Chantal Anicoche is a friend of mine. 

We have shared meals together, gone to protests together, and sat together in meeting after meeting figuring out how we can help our people in the Philippines.

On Jan. 1, 2026, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, supplied and supported by the United States, rained bombs indiscriminately on the island of Mindoro. 

The AFP’s stated reason for the bombing was to kill members of the New People’s Army. When the people’s movement condemned the bombing as indiscriminate, they asserted that “its security operations against suspected New People’s Army (NPA) rebels in Abra de Ilog, Occidental Mindoro on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, were a legitimate response to armed threats despite criticisms from human rights groups and progressive lawmakers.” 

Of course, this is a tired, recycled justification the Philippines government uses to scapegoat the people’s movement as justification for its repressive measures. 

Chantal was there. She was in the Abra de Ilog area, working with peasants and peasant advocates to truly understand life in the Philippines. She was there to learn from the communities impacted the most by the social and economic crises that arise from the relationship between the United States and the Philippines. She was there with friends and family. 

By the standards of international law, this was humanitarian work.

After the bombing on Jan. 1, which separated and displaced the communities in Abra de Ilog, Chantal was missing. The international people’s movement mobilized immediately, raising the demand to surface Chantal. 

A week later, on Jan. 8, the AFP could no longer ignore the international public outcry and scrutiny. They released to the public photos of Chantal in their custody. 

I was relieved to know she is alive, but still troubled to see her looking afraid and confused in AFP custody. I know what the AFP is capable of — torture, indefinite detention, all manner of inhumane treatment.

The public pressure also forced the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) to publish a hit piece on Chantal and staged video mischaracterizing the situation. Feigning concern and respect for her well-being, the NTF-ELCAC predictably blames the Communist Party of the Philippines for putting her in danger. 

The Malaya Movement published a comprehensive statement on the hit piece, completely debunked the myths pushed by the NTF-ELCAC, excerpted here:

“It is unbelievable and illogical that the AFP found Chantal 7 days later hiding in a hole only 400 meters from the site of the attacks and crying out ‘help.’ It is basic medical knowledge that a person can only survive 3 to 5 days without water. How many takes did the AFP have to do on this poorly scripted and staged film shoot? The video editing is so amateurish that the video they released even included two instances of the soldiers supposedly ‘finding’ her. Our hearts go out to Chantal for being clearly coerced to act in this idiotic video.

“Due to the overwhelming international outcry, the NTF-ELCAC’s rabid online troll army has been unleashed to spew the most vile attacks on Chantal and the organizations tirelessly working to free her from the captivity of these AFP monsters. Aside from the obviously staged videos of her “rescue”, the AFP and these trolls have produced clearly AI-generated photos attempting to project the false narrative that she was an NPA rebel who is now smiling happily in the custody of the military.”

To date, there is no movement on the part of the Philippines government to release Chantal from custody and back to the United States. 

For me, this has been yet another all-too-real illustration that the imperialist relationship between the United States and the Philippines must end. The bombings, the extrajudicial killings, the ravaging and pillaging of the Philippines are not possible without the complete neo-colonial control of U.S. monopoly corporations of Philippine labor, land, resources, and government.

Whatever the Philippine government may say about the Communist Party of the Philippines, the National Democratic Front, and the New People’s Army, it pales in comparison to the actual violence and exploitation perpetrated by the Philippine government. 

I may not speak for all Filipinos, but I am for the people’s democratic revolution that will sever U.S. control of the Philippines. I am for the self-determination of my people. Neither the U.S. nor its stooges in the Philippine government will bring this to the Filipino people. 

I think it can be cliche to sing the praises of a friend who has come under attack. So I say without hesitation or exaggeration that Chantal is one of my favorite people I have ever met. She is genuine, compassionate, silly, and kind. She is dedicated to the Filipino people. She is dedicated to uniting Filipino communities across the world. She is a fighter for the people. Her sincerity and kindness are infectious. 

Chantal’s friends, family, and allies in the U.S. are asking everyone and anyone who wants to help to check out the following:

• Sign & share the petition: actionnetwork.org/petitions/surface-chantal-anicoche
• Use the advocacy toolkit to contact your legislators: tinyurl.com/chantal‑advocacy‑toolkit 
• Report your outreach here to amplify pressure: tinyurl.com/SurfaceChantalForm 

New York nurses are on strike. With 15,000 walking out on Monday, Jan. 12, this is the largest nurses’ strike in the city’s history. These nurses represent three different, privately owned hospital systems and are fighting back against hospital executives who have pushed them to the limit to squeeze out more profits – burning nurses out and endangering patients in the process.

