Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status

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“The Trump administration is making it easier to deport DACA recipients. A new precedent decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals states that being a DACA recipient is not sufficient grounds for deportation relief. This decision, stemming from the case of Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago, potentially weakens DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of individuals.

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Ximena BustilloApril 25, 2026

The order in the case involving Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago came from the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative court within the Justice Department.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration is making it easier to deport immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. 

A new precedent decision published Friday by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) says being a DACA recipient is not enough reason to provide relief from deportation.

A three-judge panel of appellate immigration judges sided with Department of Homeland Security lawyers who appealed a decision from immigration judge Michael Pleters terminating removal proceedings for Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago, citing Santiago's active DACA status. They sent the case back to a different immigration judge for review.

Although the decision does not mean Santiago will be immediately deported, it potentially weakens DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of others. 

Santiago's case gained national attention after she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers while boarding a domestic flight at the El Paso airport in August. She was placed in immigration detention until a federal judge granted her release last October. She has been fighting the threat of deportation in the immigration court system since.

The BIA is an administrative court within the Justice Department. After a case is heard by an immigration judge, both the immigrant and DHS have the right to appeal that decision to the BIA. BIA's public decisions set the precedent and tone for how immigration judges nationwide should make decisions and how the general public should interpret immigration law and policy. Friday's order is the latest step by the Trump administration to strip away protections from DACA recipients.

"For over a decade, DACA has endured relentless, politically motivated attacks," said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of Advocacy and Campaigns at United We Dream, an organization fighting for the rights of immigrants.

"This decision is yet another step in dismantling the program without the government taking responsibility for ending it outright. ... This is a quiet rollback of protections, and our communities are paying the price in real time."

The BIA order, which is technically known as an interim decision, notes that DHS argued Pleters, the immigration judge, should be recused from the case because he is married to Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who has been outspoken about DACA issues on Capitol Hill, this case specifically and whose district includes El Paso. Neither the judge nor Escobar are identified by name in the interim order.

The BIA did not sustain DHS' appeal based on that argument, however, instead saying that "the Immigration Judge erred" by basing his decision to terminate removal proceedings solely on Santiago's DACA status.

DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status.

The DACA program is meant to offer temporary protection from deportationbut is not an immediate path to citizenship or a green card. Participants have to renew their protection every two years.

This second Trump administration has tried to strip 505,000 DACA recipients, also known as Dreamers, of benefits, though no regulatory changes have been made to end the program. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would make DACA recipients ineligible for the federal health care marketplace and the Education Department said it was looking into five universities that offer financial help for DACA recipients.

In a letter to senators earlier this year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that between January and November of last year, 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 were removed from the country.

In the letter, Noem reiterated that DACA is temporary.

"It comes with no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely," she wrote.

DHS did not respond to an immediate request for comment on whether active DACA recipients are at risk of removal.

Board of Immigration Appeals underscores Trump's policies

Over the last year, attorneys with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who represent DHS in immigration court, have increasingly appealed more decisions to the BIA.

According to a recent NPR analysis, BIA decisions backed government lawyers in 97% of publicly posted cases last year; that's at least 30 percentage points higher than the average over the past 16 years.

The board's decisions have made it harder for immigration courts to offer immigrants bond in lieu of detention. It's eased the way to deport migrants to countries other than their own. And a new proposed regulation would make it harder for people to appeal their immigration decisions at all.

All these actions over the last year came as the board pumped out 70 published decisions, a record number of precedent-setting cases.

Immigration courts are housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, at the Justice Department. They are not a part of the judiciary.“

Democrats express ‘grave concerns’ over secretive ICE deportation flights | US immigration | The Guardian

Democrats express ‘grave concerns’ over secretive ICE deportation flights

Oliver Laughland

From left: Representatives Jasmine Crockett, Rob Menendez and Jerry Nadler. Composite: Getty Images

"A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.

In a letter shared with the Guardian and addressed to FAA administrator Bryan Bedford, the lawmakers describe the “urgent need for transparency” over ICE’s expanded use of commercial airliners to transfer detained immigrants and its “inappropriate and dangerous” efforts to shield these flights from public scrutiny.

“Credible reports indicate that individuals have been placed on flights without notice to counsel or family members, effectively disappearing from public view when flights are inappropriately shielded from tracking systems,” the letter states. “Families are left searching for their loved ones, and attorneys are denied meaningful opportunities to intervene, raising serious due process concerns.”

The letter references an investigation by the Guardian, based on leaked flight data, which revealed the Trump administration transported detained immigrants in ways that routinely violated their constitutional rights. The reporting also identified allegations of abuse and rights violations at a private detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, a central node in the administration’s deportation program.

The Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda saw a surge in the number of ICE flights during 2025, according to monitoring by human rights groups that tracked an 84% increase from 2024.

“Concerningly, information regarding these [ICE] flights is nearly impossible to find, which undermines congressional oversight and prevents the public from understanding the scope and conditions of these flights,” the letter states.

The Trump administration has previously described claims of “hidden” or “weaponized” transfer and deportation flights as “categorically false” and argued its detention centers have “higher standards than most US prisons”.

The lawmakers ask the FAA to provide a detailed report of “all ICE air operations” since Trump was sworn into office, including flight origin and destination data as well as how many passengers were held onboard each flight. It addresses reporting by the Associated Press, which revealed how dozens of charter jets used for deportation flights were granted unusual permission by the FAA to block certain data, including tail numbers, from public flight tracking sites – making it harder to monitor ICE air operations in public.

“This transparency is important for the American people to understand what is happening every single day because there are so many violations of due process and legal rights happening that if people knew about them they would find it deeply problematic,” said New Jersey congressman Rob Menendez, the letter’s lead author. “We want people to understand what is happening on their dime.”

The signatories also include Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who authored a bill earlier this year aiming to block airline operators from hiding their tracking data while carrying out federal government services, as well as New York congressman Jerry Nadler, the ranking member on the House judiciary committee.

The letter also calls on the FAA to provide detailed information on how the agency assesses humanitarian conditions on ICE flights, including the controversial use of full body restraints during deportation flights. The lawmakers ask the FAA how restraining passengers in this manner affects evacuation and emergency procedures onboard and how ICE officers and flight attendants are trained to handle such scenarios.

The Trump administration has previously stated its use of restraints on ICE flights as “long-standing, standard ICE protocol” designed to “ensure the safety and well being of both detainees and the officers/ agents accompanying them” and argued the practices are “fully in line with established legal standards”.

Menendez, who sits on the influential energy and commerce committee, said he expected representatives from airline companies working with ICE as well as private companies operating detention centers to face greater pressure to testify before Congress should Democrats win back control of the House following the midterm elections later this year.

“We are putting pressure on now. But when we have the majority and the gavels there is so much more work and oversight that we will be able to do to demand and get accountability for the American people so all options will be on the table,” Menendez said.

“People who think they can do this [immigration detention and transfer] work without there being any consequence are wrong.”

Democrats express ‘grave concerns’ over secretive ICE deportation flights | US immigration | The Guardian

Nobody Hates Black People Like Clarence Thomas

 

Nobody Hates Black People Like Clarence Thomas

The Shadow Docket: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

 

 

What We Saw in Cuba Shocked Us

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“U.S. sanctions and a fuel blockade have severely impacted Cuba, causing shortages of essential resources and harming the population. The authors, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, witnessed the effects firsthand during a visit to Cuba. They advocate for normalized relations between the U.S. and Cuba, highlighting potential benefits for both countries and urging an end to the blockade.

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May 11, 2026

Constanze Han

By Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan L. Jackson

Ms. Jayapal, of Washington’s Seventh Congressional District, and Mr. Jackson, of Illinois’s First Congressional District, are Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Alejandro, a premature baby born in Havana’s Eusebio Hernández Pérez maternity hospital, weighed only two pounds when we met him in April. We watched him as he lay in an incubator, one of the few in the building whose delicate electronic components hadn’t been damaged by the high-voltage electricity surges that follow nationwide blackouts. Far-reaching U.S. sanctions make importing replacement parts for the other, broken incubators nearly impossible.

Touring the hospital, we saw women in the final days of their pregnancies trudging up flights of stairs, the elevators inoperable without power. The hospital staff members struggle to get to work without fuel for their cars. During blackouts, doctors sometimes have to manually pump ventilators to keep babies alive. They say the hospital has managed to avoid an increase in infant mortality over the past several months, but other facilities around the country have not been so lucky. From 2018 to 2025, as U.S. sanctions grew more punitive, Cuba’s once-impressive infant mortality rate skyrocketed by 148 percent.

As members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, we spent five days in Cuba in April to better understand the humanitarian impacts of America’s monthslong energy blockade of the island. We came away shocked by the inhumane effects of the policy, whose goal appears to be strangling the economy until the Cuban people are brought to ruin and the country is available, as President Trump put it, for the “taking.”

