protesters

Protesters have blocked roads outside the Israeli embassy in London, condemning Israel’s violent strikes on Lebanon which killed hundreds across the country on the day the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Many demonstrators also expressed solidarity with Iranians and Palestinians who have all suffered under Israeli bombardment.

Around two dozen protesters gathered outside the US embassy in Tel Aviv, calling for an end to the war with Iran and Lebanon. Police ordered the protest to disperse within minutes as tensions rose and members of the public confronted demonstrators.

The activists were protesting the alleged use of the RAF base as a departure point for US aircraft involved in the US-Israel war on Iran.

British police have arrested seven people on suspicion of supporting the banned group Palestine Action at a protest near a Royal Air Force (RAF) air base in eastern England used by United States forces.

The five men and two women arrested at a peace encampment just outside the Lakenheath airbase had gathered with other activists on Sunday to protest the alleged use of the base as a departure point for US aircraft involved in the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, which organised the protest, said the seven had been arrested wearing clothing with the message: “We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action.”

Police said the protesters had been arrested “on suspicion of supporting a proscribed organisation”.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation last year, making it a criminal offence to belong to or support the group.

In February, a court ruled the ban was “disproportionate” and interfered with the right to free speech. But the government has appealed, and the ban remains in effect in the meantime.

More than 2,700 people have been arrested and hundreds charged over rallies in support of the group, according to protest organisers Defend Our Juries.

Police said in a statement on the latest arrests that they had a duty to enforce the law “as it currently stands, not as it might be in the future”.

Two protesters were also arrested on Saturday at Lakenheath and charged with obstructing public thoroughfares, police said.

US President Donald Trump has railed against Starmer for what he calls insufficient support in the US-Israel war on Iran, straining the countries’ longtime alliance.

The United Kingdom has authorised the US to use British military bases to carry out “defensive” operations against Iran and protect the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes in peacetime.

Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores appeared this Thursday at the US Southern District Court in lower Manhattan for the second hearing since their extraction in January, this time to argue that the US government’s refusal to let Venezuela foot their legal bill amounts to a constitutional violation. Judge Alvin Hellerstein said he wouldn’t dismiss the case, but no decision was taken over the issue of Maduro’s lawyer fees. 

Outside, in the street, New York was doing what New York does, moving fast and with indifference, while dozens of people brought twenty-five years worth of receipts to show to a multitude of pro-Maduro advocates and those leaving the courthouse. This is what I saw.

On the way to 500 Pearl Street, I passed two men wearing matching grey Nike tech sets, the now infamous outfit that Maduro was wearing in the first image after his extraction. They weren’t there for the protest, surprisingly, but your brain does what it does.

I got there around 10 am with a Venezuelan flag, a phone and a jacket that I quickly regretted bringing. Even the maracuchos were struggling with the heat after a while. By the time I arrived, the scene outside the courthouse had long organized itself into two blocs. On one side: baseball jerseys, suits, delivery backpacks, seven and eight-starred flags, and handmade signs. Hanging from a tree like a piñata that had made bad life choices, a Maduro life-size figure in a prison uniform courtesy of artist Jorge Torrealba. A Spanish man held up a sign with the faces of Maduro, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez below the word Criminales. A woman from Catatumbo, Zulia held a sign that read Libertad para Fernando Loaiza, the democratically elected mayor of her local government who was detained last March by Maduro security forces and still remains in prison without trial.

On the other side of the barricade, mass produced laminated signs asking for the release of Maduro and Flores and chants delivered with little conviction. The early birds reported that the crowd arrived around 8 am. Although I found no public call from the expected culprits (The People’s Forum, Codepink, and other usual suspects) they assembled around 20 people from different socialist groups, holding our flag with the slightly uncertain grip of someone who had picked it up that morning. Their chants were about US imperialism, sovereignty, and international law. All real things. All also, somehow, beside the point.

The pro-Maduro crowd chanted back: “Free them all.” For a second I thought we were agreeing on the immediate and unconditional release of Venezuelan political prisoners.

When Venezuelan citizens addressed the crowd in Spanish, there was mostly no reaction. Some of them got out a word or two, with the confidence of a born-and-raised Venezuelan yet the persuasiveness of a no sabo kid. When we spoke their language, American English, they either ignored us, flipped us off, or played dumb.  

The Venezuelan ensemble erupted into “A mí no me pagaron, yo vine porque quise” (I didn’t get paid, I came because I wanted to) with the exasperated tone of a people who have been chanting this phrase for decades. In the background, a t-shirt with an all caps text stood out: I’M VENEZUELAN. NO PROPAGANDA.

Our Gloria al Bravo Pueblo was sung at least six times, drowning out the chants of the US protesters without fail every single time. Tambores weren’t lacking, either. The chant that carried the morning was ¿Quiénes somos? Venezuela. ¿Qué queremos? Libertad. ¿Qué queremos? Justicia. Over and over. 

Ironically, the pro-Maduro crowd chanted back: “Free them all.” For a second I thought we were agreeing on the immediate and unconditional release of the 503 political prisoners that Delcy Rodríguez and Diosdado Cabello still refuse to let out. There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that works like a splinter. I started drifting toward the ones within hearing range.

There was a pride flag next to a Free Maduro sign. I asked about Yendri Velázquez, LGBTQ+ activist shot alongside Luis Peche in a targeted attack in Colombia, both of them driven into exile by the regime they exposed. They too await justice to be served. I asked them about the socialist Gran Polo Patriótico bloc that has spent years with the government’s full blessing refusing to address abortion rights or same-sex marriage in the National Assembly. By 2025, Pride in Caracas had been stripped of its activist organizations, and groups that chose to march did so “as discreetly as possible” because of Maduro & Co.’s post-28J crackdown. 