On Jan. 11, John Parker with Struggle-La Lucha interviewed several nurses rallying outside NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. The following are excerpts.

John Parker: We’re from Struggle-La Lucha — can you tell us why you’re here?

Nurse 1: I’m here for better patient-to-nurse ratios. It means a lot. We need adequate staffing so we can properly care for them. That’s what we’re fighting for.

Nurse 2: I’m here for patient safety and safe staffing. We’re nurses and we cannot be spread so thin. They need adequate care. 

John Parker: I had a stroke three years ago, and it took three months for me to get a neurologist, a cardiologist. And luckily I survived, but the health care system is so bad. And I know what they take away from you is being taken away from us too.

Nurse 2: Exactly.

John Parker: So, why do people call you heroes?

Nurse 2: Heroes? Because we put ourselves last. We put everybody else before us.

Nurse 3: We put our patients before our bladders!

Nurse 2: Before our tummies!

Nurses and patients deserve better. Union power can get us there.

John Parker is an organizer with the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles and the Struggle for Socialism Party. 

A 19-year-old man has allegedly confessed to setting fire to a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. Stephen Spencer Pittman, of Madison, Mississippi, carried out the arson before dawn on Jan. 10, destroying the Beth Israel Congregation’s library and administrative offices. Notably, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed this same synagogue in 1967 because the congregation supported the Civil Rights movement.

Spencer has been quoted as calling Beth Israel the “synagogue of Satan” when talking to the cops. He appeared before a judge on Monday. When the judge asked him if he understood his right to an attorney, he answered, “Yes sir, Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Whatever else comes out about his personal motivations, the Jan. 10 attack should not be surprising. That is because there has been a rise in antisemitism coming from the right-wing – that is, from Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and its international counterparts. While Zionists falsely accuse the Palestinian liberation struggle of antisemitism, real antisemitic forces have gained ground.

Those forces had nothing to do with the incredible pro-Palestine encampments on campuses, or the millions who have marched in the streets of the U.S. and around the world. The real antisemites are just the usual suspects: the racist, sexist, anti-immigrant homophobes and transphobes currently applauding as the people are stripped of their rights.

That politics is very well funded by the most reactionary sections of the ruling class. And why is antisemitism so useful for the ruling class? Antisemitism serves capitalism by deflecting working-class anger away from the system itself and toward a mythical scapegoat: “Jewish bankers,” “cosmopolitan elites,” “globalists.” In reality, finance capital isn’t controlled by Jewish people – it’s controlled by capitalists of all backgrounds. This is all a diversion that divides the working class, thereby decreasing our power.

With the normalization of open antisemitism in some quarters of MAGA, formerly fringe figures from that world have gained mainstream exposure. For example, there is 27-year-old Nick Fuentes, who dined with Trump in 2022. Fuentes is a white supremacist, misogynistic, Holocaust-denying internet troll. He has over a million followers on Elon Musk’s X (Musk reinstated his account in May 2024). His livestreams routinely get over a million views and Tucker Carlson interviewed him, exposing him to even more people.

Or take the Young Republican Telegram chats that were leaked back in October. This Republican Party “youth” organization includes members from 18 to 40, so they are not all that young, even if JD Vance dismissed the outrage as “pearl clutching” over “a bunch of kids.” At any rate, these Young Republicans talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide. They mocked trans people and people of color while praising slavery.

They typed up infantile, sociopathic fantasies about putting their enemies in gas chambers. In a long string of Holocaust jokes, Joe Maligno – who had already identified himself as the general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans – quipped, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic?” Another wrote, “I love Hitler.”

Fuentes’ rise and these leaked chats show just how far toward fascism and neo-Nazism sections of the right-wing have gone. But this drift is not accidental or dependent on any specific “influencers,” grifters, politicians or billionaires. It is happening because the capitalist-imperialist system is in decay. The U.S. leads this declining system and is rapidly declining itself. So, the possibility appears for the capitalist state to be transformed from a formally “liberal” one to a fascist one. This is the capitalists’ most extreme “solution” to the system’s inevitable crises.

