Sunday, May 10, 2026
Nobel laureate’s smuggled memoir details beatings and neglect in Iranian prisons
Nobel laureate’s smuggled memoir details beatings and neglect in Iranian prisons
“Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi’s smuggled memoir details her experiences of torture, medical neglect, and solitary confinement in Iranian prisons. Mohammadi, who has been arrested 14 times for her activism, describes the severe impact of imprisonment on her health, including life-threatening medical events and denial of proper care. Her family and supporters argue that her ongoing detention and lack of medical treatment amount to a “slow execution.”
Writing by Narges Mohammadi, arrested 14 times for activism, offers a disturbing insight into treatment
In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system.
The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments.
“There is no hardship worse than illness combined with imprisonment,” she wrote. “Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail.”
After those words were written and she was rearrested, Mohammadi’s health hit another crisis point this year, with her weight dropping by more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after an apparent heart attack in March. Requests by her family and doctors for her to receive proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons in Tehran were repeatedly denied. She is now being held at a small regional hospital in Zanjan, in a critical condition.
Her family have said her ongoing detention and the refusal of proper medical care constitute a “slow execution”.
Mohammadi wrote of how her stretches in prison have caused significant damage to her health. She has suffered a pulmonary embolism, seizures, multiple infections, chest pain and other life-threatening medical events in prison, and describes the agonising wait for often inadequate medical care.
The writings were smuggled out by fellow prisoners and visitors during Mohammadi’s time in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons, at considerable risk to their own safety. They had to be rewritten several times over the past decade, after pages or notebooks were discovered and destroyed by prison guards.
The memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, will be published in September. It covers Mohammadi’s early life, the way her parents helped inspire her political convictions, her path into activism, and the many years she spent in prison for public protest.
Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism on advancing women’s rights in Iran, improving the conditions of prisoners and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty.
She has been sentenced to a total of 44 years in prison and 154 lashes across a number of convictions. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while in prison in 2023, during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.
In December 2024, she was released on a temporary sentence suspension after a series of health events, but was violently rearrested a year later and sentenced to years’ more prison time in February this year.“
Hegseth Is Sending Us a Warning
Hegseth Is Sending Us a Warning
“The Trump administration, through Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, is attempting to restrict the free speech rights of military retirees, specifically targeting Senator Mark Kelly for a video urging service members to disobey unlawful orders. This move, if successful, would set a dangerous precedent, silencing the voices of over a million military retirees and undermining their constitutional rights. The author, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, argues that this is a clear attempt to intimidate and silence dissent.
By Frank Kendall
Mr. Kendall was the secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration.
This week, I heard something that shocked me. In a federal appeals court, lawyers for Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, argued that military retirees were subject to freedom of speech restrictions because of their connection to the military, and that if they didn’t like those restrictions, retirees could forfeit their pension and benefits. Let that sink in. The Trump administration expects the people who have put their lives on the line for America to cede one of their basic rights, or forfeit the retirement pay and benefits they have earned over decades of service.
I’m a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and I was in that courthouse with dozens of other retired veterans. We were there to support and defend every veteran whose right to speak freely was being challenged by the government we had served.
How did we get here? In November, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, released a video with several other legislators reminding service members that they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.”
The duty to disobey unlawful orders is well established, but the president and secretary of defense immediately called the video outrageous. President Trump wrote that Mr. Kelly should face the death penalty and be hanged as a traitor. Subsequently, Mr. Hegseth censured Mr. Kelly and instructed the secretary of the Navy to investigate him and potentially reduce his retirement rank and pay. Mr. Kelly went to court and won, but the government appealed. Based on the reaction from the three-judge panel in the D.C. Court of Appeals on Thursday, it seems likely that Mr. Hegseth will lose in this court, too, but he has already indicated that he may appeal the case to the Supreme Court. This isn’t over, and it has implications far beyond Mr. Kelly.
