Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US Customs and Border Protection agents violently arrest Los Angeles nurse monitoring ICE operations
On Friday, August 8, federal agents violently arrested Registered Nurse Amanda Trebach outside the gates of Terminal Island in San Pedro, Los Angeles—a Coast Guard base utilized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as a staging hub for immigration raids across California.
Video footage shows Trebach being thrown face-down to the ground, her head pressed down by the knee of a masked agent, before being forced into an unmarked black van by at least six unidentified men in tactical gear. Her backpack was seized from her vehicle without a warrant.
Eyewitnesses reported she had been monitoring immigration enforcement activities with the community group Unión del Barrio as part of a “peace patrol” documenting what she and others described as “abductions by masked officers.”
CBP’s official account accused Trebach of “impeding and obstructing federal law enforcement,” claiming she “jumped in front of moving vehicles,” “hit the car with her signs and fists while yelling obscenities,” and “physically blocked and impeded CBP from completing their duties.”
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Eyewitness statements, video, and the absence of any charges directly contradict CBP’s claims. Cynthia Avina of Unión del Barrio stated that Trebach was simply holding a poster when she was accosted by CBP agents.
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Trebach, a US citizen and former member of the California Nurses Association (an NNU affiliate), was held for over a day and released without criminal charges on Saturday evening, August 9. The NNU had called for her “immediate release and a full dismissal of all charges.”
On Friday, community members protested outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles during her detention, demanding her freedom. In response the Los Angeles Police Department declared an “unlawful assembly” and arrested over a dozen people.
While NNU celebrated the outcome as a “testament to the power of organizing resistance and solidarity,” the arrest is in fact a warning shot from the state. It signals an escalation of efforts to criminalize protest and suppress any monitoring of immigration raids.
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Large sections of nurses are themselves immigrants or work side-by-side with undocumented colleagues and patients. Many live in households directly affected by the threat of raids, deportations, and family separation. In Los Angeles, one every five people is either undocumented or has an undocumented family member.
For these workers, opposition to immigration repression is not a matter of electoral calculation but of survival and solidarity. Their class position compels them toward unity with immigrant workers, documented or not, against the machinery of state violence.
This stands in sharp contrast to the outlook of the political establishment, including its so-called “progressive” wing, fully implicated in the climate that enables such arrests. The alignment between Senator Bernie Sanders and the NNU bureaucracy exposes this collusion. NNU, the largest union of registered nurses in the US, has repeatedly endorsed Sanders in his presidential campaigns.
Sanders’ recent public statements—praising Donald Trump’s “crackdown” on fentanyl, calling for stronger borders, and insisting “I don’t think it’s appropriate to have people coming across the border illegally”—do not represent some unfortunate “nuance” in an otherwise humanitarian position. They reveal fundamental agreement with the framework of repression, the defense of national borders and the reactionary narrative of “legality” that criminalizes undocumented workers.
The NNU bureaucracy, while posturing as a defender of immigrants, adapts itself to this same nationalist framework. It condemns the most egregious outrages but refuses to directly challenge the existence and legitimacy of the border enforcement apparatus. Its official responses frame the issue in terms of constitutional rights and procedural overreach, leaving untouched the bipartisan system of repression that operates with or without “due process.”
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In Los Angeles and across the country, protests against militarized raids and Trebach’s arrest reveal the genuine and strong opposition to the draconian repression of immigrants and democratic rights among the working population.
But without a clear political perspective, such protests are contained and dissipated. The union bureaucracy and allied organizations seek to confine resistance within safe, legalistic channels that pose no threat to the institutions of capitalist rule. Appeals to Democratic politicians, who are themselves co-architects of immigration repression, serve only to disarm the working class.
The defense of immigrant rights cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party, the Sanders wing of its “progressive” faction, or the trade union apparatus. These forces are committed to defending the capitalist nation-state, which by its nature enforces borders, criminalizes migration and divides workers along national lines.
The alternative is the independent political mobilization of the working class, uniting native-born and immigrant workers across borders in a common struggle against the capitalist system. Such a movement must reject the framework of “legal” and “illegal” immigration entirely, recognizing the right of all workers to live and work wherever they choose, free from harassment, detention, or deportation.