Historically, fascism was a way for the capitalist class to try to maintain its grip on power when the system experienced deep shocks, as in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Depression enabled movements like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s to grow and take power.

Trump has made the government much more authoritarian while imposing austerity on the people. The fascistic tendencies are on display in the administration and in the MAGA base, whose internal divisions may be intensifying. But for now, MAGA has been unable to develop something essential for a fascist regime: an organized mass movement that can sustain street violence to effectively crush any resistance.

Although Trump has unleashed Gestapo-like ICE and a federalized National Guard in communities across the country, these forces are not backed up in a large capacity by, say, armed Proud Boys, explicit neo-Nazi organizations, or any of the many right-wing militias in the U.S. There is certainly a great deal of crossover between such organizations and law enforcement. But in a full-fledged fascist scenario, we would expect a real deployment of these groups to go around and violently shut down progressive protests and simply seize or even kill immigrants. Think of the Nazi Brownshirts, or contemporary Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian people alongside the official armed forces.

For now, a real weakness of MAGA is that they are vastly outnumbered by progressive people in the streets, leaving the cops and troops isolated. That does not mean that these state occupation forces are not dangerous: The world watched ICE agent Jonathan Ross shoot Renee Good right in the face. But the people in the street are against them.

While we can expect more “lone wolves” like synagogue arsonist Stephen Spencer Pittman, for now, we do not have masses of such people flanking ICE. The continued resistance of working-class and oppressed people has objectively made it harder for ICE to operate, and it is the workers who can keep a full-blown fascist regime from coalescing.

As already argued, fascism has become a possibility because the imperialist system is in decay. But the crisis that produces fascism also creates conditions for a revolutionary working-class movement. Fascism is not inevitable – it can be defeated. The potentially revolutionary people outnumber them by a vast margin. If we stay in the streets – if we fight for everyone who is under attack – we can win.

The intensified bombardment of Somalia and the assault on Somali communities in Minnesota are not separate policies. They flow from the same source: a capitalist system that requires military domination abroad and uses raids, deportations and the threat of denaturalization to terrorize nationally oppressed workers at home.

In the first two weeks of 2026, U.S. Africa Command launched as many airstrikes in Somalia as it reported in all of 2024. At the same time, 2,000 federal immigration agents deployed to the Twin Cities, where the largest Somali community in the country has built a life over the past three decades. The timing is not coincidental. Both operations serve the same objective.

The military campaign

The 2025 air campaign in Somalia saw 124 strikes — nearly double the previous record. The Pentagon has stopped providing casualty estimates. The Somali government, dependent on U.S. support, has silenced local journalists. What filters through are fragments: villages bombed near Bosaso, strikes around Godane, and in September 2025, the killing of a clan elder described locally as a peace mediator.

The elder had just met with the president of the Puntland region when a U.S. drone strike killed him. AFRICOM called him an al-Shabaab operative. Somali federal and regional authorities said this was false. He was working to resolve conflicts peacefully — a stabilizing force that cuts against the permanent military presence the United States maintains in the Horn of Africa.

This is imperialism in practice. Critical shipping lanes connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden run along the region’s coast. U.S. military control ensures that trade routes remain open on terms favorable to U.S. monopoly capital and its allies. It also positions the United States to counter regional forces — whether Yemen’s Ansarullah or others — that challenge this arrangement. The instability created by decades of intervention is used to justify the continued presence of U.S. forces, which in turn perpetuates that instability.

From bombs to raids

People who flee this violence encounter a second front when they reach the United States. The same system that destabilizes their homeland criminalizes their presence here.

On Dec. 26, 2025, a right-wing influencer posted a video claiming Somali-run day care centers in Minnesota were empty shells defrauding the government. Minnesota’s Republican House speaker admitted helping produce it. Local journalists reported the claims were false — the centers were licensed, inspected and operating. But four days later, the federal government froze child care funding nationwide, citing the video as justification.

Federal prosecutors have charged 98 people — 85 of them Somali — with misuse of public funds. These prosecutions function as political instruments. They provide the pretext for freezing funding that serves tens of thousands of working families, deploying about 2,000 ICE agents to immigrant neighborhoods, and threatening to strip citizenship from naturalized Somalis over alleged paperwork discrepancies from years ago.