A decision in favor of Mr. Hegseth would chill the free speech of every military retiree, particularly officers. This would be unfair to those who have served long enough and honorably enough to retire, and it would deprive the nation of one of the most important voices in any debate about our military.
The disciplinary process Mr. Hegseth wants to use against Mr. Kelly — an officer grade determination — is one I’m familiar with; I used it on several occasions when I was secretary of the Air Force. The process allows military department secretaries, who are political appointees, to determine what rank a retiring officer should be given. If an officer’s performance was unsatisfactory at some point, the officer’s rank at retirement may be adjusted to reflect the highest rank in which his or her service was satisfactory. There is an opportunity to appeal a decision, but only to an internal Department of Defense review board. Unless there is a constitutional issue or serious legal deficiency, there is no appeal to an independent court.
Because Mr. Kelly has raised a constitutional issue, he was able to have his case considered by the civilian courts. If the courts deny Mr. Kelly his free speech rights as a retiree, as Mr. Hegseth desires, the court will be removing this constitutional protection for all military retirees, not just for Mr. Kelly.
I only ever used this process to adjust rank when someone retired because of his or her performance on active duty. It was never about conduct after retirement. My determination usually revolved around how serious the offense had been and whether it was significant enough to warrant a permanent reduction in grade and a lifelong loss of a portion of the retirement pay the individual had earned. Some of these decisions were hard, and I tried to balance fairness to the individual with the need to reinforce important standards of conduct, good order and discipline. Those decisions helped establish standards of behavior for everyone serving.
This isn’t what is happening with Mr. Kelly. In this case, Mr. Hegseth is sending a message to all military retirees: If you cross the Trump administration in public, we will come after you, and you will pay a high price for speaking out. This administration has used and abused every tool it has to coerce businesses, universities, law firms, nonprofits, political enemies and private citizens to do as it desires. Now that coercive power is being used to intimidate military retirees, starting with Mr. Kelly.
The community of military retirees includes over a million Americans who have dedicated themselves to national service. We should not deprive them of their constitutional rights as a consequence of serving. America needs their voices.“
Saturday, May 09, 2026
Friday, May 08, 2026
Supreme court’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ | US voting rights | The Guardian
Supreme court’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ
"The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.
In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”
But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.
The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.
“[The DoJ approach] is misleading because they’re including ineligible voters in the denominator,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who is one of the nation’s leading experts on voter turnout. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population.”
McDonald also said that the survey DoJ’s analysis was based on, the Census Bureau’s current population survey, is known to produce misleading turnout statistics.
“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”
A justice department spokesperson acknowledged that the agency used total voting age population and not the citizen voting age population to compute turnout figures. The spokesperson did not respond to a question asking why the department used that approach. A supreme court spokesperson did not return a request for comment about the methodology.
The Guardian also reviewed data from the Louisiana secretary of state’s office, which calculates voter turnout a third way, as a percentage of registered voters. Using that methodology, Black turnout has not exceeded white turnout in any of the last five presidential elections in Louisiana.
Alito’s claim about national turnout also misses the more recent picture that the turnout gap is actually widening, according to a Guardian review of election data. Barack Obama was the first Black US president on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, the two elections where Black turnout was higher than white turnout. In the three most recent presidential elections since then, Black voter turnout has lagged white voter turnout.
“In zero out of the last three presidential elections, did Black turnout come anywhere close to parity,” said Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, who has studied the turnout gap extensively. The overall national turnout gap has “exploded” over the last 15 years, he added. Alito’s claim is “simply not factual”, Morris wrote in a post last week.
“They’re both cherry picking a particular year, they’re cherry picking a particular method and they’re ignoring this long term more concerning trend in the data,” said Christopher Warshaw, a professor at Georgetown University who studies elections.
When the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, there were ugly racial disparities in voting across the southern US. Black voter registration rates were 50 percentage points behind the voter registration rates of white people in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Once the Voting Rights Act went into effect, that gap narrowed, in part because of federal examiners deployed to southern states to register voters. There was also a surge in Black people elected to office. In 2012, Black voter turnout reached an all time high and exceeded that of white people for the first time, at least since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
After 2012, Black voter turnout dropped and has trailed white voter turnout in every presidential election since. That drop happened amid the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby county v Holder, which gutted a requirement that places with a history of voting discrimination get election changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect. The case was a major blow to the Voting Rights Act and freed up states to pass voting restrictions.