With the exception of one Russian oil tanker carrying 10 to 14 days’ worth of oil, fuel deliveries to Cuba have been blocked for more than four months, as other countries have feared having their tankers seized in open waters by U.S. military vessels. The resulting daily indignities have rippled across Cuban society. We returned from our trip certain that if the American people knew the full extent of what is happening on the ground in Cuba, they would demand an end to the blockade immediately.

The U.S. blockade of fuel to Cuba, on top of the longest embargo in modern U.S. history, defies the norms of international law that provide for state sovereignty, nonintervention in domestic affairs and the right of nations to trade freely. It amounts to an economic assault on the basic infrastructure of Cuba, designed to inflict collective punishment on the civilian population by manufacturing a humanitarian crisis in which health care, running water, agriculture and transportation are no longer available.

During our visit, we spoke with a wide range of Cuban citizens — political dissidents, religious leaders, entrepreneurs and members of civil society organizations and humanitarian aid groups. We also met with the families of Cuba’s political prisoners. Everywhere, there was agreement: America’s blockade must end, and a U.S. invasion must not take place.

We saw for ourselves how Americans could benefit from normalized relations with Cuba in a few key ways. Under different circumstances, Cuba would be a natural U.S. trade partner. Several agricultural secretaries of both red and blue states have visited the island to explore opportunities to export U.S. agricultural products to Cuba, hampered only by the United States’ own financial restrictions under the embargo.

The Cuban health care system, for decades a global model of public health, has produced important advances that could extend to Americans, including promising treatments for Alzheimer’s and lung cancer. And both Cuba and the United States could benefit from a boost in tourism. When President Barack Obama moved to normalize relations with Cuba, hotels, restaurants and shops flourished around the island and fueled the liberalization of the Cuban economy and an emerging independent civil society.

The Cuban government can and must do more internally to improve political and civic rights, including ending arbitrary detention and mistreatment of political prisoners, which we conveyed in our meeting with President Miguel Díaz-Canel. But it has taken some important steps, including announcing the release of 2,010 prisoners in what the country’s state-run newspaper called a “humanitarian and sovereign” gesture. Cuba’s move to authorize an F.B.I. investigation of a recent deadly maritime shootout involving Cuban Americans was another important show of transparency and good will.

Many of the economic changes the Trump administration has claimed it wanted throughout the blockade are already underway. The government recently allowed Cuban American entrepreneurs to invest in private businesses. Small and medium-size businesses now account for large parts of the economy and work force.

But liberalizing reforms cannot counteract a deliberate U.S. campaign to destroy the Cuban economy. Over the past few weeks Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sweeping new sanctions targeting Cuba’s economy under the pretext that the island poses a threat to U.S. national security.

These measures reiterated that the biggest obstacle to improving the daily lives of Cubans continues to be the United States’ outdated, Cold War-era policy of economic coercion and military pressure, whose only upshot has been isolation and suffering for the Cuban people. Further destruction in Cuba, including military action, would lead only to greater economic collapse and more Cubans fleeing the island.

The United States and Cuba can turn the page and enter real negotiations if they are based on mutual respect and aim to benefit the people of both countries. This is what we believe to be in reach — a real chance for children like Alejandro and the next generation of Cubans who deserve to know the generosity of the American people and to live with hope for the future.“

 

The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians

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“Palestinian detainees report widespread sexual violence by Israeli guards, soldiers, and interrogators, including rape, beatings, and humiliation. Despite the lack of evidence that Israeli leaders order these acts, the violence is reportedly a “standard operating procedure” within the security apparatus. Victims face stigma, threats, and societal pressures that prevent them from speaking out, leaving the extent of the abuse largely unreported.

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Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.

May 11, 2026

Suhaib Abualkebash.Samar Hazboun for The New York Times

Suhaib Abualkebash.Samar Hazboun for The New York Times

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.

Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”

And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

Sami al-SaiSamar Hazboun for The New York Times

What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”

Al-Sai was blindfolded, he said, and heard someone say in Hebrew, which he understands, “don’t take photos.” That suggested to him that someone had pulled out a camera. One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and joked, “these are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.

The guards left him handcuffed on the ground, and he smelled cigarette smoke. “I realized it was their smoking break,” he said.

After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.

Al-Sai said that he had been asked to become an informant for Israeli intelligence, and he believes that the purpose of his arrest and imprisonment under the administrative detention system was to pressure him to agree. Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused.

I’ve had a career covering war, genocide and atrocities including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards or settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, 100,000 women may have been raped. Mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.

Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.

I became interested in reporting on sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners after Issa Amro, a nonviolent activist sometimes called “the Palestinian Gandhi,” told me when I previously visited that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.

By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.