In early January, those 2,000 agents turned the Twin Cities into an occupied zone. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey described the scene as chaos and demanded federal agents leave. They did not leave. Instead, on Jan. 7, less than a mile from George Floyd Square, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good four times in the face through her windshield as she sat in her car.

Good, a mother of three and widow of a veteran, had been dropping off her 6-year-old child at school when she encountered the ICE raid on 34th Street and Portland Avenue. She stopped to support her neighbors. Her wife, Becca Good, was with her. Good’s car was blocking the street because federal agents had turned the neighborhood into a militarized zone. When she tried to maneuver around an ICE vehicle, Ross approached her window and fired four shots through the windshield.

Video from Ross’s own phone shows Good smiling at another agent seconds before the shooting, telling him, “It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Audio from the scene captures someone muttering “Fucking bitch” after the shots.

Good slumped over her blood-soaked airbag for 15 minutes while agents refused to provide medical attention. When a man who identified himself as a physician asked to check her pulse, an agent said no. The agent told him, “I don’t care,” claiming ICE had its own medics. Protesters asking where those medics were got no answer. When emergency responders finally arrived, they carried Good away without a stretcher.

The administration immediately deployed a coordinated lie. ICE officials claimed Good was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” and tried to run over agents. Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist.” President Trump said she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” The video evidence, including footage from Ross’s own phone, shows the opposite. Good was trying to turn her car around when Ross shot her. He was several feet away and not in the path of her vehicle.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed there was no evidence connecting Good to any investigation. Representative Ilhan Omar, who was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and represents the district where the killing occurred, called it state violence.

ICE agents know they can kill with impunity. The administration will defend lethal force regardless of circumstances. The killing of Renee Good is not an aberration. It is what happens when 2,000 armed agents are deployed to terrorize a community and told that their targets threaten national security.

After killing Good, ICE agents moved on to raid a nearby child care center and a high school, tackling people, handcuffing staff members, and firing tear gas until both facilities were forced to close.

One week later, on Jan. 15, another ICE agent shot a man in the leg during what the Department of Homeland Security called a “targeted traffic stop” in north Minneapolis. 

President Trump wrote on social media that “reckoning and retribution is coming” to Minnesota. 

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne said he was assaulted by ICE officers while observing them, calling it what it is: “This is a military occupation, and it feels like a military occupation.”

The same week, Homeland Security terminated Temporary Protected Status for 2,471 Somali nationals. The administration also ordered a review of every Somali green card in the country, opening the door to mass denaturalization.

The Somaliland strategy

While raids proceed in Minnesota, the administration is moving to recognize Somaliland — a self-declared breakaway region in northern Somalia — as an independent state. The goal is access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait for expanded U.S. and Israeli military facilities. Recognition would come in exchange for hosting Palestinians relocated from Gaza, according to reports of discussions between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Legislation supporting Somaliland independence has been introduced in Congress. The African Union and Arab League have condemned the plan as a violation of Somali sovereignty, but sovereignty in the imperialist system is conditional. It exists when it serves the interests of the major powers and disappears when it does not.

The pattern is consistent across decades and administrations. U.S. military intervention destabilizes regions in the Global South, creating refugee flows. When people from those regions arrive in the United States and form communities, they are subjected to intensified exploitation as low-wage workers and then scapegoated when political conditions require it. The fraud accusations are a pretext. The raids terrorize workers into accepting poverty wages and staying silent about workplace abuses. The denaturalization threats are a reminder that citizenship, for nationally oppressed workers, is always provisional.

This is not a policy failure. It is how the system distributes costs and maintains control. The arms manufacturers profit from the bombing campaigns. The politicians gain electoral advantage by directing working-class anger away from falling wages and toward immigrant communities. The underlying crisis — a capitalist economy that cannot provide decent jobs, housing, or child care for the working class — remains unaddressed because addressing it would require challenging the power of capital itself.

The defense

Somali organizations in the Twin Cities are organizing legal defense, know-your-rights sessions, and support networks for families facing deportation. Child care workers are resisting the funding freeze. These efforts build the infrastructure needed for sustained resistance.

On Jan. 13, a coalition of faith leaders, union presidents, business owners, and community organizers called for a general strike on Friday, Jan. 23. They are asking every worker in Minnesota to refuse to show up to work and every Minnesotan not to spend money that day. The demand is for ICE to leave the state entirely.