“Shelby county directly increased the racial turnout gap,” Morris said.
Kareem Crayton, a vice-president at the Brennan Center for Justice, also said it was misleading for Alito to argue the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed because disparities had decreased.
“We could have stopped the project in 1970 because things did get immediately a lot better,” he said. “It’s a bit of a ruse to say that the assessment simply is ‘if things have gotten better then the project is over.’”
Revealed: The Trump administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 kids in seven months | US immigration | The Guardian
Revealed: The Trump administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 kids in seven months
"The Guardian analyzed ICE records from January-August 2025, as advocates say the family-separation crisis will lead to generational trauma
After three months in immigration detention, 1,500 miles (2,400km) away from her 13-month-old daughter, LT was running out of options.
Her baby, who was allergic to formula and had other food sensitivities, had been vomiting constantly and needed breastmilk. But the government refused to release LT – an asylum seeker from Haiti – on bond. So, the family’s pediatrician petitioned the government to allow her to pump and mail her breastmilk from the Dilley detention center in Texas to her baby in Florida. That request was denied.
Desperate, LT asked whether her child could be brought into the detention center to be with her. The government denied that, too, she said, on the grounds that the child, who is a US citizen, couldn’t be kept at an immigration detention center.
“I’m terrified of losing my baby,” she said.
The US government has targeted thousands of parents like LT for deportation since Donald Trump took office in January 2025. A Guardian analysis of government records has found that, during the first seven months of his presidency, the administrationarrested the parents of at least 27,000 children. During this period in 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was deporting about twice as many parents each month compared with 2024.
The records do not detail how many of these children were detained or deported with their parents, and how many families were split up. But the data provides one of the starkest views yet of how Trump’s mass deportation scheme has affected parents and children. In thousands of cases, DHS sought to deport parents who had a different citizenship or nationality than their children, creating major legal and logistical barriers to keeping families together.
The Guardian’s analysis also revealed:
During the first seven months of 2025, the administration arrested 18,400 parents – including 15,000 fathers and 3,000 mothers. They are the parents of 27,000 to 32,000 children.
The administration arrested the parents of at least 12,000 US citizen children.
Nearly 7,500 fathers and 1,000 mothers who were arrested had a different nationality than at least one of their children. In about half of these families, siblings had different citizenships from each other.
On average, the Trump administration has been arresting about 2,300 parents each month and deporting 1,400 parents every month. The Biden administration, in comparison, deported about 700 per month in 2024.
Taken together, these figures capture the vast scope of a new family separation crisis created by the US government, human rights advocates said, a crisis that has far surpassed in scale the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the US systematically separated immigrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
The data underlying these findings comes from I-213 forms, which immigration agents fill out each time they make an arrest alleging a person is in the US without authorization. The forms document people’s ages, nationalities, criminal histories – and, crucially, the number and nationalities of their minor children.
A spokesperson for the DHS said the agency “cannot verify the veracity of this data” – even though the Guardian acquired the data via a freedom of information lawsuit. The Guardian cross-checked the records against other government sources.
The government data, said immigration lawyers and researchers, is likely an underestimate of the number of family separations – because in many cases, immigration officials don’t ask the people they arrest whether they have children, and in other cases parents don’t disclose that they have children in order to protect their families from being detained or deported.
The separations will have generational, transnational reverberations, said Faisal Al-Juburi, of the legal aid non-profit RaĂces. “We have now reached the metastasis of family separation under this administration,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve even begun as a nation to grapple with the impact of this type of immigration enforcement and the domino effect it will have.”
