To Their Shock, Cubans in Florida Are Being Deported in Record Numbers Cubans had long benefited from legal privileges unavailable to immigrants from other countries. President Trump has changed that.

Friends:

There is so much going on that it's hard to keep up. I'm deeply saddened by the recent death of Alex Pretti, the most recent shooting of a Minneapolis resident killed yesterday at a protest by federal immigration agents.

As appalling as that is, I want to alert everyone to a quietly devastating shift that is unfolding in Florida. Cubans—long treated as a special humanitarian case in U.S. immigration policy—are now being deported in record numbers under President Donald Trump.

As New York Times reporter Patricia Mazzei documents, families who once believed themselves protected are being torn apart with little warning, including parents separated from breastfeeding infants and longtime residents deported over decades-old convictions. Legal pathways for Cubans have been slashed, family reunification halted, visas denied, and even pending asylum and residency cases frozen. Detention centers like the Everglades facility ominously dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” now hold Cuban migrants who never imagined they would be treated like everyone else. 

The shock runs deep through Florida’s Cuban communities—especially among elders who remember being welcomed as refugees—and fear has replaced the sense of security that once defined Cuban life in the state. 

What emerges is not simply a change in immigration enforcement, but a moral rupture: a severe policy reversal that erases history, fractures families, and leaves even lawful, working, and deeply rooted immigrants living in constant fear of disappearance. That this transformation has unfolded with the support—and in some cases the explicit rhetoric—of Marco Rubio, the nation’s most prominent Cuban American political leader, makes the rupture all the more painful and consequential.

This, together with the hardship we are witnessing in Minnesota underscores a simple truth: elections matter. Our power must be reclaimed at the ballot box.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

To Their Shock, Cubans in Florida Are Being Deported in Record Numbers

Cubans had long benefited from legal privileges unavailable to immigrants from other countries. President Trump has changed that.

By Patricia Mazzei

New York Times,

Reporting from Miami

Jan. 19, 2026

Leer en español

Heidy Sánchez took her 17-month-old daughter to a routine check-in last April with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa, Fla. During the appointment, federal authorities told her that she was being detained and that her husband should pick up their daughter, who was still breastfeeding.

Two days later, Ms. Sánchez, 44, who worked as a home health aide, was deported.

Ms. Sánchez’s story quickly spread across social media, in part because she is Cuban, a group that had long been treated differently than other immigrants, even when they entered the country illegally.

REMAKING AMERICA

This story is part of a series about how President Trump is changing the country, state by state.

That has changed under President Trump.

He has repatriated more than 1,600 Cubans in 2025, according to the Cuban government. That is about double the number of Cubans who were repatriated in 2024. And in the years that Mr. Trump has been president, he has sent more Cubans back than his three predecessors.

Those numbers are greater for Cubans who were deported by land into Mexico. Some of them had been in the United States for decades and built families and businesses, but were removed because of an old criminal conviction — say, from Miami’s infamous cocaine cowboys days in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

President Trump has repatriated more than 1,600 Cubans in 2025, according to the Cuban government.Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times



Little Havana in Miami.Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times

Some Floridians worry that these deportations could stain the state’s proud Cuban identity.Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times

Nowhere has the shock of treating Cubans like other migrants been felt more than in Florida, which was shaped in modern times by exiles of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Families, businesses and communities that once felt removed from or immune to immigration enforcement now must face it head-on. Some Floridians worry that these deportations could stain the state’s proud Cuban identity, turning older immigrants against newer ones.

Under Mr. Trump, many other countries saw similar increases in repatriation. The difference is that Cubans had not previously been targeted as aggressively for removal. Regular deportation flights to Cuba began in January 2017, under President Barack Obama, paused during the coronavirus pandemic and restarted in 2023.

Many Cubans have also been detained for weeks or months in a facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” At another nearby detention facility, Cuban detainees protested last June by writing “SOS Cuba” on their shirts and spelling out “SOS” with their bodies in the recreation yard.

Legal immigration has also been all but cut out. Mr. Trump enacted a travel ban on 19 countries, including Cuba, and ended a family reunification program. U.S. officials are rejecting visa applications, which can take years to complete. Last month, the Trump administration paused all Cuban immigration cases, including pending naturalization, residency and asylum applications.

“It’s the most sweeping rollback of Cuban migration channels since the Cold War,” said María José Espinosa, the executive director of the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, a nonprofit strategy organization based in Washington.

Polls suggest that most Cuban American registered voters, who tend to be Republican, continue to support Mr. Trump, said Michael J. Bustamante, an associate history professor and director of Cuban studies at the University of Miami who studies Cuban American political culture. But he said that he had noticed “a growing amount of unease” throughout the community.

Ybor City in Tampa, a historic Cuban neighborhood. Nowhere has the shock of treating Cubans like other migrants been felt more than in Florida.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Many Cubans have also been detained for weeks or months in a facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Mr. Trump enacted a travel ban on 19 countries, including Cuba, and ended a family reunification program.Credit...Zack Wittman for
The New York Times

As a senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration’s most prominent Cuban American, often criticized Cuban immigrants who received government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, and frequently returned to the island. Over the summer, Mr. Rubio said in a video commemorating huge anti-Communist protests in 2021 that many Cubans had found it “easier” to “abandon” the island than stay and fight the regime.

