But when the 1929 market crash and the Depression knifed the American economy, the blame for unemployment in the southwest and California in particular fell on these Mexicans, and the government’s “Mexican Repatriation” program sent hundreds of thousands back to Mexico, some voluntarily, some not, and some numbers of them American citizens.

Once, border migration patterns resembled a loop: thousands of laborers, mostly men, commuted here once or twice a year from Mexico to jobs in the fields, then on to other jobs once harvests were over. Then they’d take their earnings home to Mexico as breadwinners and comparatively rich men, and stay until the next year’s season.

But as U.S. policies over decades squeezed the border shut on this back-and-forth commuting, some workers chose to stay on the side of the border where they could find work, and a number brought their families north to settle, legally or otherwise.

Oct. 15, 1963: Mexican workers in the bracero program work in pepper fields in the Firebaugh area in Fresno County. This image is from the Los Angeles Times Archive at UCLA.

(Bill Murphy / Los Angeles Times)

And then that pendulum swung again. In 1942, Americans by the millions left their peacetime jobs for the war and wartime industries, and the “Bracero” program — from “brazo,” the Spanish word for “arm” — filled in the gaps in the domestic workforce with contracts for employers of Mexican workers, usually in agriculture or on railroads.

Under the program, the U.S. screened Mexicans for aptitude for the work, and for attitude. Manwaring shared with me the notes of Henry P. Anderson, a historian and farm labor organizer, who took a guided tour of a Calexico bracero processing center in 1958:

“Those deemed expendable were described one at a time: this one is too tall, he is too ‘cocky,’ that one a ‘loafer,’ another ‘lazy and irresponsible,’ he’s a ‘smart aleck,’ this one a ‘ladykiller’ and not ‘peon’ enough. On the other hand the ‘right man,’ according to the guide, was ‘built right. He’s a farm worker, you can tell that … he hasn’t got any big ideas. He’s got the right attitude. He’s humble, not fresh and cocky. He’s an Indian type, probably from Jalisco or Guanajuato.’”

Feb. 1, 1954: Unpublished photo from the Mexicali border crossing during the bracero program. Not known if these men are entering or leaving United States.

(Frank Q. Brown / Los Angeles Times)

Through the bracero program’s 22-year span, as many as 4 million workers came in and presumably went home — though not always; a generation of families came here, or were born here, and stayed. About 15 years after it ended, a former Texas labor commissioner and ranking Labor Department official overseeing the program went public. He characterized wages for braceros as unconscionably low, the food substandard and the housing prison-like. “It was not altruistic at all. The bracero program was definitely created by the farmer who needed to make a dollar.”

And then America’s policy yo-yoed again: in 1953, even as the bracero program was still operating, the federal government launched “Operation Wetback,” to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.

With its heavy-handed “sweeps” of labor camps and factories, American citizens were indiscriminately caught up in the operations, just as ICE is doing now.

Consider the breezy tone of a 1931 story in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, reporting on 1,200 Mexicans deported from L.A. County in a day, with the casual note that “virtually none of them” was “an undesirable alien — many are American citizens.”

“L.A. was really ground zero for these raids during Operation Wetback and the Mexican deportation,” said Manwaring. Those 1,200 deportees were among at least 50,000 deported from LA County in five months of 1931 — as much as a third of the county’s Mexican and Mexican American population.

Emilia Castaneda was no more than 10 years old when her Boyle Heights family was deported in the 1930s. In an archival videotaped interview made when she was in her late 70s or 80s, and now part of the exhibition, she remembered being teased by the girls in the parochial school she ended up attending in Mexico. “You’re not one of us,” they mocked her. “Go home.”

Just like today, as agriculture and other food chain businesses were hard-hit by Trump’s aggressive deportations, some industries and regions in earlier “sweeps” also asked for carve-outs and exemptions.

“I wouldn’t say there was a backlash but it really impacted agricultural networks across California and Arizona,” said Manwaring. “We came across specific requests from county officials like in Yuma, Arizona, asking for exceptions because they needed these workers, they didn’t have enough help.”

What’s called the Texas Proviso was a wink-and-nudge agribusiness-friendly federal loophole crafted in the early 1950s that for more than 30 years made it a crime to harbor or transport undocumented immigrants — but not a crime to hire them. (Federal law criminalized that in 1986.)

From the Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1954 front page headline: 500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.

