Getting co-decision powers on the budget, finally enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty after more than a decade of inter-institutional battles, was one of the European Parliament’s big wins.
The challenge facing MEPs in the coming months is whether they are really going to use those powers on the 2028-34 budget.
The early signs are that they are spoiling for a fight. The Irish government’s compromise proposal tabled on Saturday (10 October) – an 8 percent cut worth €141bn to the European Commission’s spending plan – isn’t exactly butchery.
But it does display a startling lack of ambition, in particular on the raft of ‘own resources’ proposed by MEPs to make the budget process less vulnerable to member states wanting to reduce or at least freeze their annual contributions
This time round, MEPs have proposed a digital services levy, an online gambling levy, and a levy on crypto-asset capital gains.
Put together the parliament reckons that these new taxes could bring an additional €30bn to the EU’s budget, on top of the €57.4bn that the EU commission believes can be raised from other levies, such as the emissions trading scheme and the carbon border levy.
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Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes, and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives.
Steven H. Woolf, a physician and researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, published the analysis in The Milbank Quarterly. He combined data from the United Nations, the CDC, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a U.S. mortality database to show how far American life expectancy has fallen behind the rest of the developed world, and increasingly, much of the developing world too.
By 2023, U.S. life expectancy ranked 38th among countries with populations over 1 million, trailing not just Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia but also Chile, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Israel, South Korea, and several Persian Gulf nations. Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn’t open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.
How Researchers Tracked the Rising Death Rates
Woolf built this analysis by comparing decades of death records rather than running a new clinical trial or survey. He pulled data from the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the U.S. Mortality Database, the CDC’s death-records database known as WONDER, and OECD data covering 16 other wealthy countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He tracked age-specific death rates from 1999 through 2023, sorted into five groups: infants, youth ages 1 to 24, young adults 25 to 44, middle-aged adults 45 to 64, and adults 65 and older.
A separate part of the study looked at all 50 states from 1941 onward, matching each year of life expectancy data to the sitting governor’s political party to see whether state policy choices lined up with health outcomes over time.
What’s Driving the Rise in Death Rates Among Young Americans
Drug overdoses top the list. Among adults 25 to 44, the overdose death rate rose sevenfold after 1999, from about 7.7 per 100,000 to more than 54 per 100,000, and surpassed circulatory diseases (such as heart disease and stroke) in 2015 to become the leading cause of death in that age group. Suicide rates for this same group are higher than in any other age bracket and climbed more than 40% between 2000 and 2023. Homicides rose 75.5% between 2014 and 2021, and deaths from car crashes and other transportation accidents rose 43.5% over that same stretch.
What surprised even close followers of these trends is how much of the damage now comes from disease rather than injury. Deaths from diabetes and other metabolic and hormone-related illness rose nearly a quarter between 2010 and 2019 among young adults. Deaths tied to liver damage from drinking more than doubled between 2010 and 2023. Deaths from alcohol-related mental health disorders more than tripled in that same window. Even high blood pressure, historically a problem of later adulthood, saw its death rate more than double among 25- to 44-year-olds between 2000 and 2023.
Middle-aged adults, 45 to 64, saw many of the same patterns: rising deaths from drug overdoses, liver damage from drinking, and diseases of the brain and nervous system, along with a COVID-19 death rate that nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021 even after vaccines became available. Older adults largely avoided these steep increases, though deaths from brain and nerve diseases doubled between 2000 and 2023, and deaths from endocrine disorders and suicide also climbed.
Infographic by StudyFinds
Where U.S. Life Expectancy Has Fallen the Furthest
National averages hide some brutal local realities. Comparing individual states to countries with similar life expectancy, Woolf found that Hawaii, the top-performing state, matched life expectancy in Western European countries like Sweden and Ireland. Mississippi, by contrast, resembled Libya, Venezuela, Belarus, and Syria in 2019. Conditions worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. By 2021, life expectancy in West Virginia and Mississippi matched Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and Iraq, and fell below North Korea and Syria. Life expectancy was higher in Palestine and Iran than in nine U.S. states, including Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Woolf’s review of state data going back to 1941 found that states led by Republican governors tended to see life expectancy stagnate or decline, a pattern that became especially visible after 2010 and turned into what Woolf calls a “natural experiment” during the COVID-19 pandemic. States’ sharply different decisions on masking, business closures, and vaccination, he writes, could be measured in death counts within weeks. Red states, the analysis notes, suffered the largest COVID-era drops in life expectancy, a pattern that held up even after researchers accounted for other factors like poverty rates and existing health conditions.
Other researchers cited in the review, who looked at generational patterns rather than state policy, found that Americans born after 1970 had higher death rates from heart disease, cancer, and injury-related causes than earlier generations. They concluded that the current stall in U.S. life expectancy stems from “multilayered social, biological, and generational forces.”
Why America’s Death Rates Keep Climbing
Woolf’s analysis lays out five broad categories behind America’s health disadvantage: a health care system without universal coverage, riskier individual behaviors like higher calorie consumption and firearm ownership, greater income inequality and poverty, a built environment that favors cars over walking and green space, and public policies that put less emphasis on collective welfare than peer nations do. None of these explanations are new, but the paper argues that treating overdoses, suicides, and chronic disease as separate problems misses the bigger picture: they are symptoms of the same underlying neglect.
That’s the sharpest point in the paper, and probably the one worth sitting with. Other wealthy countries didn’t stumble into longer lives by accident. They built universal health coverage, stronger safety nets, and tighter consumer and environmental protections decades ago, and it shows up in their citizens’ death certificates today. America’s problem was never a shortage of ideas for fixing this. It’s a shortage of political will to act on them, and until that changes, the gap between how long Americans live and how long people in dozens of other countries live looks likely to keep growing.
Canadians elected a government that promised to defend the country from Trump and his politics. Now corporations are demanding limits on workers’ rights — and Carney is expected to deliver
When a plurality of Canadians voted for Mark Carney’s Liberal Party in 2025, their hope was a leader who would protect and preserve Canadian values from the American onslaught of Donald Trump. Many explicitly rejected Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives because they felt his right-wing, anti-worker values were too closely aligned with the U.S. Republican Party.
So it might disappoint Canadians to know that Mark Carney is not only continuing Justin Trudeau’s controversial labour relations regime, but quickly expanding his attack upon the working class, couching in it neutral buzzwords like “modernization” all while making it clear that the goal is to make the capitalist class happy by assuring them Canadian workers have fewer rights than they used to.