Immigration enforcement in South Florida has not involved a mass federal operation, as in Los Angeles or Chicago, and previous administrations had made changes that started to erode Cubans’ immigration privileges. Still, Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration campaign has shaken some Cubans unused to feeling at risk in the United States.

“I am scared of everything,” said Javier González, a 36-year-old salesman in the heavily Cuban city of Hialeah, northwest of Miami.

Mr. González and his family crossed the United States-Mexico border in February 2022, fleeing what he described as a threat to his life in Cuba, where he was a political dissident.

Mr. González and his wife, like hundreds of thousands of recent Cuban migrants, were released under what is known as conditional parole. That does not allow them to apply for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that Congress passed in 1966, and leaves them vulnerable to deportation.

But Mr. González and his wife legally obtained Social Security numbers, work permits and driver’s licenses. He applied for political asylum and has a pending court date in 2028. He found work as an HVAC technician. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to deport criminals seemed sound to him.

Then early last year, ICE officers, during regular check-ins in South Florida, started detaining Cubans with conditional parole. Now, to avoid immigration sweeps, Mr. González said he avoided unnecessary car rides and local Hispanic supermarkets. He cannot fathom the repression he might face in Cuba were he to return as a former dissident.

“Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Why do you have to feel as if you were a criminal when you are an upstanding person?’” Mr. González said. But, he added, “They can grab you and do whatever they want.”

Some older Cuban American immigrants are angry over the turnabout in circumstances. Alicia Peláez, 78, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor in 1960, under Operation Pedro Pan, a secret program run by the Catholic Church with help from the State Department that resettled some 14,000 young Cubans.

Alicia Peláez, 78, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor in 1960, under
Operation Pedro Pan.Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times

Dominoes in Little Havana in Miami.Credit...
Alfonso Duran for The New York Times and the Miami Freedom Tower

“We were welcomed into the country,” said Ms. Peláez, who is a registered Republican, but has not voted that way in recent elections. “Now, it’s the complete opposite.”

Ms. Sánchez, who was separated from her baby and husband, remains in Havana, with a pending visa interview that will determine whether she can apply for a waiver to return to Florida.

She came to the United States through the border, presented herself to request asylum, and waited in Mexico. But she missed a hearing because of safety reasons, which resulted in a deportation order and nine months of detention. In the end, she was released in the United States because Cuba at the time did not accept her repatriation.

Once in Florida, Ms. Sánchez studied and became a nursing assistant. She met and married her husband, an American citizen, who petitioned for her residency. She underwent fertility treatments and had their daughter. Three months before her deportation, they had bought a house.

After being returned to Cuba, Ms. Sánchez said she was so upset that she had to see a psychiatrist. Her daughter, in Tampa, was no longer her cheery self.

“She didn’t laugh anymore, which really worried us,” Ms. Sánchez said.

Her husband and daughter visited Ms. Sánchez over Christmas, which lifted their spirits, she said. But she did not know how she would handle more months of separation.

Her daughter, she said, “is our joy, our happiness, our life.”

Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.

Texas Taxpayers Will Fund Dozens of Private Schools that Openly Discriminate, by Josephine Lee, Texas Monthly, Jan. 13, 2026

Friends:

In a deeply reported investigation for the Texas Observer, staff writer Josephine Lee reveals that Texas’ newly enacted school voucher program—branded by Governor Greg Abbott as “education freedom”—will instead funnel public dollars to private schools that openly discriminate on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status. 

Drawing on an analysis of 291 state-approved private schools serving students beyond kindergarten, Lee finds that more than 90 percent are religiously affiliated, over 100 prioritize or require students of a particular faith, and at least 60 maintain written policies excluding or disciplining LGBTQ+ students. 

Despite taxpayer funding of $10,474 per student (and up to $30,000 for students with disabilities), these schools are not required to accept all students, comply with Title IX, or provide meaningful special education services.

As Lee makes clear, the program’s structure all but guarantees exclusion rather than access. Many participating schools charge tuition above the voucher amount, offer little to no special education services, and retain broad discretion to reject applicants. Nik Nartowicz of Americans United for Separation of Church and State captures the core constitutional and moral concern succinctly: 

“Taxpayers should not be forced to fund someone else’s religion or discrimination; it’s a violation of taxpayers’ religious freedom.” 

Far from expanding educational opportunity, Lee’s reporting shows that Texas’ voucher scheme primarily subsidizes families already in private schools, drains resources from public education, and entrenches a two-tier system in which discrimination is not a side effect but a legally protected feature—one poised to grow into a multi-billion-dollar public entitlement. 

If this concerns you—as I believe it should—now is the time to act. I urge you to join Our Schools Our Democracy for its Week of Action, February 2–6, to demand transparency, defend taxpayer dollars, and insist on fairness for Texas public school students. Participants will be equipped with ready-to-use tools—including sample social media posts, an op-ed template, and a draft email to lawmakers—so you can take immediate, effective action.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas Taxpayers Will Fund Dozens of Private Schools that Openly Discriminate
The state has signed off on voucher funds for schools that exclude non-Christian and LGBTQ+ kids.

by Josephine Lee | Texas Monthly | Jan. 13, 2026

Upon signing school vouchers into law last May, Governor Greg Abbott pronounced that he had delivered “education freedom to every Texas family.” But the billion-dollar program, which opens to parents on February 4, has enrolled dozens of private schools that openly discriminate against Texas families on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, according to a Texas Observer analysis of information gathered from the schools’ websites and handbooks, and survey responses and phone calls with school leaders.