2. Washington Post publishes government plans for deployment of troops to cities across the US
One day after President Donald Trump announced the federal takeover of Washington D.C. police and the dispatch of 800 National Guard troops to occupy the capital, a huge step in the establishment of a fascistic dictatorship in the US, the Washington Post reported on secret plans for a rapid deployment force of troops to move into cities facing “protests or other unrest.”
The Post article exposes the fraud of Trump’s declaration of a “public safety emergency” in the capital as the law-and-order pretext for normalizing the use of the military to suppress popular opposition and crush the democratic rights of the working class. In his White House rant on Monday, Trump, flanked by the heads of the Pentagon, the FBI and the Department of Justice, threatened to mobilize active-duty regular troops and expand the domestic use of the military to cities such as Chicago and New York.
The military-police takeover of Washington D.C marks the third deployment of troops for domestic policing since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January, the others being the dispatch of troops to the Southern border and the mobilization of 5,000 National Guardsmen and 500 US Marines to Los Angeles earlier this year to suppress protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. With no serious opposition from the Democratic Party, the courts or the trade unions, Trump has effectively rendered the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter. That act, dating from 1878, bans the use of the military in domestic law enforcement.
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The response from the Democrats and the corporate media to Trump’s military-police takeover of Washington D.C. ranges from complacent indifference to enthusiastic support. Totally absent is any appeal for public resistance to the de facto coup against the US Constitution and what remains of democratic rights. This reflects the outlook of the ruling class, which maintains its rule through the two-party system and controls the media.
This is under conditions of mass and growing opposition in the working class and among the youth and sections of the middle class to Trump’s policies. Within the working class, there is a shift to the left in opposition to Trump’s policies of dictatorship, militarism, support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, persecution of immigrants, record tax cuts for the rich and over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, student debt relief and other social programs to help pay for the tax cuts for the oligarchs and record military spending. This past June saw the biggest protest demonstrations in US history on “No Kings” day, as some 15 million marched across the country in opposition to Trump.
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No official institution, including the corporatist unions, has opposed or will oppose the erection of a fascistic presidential dictatorship under Trump. This is because democracy is incompatible with the levels of social inequality that exist under capitalism, above all in America. The defense of democratic rights depends on the mass, independent industrial and political mobilization of the working class against capitalism and for socialism.
3. United States: the Clairton Coke Works disaster: Social murder in Pennsylvania
The massive explosion at the US Steel Clairton Coke Works outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Monday has now killed two workers and injured at least ten others, five of them critically.
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Rescue crews from 34 fire and EMT units braved unstable structures and lingering gas hazards to search for survivors. Two medics were briefly hospitalized during these heroic efforts, which saved the lives of injured workers.
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In a testament to corporate greed and indifference, operations at Clairton continued today without even a pause to allow coworkers of the deceased to grieve. Only coke oven batteries 13 and 14, where the explosion occurred, remain offline. US Steel executives confirmed at a press conference that while the affected batteries are shut down for investigation and safety checks, it is business as usual at the rest of the facility.
No official cause for the disaster has yet been confirmed, but evidence points to a possible gas pressure buildup in the aging infrastructure, which has long been criticized for inadequate maintenance.
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It is a marriage pact between the authoritarian state and corporate monopoly, in which deregulation, profit and war preparation advance hand in hand. Politicians from both capitalist parties vow to slash “job-killing regulations” in the name of fueling military production. In practice, this means boosting corporate earnings while dismantling the hard-won protections secured by past generations of workers.
Workplace health and safety has been under relentless attack since the late 1970s under both Democratic and Republican administrations. By 2022, one study found, it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 186 years to inspect every workplace in America.
Under Trump, the assault has reached a qualitatively new level. On the campaign trail he vowed that from “Day One” he would “immediately remove every single burdensome regulation,” including the very rules meant to prevent workers from being killed, maimed and poisoned.