LT, 30, fled political violence in Haiti, where, she said, supporters of an opposing political party burned down her house, kidnapped her and raped her. She escaped first to the Bahamas and then arrived by boat in Miami, Florida, in 2019. She fears she would die if she returned now; she said her sister was murdered last year. And her daughter, she worries, wouldn’t be able to get the medical care she needs in Haiti – so she wouldn’t risk bringing her baby there even if she could.
She has also grown increasingly worried that her baby will end up in foster care. LT’s mother is watching the child, but it is impossible for her to work full time and care for an infant – especially not one with complicated medical needs. And, LT has filed a domestic violence complaint against the baby’s father, whom she said has threatened to kill both her and the infant.
“I wish I could be there for my daughter,” LT said in a written statement her lawyers shared with the Guardian. “She is my first child, and I cannot be there for her.”
The Guardian has reviewed more than a dozen cases, and interviewed multiple parents and children who had been separated by detention or deportation. In each case, a sudden arrest or deportation of a parent had radically disrupted the trajectory of a child’s life.
When KO, a 41-year-old Guatemalan mother of three was arrested at an ICE check-in appointment, she told an officer she had a 19-month-old who would be expecting her back home. “The officer said my child and I could die for all he cared,” she said.
While Herminia was held away from her nine-year-old and 16-year-old for eight months, the children’s mental health started to deteriorate, she said. Her young daughter had trouble sleeping through the night, and her teen son considered dropping out of school in order to work and support his sister.
After Marco, 61, was arrested at a Home Depot in Maryland and deported to El Salvador, his 17-year-old, Mark – a US citizen – spent his last months of high school working so that he and his mother could make enough money for rent.
Families described scrambling for funds after a primary breadwinner was detained or deported. Teens and young adults had to drop out of school to take care of younger siblings after both parents were deported. Children were left wondering when or whether they would ever be able to see parents who had been deported back to countries where they faced death threats.
“They are uprooting lives,” said Al-Juburi.
To meet Trump ’s demand for “mass deportations”, the administration has been arresting a record number of immigrants, including people who have been living in the country for many years and have built lives and families in the US. The vast majority of people detained have either no criminal histories, or minor convictions such as traffic offenses.
The push for mass deportation has had a pernicious impact on families, and on mothers in particular. Using the same records as those obtained by the Guardian, ProPublicafound that the Trump administration was deporting four times as many mothers of US citizens each day compared with the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the administration has also weakened protections for non-citizen parents, and stepped back commitments to keep parents united. In several cases, immigration officials had also threatened to separate families, seemingly in order to coerce parents into voluntarily leaving the US.
Lauren Bis, a spokesperson for the DHS, declined to answer a series of questions from the Guardian, including questions about government policies on family separation. The agency denied separating families, and said that “parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children”. Bis also said “being in detention is a choice”, encouraging immigrant parents to use a government app to “self-deport”.
Many parents who have fled dangerous conditions in their home countries feel they cannot risk bringing their children with them. And if they are deported from the US without their children, their separation could be indefinite.
That is the case for EFA, an asylum seeker from Venezuela who was arrested – unexpectedly – at a routine ICE check-in appointment in October. Her husband struggled both to care for their two-year-old son and to make enough money to support him. Before her arrest, EFA had worked night shifts and her husband had worked days so that one of them was always home with their child.
The family’s church congregation jumped into action, organizing a childcare rotation while her husband worked. But the situation is tenuous. EFA’s husband is also an asylum-seeker, and the family is fearful that he, too, will be detained, leaving their son without a guardian.“I cannot help but feel an immense amount of sadness and helplessness due to this separation,” EFA said in a written statement her lawyers at RaĂces provided to the Guardian.
If she were deported to Venezuela, things could get even more complicated. Both she and her husband still face the threat of violence due to their political activism, she said, and are reluctant to take their son back there. But if she leaves the US without her child, it could become exponentially more difficult for the family to reunite. If she is deported, she would be barred from trying to re-enter the US for a decade. And even if EFA and her husband decided to bring their son to Venezuela, they would likely encounter logistical and legal barriers. There are no Venezuelan consulates in the US, and EFA’s husband wouldn’t be able to get a new passport to travel. Many Venezuelans in the US have been struggling to acquire travel documents to return home, even as the US government continues to encourage immigrants to “self-deport” to their home countries.
