Mamdani Says He May Still Order Netanyahu’s Arrest

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview with The New York Times that he was in “an active conversation” with New York City’s Law Department on whether he had the authority to arrest the Israeli leader.

July 18, 2026 Updated 11:06 a.m. ET

This week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed questions about the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, affordability in New York City and his wife.Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration was still discussing whether to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he comes to New York City as expected for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mr. Mamdani told Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, referring to the home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mr. Mamdani added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”

The mayor said it was unclear to him whether he has the legal authority to order the Police Department, which he oversees, to detain a foreign leader like Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department about the matter.

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mr. Mamdani added.

During his mayoral campaign last year, Mr. Mamdani said in an interview with The Times that he would order the Police Department to arrest Mr. Netanyahu, who is pursuing re-election in Israel.

At the time, the mayor said that such an arrest would be honoring a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over Mr. Netanyahu’s role in the war in Gaza, which Mr. Mamdani and a United Nations commission have called a genocide.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed Mr. Mamdani’s threat to arrest him during a recent radio appearance, saying he was not concerned, and he accused the mayor of supporting Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls a significant portion of Gaza. Hamas was responsible for the deadly attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that precipitated Israel’s war in Gaza.

“I think he should look at who he's condemning, who he’s praising,” the prime minister said during an interview this week with Sid Rosenberg, a local radio personality and a frequent critic of Mr. Mamdani. “He’s condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values.”

“Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre, the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

He also said Mr. Mamdani “doesn’t care” that “those who hate the Jews and Israel ultimately hate America."

“And in fact I think, secretly, he hates America,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, accused Mr. Mamdani in a statement on Saturday of failing to focus adequately on rising antisemitism in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has rejected such accusations, noting that he has increased funding for an office to combat hate crimes.

“Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will come to New York, address the United Nations General Assembly with pride, and stand before the world to state Israel’s truth and its unwavering right to defend its citizens,” Mr. Danon said.

Mr. Mamdani has condemned the Oct. 7 attacks. He has made his extensive concerns about Israel a focal point of his political identity, raising the issue frequently. Several people who know him well have said he considers Palestinian liberation one of the most pressing moral issues of his time.

Mr. Mamdani’s views about Israel are no longer on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Nearly half of House Democrats voted this week to end U.S. aid to Israel, which was not enough for the measure to pass, but enough to demonstrate a shift in the party’s posture toward one of the country’s stalwart allies in the Middle East.

Asked by Ms. Garcia-Navarro about the political weight he places on Israel, Mr. Mamdani said the war was motivating voters throughout the country, including in House races in New York last month, when his endorsed candidates emerged victorious.

“It is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine,” Mr. Mamdani added.

He also talked about national politics, speaking positively about the prospect that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a fellow democratic socialist, may run for president in 2028.

“I think she’d make a good anything,” he said.

He denounced President Trump’s immigration tactics, but said border security was important and that he was “willing to work with the federal government” when immigrants are convicted of serious crimes.

“What we are unwilling to do,” he added, “is to participate in civil immigration enforcement with a federal government that has said openly it wants to deport a vast majority of people for crimes that we will never even know.”

Mr. Mamdani defended his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, amid criticisms of her from some of his fellow democratic socialists, reiterating that she has been successful at driving down crime in New York City. (Some of his supporters disagree with the frequency of the agency’s low-level arrests carried out under Ms. Tisch.)

He also lamented the media coverage of his wife, Rama Duwaji, an artist who has largely avoided the spotlight during his mayoralty. Ms. Duwaji has come under fire for some of her past social media behavior, including liking a post that celebrated Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“She is her own person,” Mr. Mamdani said. “She’s an incredible artist, and yet so much of how she engages with the world today is framed through her being my wife.”

The mayor shed some light on how he views an issue that is central to his political rise: the economic struggles of New Yorkers who fall into income thresholds higher than what was traditionally considered poor or working-class.

Asked whether he would consider someone making $250,000 a year working class, he replied: “I haven’t asked myself where it starts and stops. What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class."

Ms. Garcia-Navarro followed up, asking about a janitor being lumped into the same category as a lawyer, to which Mr. Mamdani bemoaned “a fixation on a definition of something.”

“It’s not that everyone is making the same amount of money or facing the same amount of struggle, but that they just want to know, is there any way for them to actually be able to work this hard and afford a good life in the city?” he replied.