You don’t have to take my word for it; you can see the doublespeak from key members of the Carney cabinet. First up is Minister of Jobs and Families (remember, Carney refuses to have a real Minister of Labour) Patty Hajdu, who went onto the CBC to defend her government’s attack on the right to strike. Puzzlingly, Hajdu suggested that while Carney supports strike rights, their new legislation will seek to address the five per cent of cases where strike action becomes disruptive. But herein lies the trick that Hajdu even admits: collective bargaining works, because 95 per cent of the time, there are no labour stoppages. That five per cent number? Hajdu is effectively saying that she wants workers to have the ‘right’ to strike, so long as they don’t use it in the five per cent of cases they currently do. A right that exists so long as it isn’t exercised, in other words.
Indeed, more candid reporting from CTV confirmed that Carney’s objective is to go even farther than Trudeau and Stephen Harper: to not only use back-to-work legislation, but propose new legislation that “will be aimed at introducing binding mediation before strike action is taken.” This is a shocking escalation of anti-labour policy, even for the already right-wing Mark Carney. The reason is even more chilling as per CTV:
Industry’s message to the government was that its traditional tool to use for binding arbitration, Section 107 of the Canadian Labour Code, can only be applied too late in the labour dispute process and from its perspective, does not adequately prevent the damage caused from a work stoppage.
Put another way, corporations feel the government’s anti-labour tools aren’t strong enough, and that the only way to ensure investors are happy is to stop strikes before they can even manifest. But this defeats the whole purpose of strikes: they are indeed rare, but when they do happen, they must be disruptive to enact vital economic victories that benefit union members and the wider working class. This is something Avi Lewis and the NDP made clear in strong opposition to Carney’s union-busting scheme. If Carney and his capitalist buddies argue that strikes can only happen when they cause zero economic disruption, they are effectively calling for an abolition of the right to strike in practice.
This focus on pleasing investors was the central and explicit concern of Minister of Transport Steven MacKinnon. In a discussion with Rosemary Barton, MacKinnon parroted Hajdu’s insistence that while the right to strike still exists, workers better not use it: “It harms investment, harms employment, maybe even particularly in unionized environments. So we need a better framework for getting to agreements between employers and their employees.”
Again, the crux of the Carney argument is that workers’ rights are bad for business. And that if any company fears a union could strike for better wages, improved working conditions, and fair and equitable treatment, that would hurt the bottom line, and they might be less likely to invest. So, for Carney to entice the Trump-aligned American capitalists that Canadians wanted protection from, he must crush the workers under his boot, including their basic right to withhold their labour as guaranteed by the Charter.
Carney may say he opposes Trump, but his ideal Canada is a Republican dream of an anti-union southern Red state. The man elected to save Canada? He’s the one dissolving it from the inside for the benefit of capitalists, including American businessmen who supported Trump. Once Carney’s done selling away our rights and our infrastructure with the help of American banks like Morgan Stanley, he’ll be fine. But Canadians will be left picking up the pieces of a Trumpified Canada for generations.
EU leaders will mouth hollow criticism of West Bank settlers at next week’s summit, while staying mute on Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in sharp contrast to the 2026 Nobel peace prize.
The EU “strongly condemns the continued and growing settler violence against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability”, they aim to say in a declaration in Brussels on Thursday (15 October), according to a draft seen by EUobserver on Friday.
And they are to warn of “legal, economic, and reputational consequences for [Israeli] businesses participating” in building a settlement in the E1 area of the West Bank, which would destroy the two-state solution by chopping the region in half.
It remains to be seen if Slovenia’s pro-Israeli prime minister, Janez Janša, will sign up, after he ranted on X in August that he would veto this type of thing.
But even if Janša agreed, it would still amount to EU impunity for settlers, as there was no mention of banning settler imports or even blacklisting more settler extremists.
“The EU keeps condemning illegal settlements that it trades with, financing the very occupation and abuses it claims to oppose. How does that make any sense?,” said Claudio Francavilla from Human Rights Watch.
The summit draft also voiced “grave concern over developments in Gaza”, where “protection of civilians must be ensured”, and urged Israel to let in more aid.
Israel has killed some 1,450 people in Gaza since an October 2025 ceasefire.
It has killed over 74,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.8 million people in Gaza since 2023, but the EU leaders’ passive-tense language did not blame Israel for civilian deaths or mention Gaza “accountability”.
And that will put our 27 prime ministers and presidents at odds this Thursday with Europe’s moral compass, international law, and public opinion.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to Navi Pillay, a South African judge, who had chaired a UN commission that found Israel guilty of “genocide” in Gaza and worked for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which has indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.
She was “a bigot … propagating blood libels,” he said on X.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said: “[Nazi propaganda chief] Joseph Goebbels is probably applauding in hell.”
And US president Donald Trump joined their Nobel-bashing by imposing sanctions on the ICC.
But three other Nobel laureates, from Colombia, DR Congo, and Liberia were among global VIPs who also wrote to the European Commission on Friday urging trade sanctions on Israel, in a sign of wider revulsion.
And “if the EU was serious about fulfilling its obligations under international law, or indeed in terms of its own stated values and policies, it would go much, much further [in terms of sanctions],” said H. A. Hellyer, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank in London.
Palestine solidarity marches in Berlin, London, Rome, and Warsaw on Saturday showed that ordinary Europeans wanted their elected politicians to take action.
Some 83 percent of Germans and 88 percent of Italians now disapproved of Netanyahu, said the Pew Research Centre in June.
Protesters with Palestinian flags pass by a counter protest with Israeli flags at a rally in Berlin on 7 October 2026 (Source: EPA/CLEMENS BILAN)
Blood and rubble
The latest EU summit draft pledged support for Palestinian elections.
“The European Union stands ready to support the electoral process, including by the deployment of an EU Election Observation Mission,” it said.
But EU words were being buried in blood and rubble faster than the summit statements could be updated.
The Palestinian vote would have to be postponed until at least late 2027 due to the “security and economic conditions” created by Israel in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority warned France, also on Friday.
Meanwhile, the EU summit will fall two weeks before Israeli elections on 27 October and the leaders’ empty words might be tactical – so as not to throw meat to far-right Israeli zealots in a rabid atmosphere.
But Europe’s quietism is also due to Germany and Italy’s internal politics and its psychopathological mix of World War 2-guilt, raging far-right populism, and transatlantic realpolitik.
“I don’t think this [the draft EU summit text on the Middle East] is a strategy, so much as a statement of the lowest common denominator in EU foreign policy,” RUSI’s Hellyer said.
And going back to the Nazi slurs against the 2026 Nobel, Israeli author Gideon Levy said in the Haaretz daily on Saturday: “No, Sa’ar … If Goebbels has a reason to applaud, it is upon seeing what has happened to the country that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust.”
“Goebbels is applauding perpetrators of genocide around the world, particularly the one in Gaza,” said Levy.