Almost everyone was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, which made the next question unavoidable. In 2017, then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez expressed Venezuela’s desire to restore full ties with Israel. The following year, Maduro welcomed Jerusalem’s Sephardic chief rabbi to Miraflores tweeting about it warmly and awarding him with the Libertadoras y Libertadores medal. Venezuela never stopped trading with Israel either, not even after Chávez cut diplomatic relations. Anti-Zionism is a costume worn for the cameras and removed at Miraflores. A useful one the international left has used to dismiss criticisms against Maduro in the name of anti-imperialism.

The man who spent decades making sure others couldn’t speak now needs a translator to follow the room.

The international left has a type when it comes to diasporas: the refugee, the grieving exile, the cautionary tale of imperialism. Step out of those lines and you become brainwashed, biased, or on somebody’s payroll. We’re victims or foe. Noble savages or CIA plants. The crowd outside the courthouse on Thursday didn’t fit any of those categories, and didn’t try to. They are the people who have spent years being told their grief is too close to be credible and their knowledge too lived-in to count as such.

Around noon, the pro-Maduro contingent quickly cleared out. Clocked out, if you will. The hearing ended at one, giving me just enough time to gather some impressions before heading uptown for my afternoon class.

Those who had been inside began filtering out into the streets and the gathering. Among them was Jorge Torrealba, wearing a colorful outfit and holding a stack of papers. A crowd formed around him immediately. He shuffled through his sketches of the hearing as questions came from every direction: What did he look like? ¿Cómo lo viste? When is the next hearing? Did he say anything?

He looked skinnier, Torrealba said. And quiet. That tracked. Unlike the January arraignment, when Maduro delivered a several-minutes-long speech professing his innocence from the defense table, he said nothing in court on Thursday. Neither did anyone in the audience. He sat in his grey prison uniform with headphones on, jotting notes, occasionally leaning over to whisper to his lawyer through an interpreter.

The man who spent decades making sure others couldn’t speak now needs a translator to follow the room. We didn’t need one to tell each other—and the world—what it costs to have been right for twenty-five years and to finally not have to whisper it.

WASHINGTON — A lead attorney for the Department of Homeland Security suggested that federal agents should have “just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away” during an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles last June, internal emails show.

The note was in an email chain obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act and shared exclusively with The Times.

In it, attorneys for Homeland Security appear to be discussing the June 9 lawsuit filed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom over President Trump’s deployment of thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles.

Under the subject line “California DOD Lawsuit,” officials coordinated legal filings defending the Trump administration and included a draft declaration by the Los Angeles field office director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement supporting the deployment of military forces.

The final email in the thread was from Joseph Mazzara, then-acting DHS general counsel, and he appears to be referring to an incident in which protesters tried to breach a protective line at a federal building.

On June 11, he wrote: “Every time I read about the battering ram incident I’m just floored at how wild that is.”

Referring to law enforcement as “they,” he continued: “They should have, when they brought the line in, just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away from them. No one likes being hit by a stick, and people tend to run when that starts happening in earnest.”

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mazzara was later appointed deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Politico reported that Mazzara is among 10 staffers who followed former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the State Department after she was fired this month from DHS and given a new role as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

The battering ram incident Mazzara referred to is detailed in court documents for the lawsuit.

A June 19 order from a panel judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals states that Trump administration attorneys presented evidence of protesters interfering with federal officers. The protesters threw objects at ICE vehicles, “pinned down” several Federal Protective Service officers and threw “concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects,” the order said.

Protesters also “used ‘large rolling commercial dumpsters as a battering ram’ in an attempt to breach the parking garage of a federal building,” the order states.

Mazzara’s comment in the email thread with other Homeland Security attorneys was given to American Oversight with a watermark showing the agency had intended to withhold it. American Oversight also received a version of the documents with that statement redacted.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said it’s no wonder the administration wanted to keep Mazzara’s comments hidden.

“They reveal a level of hostility toward protesters that is deeply at odds with the government’s obligation to protect civil liberties — and there’s no FOIA exemption that justifies hiding them,” she said.

Kerry Doyle, the former top ICE attorney during the Biden administration, said Mazzara’s comments show a shocking carelessness about the potential for harm against both the general public and the officers he was employed to protect.

The email, she said, “seems to encourage, or, at the very least, support constitutional violations by the operators that are supposed to be getting legal counsel from him to avoid violating the law.” Plus, commenting on operational strategy is outside the scope of his responsibilities, she said.

“He’s doing a disservice to the people that are on the front line, that rely on him and his colleagues to give them the parameters of what they can and can’t do,” Doyle added. “If you give them bad legal advice, you are setting them up for liability.”

Noem’s removal came amid backlash against an escalation of violence during Trump’s crackdown on immigration, including the shooting deaths of U.S. citizen protesters by immigration agents.

Doyle said part of the secretary’s job is to set the tone for the agency so the rank and file know what is expected of them. Mazzara’s comments, she said, show how that tone has permeated all facets of the agency.

After the U.S. Supreme Court cast doubt on the Trump administration’s legal theory for using troops in domestic law enforcement operations, the president in December began removing the National Guard from Los Angeles and other Democratic-led cities.

The protests last summer caused significant property damage in a small section of downtown Los Angeles. But grand juries refused to indict many demonstrators accused by federal prosecutors of attacking agents, and a Times review of alleged assaults found that most incidents resulted in no injuries.