“We are going to leverage our economic power, our labor, our prayer for one another,” said JaNaé Bates, the co-executive director of Isaiah MN, an interfaith organizing network. Dozens of labor unions, faith groups, and businesses have endorsed the action. Organizers are calling for a mass march in downtown Minneapolis at 2 p.m. Faith communities will fast and pray.

The call comes after ICE agents have raided homes, dragged workers from their jobs, pepper-sprayed residents, assaulted high school students and staff, and continued terrorizing neighborhoods across the Twin Cities. The organizers are framing Jan. 23 as a “Day of Truth and Freedom” — truth about what is happening in Minnesota and freedom from living under military occupation.

This represents what terrifies the state: organized refusal across class, faith, and community lines. When workers withhold their labor, when communities refuse to cooperate with raids, when entire cities say no to federal occupation, the machinery of repression faces a problem it cannot solve with more guns.

Three months into the fake U.S.-imposed “ceasefire,” both Zionist forces and the elements continue to batter Gaza. The numbers are a dry ledger of atrocity: over 875 ceasefire violations, more than 400 murdered under the cover of a “pause,” and more that 1,000 injuries from airstrikes that deliberately target the lifelines of starving people: aid stations and border crossings.

Having demolished over 70% of Gaza’s homes, schools, and hospitals, the people of Gaza are left completely bare to the elements. Torrential rains, which would challenge any robust infrastructure, create mass suffering for a population living in ruins. Floodwaters churn with the debris of bombed-out apartment blocks and the unclaimed remains of martyrs. Children, already emaciated from an engineered famine backed by the U.S., now die of hypothermia in soaked tents. To call this a “natural disaster” is to repeat the lie of the century. Gaza’s inability to defend itself from the elements is a direct effect of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. 

Since winter began, over 30 Palestinians have died from hypothermia, and 24 more from storms and floods that damaged buildings. During this same period, Zionist occupation forces continued to demolish buildings – at least 2,500. Zionist destruction of what little infrastructure is left in Gaza deepens the humanitarian crisis and severely exacerbates the negative impact of weather. 

While Gaza drowns, the IDF and Mossad escalate their war against rising dissent within the 1948 borders of “Israel.” Last week, several dozen progressive Jews and Palestinian citizens of the ‘48 took to the streets against the genocide in occupied Jaffa, known as “Tel Aviv.” The event was met with the brutality that has been the hallmark of the Zionist occupation going back to 1947 Nakba. 

The demonstration was a combination of musical performance and protest against the “ongoing Holocaust in Palestine.” What began as sporadic attacks from hardline Zionist passersby soon grew into waves of assault from both fascist mobs and the police. A protester told Haaretz that “when the police arrived, they used extreme violence.” Video footage captured an officer choking an anti-Zionist Jewish woman after throwing her to the ground. Other protesters described their friends being “dragged away.” 

The violent suppression of this protest exposes the truth — there is no “vibrant democracy” inside the ‘48 borders, only a police state terrified of any anti-war consciousness growing among its citizens. 

The Zionist project has always sold itself to world Jewry as the ultimate guarantor of safety from persecution. Yet in Gaza, it has constructed the largest open-air concentration camp since Warsaw, and in “Tel Aviv,” it beats Jews in the streets for standing against genocide. What safety is there in becoming the new SS? What future is there in a state whose every action replicates the horrors our ancestors fled?

Jewish revolutionary forebears in the Warsaw Ghetto — the anti-Zionist socialists and communists of the Jewish Combat Organization — did not fight the Nazis so that their grandchildren could pilot armed drones over a crowded refugee camp. They took up arms as an act of desperate resistance to fascism. That same spirit lives today not in the IOF, but in the Palestinian fighter defending Khan Younis with an outdated rifle, in the Samaritan warrior like the released prisoner Nader Sadaqa, and in the Jewish protester in Tel Aviv refusing to bow to Nazi policies. 

Working-class people across the world must continue to demonstrate, march, strike, and raise their voices in solidarity with Gaza. And beyond that, a working-class movement to build socialism in the United States and across the world is the best and only way to permanently end the brutal U.S. imperialist system that makes Zionism possible.

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.

Federal immigration agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have seized at least five Indigenous people during raids in Minneapolis in early January, triggering furious denunciations from tribal governments who say the arrests violate binding treaties.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe confirmed that ICE is holding four Oglala Lakota people who were arrested near the Little Earth housing complex in the East Phillips neighborhood. A fifth person, Jose Roberto Ramirez, a 20-year-old Red Lake Anishinaabe man, was also detained after ICE agents repeatedly punched him in the face while he was complying with their orders, according to video evidence and family testimony.