And he offered a window into how he views his new role as one of the country’s best-known politicians, saying, “I think there is some level of absurdity that you have to have as a part of yourself to believe that it should be you.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2026, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayor Says He May Order Police to Arrest Netanyahu."

 

They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling.

"The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.

July 18, 2026Updated 9:33 a.m. ET

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

Jaime Diaz, an undocumented immigrant, was charged with assaulting a Border Patrol officer in Laredo, Texas. But video footage shows it was the officer who punched Mr. Diaz.

In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.

But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.

The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.

The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration dialed back some of its most confrontational tactics, leading to fewer assault charges. But it recently began an aggressive new wave of enforcement, with agents killing two immigrants in Texas and Maine. With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.

In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:

• In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.

• Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.

• Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.

• In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.

• Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.

Dropping charges

The government has lost or abandoned nearly half of the resolved cases in which it accused people of assaulting immigration agents. Normally the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.

 (558)Dismissed (191)Acquitted (22)Convicted (4)Pleaded guilty (246)Pending (95)

The Trump administration’s strategy hinges on a once-obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 111, that makes it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a government officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years in prison.

For decades, prosecutors used the law sparingly. One exception was when the Biden administration invoked it to charge hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors had a perfect record of winning convictions in those cases, until Mr. Trump returned to office and issued blanket pardons.

As the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented immigrants encountered resistance last year, officials embraced an expansive reading of the assault statute as a way to arrest and prosecute people who got in the way of ICE and Border Patrol agents. The government’s reliance on the statute became so great that agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” as they got into scuffles and made arrests.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on specific incidents but said that “it should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, echoed that. “Federal prosecutors are correct to prioritize these prosecutions and hold individuals accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he said, adding that prosecutors sometimes downgraded or dropped charges based on “mitigating factors identified in a case.” Another Justice Department official said that in some instances prosecutors dropped charges when defendants were deported.

Gregory Bovino, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” who championed the use of smashmouth tactics against protesters and immigrants, was blunter. He said in an interview that too many “worthless” federal prosecutors chickened out by abandoning assault cases. And he thought more protesters and immigrants should have been prosecuted.

“We were being overly judicious in who we charged with 18 U.S.C. 111,” he said.

On occasion, officers were seriously hurt by protesters or immigrants, The Times found. Last June, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a sex offender in the United States illegally, drove away while a federal agent had an arm inside the car window. The agent — who months later would kill the protester Renee Good in Minnesota — was dragged about 100 yards.

Mr. Muñoz-Guatemala is one of only four people in the Times analysis who was convicted by a jury. The other 22 who faced jury trials were acquitted. Nearly 200 others had the charges dismissed — including two mothers from Charlotte, N.C.

‘We Need Help Right Now’

Tatyana Reisini and her friend Kristen Roos were cornered. A group of armed men, some wearing masks, had surrounded their car on a dead-end street. The women screamed to a 911 operator for help.

Earlier that November morning, the two young mothers had been on their way to a Christmas market in Charlotte. They saw a car filled with immigration agents pulling into the parking lot of an outdoor shopping mall.

Operation Charlotte’s Web, as the immigration sweep in the city was known, followed a bloody and high-profile operation in Chicago. Ms. Reisini, 36, and Ms. Roos, 33, were wary of what might happen in North Carolina.

Ms. Reisini, an American citizen of Ecuadorean descent, and Ms. Roos had been organizing with other local mothers to be on the lookout for immigration agents. So they steered into the parking lot, stopping about 20 yards from the government vehicles. Other protesters were already gathered. They all began yelling at the agents.

After a few minutes, the agents moved their vehicles in front of and behind Ms. Reisini’s Acura S.U.V., she said. Several agents stepped out. Ms. Roos remembered them shouting at her and Ms. Reisini to leave and “trying to scare us.” The women drove to another part of the parking lot and watched as the agents pinned in another protester’s car.

The agents eventually drove off, and Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos resumed their trip to the Christmas market, at one point stopping to alert a resident that federal officers were nearby.

Soon the women realized they were being followed by two unmarked cars. They called 911. An operator told them to find the nearest gas or police station, but they didn’t know where one was.

Ma’am, 

are you able to safely get to a nearby police station or … 

I am trying to … 

I’m trying to get to a police station, 

but they’re not — 

they’re literally following me. 