“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

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It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a respected American organization, surveyed 59 Palestinian journalists who had been released by Israeli authorities after the Oct. 7 attacks. Three percent said they had been raped, and 29 percent said they had endured other forms of sexual violence.

The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women. Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate Israeli assaults against Palestinians. Netanyahu has denounced “baseless accusations of sexual violence” made against Israel.

Israel’s Ministry of National Security declined to comment for this article. The prison service “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse, said a spokesman who declined to be named, adding that complaints are “examined by the competent authorities.” The spokesman declined to say whether any prison staff member had ever been fired or prosecuted for sexual assaults.

The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.

One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.

Conservative social norms also inhibit discussion: Two victims told me that a prisoner who acknowledges being raped would harm the ability of his sisters and daughters to find husbands.

One farmer initially agreed to let me use his name in this article. Released early this year after months in administrative detention — with no charges filed — he related what he said happened one day last year: A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.

Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more, again with the metal baton.

“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down completely. I was crying.”

After being returned to his cell, he said, he asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.

“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?” one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a third time that day, he said.

He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more to put in your complaint.”

A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble, and he also feared that his family would react badly to the attention.

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”

Bashi said her organization has filed hundreds of complaints detailing horrific abuse against Palestinian detainees — and not in a single case did these lead to charges filed. Impunity, she said, creates a “green light” for abusers.

One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.

Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not its heroic fighters,” he said.

Bashi described the outcome this way: “I would say that dropping the charges — that’s giving permission to rape.”

That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries. The acquaintance said that the former prisoner declined to be interviewed.

Prosecutions and public attention can curb such violence. In 1997, police officers in New York City raped a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a stick so brutally that he required hospitalization and surgeries. New Yorkers were outraged, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Louima in the hospital and police officers were prosecuted in a landmark case. That sent a powerful message throughout the police force: Those who assault detainees may be punished. And that’s the message that must be sent throughout the Israeli security forces.

If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.

How does this kind of violence happen? Decades of covering conflict has taught me that a combination of dehumanization and impunity can propel people into a Hobbesian state of nature. I’ve encountered this drift toward savagery in killing fields from Congo to Sudan to Myanmar, and I think it also roughly explains how American soldiers came to sexually abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, called detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and boasted of making prison conditions harsher for Palestinians. When such attitudes prevail, sexual abuse can become one more tool to inflict pain and humiliation on Palestinians.

Ben-Gvir declined, through a spokeswoman, to comment on sexual assaults by security services.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, documented “a grave pattern of sexual violence” toward Palestinians. It cited the account of a Gaza prisoner, Tamer Qarmut, who said he had been raped with a stick. Torture, B’Tselem said, “has become an accepted norm.”

A former Israeli officer in a prison infirmary described in testimony to the Israeli group Breaking the Silence what that kind of acceptance means in practice: “You see normal, pretty ordinary people reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything. For fun, to have something to tell the guys, or revenge.”

Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.

For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.

“They had their hands all over my body,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t know if they raped me,” she said, because she sometimes lost consciousness from the beatings.

The aim of the abuse was twofold, she thinks: to crush her spirit and also to let Israeli men molest a naked Palestinian woman with impunity.

“I’d be stripped and beaten several times a day,” she said. “It was as if they were introducing me to everyone who worked there. At the beginning of each shift, they would bring the guys to strip me.”

When she was about to be released from prison, she said, she was called into a room with six officials and given a stern warning never to give interviews.

“They threatened that if I spoke up, they would rape me, kill me and kill my father,” she said. Not surprisingly, she declined to be named in this article.

Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reportsof police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”

So why was he willing to speak?

“There are moments when remembering feels unbearable,” he said. “My heart felt it might stop while talking to you about it just now. But I remember there are people still in there. So I speak up.”

Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

The other boys told very similar stories of sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.

Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”

In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike, stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and yanked.

“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.

“For six months I couldn’t speak about it, even to my family,” said Mohammad Matar, a Palestinian official who told me that settlers stripped him, beat him and poked him with a stick in the buttocks while talking about raping him. During the attack, the assailants posted a photograph on social media of him blindfolded and stripped to his underpants.

With time, Matar decided to speak out to try to break the stigma. He now keeps a blown-up print of the settlers’ photo of him on the wall of his office.

To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.

So we return to the point I noted at the beginning of this column: Supporters of Israel were right in 2023 that whatever our views about the Middle East, we should be able to repudiate rape.

“Where the hell are you?” Netanyahu asked the international community then, demanding that it condemn sexual violence committed by what the Israeli government has called the “Hamas rapist regime.”

Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”

Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?“