A shooting at a midtown Manhattan office building, in photos
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
Reeves acknowledges voter disappointment amid fresh call for wealth tax
Chancellor Rachel Reeves says that Labour must deliver change to earn victory in the next election, acknowledging that some voters are disappointed with the party's progress. She said she is also 'impatient for change' but stressed that ministers cannot implement everything at once, highlighting her responsibility for financial prudence. These remarks coincide with growing public concern over Sir Keir Starmer 's government, whose approval rating recently reached an all-time low. Ms Reeves defended the government's tax policy, saying it has found the right balance despite the challenge of addressing public finance deficits. The discussion follows former Labour shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds' call for a wealth tax, as recent polling indicates a significant perception of chaos within Sir Keir's administration.
The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
ICE turned Louisiana into America's deportation capital. The inspiration was Amazon and FedEx ‘with human beings'
After he was arrested outside his Virginia apartment in March, Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri was briefly detained in the state before being put on a plane bound for an immigration detention center more than 1,000 miles away. Suri — who was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his Palestinian activism and his family ties to Gaza — arrived at the only ICE facility that doubles as an airport, without his attorneys having any idea where he was. Officers told Suri that he had entered the nation's ' super deportation center, ' according to his attorneys. The college professor was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed then marched into a 70,000 square foot 'staging facility' in Alexandria, Louisiana, which has emerged as the nexus point for President Donald Trump's mass deportation machine. Suri is far from alone. Since Trump returned to the White House, more than 20,000 people en route to other detention centers have passed through the Louisiana facility — which ICE officials have long aspired to operate like corporate giants FedEx and Amazon. ICE's acting director Todd Lyons has bluntly compared the movement of people to packages. 'We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,' Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix earlier this year. 'So, trying to figure out how to do that with human beings,' he said. The idea of 'running the government like a business' has taken root inside ICE over the last decade with lucrative public-private partnerships between the federal government and for-profit contractors, which operate roughly 90 percent of all ICE detention centers. Since before the Trump administration, the ICE field office in New Orleans — which is responsible for removal operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee — was modeling operations after shipping giant FedEx and its 'spoke-hub' model. Detainees are temporarily held in detention 'hubs' before they're sent to a network of detention center 'spokes' where they wait to be deported. In Suri's case, he arrived at the Alexandria 'hub' before he was moved to a regional 'spoke' in Texas. The idea for a staging facility in Louisiana ' started on a cocktail napkin ' at Ruth's Chris steakhouse, according to Philip Miller, a former ICE official in New Orleans who went on to work for an IT firm that contracts with federal law enforcement. Miller sought 'a more effective and efficient way of moving the growing number of foreign detainees,' according to 2015 newsletter from GEO Group, the private prison contractor that operates the Alexandria facility. Trump's border czar Tom Homan tapped former GEO Group executive David Venturella to support the administration's deportation agenda, and he is now serving in a top role at ICE managing contracts for immigrant detention centers, according to The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Daniel Bible, who worked at ICE for 15 years, including a year as the executive associate director of removal operations, left the agency in November 2024 to join GEO Group as its executive vice president. Lyons, who has helmed ICE since March, addressed his now-viral remarks about treating immigrants like packages in an interview the following month. 'The key part that got left out of that statement was, I said, they deal with boxes, we deal with human beings, which is totally different,' he told Boston 25 News. ICE 'should be run like a corporation', he told the outlet. 'We need to be better about removing those individuals who have been lawfully ordered out of the country in a safe, efficient manner,' Lyons continued. 