So every time I get to like a  stoplight or something, they — 

they’re trying to get in front of me. 

They’re intimidating us. 

Instead they wound up on the dead-end street. They turned into a driveway in a housing development. The unmarked cars blocked them in.

“We need help right now,” Ms. Reisini exclaimed to the 911 operator. “They’re going to [expletive] hurt us!”

Just then, an agent began smashing the driver’s side window — with the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed toward Ms. Reisini, according to footage recorded by a nearby resident.

The women were terrified; their shrieks can be heard on the 911 recording.

I am in an apartment complex right now. 

It’s, 

it’s 

a — 

they’re breaking open the window! 

“We didn’t do anything,” Ms. Reisini said.

“Yes, you did,” an agent responded. “You impeded. 18 U.S.C. 111. Driving erratic.”

Lawyers said that was a misreading of the statute, which specifies that it applies when people use or threaten force. “It’s not enough to show that they might have been interfering with what was happening,” said Carissa Hessick, a University of North Carolina law professor.

Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos were led from the car, and their hands were zip-tied behind their backs. One agent noticed a child seat in Ms. Reisini’s car and sarcastically remarked that she must be a “stellar” mother, she recalled.

Ms. Reisini retorted that she was, in fact, a stellar mother, which was why she was protesting against agents who she thought were breaking up families in her community.

The women were taken to the local F.B.I. building, where they spent several hours in confinement and eventually received tickets accusing them of violating 18 U.S.C. 111.

Mr. Bovino, who was running the Charlotte operation, shared a social media post from a far-right account that called the women “liberal terrorists,” and he praised what he called “excellent arrests for assault.” Yet the charges were so weak that the U.S. attorney’s office in Charlotte eventually withdrew them.

Asked about the agent’s use of a rifle muzzle to smash Ms. Reisini’s window, Mr. Bovino said he wasn’t concerned about the risk to the car’s occupants. “I’m more worried about the officer getting hurt or killed or the public getting hurt or killed, not necessarily the suspect,” he said.

Shoved by Bovino

Mr. Bovino’s crackdown soon moved to Minneapolis.

On Jan. 7, hours after Ms. Good was killed, Quentin Williams, a special education assistant at a high school about three miles away, was helping direct students to their rides after school.

He spotted a group of federal agents who had come onto campus while arresting someone. Mr. Williams moved toward a crowd that had gathered to watch. Some were yelling at or filming the agents.

Mr. Bovino ran up and shoved Mr. Williams, videos show. In an ensuing skirmish, agents yanked Mr. Williams by the hair, tackled him and, he said, choked him.

“I could not help but think of George Floyd,” Mr. Williams wrote later that day, memorializing the incident. “I was so scared for my life.”

Mr. Bovino said Mr. Williams was among a group of “rioters and anarchists” who failed to follow orders from law enforcement.

Mr. Williams was arrested, taken to a federal building and released that same day. Agents told him they’d be in touch.

About two weeks later, the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis charged Mr. Williams and 15 others for violating 18 U.S.C. 111. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, announced the charges on social media, posting photos of Mr. Williams and other shackled defendants, who she said were “resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.” She cited the statute but left out its language about it applying when people “forcibly” interfere.

In a sworn affidavit, an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security said that an agent at the scene had seen Mr. Williams trying to grab and pick up a Border Patrol agent — a claim that Mr. Williams denied and that was not supported by video of the incident that The Times reviewed.

The U.S. attorney’s office later reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and ultimately dropped the case altogether.

The Times identified numerous other cases in which people were charged with assault even though officers were the ones who appeared to have used physical force first.

One involved Jaime Diaz, an undocumented Honduran man who was arrested last July during a traffic stop in Laredo, Texas. Prosecutors charged him with assault, saying he had struck a Border Patrol officer “two to three times.” But during his trial, body-camera video showed Mr. Diaz, who is slightly built and under five feet tall, being grabbed by the neck, forced to the ground and punched by the much larger officer as he tried to handcuff him.

A federal jury acquitted Mr. Diaz in November. He was then scheduled for deportation.

“In the past, this officer could’ve been prosecuted, based on the body cams,” said his lawyer, Roberto Balli. “And instead we have my client being prosecuted.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas said that Mr. Diaz elbowed the officer. “The jury did acquit the defendant, but it was a righteous prosecution,” she said.