“This is a treaty violation. Treaties are not optional. Sovereignty is not conditional. Our citizens are not negotiable,” Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement. “The irony is not lost on us.”

Militarized raids target Indigenous people

The detentions occurred as roughly 2,000 ICE agents and other federal personnel swarmed the Twin Cities in one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in the region’s history. The raids followed the Jan. 8 killing of Renee Nicole Good, a legal observer and mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents during protests against the crackdown — underscoring the level of force now being deployed against entire communities.

Tribal leaders say ICE has no jurisdiction

When the Oglala Sioux Tribe demanded information about its detained members, federal officials responded with an ultimatum: the tribe would only receive details if it entered into a formal agreement with ICE. Tribal leadership refused, stating that such an agreement would directly violate treaties that explicitly recognize tribal sovereignty and self-governance.

“We will not enter an agreement that would authorize, or make it easier for, ICE or Homeland Security to come onto our tribal homeland to arrest or detain our tribal members,” Star Comes Out wrote in a memo addressed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The memorandum states plainly that “tribal citizens are not aliens” and are “categorically outside immigration jurisdiction.” The implication is unavoidable: federal agents are acting as if treaties do not exist.

Detentions tied to a site of genocide

ICE has established its base of operations at Fort Snelling, a site inseparable from the history of genocide and forced removal in Minnesota. In 1862, the U.S. military imprisoned Dakota people at Fort Snelling following the U.S.-Dakota War, a campaign that culminated in the mass execution of 38 Dakota men — the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

“The fact that Lakota citizens are reported to be held at Fort Snelling — a site forever tied to the Dakota 38+2 — underscores why treaty obligations and federal accountability matter today, not just in history,” Star Comes Out said.

Community mobilizes to block arrests

Indigenous communities have responded with rapid-response defense networks aimed at physically protecting tribal citizens from ICE seizures. On Jan. 10, Rachel Dionne-Thunder, founder of the Indigenous Peoples Movement, narrowly avoided arrest after ICE agents surrounded her vehicle and threatened to smash her window. Community members quickly converged on the scene, forcing agents to retreat.

“ICE returned to their vehicle and left me alone when they saw the power of our people,” Dionne-Thunder said at a press conference. “The real power is with the people — with our connection to each other and to the earth. That’s what they’re afraid of.”

Sam Strong, secretary of the Red Lake Chippewa Nation, said approximately 8,000 Red Lake citizens live in Minneapolis and are directly threatened by the raids. “We are going to protect each and every one of them, including our descendants,” Strong said. “We are going to defend our people, and we are going to stand up for all of Minneapolis, all of Minnesota.”

Tribal governments including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Lac Courte Oreilles, and the Fond du Lac Band have issued statements condemning the raids and circulating “Know Your Rights” guidance. Several tribes are distributing free tribal identification cards while warning that documentation alone does not guarantee safety from detention under ICE operations.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe has pledged aggressive legal action to secure the immediate release of its detained members.

Oglala Sioux Tribe bans Homeland Security’s Noem

In a related development, the tribe formally banned Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation on Jan. 9, one day before the Minneapolis detentions were publicly confirmed.

The ban followed repeated comments by Noem, made while she was governor of South Dakota, claiming that “Mexican drug cartels” operate on tribal reservations and that murders on Pine Ridge were being committed by cartel members. Noem has also repeatedly described migration at the southern border as an “invasion.”

Star Comes Out rejected those claims outright, calling them a racist pretext for militarization and repression. He noted that many migrants arriving at the southern border are Indigenous people displaced by poverty, violence, and economic devastation rooted in U.S. imperialist policies.

“Calling the United States’ southern border an ‘invasion’ by illegal immigrants and criminal groups to justify deploying the National Guard is a red herring that the Oglala Sioux Tribe doesn’t support,” Star Comes Out said in the Jan. 9 statement announcing Noem’s ban from tribal lands.

The Native American Rights Fund has reiterated that ICE has no jurisdiction over Indigenous people in immigration matters and urged anyone whose rights have been violated to contact the organization at 303-447-8760.