'We can't trade innovation and efficiency for how we treat the people in our custody.' The Independent has requested comment from ICE on its removal operations at the Alexandria facility. Fourteen of the 20 largest ICE detention centers in the U.S. are in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a network that immigrant advocates have labelled 'deportation alley.' The jails — most of which are operated by private prison companies — hold thousands of people each year. More than 7,000 people are currently jailed in Louisiana's immigration detention centers while Texas facilities are holding more than 12,000. More than 56,000 people are in ICE detention across the country. But Louisiana is home to the nation's only ICE detention center with a tarmac. The facility in Alexandria has become the nation's busiest deportation airport with 1,200 flights to other U.S. detention centers and more than 200 planes leaving the country since Trump took office. ICE has operated at least 209 deportation flights in June, the highest level since 2020. During the first six months of Trump's second presidency, ICE removed nearly 150,000 people from the U.S. Alexandria, a city of roughly 44,000 people, is the ninth largest in the state but surrounded by forest and swampland, with summer temperatures regularly climbing into triple digits with humidity levels exceeding 70 percent. Detainees at the facility in Alexandria cannot be held for more than 72 hours, and the facility does not permit access to visitors or even legal counsel, according to attorneys. Suri was held there for three days before being transferred to a Texas detention center where he was housed in the 'TV room,' according to his attorneys. He was given only a thin plastic mattress. Suri was released after spending eight weeks in detention amid an ongoing legal battle. Louisiana locks up more people per capita than any other U.S. state, in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet. Most incarcerated people in Louisiana are in local jails, and the state pays sheriffs a daily rate per inmate, creating what civil rights groups fear is a cruel pay-to-play system that incentivizes locking people up. In 2017, the state's Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards advanced legislation to reduce the state's prison population, which ultimately fell by more than 8,000 over the next five years. But at the same time, the first Trump administration was ramping up immigration arrests and expanding capacity to hold immigrants in detention. Following Trump's 2016 victory, ICE expanded the nation's immigration detention system by more than 50 percent, with contracts for private companies to operate at least 40 new detention facilities. Companies including GEO Group, CoreCivic and LaSalle Corrections own or operate facilities that jail the majority of immigrants. All but one of Louisiana's nine facilities are run by private prison firms. The 400-bed detention center in Alexandria is run by GEO Group, whose stock is valued at roughly $4 billion. Inside, dorm-style units hold up to 80 people each, and each includes an expansive 'processing area' with rows of benches and walls lined with hundreds of shackles. People who are processed at the facility from arriving flights are placed in five-point restraints and forced to sit on the benches, according to immigration attorneys. Before it opened in 2014, ICE transported people by bus from different jails to a local commercial airport or Alexandria International Airport, a converted military base that has emerged as what human rights groups called a 'national nerve center' for ICE Air, the group of charter airlines contracted with the agency to operate deportation flights. 'Alexandria allows the concentrated detention and staging of hundreds of people at a time, optimizing efficiency of ICE's deportation machine,' according to a 2024 report from a coalition of human rights groups. In August 2017, the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties found that the Alexandria facility 'is not properly screening for and identifying detainees at risk for suicide' and 'does not provide mental health treatment and programming,' the report found. That civil rights office was among bureaus within Homeland Security that have been abruptly shuttered under Trump's second administration. Alexandria is a two-hour drive from Baton Rouge and more than three hours away from New Orleans, where most of the state's immigration attorneys live and practice. That distance has made access to legal counsel for the nearly 8,000 people in Louisiana's detention facilities enormously difficult. There is little if any access to the internet or law libraries and few chances to privately speak with family or attorneys. To visit detainees at another facility, the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, roughly 200 miles from New Orleans, Tulane University law professor Mary Yanik and students with the Immigrants' Rights Law Clinic said they leave by 5:30 a.m. and return as late as 10 p.m., in order to speak with as many people as possible. 'That is a grueling schedule, if you think about the number of hours for a single visit with a client for a single court hearing,' she told The Independent earlier this year. 'They feel forgotten. They feel like they're screaming into a void.' The most common question among them is 'why am I here?' 'They're so disoriented by what was happening to them, and so confused. At least one person thought they were in Texas,' she said. ''What is going on? Can't I just go home?''