So long as Berlin and Rome don’t realign their compasses, Europe’s silent blessing for Palestinian erasure will feed Israeli hardliners’ schizoid and delusional sense of self-righteousness.
“As long as Israel is not willing to … admit, at least partially, to its crimes, it will never change,” Levy said.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce faces criminal charges for standing silently on a street, saying nothing and obstructing no one. Whatever your views on abortion, CJ Strachan argues that criminalising silent prayer is not who we are.
America’s last troops have left Iraq, but anyone looking for a US withdrawal from the Middle East is looking in the wrong place. The end of the Iraq model On September 30, the United States completed the withdrawal of its forces and equipment from Erbil Air Base, formally ending the mission of Operation Inherent Resolve […]
Vietnamese police have arrested 12 men accused of stealing nearly 2,700 cats during night-time raids in residential neighborhoods; the pets were taken to be slaughtered for food. Fur-removal machines, cat traps, and weighing scales were among the items confiscated during the investigation into the cat-theft gang in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese police and state […]
An EU Parliament memorial for victims of the 7 October attack caused disarray and anger as well as grief in a divided European house.
It was crowned by a towering Israeli flag, alongside the EU’s.
The exhibit set up in Strasbourg’s parliament included maps showing Occupied Palestinian Territories as part of Israel and sold trinkets made from debris of Israeli missiles.
But it made no mention of the 74,200 people killed by Israel in Gaza in the past three years, after Palestinian militants Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis in a surprise attack.
This situation struck a chord with the sole Palestinian in parliament, left-wing French MEP Rima Hassan, who tried to take down the Israeli flag in protest, and toppled over the EU one as well in an unwanted domino effect.
“My action was in no way directed at the victims of 7 October or their memory,” Hassan told EUobserver.
Instead, it targeted “this incessant and untenable double standard, for a Russian flag would never be permitted, and rightly so, within the [EU] institution’s premises”.
The memorial was organised by German centre-right MEP Hildegard Bentele, who chairs the parliament’s Israel delegations, alongside the Israeli embassy, and the The International Movement for Peace & Coexistence (IMPAC) group in Brussels, as well as others.
“During a conversation with a member of my team, the guest artist [at the EU Parliament memorial] claimed that Palestine ‘does not exist’,” Hassan added.
Her family were expelled from their birthplace by Israel in 1948 along with hundreds of thousands of others in what Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
But in the cacophony of narratives in the EU assembly, those who saw her anti-Israel flag protest as offensive or antisemitic had echoing voices.
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Aux Etats-Unis, un rapport du Government Accountability Office (GAO-26-108663) épingle l’Immigration and Customs Enforcement( ICE). Le GAO, l'organisme d'audit du Congrès américain, constate que la police de l'immigration,ICE, a multiplié les chantiers de détention sans aucun plan stratégique. Le centre floridien « Alligator Alcatraz » a coûté environ un milliard de dollars à l'État pour onze mois d'existence, soit grossièrement trois millions par jour. Le ministère de la Sécurité intérieure, lui, vante 13,2 milliards d'économies.
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Commandé par quatre élus démocrates, le document du GAO dresse le constat d’une administration qui empile les initiatives sans feuille de route. Pour l’exercice 2025, l’ICE a reçu quelque 3,8 milliards de dollars destinés aux opérations de rétention. La loi budgétaire de juillet 2025 a ensuite débloqué 45 milliards de dollars de capacité jusqu’en 2029. Résultat : des démarrages et arrêts successifs, des chevauchements et, selon Heather MacLeod, directrice du GAO chargée de ces questions, « du gaspillage ».
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Le constat du GAO est sévère : l’ICE aurait lancé plusieurs initiatives simultanément sans disposer d’un plan stratégique permettant d’en articuler les besoins, les coûts et la durée. L’agence avait reçu environ 3,8 milliards de dollars pour ses opérations de rétention durant l’exercice 2025. En juillet 2025, la loi budgétaire a porté à 45 milliards de dollars la capacité de rétention prévue jusqu’en 2029.
Six opérations sont recensées : Guantanamo Bay, des bases militaires, onze entrepôts, l’achat de centres existants, les installations de Floride et l’utilisation d’établissements du Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Le cas des entrepôts est particulièrement parlant : environ 1 milliard de dollars ont été engagés en décembre 2025 pour onze sites, dont sept devaient finalement être revendus. Deux autres installations ont été achetées en juillet pour1,5 milliard de dollars.
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« Alligator Alcatraz » concentre cette logique. Le centre floridien, mis en place en huit jours selon les responsables, a ouvert en juillet 2025 avant de fermer en juin 2026. Son coût atteint environ 1 milliard de dollars pour l’État de Floride. Le montage financier mérite attention : l’ICE n’a pas directement payé le centre. Le Department of Homeland Security(DHS) rembourse la Floride par l’intermédiaire d’une subvention de la FEMA de 608 millions de dollars, tandis que l’État attend encore plus de 500 millions.
À partir du milliard et des onze mois d’existence, cela représente un ordre de grandeur d’environ 3 millions de dollars par jour. Ce calcul n’est pas celui du GAO, mais il suffit à mesurer l’échelle de la dépense. Le GAO recommande donc l’élaboration rapide d’un plan stratégique. L’ICE accepte cette recommandation, mais indique qu’il lui faudra près d’un an pour y répondre. Pour le GAO, cette échéance cadre mal avec l’urgence invoquée.
Le Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conteste toutefois la lecture du rapport,affirmant que les coûts étaient « appropriés et nécessaires ». Le DHS revendique plus de 13,2 milliards d'économies. Ce chiffre n'est étayé nulle part dans le rapport : c'est une déclaration du ministère.
L'ICE a accepté d'élaborer un plan, mais pas avant près d'un an. Mme MacLeod juge elle-même ce délai peu compatible avec l'urgence. Un autre rapport sur les coûts est attendu avant la fin de l'année. Quand une administration reçoit des dizaines de milliards sans obligation de prioriser ni de séquencer, le contribuable finance la précipitation et l’improvisation. Le rapport du GAO ne tranche pas sur la politique migratoire ; il rappelle une vérité budgétaire élémentaire : ouvrir le robinet sans compteur produit mécaniquement de la dépense sans retour.
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La leçon budgétaire dépasse donc largement le débat migratoire américain : lorsqu’une administration dispose soudainement de dizaines de milliards, l’absence de plan préalable peut transformer la rapidité d’action en machine à dépenser. L’argent public n’est pas moins gaspillé parce qu’il est américain.
Twelve years ago, EU summit leaders announced they had a strategy to tackle unprecedented migrant arrivals.
Next week, they will meet again in Brussels and to tell us something similar.
We journalists will report on the latest twists and turns, hoping to get some sort of angle that hasn’t been covered. But the reality is that our leaders have broadly failed.