New York, Jan. 13 — Do you remember when New York City nurses were heroes? When they showed up every day at the height of the pandemic, risking their lives to save thousands from a deadly and highly contagious virus?

The city clapped and banged pots at 7 p.m. for them. Politicians called them angels. Their courage was the thin white line between life and death for a city in crisis.

Hospital executives claw back pandemic-era gains

But the executives at New York’s largest and richest private hospital networks — Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, and Montefiore — have short memories. In the cold dawn of the new year, they have chosen not to honor that sacrifice, but to betray it.

Now in its second day, more than 15,000 nurses from these three corporate health care giants walked out, forming the largest nurse strike in New York City history. Their red NYSNA (New York State Nurses Association) shirts flooded the picket lines, a river of justified anger outside institutions dripping in billions of dollars in endowments and revenue.

This is not a strike for new gains. This is a defensive battle, a necessary uprising to stop hospital executives from clawing back the historic protections nurses won just three years ago. 

In 2023, leveraging the moral authority they earned during COVID, nurses struck and secured a landmark contract with, for the first time, enforceable safe-staffing ratios. That contract expired on Dec. 31, 2024. Now, management has returned to the table with red pens, seeking to slash and burn what nurses risked everything to achieve.

The nurses’ union has contended that the assault is twofold: an attack on patient safety and an attack on the nurses’ own well-being. 

The hard-won staffing ratios are on the chopping block, a move that would directly endanger patients and burn out nurses. Simultaneously, the hospitals are gutting health care benefits. At Mount Sinai, the contract with Anthem insurance also expired on Dec. 31, leaving nurses in the grotesque position of being unable to afford care at the very hospitals they serve.

The hospitals’ response has been a lesson in capitalist brutality. Rather than negotiate in good faith, they have chosen to spend obscene amounts of money — up to $10,000 a week per nurse — on temporary “travel nurses” to break the strike.

Nurses on the picket line have continued to exclaim that it is not safe and that replacement nurses are not properly trained. The striking nurses know this better than anyone; it was their job to train these underqualified replacements. As flu season peaks, this scab solution, paid for at a premium, constitutes a deliberate public health hazard orchestrated by management.

Profits over patients: why this strike matters

This struggle reverberates far beyond the picket lines at these three networks. The contract settled here will set the pattern for 6,000 additional NYSNA nurses at the city’s 11 public hospitals. This is a fight for the soul of health care in New York.

The pandemic revealed that our health care system is not broken — it is working exactly as designed by the profiteers who run it. It is a system that exalts caregivers as heroes in a crisis, then treats them as disposable costs in a spreadsheet when the crisis ebbs. It is a system where executives would rather pay a premium for scabs than guarantee safe staffing and decent care for the workers who form its foundation.

The nurses, in their brilliant red shirts, are drawing a line. They are reminding us that the heroism of 2020 was not a passive act of suffering, but an active, collective power. That power, forged in the ICU, is now being exercised on the street.

They are fighting for patients, for safe care, for their own lives, and for the principle that those who do the most essential work deserve security and respect. Their strike is a necessary intervention to cure the disease of greed infecting our hospitals. Solidarity with the nurses is a prescription for a healthier city for us all.

Sharon Black is a retired nurse who worked in Manhattan and Baltimore. 

On Jan. 11, at a high-priced gala in a carpeted ballroom, Rudy Giuliani let the mask slip. Speaking to a group of well-funded exiles, the former New York mayor and longtime fixer for the powerful didn’t talk about “human rights” or “democracy.” He talked about hunger.

“The sanctions are working,” Giuliani gloated. “The currency is going to nothing. We see signs of young men and women saying, ‘Give me some food.’ These are the kinds of conditions that lead to successful revolution.”

He wasn’t expressing horror at the sight of starving youth. He was bragging about it. For the billionaire class and the generals in Washington, a hungry child in Tehran is not a tragedy; it is a metric of success. This is the reality of U.S. sanctions. They are not a “peaceful alternative” to war. They are war conducted without uniforms or front lines — a calculated, systematic attempt to break a working-class population until it submits to a harsher, imperialist-backed order.

Hunger as policy

The people Giuliani addressed are a collection of former royalist exiles being groomed by the Pentagon and Wall Street to oversee the recolonization of Iran. Long promoted as a replacement government, these figures represent a bridge for foreign corporations to return to the oil fields and banks they once owned. 