The Observer gathered information about all 291 schools selected by the state that offer education beyond the kindergarten level. More than 90 percent are affiliated with or owned by a religious or faith-based group, the analysis found. More than 100 of those schools require or prioritize for admission students of the same faith, and more than 60 have a written policy that discriminates against LGBTQ+ students, the schools’ own data shows.

The Texas Comptroller’s office announced December 22 that nearly 600 private K-12 and early pre-K schools had already been enrolled in the Texas Education Freedom Account (TEFA) program, as the state vouchers have been dubbed. But only about half that were listed on its website as of January 1 serve students beyond kindergarten. The comptroller’s office, which administers the voucher program, has not provided comment for this story.

About 70 percent of these schools are concentrated in the greater metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin. Many rural Texas families will have no options; more than 180 of Texas’ 254 counties have no elementary, junior, or senior high schools enrolled so far.

Participating students in approved private schools will receive $10,474 for the 2026-27 school year—though students with special needs may receive up to $30,000 and homeschool students will receive $2,000. If applications for the voucher program exceed available funding, program rules state that the comptroller must prioritize applications of students with disabilities and lower incomes.

But these rules don’t guarantee student access to enrolled private schools.

The Observer’s analysis found that around a third of the schools enrolled in the program have a 2025-26 tuition that exceeds $10,474 and few offer special education services. Private schools generally increase rates every year, and the tuition excludes other fees and costs, such as registration, testing, sports, supplies, field trips, or uniforms.

Governor Greg Abbott in 2023 (Logan Hannigan-Downs/College Station Eagle via AP)

Unlike public schools, private schools are not required to accept all students and can weed out students through a lengthy admission process that requires recommendations, testing, and interviews. Chinquapin Preparatory School, a secular school in the Greater Houston area, only invites students to take an admissions test if they first pass a review of prior standardized test scores, report cards, and recommendations. Even after passing the exam, they still have to clear interviews and classroom observations.

In addition, around 40 percent of the religious schools have policies that favor students of their own faith and around 25 percent have policies that discriminate against LGBTQ+ students.

Nik Nartowicz, lead policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the organization has opposed private school vouchers for many years because of such inherent biases. “Taxpayers should not be forced to fund someone else’s religion or discrimination; it’s a violation of taxpayers’ religious freedom,” he told the Observer.

Of the participating schools included in the Observer’s analysis, 268 are religious—with 176 Catholic, 91 Protestant, and one Jewish. Only 23 are secular.

Of the 176 Catholic parochial schools, at least 40 percent prioritize admission of students from their own parish or other Catholic students, based on a review of policies posted on school websites and handbooks. For many of these schools, non-Catholic students are at the bottom of the priority enrollment list. For example, St. Theresa Catholic School in Austin prioritizes in order: children of faculty, siblings of current students, children of parishioners, children of alumni, and children of other Catholic parishes, before enrolling all other applicants, based on “alignment with the school’s mission and values” and assessment results.

“Parochial schools maintain admission requirements so we can faithfully live out our educational and spiritual mission,” Camille Garcia, Secretariat Director of the Diocese of Austin, wrote in response to the Observer’s inquiry on St. Theresa Catholic School’s admission policies. “These requirements are not meant to exclude, but to ensure alignment with the mission and with the parent’s vision for their children.”

About a third of the other participating 91 Christian schools bar from enrollment students who are not from Christian families, based on admission policies posted on websites and handbooks and some responses via phone calls. Some identify themselves as “covenant schools” that aim to only partner with Christian families in the education of their children, as opposed to “mission schools” with an evangelical objective. Many of these covenant schools require an applicant’s family to be professing Christians, to be active members of a Christian church, or provide a character reference from a pastor. That includes Conroe’s Lifestyle Christian School, whose website states: “For a student to be eligible for admission or re-enrollment, the family must be Christians, a member of an evangelical, Bible-believing church, and REGULAR in attendance at the church.” Even if families fit this criteria, its handbook states, “LCS reserves the right to decline admission or re-enrollment of any student at the sole discretion of the school’s administration.”

Lifestyle Christian School’s head of school Chris Brown did not respond to the Observer’s multiple requests for comment on the school’s admission policies.

Students enrolled in Christian schools generally have to attend chapel services and are taught scripture. But some of the approved schools also practice “Kingdom Education,” a religious education model that integrates the Bible into all subject-area instruction. For example, the the McAllen-based Covenant Christian Academy’s curriculum map for 8th Grade American History states that for all units from European settlement to the Civil War to the Industrial Revolution students will learn the guiding Biblical principle that begins with, “God is creator. All things, including time, were made by and for Himself” and ends with, “God’s plans for history are beyond my full comprehension.” Its curriculum map for a unit on “Prokaryotes and Viruses” for 9th Grade Biology states students will learn about creationism, the “success of pathogenic organisms as a result of the Fall and Curse,” and “disease as a result of sin.” Learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, according to its 3rd Grade Math curriculum map, means learning about the “absoluteness-immutability” of God.

Milton Gonzalez, executive director of Covenant Christian Academy declined to comment on the school’s curriculum for this story.