Dozens of EU summit conclusions have been published since 2015, when one around million Syrians arrived in Europe to seek protection.
We need stronger external borders to preserve the Schengen passport-free zone, they said. We need partnerships with foreign states to save lives. We need to step up deportations. We need a European solution.
All of these ideas and strategies have found a home in council conclusions, in various iterations, since 2015. All of them.
Some have actually panned out, including an EU migrant swap deal with Turkey and other deals with autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Others like internal reforms on asylum have also been delivered.
Yet the sense of urgency to tackle these issues continues because there is an obvious disconnect between what has been delivered, the promises made and the lived experience on the ground.
People still come. Some 80,000 arrived in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta end of July alone.
Many are still fleeing violence, war and economic hardships. Others are lured by the promise of labour in Europe by Europeans willing to exploit them.
I remember meeting a group of boys from Bangladesh on the Ocean Viking, freshly rescued in the middle of the night, asking when they would be able to start working in Italy.
One of them was still shaking with fear and sobbing, following a near death experience.
The European Commission is now claiming that the drop of irregular arrivals is due to their migration policy reforms, as if the fall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria had no discernible impact.
Perhaps some of that is true. But there is no disputing that Syrians accounted for over 100,000 irregular crossings in 2023, a year before Assad fell. It then dropped to around 6,000. Today, it is around 1,000, according to Frontex.
At some point, one has to wonder if these conclusions, repeated ad nauseam, is nothing but political theatre by a leadership that has run out of ideas.
Un mur de Nanterre, le 29 juin dernier. Des lettres violettes inscrites à la bombe. « Sans vidéo Nahel serait une statistique pour la Place Beauvau. Fuck le 17 ». Deux jours auparavant, Nahel Merzouk, 17 ans, avait trouvé la mort au volant d'une voiture, après qu'un agent lui eut tiré en pleine poitrine, à bout portant. Des images tournées par une passante et diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux le jour même ont remis en cause la version policière reprise dans les premiers articles sur le drame. Le 27 juin à 8 h 22, le compte rendu du centre de commandement consignait : « Individu blessé par balle à la poitrine gauche. Le fonctionnaire de police s'est mis à l'avant pour le stopper. Le conducteur a essayé de repartir en fonçant sur le fonctionnaire. » Or la séquence filmée montre le motard ouvrant le feu depuis le côté d'un véhicule qui redémarre lentement.
Sans image, que se serait-il passé ? « S'il n'y avait pas eu la vidéo, s'est interrogée la jeune femme qui l'a postée, une collègue de son auteure, quelle aurait été la suite (1) ? » Plusieurs médias ont comparé l'émotion suscitée par la mort de Nahel Merzouk à la relative indifférence dans laquelle, deux semaines plus tôt, Alhoussein Camara était décédé d'une balle dans le thorax à Saint-Yrieix-sur-Charente, dans la banlieue d'Angoulême. Lors d'un contrôle de police sur la route de son travail, ce jeune homme de 19 ans aurait refusé d'obtempérer et heurté les jambes d'un agent avec sa voiture. Un ami d'enfance témoignait, interdit : « Je sais tellement qu'il n'a pas pu blesser ce policier, mais comment le prouver sans vidéo (2)… »
Les images, en réalité, ne suffisent pas toujours. Du moins à obtenir justice. En 1991, Rodney King, un Afro-Américain de 25 ans, est passé à tabac par quatre policiers à Los Angeles. Avec une petite caméra portative, un riverain capte la scène. Son enregistrement et sa diffusion provoquent l'indignation. La vidéo devient dès lors un outil de preuve, un moyen de scandaliser et de mobiliser, mais aussi d'engager des poursuites judiciaires. L'affaire n'aurait sans doute jamais conduit à un procès sans cette captation, et sans son passage en boucle sur Cable News Network (CNN) : même s'ils ne permettront pas de faire condamner les responsables — les policiers sont acquittés un an plus tard —, ils cristallisent une colère qui conduira aux plus grandes émeutes qu'ait connues Los Angeles.
Dans les années 1960, des collectifs avaient déjà utilisé des caméras comme instrument de surveillance de la police (copwatching). Une coalition d'organisations noires les expérimenta dans le quartier de Watts à Los Angeles à la suite de nombreux meurtres policiers, suivie à Oakland par le Black Panther Party à partir de 1966. Act Up se dota aussi d'un groupe de vidéastes dans les années 1980, dont un des buts était de filmer les manifestations pour prévenir les violences policières. Catherine Gund Saalfield, l'une des fondatrices de Damned Interfering Video Activist Television (DIVA TV), expliquait alors : « Nous avons une banque d'images de flics pliant les poignets des gens jusqu'au point de rupture, de flics matraquant des manifestants sur le dos et les épaules (3). »
À la différence des tenants du cinéma d'intervention — les groupes Medvedkine, par exemple — ou de la télévision alternative, DIVA TV ne cherchait plus seulement à donner la parole aux sans-voix ou à faire exister des corps exclus de la visibilité. La caméra devait servir d'outil dans la lutte, les vidéos de preuve. Mais ce copwatching relevait encore de la pratique politique, de la longue histoire des expériences audiovisuelles militantes. Au cours de la période récente, dans les cas des homicides de George Floyd aux États-Unis ou de Cédric Chouviat en France en 2020, ce sont des voisins ou des passants qui ont filmé la scène ; des caméras de vidéosurveillance ont capté l'arrestation violente de Théo Luhaka à Aulnay-sous-Bois en 2017 ou les coups assenés au producteur de musique Michel Zecler (en 2020 également) ; et, aux États-Unis, où leur emploi est quasi systématique, certaines vidéos de violences proviennent des caméras corporelles de policiers.
Pour les activistes d'aujourd'hui, l'Observatoire national des pratiques et des violences policières (ONVP) ou David Dufresne et sa plate-forme « Allô Place Beauvau », le partage apparaît plus déterminant que l'enregistrement. Et il faudra s'en remettre aux acteurs judiciaires et médiatiques, dont le rôle devient décisif. Or, du journal télévisé au procès, faire parler l'image implique une série de procédés tant techniques que rhétoriques. La parole de l'expert ou du témoin la décrit, la commente ou la met en contexte. À la télévision, les vidéos subissent des modifications matérielles. Des inserts graphiques dirigent le regard vers ce qui devrait être vu, quand le ralenti « peut amener les téléspectateurs à percevoir une action comme plus intentionnelle (4) », le ralentissement induisant le sentiment que l'auteur des faits a eu le temps de penser son action. Il en va de même lors des procès, où les captures d'écran, parfois imprimées et annotées, se substituent à la projection, comme, en France, dans l'affaire Gaye Camara en 2019 (5).