They aren’t looking to free the Iranian people; they are looking to hand Iran’s oil and gas back to the same Western billionaires and bankers who used to treat the country as their private gas station.

For more than 40 years, the U.S. military and financial centers have surrounded Iran. They use sanctions when a direct invasion is too risky and a permanent occupation too unstable. This allows the centers of power in Washington and Wall Street to impose their will without the political cost of a body count of their own soldiers. Instead, they let the bodies pile up in the hospitals and marketplaces of the target nation.

Since the 1979 Revolution, every U.S. administration — regardless of party — has tightened the noose. The excuses change like the weather: Sometimes it is nuclear technology, other times it is “terrorism” or “regional stability.” But the underlying demand remains fixed: Iran must surrender control of its oil, its banks, and its future.

Iran’s real “crime” was the 1979 Revolution itself. That year, the people overthrew a U.S.-installed dictator, the Shah, who had been placed on the throne by a CIA-led coup in 1953 to ensure that Iranian oil enriched foreign corporations rather than the Iranian people. By reclaiming their resources, Iran did the one thing the imperialist system cannot tolerate: It existed outside of their control.

What independence made possible

What followed the revolution was a demonstration of what independence makes possible. Despite the hostility, the new order reduced poverty and expanded health care into rural areas that the Shah had treated as mere extraction zones. Literacy rates climbed as education became a right, not a privilege for the elite. Life expectancy rose. Electricity and clean water reached millions for the first time.

These advances did not erase class contradictions or eliminate struggle inside Iran. But they were real, and they mattered. They showed that an oppressed nation, even developing unevenly under constant imperialist pressure, could use its own resources to raise living standards without submitting to foreign control.

These gains showed that an oppressed nation could develop its own life, even under constraint, without taking orders from the World Bank or the Pentagon. And that is exactly why those gains had to be destroyed.

Sanctions strike at the kitchen table

Sanctions are designed to strike at the kitchen table. This is not a side effect. It is written into sanctions design.

When the U.S. Treasury Department blocks a bank, it isn’t “pressuring a regime.” It is devaluing the paycheck of a factory worker in Isfahan. It is making sure a mother in Shiraz cannot find specialized medicine for her child. It is ensuring that spare parts for power plants don’t arrive, so the lights go out in working-class neighborhoods.

This suffering is the intended output of the system. In the 1970s, the Nixon administration explicitly set out to “make the economy scream” in Chile to topple the Salvador Allende government that dared to nationalize its copper mines. In the 1990s, U.S.-led sanctions destroyed the industrial base of Iraq, leading to the deaths of half a million children. When asked if that price was worth it, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright didn’t flinch. She said it was.

Today, the same script is being played out. Since late December, the collapse of the rial and the rising cost of bread have driven people into the streets of Tehran and beyond. Western media outlets, acting as the public relations arm of the State Department, rushed to frame these as “freedom protests.” They ignore the fact that the “food riots” they celebrate are the direct result of the economic blockade they support.

The grievances are real, but they are being selectively amplified and repackaged to divert attention from the imperialist siege itself.

Washington creates the misery, and then points to that misery as proof that the Iranian people need “saving” by the very people who are starving them.

But the goal is not to “save” anyone. The goal is submission. When a country is placed under siege, the margins for survival shrink. The government is forced to make impossible choices: Cut subsidies for the poor or watch the currency evaporate. This is how the imperialist system weaponizes the internal life of a nation, forcing workers to choose between the slow death of a blockade or the sudden death of a puppet government that will hand the country back to the oil companies.

Despite this, the siege has not produced the surrender Washington expects. Instead, it has forced a different kind of growth. Iran has been forced to build its own refineries, its own medicines, and its own industrial base because it had no other choice. It has also found allies in the same boat — forging ties with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. These are not ordinary trade deals; they are acts of mutual survival among nations that refuse to be colonies.

Sanctions are a globalized form of class war. The same forces that use the dollar to strangle Iran are the ones that use the police to break strikes at home, allow landlords to hike rents until families are on the street, and shut down hospitals in our own neighborhoods.

The struggle of the Iranian worker to afford bread and the struggle of the worker in the United States to afford rent are the same struggle. Both are being squeezed by a system that prioritizes the expansion of profit over the maintenance of life. Breaking the siege on Iran is not just a matter of “foreign policy.” It is an essential step in dismantling a system that enforces profit through sanctions abroad and repression at home.