BreakingNews.ie
30 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
'It is a terrible deal': UCD economist says EU was 'robbed' in US negotiations
The EU-US deal confirmed earlier this week was "terrible" and the trading bloc was "robbed" during negotiations, according to a professor of economics at University College Dublin (UCD). On Sunday, t he United States and the European Union agreed to a trade deal setting a 15 per cent tariff on most goods, staving off higher import taxes on both sides that might have sent shockwaves through economies around the world. Advertisement While the overall reaction to the deal has been positive — with the Taoiseach saying it " avoided a damaging trade war " — others have been more critical of the agreement. Speaking to UCD professor of economics, Ronald Davies said the EU gave in too easy to Donald Trump. "Essentially, Trump said: 'Give me your wallet and your car'. We gave him the car. 'So, yeah, we got to keep the wallet, but we still got robbed." Advertisement Prof Davies said people can paint it as it could have been worse, "but this was in no way a deal: we got mugged." He claims Ursula von der Leyen should have initiated a trade war with Trump as "he is somebody that only respects force, to the extent he respects anything." "People can have differing opinions on what the better approach is. I think Europe needs to cut the US out entirely," he said. Prof Davis thinks the EU should reorganise their supply chains and bypass the US entirely. Advertisement "What I'm saying is, if progress is going to be made on a global scale, it is got to be Europe, working with China or working with Latin America." While that may seem extreme, I asked him whether he thinks it is worth renegotiating with a possibly less unpredictable Democrat administration in four years. His outlook was quite bleak: "The reason why it does not matter is that the US is fundamentally broken. "You can tell by the accent where I grew up, right? I've been in Ireland for nearly 20 years now. I think it's just going to be this pendulum swinging back and forth. Advertisement "In terms of its own domestic, internal policies, the US will make no progress. Every incoming administration is just going to try to undo what the last one did, and whatever they achieve is going to be undone by the next." In terms of how the deal will impact the European single market, being part of a globalised world complicates things. "This deal is going to have an impact on European consumers," he said, noting half of what the US imports are intermediate inputs from other countries, including Europe. "60 per cent of what Europe imports are intermediate inputs, including what we get from the US. The idea that we are not adding the tariff and therefore not going to have higher prices, while being part of global supply chains, does not work." Advertisement In 2024, Irish exports to the United States totalled $78.61 billion (€67.45 billion), with pharmaceutical products accounting for $33 billion or 42 per cent of all exports. How the deal will impact Irish businesses overall depends on the sector in question. Elastic products Photo:"So, the question is, okay, if prices go up by 15 per cent, how much are (US) consumers going to buy for something like alcohol? He described it as an elastic product, so if Irish whiskey is more expensive, consumers might switch to scotch or Kentucky bourbon because there is only a 10 per cent tariff on it. 'That is something where people actually have the ability to move to a different product easily or cut back. 'Something like dairy or butter, that is also one that I think is probably fairly elastic too." He has concerns about the Irish agri-food sector and how there could be a drop in demand for Irish produce as a result. Meanwhile, for pharmaceuticals, it is a different story. "If you cannot get your usual drug. What's the next best option? A lot of the time, there is not one. "Ireland is the leading producer of Viagra, you know, if you cannot get your magic blue pill, what's the next best option?" The long-term outlook makes for grim reading, with tariffs likely to add to the already skyrocketing cost of living. "This is not going to be good. We will sort of bump along for a while until things even out. But, you know, it is a trade war and make no mistake, we are in a trade war. 'We just kind of surrendered. There is also the Russian-Ukraine war, there is an impending AI war. It is going to be a turbulent decade," he said. Ultimately, the deal for the EU is about bringing some semblance of certainty to things, even if that means taking a substantial hit in the short term. "They are saying, 'Okay, this is a crap deal, but it's 15 per cent; we know what's going on. Now let's get on with things'." World US-EU deal sets 15% tariff on most goods and avert... Read More In terms of how quickly we can expect to see the impact of the deal on prices, there will be some lag. "It will take a while. Even in the US, where they have had the tariffs, at some level, they have not seen prices go up as fast as one might expect. "That is because there is a lot of drawing down of stockpiles in place before tariffs kicked in. Come autumn, those stockpiles are going to be largely evaporated. That is when the US will start to see prices rise," he said. For Europe, Davis reckons it will be hard to pinpoint when exactly we could see the impact, but as winter comes along and rising energy costs ensue, we will likely see the real impact of this deal.