Covenant Christian Academy and other approved schools, like the First Baptist Academy in the San Antonio area, use textbooks from Abeka or Bob Jones University Press which have included inflammatory and controversial racist statements that describe slavery as “black immigration” and characterize slaves as “better investments than indentured servants.”

Christine Povolich, head administrator of the First Baptist Academy did not respond to the Observer’s multiple requests for comments on the school’s curriculum.

In 2005, the Association of Christian Schools International sued the University of California for religious discrimination because the university system had rejected credits from high school courses based on Abeka and Bob Jones textbooks. The attempt was quashed by a 2008 United States District Court for the Central District of California decision in favor of the University of California and a year later upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But Texas’ approval of schools that use these texts could raise more questions about whether these schools are appropriately preparing students for colleges.

For at least 25 percent of the 268 participating religious schools, behavioral expectations include adherence to strict sexuality and gender policies. Some of these schools forbid enrollment of or allow schools to kick out LGBTQ+ students, according to the Observer’s review of school handbooks.

Many Christian schools use the Association of Christian Schools International’s template “Statement on Marriage, Gender, and Sexuality,” which states that “rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person,” that “‘marriage’ only has one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman,” and that “any form of sexual immorality (including adultery, fornication, homosexual behavior, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography) is sinful and offensive to God.” The Bay Area Christian School in the Greater Houston area states in its handbook under a section called “Bay Area Christian School Lifestyle Stance” that “The school reserves the right to refuse enrollment or discontinue partnership when the atmosphere or conduct within a family or actions or stances of a student oppose the scriptural posture” of the school, including “immoral heterosexual activity, homosexual activity, bisexual activity, transgender activity, or sexual deviancy.”

Many Catholic schools included similar statements in their policies. For example, Catholic schools in the Diocese of Corpus Christi use “Human Sexuality: Guiding Principles for Catholic School Leaders,” which states that students will use names, pronouns, and facilities corresponding to their biological sex and that “expressions of a student’s sexual identity” and “expressions of a student’s disordered inclination for same‐sex attraction” are prohibited as they may cause “disruption or confusion regarding the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.” The Diocese also suggests conversion therapy should be used when school leaders identify gay and transgender students. The document states that school leaders should “encourage the family to seek the guidance of their pediatrician and counseling by a trained licensed professional who may be able to assist with this issue in accord with Catholic teaching and natural law.”

Katia Uriarte, director of communications for the Diocese of Corpus Christi, declined to comment for this story.

Bay Area Christian School’s Head of School Les Rainey did not respond to the Observer’s multiple requests for comment on the school’s admission policies.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 mandates that public schools prevent and redress sex-based and gender-based harassment of students in public schools. But “Private religious schools don’t have to have that framework,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, chief legal analyst at the Intercultural Development Research Association, a Texas education and civil rights policy organization. “Private schools can say our religious beliefs or our moral beliefs dictate that having a gender identity or sexual orientation that doesn’t conform with traditional male-female binaries is against our religion.”

Texas’ voucher law also states that private schools will not be considered “state actors,” thus restricting the state from “imposing requirements that are contrary to the religious or institutional values or practices of an education service provider.” Attempts during the legislative session to include anti-discrimination provisions in the voucher law were blocked.

Unlike public schools, private schools are also not required to enroll or provide special education services to students with disabilities that are otherwise required under federal law—so long as they don’t receive federal funding under those provisions.

Even though Texas’ voucher program prioritizes students with special needs, most private schools currently enrolled lack special education services. The Observer received information from 257 schools regarding special education services through a mix of survey responses, phone calls, or information from school handbooks. Of those, less than a dozen schools stated that special education services are available to students. If students with special needs are accepted, some schools said they provide limited accommodations, such as extended time for tests, preferential seating, small-group instruction, and testing; fewer schools offer services for dyslexia and dysgraphia or tutoring for extra costs. Most Catholic school handbooks include a statement similar to that by the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which states, “Students with exceptional learning needs are admitted to the extent that the needs of students can be met within the scope of the programs and available resources on each campus.”

These private schools’ limited ability to provide special education services to students has not stopped private school leaders from encouraging families to obtain an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) to qualify for up to $30,000 in school vouchers. The Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, has created a handout for parents instructing them how to request an evaluation for an IEP from their local public school district. (The Texas comptroller enacted rules requiring an IEP to qualify.)

Steven Aleman, senior policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas, which advocates for public school students with disabilities, told the Observer he’s concerned this will “only divert precious public resources away from remaining public school students with disabilities.”

State Representative Gina Hinojosa, a longtime voucher opponent who is running to be the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, told the Observer, “Make no mistake, every time they talk about ‘school choice’ they are actually taking options away from Texans.” She added that Abbott is “making taxpayers pay the tuition of families who are already enrolled in private school.” 

Gina Hinojosa on the House floor in May 2025 (Jordan Vonderhaar for the Texas 

Observer)

Last December, Brentwood Christian School in Austin held a webinar on the program for families whose students were already enrolled at the school. During the meeting, a parent expressed concern that the award-winning school would change if there was a “run of people” from public schools.

But President Jay Burcham eased their concerns. “We’re full,” Burcham said, explaining that the school only has 15 remaining seats across 14 grade levels. “We do not have to change our accommodations for anyone. We are Brentwood Christian school. This program is for the parents. You’re the beneficiary,” he said.