In more than 20 cases that the government lost or abandoned, protesters and immigrants argued that what the government said was assault was instead self-defense.

Last May, Josefina Gabriel-Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulling into her driveway in Biloxi, Miss., when federal agents suddenly approached and ordered her out of the car.

Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who doesn’t speak English, didn’t immediately comply. An officer reached through the partly opened window to try to unlock the door, and the window closed on her arm. The agents blamed Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, but she said the officer had accidentally shut the window on herself as she pushed buttons inside the car.

After officers wrenched open the car door, Ms. Gabriel-Lopez struggled against an agent who climbed inside and twisted her arm and wrist before dragging her out. Her 18-year-old daughter ran out of the house barefoot and tugged on an agent’s protective vest.

Both women were arrested and charged with assault. When the case went to trial in September, they argued that they had acted in self-defense.

“I wasn’t resisting,” Ms. Gabriel-Lopez told jurors through an interpreter. She added, “I keep telling him it was painful, it was painful. He did not listen to me.”

The jury found the women not guilty. Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who had entered the United States illegally in 2005, was later deported.

Scolded by the Court

The Times identified more than 30 instances of judges criticizing prosecutors or federal agents for conduct such as destroying or withholding evidence, violating rules about communications with jurors and making false or exaggerated claims, including some disproved by videos.

Judges have denounced the government’s actions as “flagrant,” in “bad faith” and “shocking to the universal sense of justice.”

One case of evidence being destroyed took place last September in San Bernardino, Calif. Federal agents were following a Nicaraguan man, Joseph Blandon-Saavedra, who was driving to work in a Toyota Corolla. At an intersection, the agents boxed him in with their two cars, smashed his window and arrested him.

All three vehicles were damaged. Mr. Blandon-Saavedra said the agents had hit his car when they cut him off. But the government said he had rammed them, and prosecutors charged him with two counts of assaulting officers with his sedan.

Mr. Blandon-Saavedra’s lawyers asked that the cars be preserved so their expert could examine them. But agents immediately repaired one of theirs.

The judge dismissed the count tied to the repaired vehicle, calling the agents’ actions part of a “growing pattern of mishandling evidence” that might undermine officers’ assault claims. Prosecutors appealed the dismissal. The count related to the other government vehicle is pending.

In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles threw out assault charges against two protesters, in the middle of a trial, after finding that prosecutors had failed to turn over internal “use-of-force” reports that could have been helpful to the defense. A month later, the government dropped charges against six protesters in Chicago after a judge criticized prosecutors for having mishandled a grand jury, partly by speaking to jurors outside the courtroom.

In Laredo, Ariana Guadalupe Garcia, a 19-year-old American, arrived at a border crossing last July to meet her young niece. Ms. Garcia, who had come from the U.S. side, had clothes for the girl to bring back to a relative in Mexico to sell, a common exchange at border crossings.

But Ms. Garcia found that the girl, who had arrived from Mexico, was being held in an inspection area, and when she tried to speak to her through a window, an officer told her to leave. Ms. Garcia did not immediately obey, prompting several other officers to approach her. After some back-and-forth, the officers began escorting Ms. Garcia away, according to court records.

As they passed through a short stretch of walkway with no working security cameras, Ms. Garcia took at least one photo with her phone. An officer swatted it away. Prosecutors said that Ms. Garcia then hit an officer on the arm and another in the ear, which she denied. She was arrested and later charged with assault.

Afterward, an officer told her to delete the photo she’d just taken, going so far as to watch her permanently erase it from the Recently Deleted folder.

The case against Ms. Garcia began to fall apart when the judge asked how prosecutors intended to prove she had hit anyone — especially since security footage from right before the alleged incident showed no sign of her acting violently toward the four male officers.

The deleted photos were the final straw.

“The government acted in bad faith in destroying the evidence,” the judge wrote, “further demonstrating that Ms. Garcia’s constitutional rights have been violated.”

---

Methodology

There is no simple way to identify immigration-related cases brought under 18 U.S.C. 111. We searched online databases — Nexis, CourtListener and Pacer (the federal judiciary’s electronic docket) — for all such cases since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.

We used an artificial intelligence model to help remove duplicate cases, as well as cases unrelated to immigration enforcement. We checked the model’s work. We also requested records from the Central Violations Bureau, part of the federal judiciary, which processes tickets issued for violations of 18 U.S.C. 111. Our review was exhaustive, but it is possible that we missed cases.