Reste que les effets sociaux des images inquiètent les autorités et agacent les forces de l'ordre. Face à la multiplication des entraves policières à la liberté de filmer, notamment lors des manifestations, le ministère de l'intérieur avait dû rappeler à ses troupes par la voie d'une circulaire datée du 23 décembre 2008 que « les policiers ne bénéficient pas de protection particulière en matière de droit à l'image (…). La liberté de l'information, qu'elle soit le fait de la presse ou d'un simple particulier, prime le droit au respect de l'image ou de la vie privée dès lors que cette liberté n'est pas dévoyée par une atteinte à la dignité de la personne ou au secret de l'enquête ou de l'instruction ».
Malgré cela, en septembre 2019, un jeune « gilet jaune » dijonnais a été condamné à cinq mois de prison avec sursis pour avoir filmé et mis en ligne les images d'affrontements entre des manifestants et des gendarmes. Une décision rendue sur le fondement d'un article du code pénal introduit en 2007 pour sanctionner le happy slapping (ou « vidéo baffe », une agression captée puis diffusée sur les réseaux sociaux). La majorité de M. Emmanuel Macron a ensuite tenté d'entraver la circulation des vidéos de violences policières. Finalement écarté par le Conseil constitutionnel, l'article 24 de la proposition de loi relative à la sécurité globale visait à punir de cinq ans d'emprisonnement la diffusion d'images d'un agent portant « atteinte à son intégrité physique ou psychique ».
La loi promulguée en 2021 a quand même autorisé les policiers à exploiter en temps réel des caméras installées dans les halls d'immeuble ou l'extension de l'accès à la vidéosurveillance aux agents des polices municipales et de la Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF). Face à la multiplication des dispositifs d'enregistrement au sein de la population, il s'agit de construire des contre-feux. « Quand on est attaqué par l'image, il faut se défendre par l'image (6) », soutient M. David Le Bars, secrétaire général du Syndicat des commissaires de la police nationale (SCPN).
Cette volonté d'opposer œil pour œil les caméras-piétons et de vidéosurveillance à celles des citoyens comme celle d'empêcher la circulation de certaines images trahissent la foi des gouvernants dans leur capacité à sensibiliser ou à révéler la répression au plus grand nombre. Cette foi se double d'une croyance dans la puissance mimétique qui conduirait des individus généralement jeunes, peu diplômés, de classes populaires à s'égarer dans la violence pour reproduire ce qu'ils ont vu. À ce titre, le président de la République a souligné le 30 juin dernier, dans une allocution depuis la cellule interministérielle de crise, le « rôle considérable » de Snapchat et TikTok dans les soulèvements des quartiers populaires qui ont suivi la mort de Nahel Merzouk, et dénoncé la diffusion d'images des violences commises dans de très nombreuses villes françaises.
Face à la censure des médias audiovisuels, les plates-formes numériques ont permis au cours des années 2010 de diffuser assez librement des enregistrements. Mais ces entreprises, actrices majeures du capitalisme, n'ont pas vocation à soutenir les révoltes. À l'Assemblée nationale le 10 juillet, la responsable des affaires publiques de Snapchat en France a assuré que son entreprise avait « travaillé conjointement avec le ministère de l'intérieur et les différentes autorités afin d'endiguer le plus rapidement possible les différents dérapages qu'on a pu percevoir sur le terrain ». Avant de se féliciter du résultat de cette collaboration en constatant que « l'ensemble des stories qui étaient publiées » aux derniers soirs du soulèvement provenaient d'utilisateurs « qui se plaignaient justement des émeutes et des conséquences des émeutes ».
Le matin du même jour, le commissaire européen au marché intérieur avait averti de la fin de la fête. Déplorant que les réseaux sociaux n'aient pas préalablement censuré tout message susceptible d'accentuer les émeutes, M. Thierry Breton a prévenu : « Tout cela ne sera plus possible à partir du 25 août », en vertu d'un nouveau règlement sur les services numériques. « Lorsqu'il y aura des contenus haineux, des contenus qui appellent par exemple à la révolte, qui appellent également à tuer ou à brûler des voitures, [les plates-formes] auront l'obligation dans l'instant de les effacer. Si elles ne le font pas, elles seront immédiatement sanctionnées », voire temporairement interdites. Le temps de la désillusion pour les militants qui, depuis le « printemps arabe », associaient réseaux sociaux et liberté ? « Sans les images la révolution n'aurait pas eu lieu », nous disait un Tunisien en 2011… Sans les images ou sans les moyens pour les diffuser ?
(3) Catherine Saalfield, « On the make : Activist video collectives » (PDF), dans Martha Gever, John Greyson et Pratibha Parmar (sous la dir. de), Queer Looks. Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, Routledge, Londres et New York, 1993.
(4) Cf. Zachary Burns, Eugene Caruso et Benjamin Converse, « Slow motion increases perceived intent », Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 113, Washington, DC, 2016.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa interviews archivist, photographer, and veteran Black Panther Party member Billy X Jennings.
Joining the Party at age 17 after relocating from Hobson City, Alabama, to Oakland, Jennings managed BPP offices and served as bodyguard to Huey P. Newton. During Bobby Seale’s 1973 Oakland mayoral run, Jennings helped spearhead an unprecedented electoral effort: “…an organizing event on the highest level the parties had ever been. I mean, the party is known for organizing, but to go into electoral politics and do what we did for a first time basis, it changed over. Even though Bobby lost that election, it changed openly because it opened up so many doors. Part of his job was to kick down doors because we were the Vanguard.”
Today, Jennings operates the official Black Panther Party Alumni website and leads political education initiatives across the Bay Area for the Party’s 60th Anniversary.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to the edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, which started in Oakland in 1966. Today, I’m honored to be joined by Billy Jennings, AKA Billy X, well-known archivist in Oakland, member of the Black Panther Party, a photographer who runs the official Black Panther Party alumni website called It’s About Time. Thank you for joining me, Billy.
Billy X Jennings:
Hey, thanks for having me again. Good morning to everyone.
Mansa Musa:
And as we talked earlier, I was in different spaces and hoping I had met you while I was in Oakland. So this would more or less be like a reunion, but this is my first time meeting you. I’m really honored. I heard a lot about you. I know a lot about your work, and it’s an honor to be able to interview you about the party and some of the things and some of your experiences.
Billy X Jennings:
Okay.
Mansa Musa:
Please introduce yourself to our audience, who you are and how you came to be involved in the Black Panther Party.