Burcham suggested students already enrolled in private schools would be prioritized. “It’s been said they want this first go-through to be more for the people who are already in private schools,” he said, later adding, “We want as many of our people in as possible.” During the webinar, Burcham instructed parents how to qualify for the program’s first priority tier for students with disabilities: “If you got the diagnosis, that’s step number one. … Then we have to work really hard with the school district to get an IEP in place.” Even if they don’t qualify for the priority slots, Burcham still encouraged existing Brentwood parents to apply.

In response to the Observer’s inquiry about the webinar, Burcham said the school also held an informational meeting including prospective applicants. But he wanted to make sure currently enrolled families knew they could also apply. “BCS tuition is quite a bit lower than most Central Texas private schools. Even with this lower tuition, we still have many families who receive financial aid subsidies through BCS. These are families who are making ongoing sacrifices to keep their kids in a private and parochial school environment, and they are an intended and welcome participant in the TEFA program, just like the students who may be using TEFA to transfer from a public school to a private school are intended and welcome participants,” Burcham wrote via email.

According to the voucher law’s fiscal note, the billion-dollar program could grow past $6 billion in the next biennium since the Legislature can appropriate more money to expand it to cover more students.

“We need you to register, because the intent is that they’re going to grow this,” Burcham told Brentwood parents during the webinar. “In other words, if you register, but you don’t get TEFA, in two years, you have a high likelihood. So, think of the long game.”

Josephine Lee is a staff writer at the Texas Observer. She has previously worked as an educator and community organizer. Her reporting on labor, environment, politics, and education has been featured in Salon, The Daily Beast, Truthout, and other outlets. She was raised and lives in Houston.

Randall Kennedy Is Afraid. He Thinks You Should Be Too. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2, 2026

Friends:

This interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin of Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy is one of the clearest, most sober-eyed assessments yet of what many in higher education are feeling but struggling to name: that we have crossed a threshold. 

Randall Kennedy—long known for his intellectual independence and willingness to critique excesses within progressive politics—states plainly that he now fears for the freedom of American universities. His warning is especially powerful because it comes not from a reflexive institutional defender, but from someone who has repeatedly challenged DEI overreach, due-process failures, and moral absolutism often found on college campuses where any perceived moral failing is treated as disqualifying,

Here is one of my favorite, truly explanatory quotes from this piece:

"Why is it that the right wing is so upset at the universities? Because universities, more than any other place in American society, are actually open to groups who have been historically marginalized."

When Kennedy says the barking has turned into biting, he captures the reality that legal victories, however important, cannot undo the chilling effects of extortionate governance, coerced compliance, and the quiet normalization of fear.

What makes this exchange essential reading is its insistence on perspective. Kennedy refuses false equivalence: the excesses of campus politics, however real, are not morally or politically comparable to a federal government willing to take higher education “by the throat.” At the same time, he does not absolve universities of responsibility for earlier failures to defend academic freedom when it was inconvenient or unpopular to do so. 

That combination—clear-eyed self-critique without capitulation—is precisely what has been missing from much public debate. Read alongside the longer arc of culture-war politics in education, this piece underscores a hard truth: institutional autonomy is not preserved by silence, euphemism, or quiet retreat. It is preserved only when faculty and leaders alike are willing to speak plainly, defend one another, and recognize that what is at stake is not a policy preference or a contested acronym, but the very conditions under which knowledge can be pursued at all—and to this, I might add, the viability of democracy itself.

-Angela Valenzuela

Randall Kennedy Is Afraid. He Thinks You Should Be Too.
The Harvard law professor on federal extortion, DEI overreach, and why defeating Trump in court won’t be enough.

By Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin

January 2, 2026

Randall Kennedy doesn’t shy away from an argument. His classes at Harvard Law

School, where he has taught for more than four decades, are intellectually raucous affairs. As a law student, future President Barack Obama enrolled in one of Kennedy’s courses but, according to David Remnick’s biography, later dropped the course, fearing a “semester-long shout fest.”

Kennedy remains feisty, iconoclastic, and unpredictable. He’s a self-described progressive who’s willing to call out his own side. On questions of race, Kennedy has long considered himself an optimist. His optimism can put him at odds with activists who draw a straight line from 1619 to today. Where they see implacable racism, Kennedy tends to see progress, not perfection.

But he is the first to admit his optimism has been tested over the past decade. On the topic of the Trump administration and higher education, he is deeply unnerved. “Until recently, I never would have said that I fear for the freedom of universities in the United States,” he told us. “I fear for the freedom of the universities in the United States now.”

During an interview over Zoom from his office at the law school — where the walls are lined with blown-up covers of his many books, including Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word — Kennedy was characteristically frank and voluble as we discussed the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education; double standards around diversity, equity, and inclusion; George Floyd and the October 7 attacks; and whether academics are too self-critical. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Goldstein: We last spoke in February, about a month into Donald Trump’s second term. Back then you said: “I have never felt so worried about the state of academia. Fear is palpable. There’s tremendous foreboding.” Are fear and worry still palpable?

Randall Kennedy: I still feel very fearful. Before, there was worry about what might happen. There was concern about the barking. Now there’s been biting. This administration has time and again shown that it cares little to nothing about the law. And it has succeeded. A bunch of institutions have felt compelled to enter into “deals” with the federal government. These universities say over and over again, “These deals do not compromise our autonomy, our independence, our academic freedom.” Of course that’s not true.