We confined our analysis to 18 U.S.C. 111, though the government has occasionally invoked other laws to prosecute people for assaulting officers.

We created a database of court records, including hearing and trial transcripts, for the cases that were dismissed or ended in acquittals. With help from an A.I. model, we looked for common characteristics, such as courts admonishing the government for misconduct or agents initiating physical force against people they arrested. We reviewed every case the model flagged.

We also interviewed federal prosecutors and other experts and examined historical statistics about federal prosecutions, as reported by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Alan Feuer and Will Houp contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Produced by Alice Fang and Rumsey Taylor.

1. 

   Mike McIntire

   Investigative Reporter

   After stories started to emerge of assault cases against protestors and immigrants falling apart, we decided to find out how widespread this was. My colleagues and I spent months identifying and examining the outcomes of more than 550 such cases, and discovered a trail of misconduct that oftentimes seemed less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to intimidate people into submission.

Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter, has been with The Times since 2003.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.

Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter covering American politics and elections for The Times.

Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times."

Countries Where Black People Aren't Welcomed

 

 

Why does the US want to ‘dismantle’ the international criminal court? | Kenneth Roth

“With the pointless war of choice in Iran going poorly, the Trump administration has declared a virtual war on the international criminal court (ICC). Secretary of state, Marco Rubio, vowed on Monday to “dismantle” the court as a supposed threat to US sovereignty. His rationale is laced with sophistry. The administration’s real goal is to secure impunity for war crimes, even those committed on the territory of ICC member states.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a video posted on X, Rubio conjures up a dystopia in which local American officials such as police officers or border patrol agents “could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America”.

This is utter fiction. The ICC has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in the United States. Unless Donald Trump were to start deploying police officers or border patrol agents abroad, the ICC would have no capacity to charge or prosecute them.

Nor can the US government claim not to have consented to the laws applied by the court. They are drawn from treaties such as the genocide convention and the Geneva conventions and protocols that the US government has either ratified or incorporated into its military manuals. Is it really un-American to outlaw genocide?

While Rubio complains that the US government cannot “control” international law, no one should be able to. Law is meant to bind people, not be controlled by them. Although Trump has said “I don’t need international law,” that is a vision no decent leader should embrace.

Ironically, Rubio attacked international law just as he was invoking it. He said it was illegal for Iran to charge fees for ships passing through the strait of Hormuz (as Trump was briefly threatening to do precisely that). That sums up the Trump administration’s view of international law – to be weaponized when convenient and ignored when applied to its own conduct.

Rubio describes the court as “run” by “hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.”. That would surprise, say, the governments of Europe, virtually all of which are among the ICC’s 125 members. The most abusive governments tend to avoid signing up because their officials would then become subject to prosecution. Their domestic atrocities can be reached only by resolution of the UN security council, where the US government has a veto.

Behind its overblown rhetoric, the Trump administration’s real objection is to the court’s power to prosecute war crimes and other mass atrocities committed on the territory of its member states when the perpetrator is a national of a non-member state. Trump wants to be able to commit war crimes anywhere in the world with impunity.

Rubio talked breathlessly about the ICC threatening American sovereignty, as if the Trump administration has a sovereign right to commit war crimes. But what about the sovereignty of other nations that seek protection against crimes committed on their territory by joining the ICC? Recognizing their sovereign right is apparently inconsistent with Trump’s might-makes-rightworldview.

Trump is not alone in this selective conception of sovereignty. At the ICC’s founding in 1998, Bill Clinton’s administration voted against territorial jurisdiction – and lost overwhelmingly, by a vote of 120 to seven. Yet when territorial jurisdiction was used in March 2023 to charge Russian president Vladimir Putin for kidnapping Ukrainian children, the US government changed its mind. Russia had never joined the court, but Ukraine had, so the ICC had jurisdiction because the children were kidnapped from Ukrainian territory. Suddenly, the US government loved the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction.

Joe Biden called the charges “justified”. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, an influential foreign policy voice, applauded. The South Carolina Republican, who died this weekend, engineered a unanimous Senate resolution supporting the ICC.

The love affair was short-lived. When in November 2024 the ICC chargedIsraeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, the Israel exception to international law kicked in and the Biden administration was outraged. But the court had used the same territorial jurisdiction as for Putin – Israel had not joined the court, but Palestine, the locus of Israeli crimes (in Gaza), had. When Trump took office two months later, he imposed sanctions on certain court judges and prosecutors.