Billy X Jennings:
Well, my name is Billy X. Jennings. I’m a member of the Black Panther Party. I joined in 1968 when I was 17 years old. And I came about joining the party because I’m from a historical town in Alabama in the South where most original members came from the South and migrated to California. So I came from a place called Hopson City, Alabama. And the tradition there, Hobson City have had the right to vote since 1890. And we were one of the only black municipal cities, little towns that could vote and had that right to do that. And so I came from a very strong area that had embedded that kind of thought into my mind. And when I traveled to California and I saw the Black Panther Party on TV for the first time in 1967 when they went to Sacramento, California, it blew my mind.
I was in high school at the time and I immediately changed our social… We had a social club called the Buccaneers. I changed it to the Panthers the next day. I didn’t know anything about the party with just that symbolism and how they stood up to the police and read their demands and so forth. It made a change happen in me. And it wasn’t until I graduated from high school, I decided to move to Oakland. And when I moved to Oakland, it was during the time that Huey knew the trial had just started and I was going to a college that’s two blocks away from where Huey was going on trial at the courthouse. And when the trial started, we would hear them saying Free Huey off the preg, free Huey. And I went over there one day and I was reading a book simultaneously at the same time called The Audible Malcolm X.
So what I read, I had read in the book already, but I heard Bobby Steele speak at a rally for Huey and they were saying the same thing. So it got me really interested in the party. And so I started going to the rallies to Free Huey. I met some Panthers and then they said their Panther office was going to open in my area. And when it did, I went down and joined, became a Panther in training and I’ve been working with the party ever since.
Mansa Musa:
Okay. And take us back to the party’s founding because you came in two years after its founding. And also you came in to your own observation and to what we know to be a fact, you came in at a point where they had just started to become on the radar of the feds, but more importantly, they was definitely on the radar of the Oakland police, LA police. And so talk about what was it like to be able to be in that space and ultimately find yourself in a position to be the bodyguard for Huey Newton once he got out.
Billy X Jennings:
Well, my process started at the very beginning. In 1968, there was a certain method the party employed. Before you became a Panther, you had to become a Panther in training, which requires six to eight week training. They give you a list of books that has about 35 different books, about books by Franc Fanon, Mao Saintong, Che Guevara, Pruma, and other revolutionaries to read. And you had to attend political education class on a weekly basis. Panthers at that time was required to read two hours a day. A Panther had to secure and have what we call technical equipment. Technical equipment was a firearm of some type, because at that time I joined the Black Panther Party, it was called Black Panther Party for self-defense. Later on, we dropped off the self-defense, but at that particular time, the party was engaged into patrolling
Police officers in the community, observing them and making sure they don’t beat and brutalize people. So the first six weeks is reading and studying and learning the rules of the Black Panther Party. And then you’re given a section. The city is divided into different sections. I worked in the section four in East Oakland. Section four had a section leader. They had a geographical area that they were responsible for. And so I was in section four. At that very beginning when I first started, we were theorizing about the breakfast program. It hadn’t came about, but we were still looking for geographical locations to have these breakfast programs in the future. So we did that. And every Panther is required to sell the Black Panther Party newspaper, which is the voice of the party. And at that time, the party was growing tremendously by leaps and bounds.
We had people flying into California from Kansas City, Chicago, New York, all to get this education. Before you can open up a chapter of the Black Panther Party or a branch of the Black Panther Party, you have to come to Oakland first and get educated. And you have to meet the leadership. The leadership has to eyeball you and find out your level of consciousness, what type of person you are before you can go back and represent the party. So this whole process was going on. People were flocking to the party. The party got so big that in 1969, we had put a stop on membership and we call that particular part of the party’s history the purge because the party had grown… I mean, the party was attractive. I mean, black coats, leather coats, I mean sunglasses and Afros at the same time. So this was a big thing for our culture.
At the same time, our culture level was rising even in music. James Brown had a record out in 1968 that elevated people’s social conscience, I’m Black and I’m proud. It moved people from the level of being a Negro, because that’s what the newspapers and that other people was referring us to. But in our community, we’re referring to ourselves as Black or African. And when James Brown came out with Black and I’m Proud, you could never go back to ever saying he was a Negro no more. There was different progress being made, but James Brown couldn’t sing no song like that. It wasn’t for groups like the Black Panther Party. Groups like The Shot Light Can’t Sing got to give more power to the
Mansa Musa:
People
Billy X Jennings:
Like the Black Panther Party, paving the way to educate people to lift up their consciousness. And so my role in the party, I came up as a Panther in training. I became a officer of the day, which is the person who runs the office. And from there I was transferred to central headquarters. Now, my name came about because my captain at that time was a legendary Panther called Robert Bay. Robert Bay ran the East Oakland office. Robert Bay was also an age of the central committee. And when Huey Newton got out of jail in 1970, the central committee made Robert Bay his permanent bodyguard and assistant. Now, I worked in that capacity as well after Huey got out of jail, mostly going to… I went to court with Huey on a daily basis because he was let out on appeal. He wasn’t just let out.
He had to go back to court and defend himself. And so my job became that. And also at the same time, I became to the Newton family. Mr. Newton, Mrs. Newton, I lived three or four blocks from them. I would walk over their house around the corner, mow their lawn. I’d be taken to the pharmacy, driving to doctors because they’re old people and they don’t drive so much. So that became my responsibility and me and Huey’s relationship grew behind that. So we had good personal relationship.
I worked central headquarters. Working at central headquarters was key to who I am today because I know Panthers from everywhere because every Panther had to call the central headquarters on a weekly basis or if the office gets ready or they need lawyer resources and stuff like that, I pick up the phone, write on the messages or tell them what they need to know. So I know Panthers from almost all the chapters and branches. And so I worked that group for a while. Then I was drafted into Bobby Seal’s campaign when he ran for mayor of open. I ran Bobby Seal’s campaign office in East Oakland. And it was an organizing event on the highest level the parties had ever been. I mean, the party is known for organizing, but to go into electorial politics and do what we did for a first time basis, it changed over.
Even though Bobby lost that election, it changed openly because it opened up so many doors. Part of his job was to kick down doors because we were the Vanguard. We had lead to struggle and there’s other people who follow behind us. I mean, our life was constantly in threat because we were on the front line, police department, clientele pro, all those things aimed at members of the Black Panther Party. So not only did we have the burden of dealing with the system, we had to deal with the authorities as well.
Mansa Musa:
Talk about, and you’re familiar with Eddie Conway, right? And so Eddie Conway, when he got locked up, he organized a chapter for the Black Panther Party in the prison, which I became a part of. And everything you outlined, as you was talking, I was reflecting on, we had to read at least two albums. We had every aspect of the thing that you outlined as what the party was doing, Eddie had us doing the same thing. We had political education classes, we had military classes, we had first aid classes. All our class was structured around an environment that we was in, and our technic class was finding a hole to get out of prison by any means necessary. So we had that type of mentality. So Billy, as an archivist, you have a lot of distortions in terms of the images that’s being projected of the party and it’s been dubbed Panther Porn, and just to note that it’s images that’s being perpetuated by the federal government, it’s images that’s become more idolization of the party versus the images as an archivist.