The Trump administration’s plan for social counter-revolution slashes OSHA’s budget by 8 percent and cuts more than 200 inspector positions, ensuring fewer on-site safety checks at plants like Clairton. At the same time, the White House is pushing the steepest reduction for the Environmental Protection Agency in decades—up to 50 percent in one proposal—while eliminating all funding for the US Chemical Safety Board. The Mine Safety and Health Administration faces a proposed 10 percent budget cut.
These attacks on workplace safety unmask America’s dirtiest secret: That the ruthless drive for profit and the push toward war are actually two sides of the same coin. The budget savings from the cuts—about $5 billion—is a pittance compared to the $6.2 trillion in wealth held by America’s billionaires. And the richest 1 percent are now set to reap $117 billion in tax breaks in 2026 alone under Trump’s “megabill,” with a projected windfall of $1.02 trillion over the next decade.
Meanwhile, the total budget remaining that is allocated to major federal workplace and environmental regulatory agencies is approximately $12 billion. This is a mere one one-hundredth of the military budget, less than the cost of a single aircraft carrier, and less than the “special” extra funding handed over to Israel for its genocidal war against Gaza in the last year of the Biden administration.
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The union apparatus is doing nothing to stop the ongoing wave of workplace deaths, including that of Timothy Quinn.
The United Steelworkers (USW), whose members work at Clairton and other US steel plants, has not merely stood by as health and safety protections are gutted, it has functioned as an active partner of corporate management, subordinating workers’ lives to industry profitability. The last thing the USW bureaucracy wants is any movement among workers that threatens the national security pact between the industry and the Trump administration, which it hopes will provide new streams of revenue and “seats at the table” in the councils of war.
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The unending wave of industrial slaughter and the sacrifice of lives for profit must end. “Workers’ lives matter!” must become a guiding principle for action. Last month, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) convened a meeting of the workers’ inquiry into the death of Ronald Adams Sr. at the Stellantis auto plant outside Detroit.
The hearing, based on detailed testimony from Adams’ coworkers, exposed persistent safety hazards, management’s disregard for repeated warnings, and the United Auto Workers bureaucracy’s refusal to enforce even the most basic protections. It concluded that Adams’ death was not an unforeseeable “accident,” but the inevitable outcome of a system in which workers’ health and lives are treated as expendable.
The World Socialist Web Site and the IWA-RFC insist that only the independent initiative of the working class—through the formation of rank-and-file committees, democratic bodies led by workers themselves—can secure safe conditions, defend lives and uphold human dignity on the job. These committees unite workers across industries and borders, breaking free from the grip of the pro-corporate union apparatus, and linking the fight for safety to the struggle to replace a system that subordinates human life to private profit.
4. Worldwide condemnation of Israel’s targeted murder of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif
The assassination of Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a journalists’ tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday has provoked a wave of mass anger and condemnation around the globe.
The event is the latest in the series of US-backed Israeli war crimes in Gaza and is part of the campaign to silence those exposing to the world the reality of the genocide against Palestinians over the past 22 months.
As of Tuesday, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that since October 7, 2023, 61,599 Palestinians have been killed, and 154,088 have been wounded. The recent increase includes those killed in ongoing attacks and a surge in deaths linked to malnutrition and the targeting of civilians seeking food aid. Since May 27, 2025 alone, at least 1,838 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to access aid, with over 13,409 injured in these incidents.
In the aftermath of the attack that killed al-Sharif, thousands of Palestinians filled the streets of Gaza to mourn his death. A funeral, held alongside those of his colleagues who were killed in the same assault, became an outpouring of collective grief and determination by Palestinians to fight the barbarism that has been relentlessly unleashed upon them.
Friends and family gave heart-rending accounts of Anas’s role as an outstanding representative of the Palestinian struggle against Zionism. One friend, holding back tears, told the press:
He gave his life to telling Gaza’s story to the world. By killing Anas, Israel wanted to silence all of us. But we will not be silenced; his truth will live on in us.
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Anas Jamal Mahmoud Al-Sharif (أنس جمال محمود الشريف) was born on December 3, 1996, in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, into a family of refugees originally displaced from Al-Majdal (now Ashkelon) in 1948. He grew up amid hardship as a child during the Second Intifada, a teenager under the Israeli blockade, and an adult faced with repeated wars.