Her health and sanity, she said, are unravelling at the Dilley detention center where she’s being held. She cries herself to sleep every night, she said, but “I have not sought psychological help because I do not believe anyone can ease the sorrow in my heart. I just need to be with my son.”
Seven years ago, Trump’s “zero tolerance” separation policy sparked national outrage after the media began sharing images of agents wresting crying children from their parents’ arms and placing them in cages. Trump officially ended the policy after about six weeks, but more than 5,500 children had been separated from their parents by then. Hundreds of parents remain separated from their children years later, because the administration lost track of many of the families it forced apart.
Kelly Kribs, an attorney at the Young Center, said the separation crisis unfolding now is even more insidious.
“It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma that we saw unfold back in 2018,” said Kribs, who worked for years to reunite families separated by the zero-tolerance policy. “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”
In recent months, she has been working with parents who have been both detained or deported away from their children in the US. A report earlier this year also found that the government was deporting a significant number of parents without first asking whether they had children, or allowing them an opportunity to arrange for the care of their children, in apparent violation of its own policies.
Once families are separated across international borders, it can be extraordinarily difficult to reunite them, Kribs said.
For Oscar, 32, a Honduran environmental activist who was deported back to the country from which he had fled death threats, it could take months or years before he is able to rejoin his wife, Ana, and his seven- and nine-year-old children in Maryland.
The family had applied for asylum together, but then Oscar was arrested at a check-in appointment, moved to a Texas detention facility and deported. Ana and the children, in the meantime, were granted asylum. So Oscar’s lawyer filed a petition to allow him to rejoin his family in the US. But the International Refugee Assistance Project, an advocacy group, found “dramatic delays” in the processing of these petitions.
Oscar, meanwhile, plans to remain in hiding in Honduras – staying alone in an apartment and avoiding going outside – for as long as he can. When he calls the children, he tells them: “Dad is going to come back soon.” He tells them to behave well for their mother, to remember that he didn’t leave them by choice and to consider that, maybe, this is all part of God’s plan. “We are going to get through this, that I know,” he tells them. “I believe in God’s will and I know that I can return to you.”
Things can get doubly complicated when parents and children don’t share the same citizenship. Recently, Kribs said, she was trying to help a Venezuelan man who was deported by the US to Mexico – one of many immigrants that the government has sent to “third countries” that are willing to accept deportees. His son, who was born in Colombia, remained in the US. So at first, Kribs tried to get the US to deport the child to Mexico – but Mexico declined to receive him. Instead, the father had to figure out a way to travel to Colombia, where he was finally able to reunite with his son after two months of separation.
Among the many considerations Kribs had in that case and others was the question of how to help a young child cross international borders alone. Often, the relatives who step in as guardians after children’s parents are deported are also undocumented, and unable to travel with a child. Getting someone who isn’t a relative to accompany them can be challenging to arrange, and it requires notarized paperwork so there’s no risk the adult will be stopped under suspicion of child trafficking.
Complex, and ever-evolving international politics can also affect how easy – or difficult – it is for a child to get the correct travel documents. Airline policies vary on when and how children can fly unaccompanied. Even if the airline allows for it, Kribs said, it can be a scary journey for a young child. “How can a six-year-old be expected to navigate customs and immigration on his own?” she said.
Hundreds of families are facing similarly mundane yet mountainous barriers to reunification, Kribs said. Hundreds of parents do not know when they will be able to hold their children again.
“I think that’s part of what makes this problem harder for the public to wrap their brains around, is now the family separation is all around us every day across the country, which makes it hard to call out as a unique crisis,” she said. “It has become our everyday reality.”
The Guardian has used initials or first names only in some cases, to protect the identities of individuals who fear retaliation within the US immigration system, or who face threats in their home countries"
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