What would you say is the most positive or how would you characterize the imagery of the party as from an archivist in terms of educating people and raising their conscience? I see you with a shotgun. I know you in Sacramento. I know why you in Sacramento and I know why you coming out like that. That’s a good thing. But then I turn around, I see somebody standing on the corner. They got a picture of somebody standing on the corner with their mug broke and they got a bandela on and it had nothing to do with organizing, had nothing to do with raising people’s conscience. It’s got more to do with projecting the image of a thug, for lack of a better word. Talk about that if you can.
Billy X Jennings:
Well, the party was vilified on the highest level from the government who lied on us continuously to the media that used disinformation to scare people. The big image they had was, oh, these Negroes, they have guns. They’re angry. They hate white people. That’s their basic pitch on everything. Let it be Republican New Africa or any Black group, they paint them as very threatening group. And because we had guns, I mean, there was nothing… It wasn’t against the law in California to have guns, to have them in public long as they was not loaded, which we knew that. So the images they printed of the Black Panther Party was to vilify us and to scare white people and to frighten Black people. So it was all a part of their method to control who we were. They were trying to identify who we were. We could only define that.
We defined our own selves. And so that’s why we started a Panther newspaper in 1967 to get our voices and views out. So even though we had Time, Newsweek, Life Magazine, the Black Panther Party was cranking out close to 250 to 300,000 copies of papers per week into the community to combat this disinformation about the Black Panther Party. The 10 point program outlines what the Black Panther Party was all about, what we stood for.
Only on one aspect, which is 0.97, we talk about defending ourselves with guns. Other
Than that, we’re talking about social change in all levels, in education, housing and so forth. That was a threat to them because they did not want anyone to rocking the boat and we are rocking the boat. We are waking people up from their deep sleep. I mean, we’re telling people to read. We’re showing people what books to read. We are the Vanguard. People are following us. They didn’t want that. We had people in the white community, they wanted to join in with us. We had people from the Latino community, they want to join with us. You had people from around the world reading the 10 point program and looking at the positive aspect of the Black Panther Party. And that’s how we get the New Zealand Panthers and the Panthers from Africa and Panthers from India and the UK because of our social programs, how we was dealing with the oppressor here.
And so they follow those same examples there. They started social program, they started demanding and fighting for their rights. And that’s what the oppressor hates. They hate for people to wake up. And we were waking up big time in the 60s with the music, the culture, the back to Africa, who we are. How could you be a Negro in 1970 after all has been presented before you? So those things have changed. The party was a part of that change, that
Mansa Musa:
Consciousness. Talk about, because to your point, I remember reading the paper and when United Farm Workers, the party was one of the first papers to one, educate people on what their issues were, two, organize the boycott certain wines that they was taking and exploiting their labor and not giving them equal pay. So talk about the party’s social contribution to raising people’s concept, but more importantly, the elasticity of it, because can you see some of the influences today? Oh,
Billy X Jennings:
Definitely. Definitely. I can see the influences of the Rainbow Coalition. And that was something that Fred Hampton talked about. I could see the coalition building of the Black Panther Party. We’re working with the Brown Beret, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots. We’re working with the welfare rights groups. We’re working with the BSU, the Black Student Unions on campus. We’re working with prison groups. There was a number of prison groups throughout the country that started Black Panther Party off in San Quentin, in Algeria, Raway and other prisons because the ideology of the Black Panther Party was strong. What we were talking about, there was backbone to it. Everything we did was dialectic materialism, right? We were dialectic people. We looked at things from all sides. We just didn’t look at things in one side. Black Panther Party was an international group from the very start. Dewey and Bobby were international.
You can look at our reading list, those 35 books that come from Fanon, that’s from Africa, Mao Zeitang from China. So there was all kind of influences in the party. And so it was a big job just working to educate and organize people on all levels. Because in our community, action speaks. People learn in various ways, but in our community, people relate to action. They see something, they learn from it. Just like the breakfast program. We started the breakfast program in California and within two weeks it was a national program because people said, “Hey, we can do that here. This is how they did it. We can do it here.” The party set examples that people could follow in every aspect. We were on the forefront of fighting racism on all levels.
“We started the breakfast program in California, and within two weeks it was a national program because people said, 'Hey, we can do that here. This is how they did it. We can do it here.' The party set examples that people could follow in every aspect. We were on the forefront of fighting racism on all levels.”
French borrowing costs are surging and central bankers are starting to fret. Some of them, at least.
The head of the French central bank, Emmanuel Moulin, told the Financial Times that his country risks being “strangled by interest rates”.
The best solution, he made clear, was for the French government to cut costs and reduce the deficit, which, in an unchanged scenario, could reach upwards of six percent next year.
Last week, the French minority government proposed €43bn worth of cuts for 2027. But pushing them through parliament is a tall order in a divided country.
Meanwhile, investors are dumping French bonds, pushing up French government borrowing costs compared to German benchmark Bunds. This is already immensely costly to French society.
“In three weeks, we’ve lost the equivalent of €15bn a year in higher debt-servicing costs over a 10-year horizon, or almost €100bn cumulatively over 10 years!”, French economist Shahin Vallée said on social media last week.
The gap, or spread, between French and German bond yields, historically around 50 basis points (0.5 percentage points), was 109 basis points when he wrote it on Wednesday. It is now 30 points higher.
Spreads are a crucial marker for financial stability because they show how nervous investors are. The bigger the spread, the higher the perceived risk.
And France’s parabolic bond spread is already bringing back unwelcome memories of the eurozone crisis in November 2011, when the spread reached 200 basis points.
Bypass parliament?
The question is what to do about it, and who is best positioned to act. The French government could bypass a parliamentary vote or push through the budget by ordinance, under articles 49.3 and 47 of the constitution, respectively.
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Having said several months ago that he had no intention of a ‘rerun’ of the Brexit debate, UK prime minister Andy Burnham told Labour delegates at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool last week that nothing should be off the table as far as EU-UK relations are concerned.
Brexit had “done more harm than good”, he said, adding that “we will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of the century until we decide on a long-term relationship with what is still our largest market.”
In fact, Britain could “go all the way” back into the EU, said Burnham.
The new prime minister is still enjoying something of a honeymoon period. His Labour party now tops the opinion polls, albeit by less than 30 percent, and his early policy announcements on nationalising utilities and pension reform are the most radical in a generation.