He developed a passion for journalism and studied mass communication at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, specializing in radio and television. He began his career volunteering at Al-Shamal Media Network before joining Al Jazeera Arabic as a correspondent in northern Gaza. He lived in Jabalia with his wife and two young children, often spending long stretches separated from his family due to the demands and risks of his work.
When the Israeli genocide began on October 7, 2023, al-Sharif quickly rose to national and international prominence. Although unknown before the war, his daily on-the-ground reports, often from the epicenter of conflict and destruction, brought the violence faced by Gaza’s civilians to millions around the world.
He documented Israeli airstrikes, starvation, the escalating humanitarian crisis, and the experiences of Palestinians under siege. Al Jazeera recruited him in December 2023 after his raw, social media coverage of the strikes in his hometown of Jabalia went viral.
In that same month, his father, Jamal al-Sharif, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their family home, a strike that was said to be preceded by direct threats to Anas to stop reporting. A report by the Guardian in December 2024 said that Israeli forces, in a series of three major military offensives, completely destroyed the camp where 100,000 Palestinians had once lived.
At 28 years old, al-Sharif became identified by colleagues and observers as “the only voice left in Gaza City,” and he was lauded for his integrity and unwavering commitment to reporting the truth. He became known for his courage in broadcasting from areas under direct bombardment, while many international media organizations were denied access by Israeli authorities.
His reporting earned him and his Reuters team the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, underscoring how his work provided the outside world with vital evidence of the reality in Gaza. He repeatedly faced threats from Israeli authorities, especially IDF accusations without evidence that he was a terrorist.
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As the funerals are held and the people of Gaza mourn the silencing of al-Sharif, masses of people around the world are seeing that the war crimes of Israel and the imperialist powers are continuing and becoming more barbaric. A mass movement of the working class internationally is required to put an end to the world capitalist system responsible for Israel’s revival of the methods of ethnic cleansing and genocide that were used by the Nazis in World War II.
5. Mexico’s Sheinbaum orders arrest of prominent immigrant rights activist in bow to Trump
The arrest of Luis Rey García Villagrán, a prominent defender of immigrant rights and longtime organizer of migrant caravans through Mexico, marks a major escalation in the assault on democratic rights by the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum and its collaboration with the fascistic US administration of Donald Trump.
The timing is unmistakable: Federal agents swooped in on García as he left a public meeting held in a park last Tuesday in final preparations for the departure of another migrant caravan the following day from the southernmost city of Tapachula, Chiapas. Significantly, the military took part in the operation to arrest him.
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Federal authorities have accused García Villagrán of involvement in organized crime, human trafficking, and using his NGO as a front to traffic migrants and potentially drugs. These frame-up accusations are aimed at intimidating any opposition to the Sheinbaum administration’s deepening and servile cooperation with Trump’s fascist onslaught against migrants.
In 2022, García Villagrán, a trained lawyer who worked for the judiciary, was arrested briefly on similar charges, amid baseless claims by prosecutors that he charges migrants and puts them in more peril by organizing caravans.
In 1997, he served a 12-year prison sentence for kidnapping, after an initial 40-year prison sentence.
It is striking how few reports even mention the outcome or background of his case or the work carried out by his organization in the corporate media’s malicious attempt to justify his most recent detention. Human rights organizations signed a statement denouncing the detention and reporting that several news reporters said that their corporate bosses gave them instructions not to contradict the president’s official version.
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The caravans themselves are not a plot or political conspiracy, but rather a phenomenon that emerged in 2018 as the outcome of grinding poverty, state repression and gang violence throughout the region, driving families, women and children into a desperate search for security and a future.
Now, Sheinbaum’s administration justifies García Villagrán’s arrest with an aged warrant for “trafficking”—a common tactic used to tar those who resist anti-immigrant clampdowns.