There is nothing extraordinary about territorial jurisdiction, except in the minds of US officials who want to operate above the law. If I were to murder someone on the streets of Paris, Tokyo or São Paulo, the US government could hardly object if French, Japanese or Brazilian officials prosecuted me. So why is it objectionable if I were to commit war crimes on their territory, and instead of charging me themselves, they deferred to the ICC?

Beyond Putin and Netanyahu, territorial jurisdiction is the key to justice for some of today’s worst atrocities. It is needed to prosecute officials from Rwanda, which is not an ICC member, for mass atrocities of their M23 militiacommitted in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has joined the court. It is essential for prosecuting officials from the United Arab Emirates, also not an ICC member, for sending arms and mercenaries to the genocidal Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, where the ICC has jurisdiction by virtue of a UN security council resolution.

But what worries Trump officials most is the prospect that territorial jurisdiction could be used to prosecute them. For example, the court could reach the summary executions of people in suspected drug boats if any of these potential crimes against humanity took place in the territorial waters of Venezuela or Colombia, both ICC members. Trump (as well as Biden) officials could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza by continuing to provide arms and military aid as it unfolded. And Trump might be prosecuted for obstructing justice (under article 70 of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute) for having imposed sanctions on ICC officials because they pursued the case against Israeli officials in Gaza; in his Journal op-ed, Rubio mentioned my earlier Guardian column advocating that possibility.

Rubio has promised a frontal assault on the ICC, with new sanctions on court personnel and pressure on governments that cooperate with the court. He plans to highlight “the risks posed to Americans”. That is unlikely to convince anyone. What he really means is the risk that Trump officials might be brought to justice for war crimes committed in ICC states. God forbid!

• Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments“

 

In Houston, a Different Kind of Mourning After Fatal ICE Shooting

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“In Houston’s Magnolia Park, a predominantly Latino neighborhood, the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE agent has sparked grief and anger. While the mourning has been more subdued compared to other cities, with residents expressing their sorrow privately and through small gestures, the incident has stirred memories of past injustices faced by the community. The neighborhood’s history of discrimination and deportation campaigns has led to a cautious approach to activism, but the killing has reignited calls for accountability and justice.

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After a federal agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the grief and anger in Magnolia Park has been less visible, but no less intense.

July 17, 2026Updated 9:06 a.m. ET

A group of people prayed together at a memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Saturday.Antranik Tavitian for The New York Times

A group of people prayed together at a memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Saturday.Antranik Tavitian for The New York Times

In Magnolia Park, one of Houston’s oldest Latino barrios, a makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo sits on a torn-up street near the spot where he was killed.

Since Mr. Salgado Araujo, a Mexican home builder and father of three, was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last week, construction workers and landscapers in work shirts and dusty boots have often come alone to stand in silence.

Neighborhood residents have dropped off rosaries and candles. Many have worn Mexico soccer jerseys in tribute to one of Mr. Salgado Araujo’s favorite teams.

His killing has hit hard, another immigrant’s life taken by agents carrying out President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Yet, the mourning feels different in Magnolia Park.

In parks, shops and backyards in the neighborhood, people have voiced their grief in hushed tones. There are no shrill whistles or clashes with agents. There have been fewer news cameras and demonstrations than in cities like Chicago or Minneapolis.

At a restaurant, television screens alternated between clips of World Cup matches and news footage of federal agents wrestling migrants to the ground in confrontations across the country.

Maria, 52, a cashier who spoke on the condition that her last name not be published because she fears retaliation from immigration authorities, said she had lived and worked in Houston without legal status since she had left central Mexico with her daughter some 30 years ago.

She had never seen staff and customers so scared or concerned over immigration enforcement — or so angry, she said. “It could have been any one of us,” she said. For now, she added, there is little she can do but stay inside as much as possible and check her social media accounts for reports of ICE before she goes out.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son Ronaldo Salgado speaking about his father at a vigil in Houston.Antranik Tavitian for The New York Times

Magnolia Park, home to more than 14,000 residents, has been a center of Mexican American life in Houston for generations. Many live in families where some people have legal status and others don’t.