A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

There are moments in this nation’s history when what the powerful say is so transparently opposed to what any reasonable person can see—with their own eyes, with their own conscience—that we must call it what it is.

This is one of those moments.

Renee Nicole Good should still be alive.

Renee Nicole Good

She was a 37-year-old mother and an award-winning poet, driving with her
partner shortly after dropping off her child at school in Minneapolis when an ICE agent fired—killing her (Bjornson, 2026). 

Video footage and eyewitness accounts suggest she was not charging anyone, not wielding a weapon, not threatening lethal harm. Instead, the footage shows a woman who moments before being shot said, “I’m not mad at you,” revealing a human being clinging to peace even as violence unfolded.

Accordingly, I encourage you to see the video from the perspective of the ICE agents posted by The Guardian to witness a peaceful Renee Good with one of the two cops who then calls her a "f-ing bitch" right before she was shot in the face one or more times and summarily killed (Vargas, 2026).

But instead of truth, we are being offered something far worse: denial dressed up as an official story. How deeply offensive.

Kristi Noem

In the hours and days after Renee’s death, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rushed forward with sharp, self-serving narratives about self-defense and “domestic terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a premature, a priori conclusion—declaring Renee a threat before facts, investigations, or even basic accountability have been offered. 

And what's with the get-up? Wearing an over-sized cowboy hat worn for a photo op, jarringly out of step with the gravity of the moment. Even her eyes were hidden—mirroring masked ICE agents whose anonymity shields their violence from accountability.

This is not leadership. This is gaslighting.

Gaslighting isn’t merely lying. It is attempting to make the public distrust its own senses—its own basic moral compass. It insists that what feels wrong, what looks wrong, and what is wrong is somehow righteous, necessary, inevitable—or something else altogether.

This is why this moment feels like a Kent State moment.

Kent State was not only the killing of four students by the National Guard in 1970. It was the lie that followed—the attempt to justify lethal state force against unarmed youth, and then to sanitize that violence into a narrative of necessity. Despite photographs, witnesses, and tears, officials tried to tell the nation that nothing extraordinary had happened—that the pain we saw was a distortion. The lie was worse than the bullets. It asked us to turn away from what history later confirmed was inescapably undeniable.

Because what followed Kent State wasn’t just outrage. It was a breaking point in how Americans saw state power and the stories told to protect it.

That is why I am calling this a Kent State moment.

And I am not alone (e.g., OB Rag, 2026).

What makes this moment especially eerie—almost unbearable in its symmetry—is geography itself. According to The Associated Press, Renee Good was killed about a mile from where Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020. One mile. Close enough that the memory of that pavement, that breath, that collective trauma still lingers in the city’s air. The distance is short, but the connection is vast—linking the two deaths in public memory as reminders of how easily state violence reappears, even after national reckoning, including promises of reform.

Here at home in Washington, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, herself moved to tears, did what true representatives are supposed to do: she named the human pain this incident has caused and asked those on the other side of the aisle to show something called humanity—to care about a mother who lost her life, a family shattered, and a community outraged. Crockett’s voice broke as she asked: Where is the decency? The courage? The basic heart to acknowledge a life lost, rather than rush to defend federal force?

Her tears were not performative. They were painfully real—so honest they undid me. They became a moral mirror, exposing a political body far more concerned with controlling its story than confronting the searing truth of a mother’s death and a child left orphaned.

And that is the real tragedy here.

Because this was not an abstract policy clash. This was a human being—a wife, a mother, a friend, a neighbor—whose last moments were recorded not as an act of aggression, but as a cry for peace and connection. Her partner’s anguished pain—chasing the car, saying “They shot my wife”—is etched into the conscience of any American who has ever lost someone they loved.

And yet the strongest responses from the federal stage have been attempts to reframe reality instead of confronting it.

To repeat, this is gaslighting. They are telling us what to see, even as the evidence screams otherwise. Power is demanding obedience to a lie.

That is why we must say, clearly: We see what happened. We see the video. We see the pain. We refuse to let a political narrative overwrite what is unmistakably evident.

A Kent State moment is not just a historical comparison. It is a wake-up call. It is a moment of moral reckoning when the state’s attempt to redefine reality collides with the undeniable truth that humans can see with their own eyes and feel in their own hearts.

We should not let this go quietly.

Renee Nicole Good deserves more than euphemism or spin. Her family deserves honesty. And the American public deserves leaders willing to name what is true rather than protect a narrative that defies what we all can plainly see.

This is not just politics. This is conscience.

And we should not pretend it is anything less.

References

Associated Press. (2026, January 7). ICE officer kills a Minneapolis driver in a deadly start to Trump’s latest immigration operation. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-enforcement-shooting-crackdown-surge-173e00fa7388054e98c3b5b9417c1e5a

Bjornson, G. (2026, January 8). Renee Good had just dropped 6-year-old off at school when she encountered ICE. Soon her partner was crying, “They just shot my wife.” People. https://people.com/renee-good-dropped-6-year-old-off-at-school-before-ice-encounter-11881867

OB Rag. (2026, January 8). ICE agent who killed Renee Good needs to be identified, arrested and brought to trial for murder. OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/01/ice-agent-who-killed-renee-good-needs-to-be-identified-arrested-and-brought-to-trial-for-murder/

Vargas, R. A. (2026, January 9). Renee Nicole Good said ‘I’m not mad at you’ before ICE agent shot her, video shows. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/09/ice-agent-minneapolis-bodycam-footage

West, A., & Fiorillo, C. (2026, January). Kristi Noem hides face under massive ‘stupid’ cowboy hat as she gives update on ICE shooting. MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kristi-noem-hides-face-under-massive-stupid-cowboy-hat-as-she-gives-update-on-ice-shooting/ar-AA1TXHXU

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

Writing for The Nation, Gregg Gonsalves is right to call Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett what it is: an act of institutional cowardice. But it is also something larger—a sign of how higher education is being quietly reshaped for an authoritarian moment.