García’s arrest can only be understood in the broader context of Sheinbaum’s embrace of militarized border repression in direct obedience to the demands of the Trump administration. In February 2025, under threat of punishing US tariffs, Sheinbaum struck a deal with Trump to deploy an additional 10,000 National Guard troops to key border cities. Far from an isolated incident, this concession followed repeated episodes since 2019 where Mexican forces blocked, detained and violently dispersed migrant caravans under US pressure.
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The “success” of these fascistic measures is now being trumpeted by both US and Mexican officials. New Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data show historic lows in daily apprehensions—just 88 migrants detained one day in July, the lowest figure in the agency’s history. Monthly totals for border encounters have also plummeted to previously unseen levels, which is not the result of any genuine resolution of the causes of migration, but due to the overwhelming climate of fear and the brutal enforcement actions carried out on both sides of the border.
Much of this “success” is owed to mass detentions and new sites like the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which has already become a site of rapid deportations and gross abuses. Such facilities amount to concentration camps set up to terrorize and contain immigrants, with scant due process or oversight.
Sheinbaum’s nominally left-nationalist Morena party has not only gone out of its way to deploy the security apparatus against refugees, trampling Mexico’s own constitutional and international law. Her administration is mirroring the fascist White House in taking calculated steps to exploit the criminalization of migrants to justify preparations for repression of social opposition and police-state dictatorship.
6. Declining birth rate highlights impact of government cuts and corporate profiteering on UK families
One of the most poignant expressions of the social crisis caused by capitalism is the “fertility gap” between the number of children people would like to have and the number actually born.
A recent United Nations survey, The Real Fertility Crisis, identified hundreds of millions of people globally not able to have the number of children they want. The most commonly cited reason was “Financial limitations” at 39 percent of respondents, followed by “Unemployment/job insecurity” at 21 percent, and “Housing limitations” at 19 percent.
Fertility in England and Wales is now 1.44 children per woman, the lowest rate since records began in 1938. This is far from being entirely down to choice. The UK’s fertility gap has been estimated at 0.3, meaning that for every three children wanted two are born. It’s not hard to understand why.
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Having children today is so costly and stressful because society is run to produce grotesque profits for a few, not fulfilling lives for all. The most significant factors impacting working-class families are poor state support—maternity/paternity leave is worth less than half the National Living Wage of £12.21 an hour—and the spiraling cost and lack of availability of childcare.
Government spending on family and early childhood benefits fell from over 3 percent of GDP in 2010 to under 2 percent in 2022—a real terms decline of more than a third. Funding for childcare has fallen consistently behind rising costs for providers, whose numbers have plunged by a third in a decade.
Nearly half of children under five now live in “childcare deserts” where there are more than three children for every early year’s place—with the poorest areas worst affected. Working-class, and many middle-class families are left heavily dependent on scarce providers—a captive market that private profiteers have gleefully exploited.
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Childcare is so difficult to access that many parents are forced out of work to look after their children, taking significant long-term wage cuts to do so. Capitalism effectively forces the working class to take on the costs of raising the next generation of employees.
It is predominantly women who drop out of the labour force, fully or partially, meaning the income lost to the working class takes the form of a “motherhood penalty”—the overwhelming cause of the gender pay gap. Charity group Pregnant then Screwed reports that over a third of mothers in England do not return to full-time work due to childcare pressures, versus 12 percent of fathers.
A lack of part-time or flexible work in any but the lowest-paid industries—plus employer excuses about “career breaks” and the like—create a median hourly wage gap of 24 percent for mothers versus fathers. This adds up to roughly £40 billion of lost income for working families every year.
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The resources exist to provide comprehensive childcare and support to all parents.
Increasing maternity/paternity pay to level of the National Living Wage would cost roughly £5 billion a year. A 2022 study by the Institute For Public Policy Research estimated that a “universal childcare guarantee” for children up to 11 would cost £17.8 billion a year, substantially offset by tax receipts from working parents.
This is a fraction of the wealth looted by the super-rich. Over £90 billion is paid out each year in dividends, £80 billion is realized in capital gains and roughly £40 billion received in bonuses—all flowing overwhelmingly to the very richest in society.
This privately hoarded fortune would not be possible without either the wage labor of the working class, or the estimated £134 billion’s worth of unpaid childcare carried out every year. It should be made available for the benefit of those who produce it.