Even so, Burnham’s remarks were a surprise that left pro-European columnists positively giddy with optimism over the weekend.
In truth, rejoining the EU – if it happens – would probably take a decade.
Burnham didn’t offer any timetable or any other specifics, and has said that no moves towards EU membership would be taken before the next UK election due in 2029. And talk of rejoining the EU is not purely borne out of pro-European enthusiasm.
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Police have 'locked down' an entire town to stop unrest by setting up a dispersal zone covering the whole of Gosport following protests sparked by the arrival of a migrant boat using a 'new route' from Normandy.
Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that […]
Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.
Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.
“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.
He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.
Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.
She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.
Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.
“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”
The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.
Shehadeh said that when he was stopped at Newark on September 17, CBP officers only conducted a “cursory” search on his bags because they did not appear to be interested in physical items.
“They are looking for our thoughts,” he said. “They’re looking to see what I’m thinking. They want to see who I’m messaging. They want to see what WhatsApp groups I am part of.”
The lawyer, who has Global Entry for expedited border crossing, said he was flagged by name for secondary inspection and led to a waiting room. He was asked general questions about his travels, work, and family before the agents asked to search his phone.
Shehadeh objected to allowing the officers to go through his device, citing the attorney-client privileged information on the phone. The agents kept him waiting and subjected him to another round of questioning as they took the case to a supervisor. As the clock ticked, the Florida-based lawyer missed his connecting flight to Miami.
Eventually, he was informed by an officer that CBP would take his phone and let him go. “I told them, ‘I just want to be very clear. I am not giving you permission, consent to search my phone, and I’m not giving any other arm of this agency or anybody else consent to search my phone,’” he said.
The cell phone still has not been returned.
Shehadeh told Truthout that if the goal of the episode were to deter his activism for Palestinian rights, it would not succeed.
“It will not move our advocacy work an inch. Literally, it will have no impact. If anything, it will fuel the importance of doing more of this work,” he told Truthout. “But when it comes to travel, I’m going to be much more careful about what my phone situation will be.”
The Trump administration has been cracking down on Palestinian rights activism, including through a deportation campaign targeting non-citizen students who participated in protests against the war on Gaza.
Shehadeh warned that the administration is creating a new norm of weakened constitutional rights that many people may take for granted.
“This search is a perfect example of that. Protection against search and seizure is one of those things that comes out of our Constitution that really empowers citizens to know you will not have government intrusion,” he said.
“What this administration is doing is chipping away at the rights of Americans — of all Americans. But sadly, Arabs, Muslims, and minorities tend to be the first victims of these abuses. But they’re certainly not going to be the last ones.”
Abu Irshaid of AMP said the government is turning border crossings into a “hunting ground for individuals it wishes to target” for political retaliation or to gather information about constitutional protected activity.
Abu Irshaid has sued the government, alleging that the repeated searches he has been subjected to at the airport, along with the seizure of his phone, amount to illegal discrimination.
A federal judge ruled in his favor in July, declaring that the government violated Abu Irshaid’s rights with the searches.
Some activists are pinning their hopes on a case before the Supreme Court, Anibowei v. Blanche, that could determine whether the Fourth Amendment applies to the electronic devices of U.S. citizens travelling internationally.
CBP argues that only a tiny fraction of travelers, less than one-half of one percent, are subjected to a device search. But official statistics show an uptick in such searches since Trump returned to the White House.
In 2024, federal officers inspected the devices of 47,047 travelers. The numbers increased to 55,318 last year. Of those inspections, 13,590 targeted U.S. citizens in 2025, compared to 10,541 a year earlier.
In January, CBP released a memorandum outlining its regulations and authorities around searching travelers’ personal devices. The document stressed that people at ports of entry have diminished privacy rights and that phone searches are essential “to identify and combat a wide range of illicit activities.”
A basic search, one where the officer goes through the phone manually, can be conducted “with or without suspicion.”
The bar is higher for carrying out an advanced search, which includes copying and analyzing the content of the phone through an external device. It requires “reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws” enforced by CBP. But there appears to be a loophole. An advanced search can still be conducted “in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern.”
The directive does not provide details on what constitutes a “national security concern” to enable an advanced search.
Officers can only search the device itself and may not access information stored remotely. That’s why they must disable the external connectivity of the phone, according to the memorandum.
The directive gives officers the authority to seize a device and keep it even after the traveler leaves the airport, which is what happened to Shehadeh. According to the memorandum, CBP could effectively keep his phone indefinitely. The agency is allowed to hold on to the device for a period of five days, which can be extended by 15 days and subsequently by seven days in increments without specified limits.
As of Thursday, CBP has kept Shehadeh’s phone for 14 days, meaning the agency has applied at least one extension to its hold on the device.
In response to Truthout’s request for comment, a CBP spokesperson told Truthout that the likelihood of a search at a port of entry “remains exceedingly rare” but did not answer specific questions about Shehadeh’s case, including why the agency is still holding on to his phone.
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection has statutory authority to conduct border searches of electronic devices for all persons entering or departing the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud, and national security threats,” the CBP spokesperson said.
In the face of the U.S.’s ever-expanding definition of “national security threats,” which now seem to include lawyers, journalists, and activists who have advocated for the rights of Palestinians, are now living in fear that border stops are being used as a form of intimidation.
“What is most disturbing is that many of these aggressive government actions target activists whose only ‘offense’ is criticizing Israel’s violations against Palestinians,” Abu Irshaid told Truthout in a statement.
A Personal Connection
As a reporter, I try to stay out of the stories I am telling. But my personal experience with being stopped and searched after returning to the U.S. from international travel is too relevant for this article to withhold.
After returning to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. from a trip to Lebanon in February 2025, I was detained for nearly five hours and faced similar treatment as Shehadeh.
CBP officers asked me intrusive questions relating to my work as a journalist and political leanings in my family’s hometown in Lebanon, which had been targeted by Israeli bombardment in the war.
After a brief search of my bags, a CBP officer asked me to hand my phone and unlock it. I initially refused. The federal agent handed me a piece of paper stating that CBP has the lawful ability to search electronic devices. When I highlighted that the flyer reflects CBP policy, not the Constitution, the officer threatened to seize both my phone and computer indefinitely if I didn’t hand the phone in.
CBP took the phone after pressuring me to write down its passcode and kept me waiting for around two hours before handing it back — with a disclaimer that they couldn’t “process” it because the system was down. They eventually let me go. Throughout the hours-long ordeal, the officers did not allow me to contact my family member who was waiting to pick me up at the airport.
I have traveled outside the country twice since then and have been flagged for secondary inspection on the way back each time, albeit without a device search. At the advice of press freedom experts, now I travel internationally with an alternative phone that does not contain sensitive personal or professional information.
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