(Los Angeles Times)

The 1950s enforcement drive also put the word “wetback” into casual use. Official statements and news stories used it to mean anyone here without documentation. It was derived from the people who waded across Texas’ Rio Grande into the U.S., but it was sometimes used interchangeably with any Latino workers. Sometimes it just got clipped to “wets.”

In 1961, as astronaut Alan Shepard sat aboard his Redstone rocket waiting to become the first American launched in space, hours of delays forced him to urinate in his space suit. “Well,” he remarked nonchalantly, “I’m a wetback now.”

Not much has changed. Court records released this July confirmed that ICE agents had been referring to immigrants during raids with such slurs as “wet” and “tonk,” the last term reportedly derived from the sound an agent’s utility flashlight makes when hitting a migrant’s head.

A 1956 crime drama called “Wetbacks” was a B picture about a human smuggling ring victimizing the undocumented. The Los Angeles Examiner’s movie reviewer called it a “tedious, amateurishly made picture [that] supposedly deals with how illegal Mexican immigrants are smuggled into this country.”

One of the paradoxes of these periodic anti-undocumented worker campaigns is how they divided Latino communities: the “I did it the right way” people who managed to get visas, the people whose forebears may have come illegally but are now themselves established, and the paperless people who have just arrived, or who have lived here for years under the radar.

Cesar Chavez with Richard Ybarra during the 1973 Coachella Grape Strike.

(Richard Ybarra)

César Chávez lived that paradox. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers — along with Dolores Huerta, an advisor on this exhibition — was a U.S. citizen. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, he wanted immigration officials to keep out undocumented workers, believing they’d be exploited as strikebreakers for growers and erode his union’s bargaining power. By the 1980s, though, he was endorsing immigration reform and protections, especially in the face of President Reagan’s recession-era 1982 “Operation Jobs” sweeps.

A Los Angeles Times survey that same year found that within three months of those raids, 80% of the booted-out workers were back on the job. Many of the Americans hired to replace them soon quit. They didn’t like the wages or the working conditions.

The employment manager of B.P. John furniture maker, in Santa Ana, told The Times, 75 of the American-born workers soon quit on him. “They told me they found another job, that the work was too hard, that there wasn’t enough pay.”

In June 1954, The Times covered the Border Patrol’s plans for L.A. Herman Landon, the local immigration chief, described a “stockade” being built in Elysian Park to “imprison illegal Mexicans flushed out” of factories, hotels, and “skid row saloons” at the rate of a thousand or two per day.

Farmers had once requested immigrant workers from smugglers by the truckload, and counted by “the head,” like livestock. When the feds moved in, workers were deported south of the border, sometimes far south, by bus, by ship, by plane. The feds briefly charged each worker $10 each for the cost of being deported.

The caption of a June 1952 photo in the McAllen, Texas, Evening Monitor that showed men boarding a deportation plane read, “It’s a quick bite to eat then off into the wild blue yonder for these wetbacks.” The newspaper offered a $5 prize in a contest to name the airborne deportations. Not all readers were cheering. One acidly suggested calling it “Truman’s Gestapo Airlift.”

The human numbers for any of these programs, coming in or kicking out, are hardly ever confirmed, but over all this time we are talking about the movement of millions — and the deaths, still uncounted.

Trump said he always planned to model his deportations on the Eisenhower-era operation.

“We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,” Trump told “60 Minutes.”

In July 1954, under Eisenhower, 88 workers died of sunstroke in the desert below Calexico, where they’d been deported.

A poster size photo in San Pedro of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who was fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In the first 17 months of the second Trump administration, at least 52 people died in ICE custody. ICE agents have shot and killed at least six more people, some in their cars, and some right out in public, like Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and Keith Porter Jr., shot last New Year’s Eve in front of his L.A. apartment building by an off-duty ICE agent.

The deaths recall a deportation sweep in 1948, when a plane carrying 28 workers back to Mexico, with a crew of four, caught fire and crashed near Coalinga. The press coverage then identified the crew but not the dead Mexican workers, whose individual stories were finally told 70 years later in Tim Z. Hernandez’s book “All They Will Call You.”

The grave marker for the Mexican nationals killed in a 1948 plane crash did not include their names.

(Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

The title is a line from Woody Guthrie’s celebrated song “Deportees,” about the crash, and what it signified in a nation that used and used up its foreign workers, and it ends like this:

“Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/And be called by no name except ‘deportees’?”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.