More than simply providing resources, taking society out of the hands of a money-hungry oligarchy would allow a drastic reduction in the working day and week, making working hours more flexible and a new flourishing of withered communities and social connections.
It would allow the activity of raising children to be transformed from a problem to be solved, as it is under capitalism, into the naturally integrated and fulfilling part of daily life it should always be.
7. Australia’s central bank cuts rates marginally, warning again of world “uncertainty”
Following in the footsteps of other central banks, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) board yesterday tentatively and fractionally lowered its official interest rate for the third time this year.
The board decided, reportedly unanimously, to lower its cash rate target by 25 basis points to 3.60 percent, taking the total cut to 75 basis points since February. This follows four years of lifting and then maintaining high rates, inflicting financial pain on working-class households.
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Payments of thousands of dollars a month are still producing high levels of financial stress, particularly in the outer suburbs of major cities. A February survey, just before the RBA announced its first 0.25 percent cut, reported that almost four million households in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were suffering mortgage or rental stress. Repayments or rents were consuming more than 30 percent of their income.
Moreover, the rate cut is likely to accelerate soaring house and apartment prices, locking more working-class and young people out of ever being able to afford to borrow the money to buy and pay off a home. Expectations of rate cuts have already sent prices to record levels in recent weeks. The median house now costs $915,000, and a unit $678,000, with far higher prices in capital cities.
8. South Korean online retail workers to hold one-day strike
South Korean workers at the online retailer and delivery company Coupang are planning to hold a one-day strike Friday following a similar walkout on August 1. Workers at the company and throughout the logistics industry are underpaid and have long faced unsafe working conditions and brutal hours.
Coupang is a South Korean company similar to Amazon, which in addition to providing online sales, also operates food delivery services, mobile payment services, and online streaming. It is a regular part of the daily lives of many South Koreans and also has a growing presence in Taiwan.
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Whether it is in South Korea or any other country, companies like Coupang, with the aid of the unions, profit from what is in reality an industrial meat grinder. Workers must break free from the straitjacket imposed on them by the union bureaucrats and take the fight into their own hands and expand the struggle to other companies and industries on the basis of a socialist perspective.
9. DHS cover-up continues as outbreak spreads at Florida Everglades concentration camp
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in league with the Florida state government, is engaged in a cover-up of the near-death of Venezuelan detainee Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez and an ongoing viral outbreak at the Florida Everglades “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp. Federal and state authorities are refusing to acknowledge the spread of illness inside the remote facility, or provide adequate medical care to the hundreds of people detained there.
The government is deliberately confining immigrants, the vast majority of whom have not been convicted of a crime, in facilities where adverse health outcomes, including death, are inevitable. Including the alleged suicide of Chaofeng Ge, 32, in Pennsylvania last week, at least 12 people have died in ICE custody in 2025. According to the New York Times, more than 60,000 people are currently imprisoned in ICE facilities—by far the most in decades.
In an interview with the Guardian, Eric Lee, one of Rivas Velásquez’s attorneys, confirmed the horrific conditions at Alligator Alcatraz.
Based on what multiple detainees have told me, in the last 72 to 100 hours, there is some respiratory disease which has made the majority, or I would even say vast majority, of detainees sick in some form. There are people who are losing breath. There are people who are walking around coughing on one another. Their requests for masks from the guards are denied, and they only are allowed to shower once or maybe twice a week.
In a phone call with his client, Lee confirmed that Rivas Velásquez was denied medical care for 48 hours before he collapsed on Tuesday. While fellow detainees, including a nurse from Cuba, performed CPR on Rivas Velásquez, staff on site offered no medical support. According to multiple witnesses Rivas Velásquez was left to lie on the floor for approximately 30 minutes before emergency personnel arrived.
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As the World Socialist Web Site reported Sunday, Lee confirmed to the Guardian that his client was secretly transferred on Saturday to a detention facility in El Paso, Texas. Lee has been able to speak to his client only once since the transfer. During that call, Rivas Velásquez said he was being denied medical care and that he thought he was going to die. An emergency medical team in El Paso was dispatched to the detention center but was blocked from entering by ICE agents.