Bassett was not removed for poor leadership or scholarly failure. She was removed because her work named injustice—specifically, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza—and refused the demand for silence now imposed on universities by donors, politicians, and bad-faith actors wielding accusations of antisemitism as a political weapon. This was not compliance with law. It was anticipatory obedience.

What makes this moment dangerous is not only Harvard’s decision, but the logic behind it. Universities are increasingly sacrificing people, programs, and principles to prove their “neutrality.” In reality, there is nothing neutral about purging scholars whose work confronts racism, colonial violence, or state power. That is not risk management; it is ideological discipline.

We have already seen where this leads. At New College of Florida, political intervention openly remade an institution. Harvard’s case is more troubling precisely because no governor forced its hand. The institution chose to capitulate.

It should not go unnoticed that two of the most prominent academic casualties of this era have been Black women leaders, namely, Dr. Claudine Gay — Harvard’s first Black President—and now Mary Bassett, a globally recognized Black public health leader. When universities decide who is expendable, power speaks plainly.

If institutions of higher learning cannot tolerate scholarship that links public health to human rights, or education to democracy, they cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They become risk-averse corporations, curating acceptable knowledge to appease those in power.

Bassett’s ouster clarifies the stakes. Higher education is being remade—not through force alone, but through fear. The question now is whether universities will continue down this path, or whether faculty, students, and the public will insist that truth-telling is not a liability, but the very reason universities exist.

Society / January 8, 2026

Harvard’s Ouster of Mary Bassett Is a Revolting Act of Cowardice

The public health icon was brutally removed from her job for one reason: her opposition to genocide in Gaza.

Gregg Gonsalves |The Nation

Mary Bassett, commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, speaks
during a health department press briefing on August 22, 2022, in New York City.
(John Lamparski / Sipa USA via AP)

We’ll come out of this. Let me tell you something. If none of us are here, if none of us are here to see it, tell your children who the cowards were.

                      —Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mary Bassett is a legend in public health. From her student years at Radcliffe College where she volunteered with the Black Panthers to provide sickle cell disease screening in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, to her work on HIV prevention when she was on the faculty of the University of Zimbabwe, to her pioneering role on AIDS care in Africa as the Rockefeller Foundation’s point person on health equity, to her tenure as the commissioner of health for both New York City and New York State, Bassett has been a visionary, sought after for her commitment to the health of the most vulnerable people in the US and around the planet.

In 2018, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health scored a coup by getting Bassett to lead the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Let me be clear—Dr. Bassett elevated Harvard by taking up this role, not the other way around.

Yet in mid-December of last year, the school’s dean, Andrea Baccarelli—more on him later—suddenly told Bassett that he was removing her as director of FXB. It was abrupt, unceremonious, and cruel. But cruelty is the point nowadays, isn’t it?

Harvard’s decision has sent shock waves through the international public health and academic communities. Over 2,000 colleagues have signed a petition calling for Bassett’s reinstatement. Leaders like Jocalyn Clark, international editor of The BMJ, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, called it “a shocking move,” while Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was appalled at what happened, asking, “What were they thinking?”

Well, what were they thinking? It’s clear that Bassett was pushed out for one reason only—her insistence on highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Her leadership of the FXB Center was singled out in a report on campus antisemitism as focused “heavily on Palestinians”—an apparent cardinal sin.

Let’s be frank about a few things. By now, many people have come to see what is happening in Gaza as an abomination—including people from within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. It is those who have refused to condemn the atrocities in Gaza—including noted Harvard bigwig and sex pest Larry Summers, who has been critical of FXB for months and months—who came gunning for Bassett.

And the charges of antisemitism are, bluntly, bullshit. The massacres by Hamas on October 7 were abhorrent in their own right, but the response from the Netanyahu government has been indefensible—his government means to wipe Gaza off the map and has taken 70,000 lives in this quest to date. The genocide has also caused one of the gravest public health crises of the 21st century, with Gaza’s entire medical system virtually wiped out and hunger and disease running rampant. In other words, the situation in Gaza couldn’t be more relevant to the work of an institution focused on health and human rights like the one Bassett ran.

To categorically frame Bassett and every single other person who refuses to give the Israeli government carte blanche and justify Netanyahu’s actions as antisemitic is just not right. Of course, there are antisemites among Israel’s critics, but plenty of Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel, are appalled by what is happening—they don’t give up claims to their Jewishness because they oppose Likud and its coalition partners’ actions. In fact, what is happening is simply a political move to crush dissent against a country’s foreign policy and military decisions. It also is a move to silence the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis trying to bridge divides in their home country.