So while there are rosary beads draped on plastic flowers and Mexican flags projecting out from telephone poles in Mr. Salgado Araujo’s honor, Magnolia Park residents say their response has been muted in a community conditioned by a painful history of discrimination that has taught residents to be cautious about using their voice.

The road now called Canal Street, where the memorial has sprung up, has been woven into the fabric of the neighborhood since it was mapped out in 1890 and adorned by more than 3,000 newly planted magnolias.

Germans, Greeks and Italians were some of the first immigrants to settle into the city’s surrounding East End. Mexican Americans from South Texas arrived in Magnolia Park more than two decades later, along with Mexican migrants fleeing the revolution convulsing their homeland.

In the 1950s, Mexicans found themselves caught up in the mass deportation campaigns under the Eisenhower administration. Local and state law enforcement officers helped U.S. Border Patrol round up Mexicans and Mexican Americans believed to be living in the United States without legal status.

Joaquin Martinez, a City Council member who represents Magnolia Park, said his father recounted life growing up in the neighborhood during that era, being bullied for being Mexican and spanked or hit with rulers in school for speaking Spanish. His father, like many Mexican and Latino elders of his generation, learned that the way to survive in Magnolia Park was this: “Keep your head down, focus on your family, work hard,” Mr. Martinez said.

But the mourning in Magnolia Park over the last 11 days has at times been pierced with sound.

On many afternoons, day laborers in white work vans, like the one in which Mr. Salgado Araujo was killed, have driven down Canal Street honking horns, fists raised out the windows. Lowriders have rolled down the road in homage, blasting cumbias, Norteñas and corridos, Mexican ballads that immortalize stories, including Mr. Salgado Araujo’s life and death:

Trembling with fear

I cried for help

Nobody could hear me

To Jesse Rodriguez, 56, a local artist who goes by Magnolia Grown, that loud, defiant public sorrow is baked into his neighborhood’s history, but one that is deeply buried. As a teenager, he and his friends drew inspiration from Pachucos, Mexican American rebels who embraced their bicultural duality through a distinct style and love of music.

Mr. Rodriguez and his wife, JoAnna, have since transformed the 100-year-old bungalow once owned by her great-grandfather into an art space and Mexican American history school. Over the past two years, their students have been learning about deportation campaigns that preceded the one unfolding under Mr. Trump.

A class last summer painted canvas pieces in response to the sweeps in Los Angeles that deck the walls. Last week, a cohort channeled its grief over the ICE killing just down the street. “We’re teaching the past, but now it’s here, not just in Houston, but right in our own neighborhood,” Mrs. Rodriguez said.

On Thursday, residents from Magnolia Park and across the Houston area packed into a chapel in the East End for Mr. Salgado Araujo’s public viewing.

For people who know the neighborhood’s painful history, the killing last week stirred memories of the 1977 death of José “Joe” Campos Torres, a Mexican American Army veteran.

In May 1977, a group of white Houston police officers pulled Mr. Campos Torres, 23, out of an East End bar and charged him with disorderly conduct. They beat him up so severely that local jailers told the officers to take him into the hospital. Instead, they pushed him into the bayou, where he drowned. His body was recovered days later.

Activists from the neighborhood marched down Canal Street in protest, over red bricks that had largely been laid by Mexican and Mexican American laborers. Months later, when news hit radio stations that an all-white jury had let the officers off on misdemeanor convictions, tensions ultimately erupted into violence the following spring.

Some residents said there was no reckoning for the officers involved, and the killing and protests faded from the city’s memory. Houston seemed to bury the episode when it poured asphalt over Canal Street’s red bricks.

What Janie Torres, Mr. Campos Torres’s sister, said she wants for Mr. Salgado Araujo — for her brother — is accountability. There was a time when she could not bear the grim details of her brother’s death. “But then I realized I could draw strength to keep fighting by putting myself in his shoes,” she said.

In the days before Mr. Salgado Araujo was killed, construction crews had stripped Canal Street to resurface the road. Some of the old red bricks were visible, and some of the mourners found themselves walking amid them as they made their way to his memorial. A worker who lived nearby helped craft wooden shelves to hold some of the candles spilling onto the street. Another hammered a saw, a yardstick and other tools into it to honor Mr. Salgado Araujo’s labors.

One night late last week, a couple of residents were lighting candles and debating whether to relocate the memorial. The rains had stopped, and construction crews were expected on Canal Street any day to pave back over the red bricks.

Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.“