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The government has denied there is any outbreak at the Florida facility. On July 14, Miami New Times journalists began contacting the Florida Department of Health (FDH) about possible COVID-19 cases at Alligator Alcatraz after reports emerged of detainees falling ill.
Despite six calls and emails, the FDH did not respond until July 22, when press secretary Isabel Kilman replied to the New Times that the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) would handle all media inquiries. Repeated follow-up requests by New Times reporters to FDEM spokesperson Stephanie Hartman were ignored until August 8—after Rivas Velásquez had been hospitalized.
Hartman then falsely claimed that reports of a “serious illness” were “false,” and insisted, “Detainees have access to a 24/7, fully staffed medical facility with a pharmacy on site.” She has refused to answer any further questions, including those about the spread of COVID-19 inside the camp.
10. The 2025 Boeing strike and the lessons of the 2014 contract extension
Workers walked out at the weapons manufacturer after a 99 percent strike authorization vote on August 4, followed by the rejection of two successive contracts proposed by Boeing and backed by the leadership of International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 837. Workers are determined to oppose a deal that would force new employees to wait 12 years to reach top pay, with 20 percent wage increases that tariff-driven inflation would rapidly erode.
As Boeing worker Eric Easter told local NBC affiliate KSDK, “We all just want to not have to work 70-80 hours a week to make ends meet.”
To win their fight, workers must critically examine the lessons of the 2014 contract struggle, recognize the role of the IAM bureaucracy, and take urgent steps to form rank-and-file committees to enforce the democratic will of workers on the shop floor.
11. Australia: NSW doctors oppose meager Labor government pay offer
In a series of online “town hall” meetings held over the past month by the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF), public sector doctors in New South Wales (NSW) have expressed strong opposition to the latest miserly pay offer from the state Labor government.
But while many doctors want to reject the deal and resume industrial action, ASMOF is adopting a “neutral” position, continuing to enforce a strike ban and seeking to subordinate the physicians’ struggle to still-unscheduled arbitration in the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC).
The Labor government’s “new” proposed deal consists of a 3 percent “interim” pay increase, backdated to July 1, 2024, and a further 3 percent “interim” increase, backdated to July 1 this year. These nominal wage rises would fall far short of what is needed to keep up with the soaring cost of living, let alone recoup past losses that have resulted in NSW doctors earning on average 30 percent less than their interstate counterparts.
The offer would do nothing to address the increasingly difficult working conditions doctors confront, which, as much as wages, motivated them to strike in April, for the first time since 1998. Like health workers across Australia, doctors are on the frontlines of a breakdown of public hospitals and healthcare, characterized by bed shortages, lack of resources, understaffing and overwork. Medical staff are being driven to the point of burnout, while patients face growing wait times in emergency departments and dangerous delays for diagnosis and surgery.
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Doctors and psychiatrists must reject the fraud promoted by ASMOF, that their demands can be won through legal maneuvering in the IRC, or through appeals to the state Labor government, which is carrying out a further assault on the already crumbling public health system, and all of its employees.
Talks with Health Secretary Wes Streeting have been described as a “window of opportunity” to rule out any further strike action for the summer period, while the RDC attempt to cobble together a sellout they can put a face-saving spin on.
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The fight by resident doctors for pay restoration is threatened with a sellout. This can only be prevented if they take their struggle out of the hands of the British Medical Association (BMA) leaders and turn to the working class in a political fight to defend the National Health Service (NHS) against the Starmer government.
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Resident doctors should demand the RDC leaders respect the mandate for pay restoration or be immediately stood down. They should be no further negotiations which exclude this basic demand, and all closed-door talks should be ended with direct oversight by the rank-and-file.
The fight for a livable wage and safe working conditions for health workers is inseparable from the fight to defend the NHS. Labour’s “recovery plan” is a recovery for private health corporations, not for patients or staff. Its commitment to increased military spending and corporate giveaways shows exactly whose interests it serves.
13. Demand the freedom of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site have initiated a global campaign to demand the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. The fight for Bogdan’s freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