But on college campuses, Bassett’s firing is about something more. Antisemitism has been mobilized by antisemites to assert control over higher education in America. Elise Stefanik, a key architect of the ouster of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay and others on the basis of their response to campus antisemitism, was called out by her own hometown newspaper in 2021 for her invocation of the Great Replacement theory (“How low, Ms. Stefanik?”)—she is clearly no friend to the Jews. Far-right activist Christopher Rufo willingly exposed his strategy in his use of antisemitism in an interview with Politico in January 2024, gleefully admitting he used it to bring down university presidents by cultivating allies among the liberal press who were credulous enough to take the charges he was making at face value.

And more and more influential figures among American Jews are calling all this out. In December, a letter from Joe Berman, a former top litigator for the Anti-Defamation League put it succinctly, “Jews and the fight against antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda.… Make no mistake: this will not end well, especially for Jewish Americans.” And an Ipsos poll last September of over 1,000 Americans who self-identified as Jewish found that “a wide majority—by nearly a three-to-one margin—report that President Trump uses allegations of antisemitism as an ‘excuse’ to pause or cut university funding, rather than saying he ‘truly cares’ about the well-being of Jewish students.” Clearly, the game is up for many Jewish Americans. But not for Harvard.

The only reason Bassett was fired is that Harvard donors, trustees, HSPH dean Andrea Baccarelli, and President Alan Garber wanted it to happen. There are two possible reasons for this, and both are alarming at this terrible political moment in American history. One scenario is simple: they agree with the policies of the current Israeli government, and the charges hurled against colleges by the Trump administration, and are gladly squelching any dissent. That is, they are collaborators.

The second, and more likely, reason is that the leaders at Harvard are cowards. Under pressure from the White House and the far right, they thought the sacrifice of Bassett was simply worth it to appease their critics, even bad-faith ones. The quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates above is from a longer speech he gave recently, where he explicitly calls out civic leaders, including those at universities, who speak forthrightly about the importance of institutions of higher education, but yet shrink back at the moment of truth: “These institutions, rich, prestigious, cower rather than confront. They compromise their principles instead of defending justice.”

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Baccarelli and Garber have sacrificed one of the leading public health figures of our time out of deep moral cowardice. They’ll go down with those who turned in their friends and colleagues during the blacklist in the 1950s, substituting a dubious expediency for any self-respect. And one might also ask, where is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard on all of this? While these faculty have been noisily clamoring for free speech and viewpoint diversity on campus for years, they’ve been noticeably silent on what is clearly a purge of a fellow academic. I guess it’s free speech for me, not for thee when it comes to viewpoints they may disagree with. Cowards all.

Why does all this matter? The Trump administration is trying to reshape higher education for an authoritarian era, as has been done in other countries, at other times. You need cowards to do this: people who will sell out their colleagues and their principles to promote their own safety or advancement, even as they claim they are doing it because they have no choice. I am sure Baccarelli and Garber have also told themselves they are saving their school by making these concessions, but what is left in capitulation and collaboration’s wake?

Universities are no longer about open inquiry and debate if they are willing to close programs, shutter departments, shift away from priorities that arouse the ire of the state, and purge those who run afoul of those in power. Rebuilding academia in the image of the far right is the goal. For an example of where that leads, just look at New College of Florida. But even there, Governor Ron DeSantis forced New College’s hand. Baccarelli and Garber are lending their own hands to this project.

As for public health and medicine? This move is part of the campaign to reshape our fields as well. Bassett was fired because she spoke up on Gaza, but it is clear that her seminal work on racism and health, and her willingness to speak up about these issues, also put her on the wrong side of the Trump administration, as well as those on campus who see current discussions on race and social justice in medical school curriculums as overly woke, “promot[ing] extensive and dangerous misinformation,” and representing a form of “pedagogical malpractice.”

Baccarelli has said the “new” version of FXB will emphasize children’s health as its focus (even though FXB already has a program on this topic). One has to wonder which children will count in this new cramped vision of human rights at Harvard. If I were at Harvard, I’d also be worried about the future of FXB’s other programs on climate change and public health emergencies, on racial justice, on migrants and refugees, and the Roma program for health and human rights. This is what Baccarelli and Garber are willing to leave behind.

At this moment, the rise of authoritarianism and the backlash to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the fight for trans equality have begun to converge. Those on campus who want to make university life safe for misogyny, racism, and transphobia again are feeling empowered. The academics among Epstein’s men, like Larry Summers, who yearn for a past in which we all knew our place in the pecking order, see their fortunes rising. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the two most prominent terminations at Harvard in this era—Mary Bassett and Claudine Gay—have been two Black women.)

Making an example of Mary Bassett was a very bad move. We know who the cowards (and collaborators) are now. Bassett was at the forefront of a new public health, grounded in science and justice for all. And even as they may say they are doing no such thing, we need to realize that these men have declared war on an entire field, because their quest was not just to remove a single leader but to extirpate a set of ideas and principles fundamental to public health that their patrons find objectionable.

At least, though, we know where we stand. The contours of the struggle ahead are coming into clearer relief every day. It is bad medicine to carve out discussions of gross human rights violations, like the carnage in Gaza, of race, sexuality, and gender, and the entire panoply of social determinants of health out of our work to satisfy this regressive politics. Because in the end, it is not viruses and rogue cells alone that kill us—it is what we inflict on each other that makes us sick, leaves us dead.

Gregg Gonsalves
Nation public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves is the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.