As I listened to the recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors — a pseudoscientific practice that attempts to change or suppress a person’s sexual or gender identity — as a mental health professional, I was confronted with a difficult truth: The Supreme Court debate itself revealed major gaps in the general understanding of what ethical therapy is, and how it differs from malpractice.
While the decisive action taken in 2024 by the Shapiro administration and five state licensing boards to officially declare conversion therapy professional misconduct and harmful is a major victory affirming our ethical standards here in Pennsylvania, the questions raised by the justices underscore a critical and urgent need. Mental health professionals must clearly communicate to the public, especially to the youth in our commonwealth, what constitutes sound, ethical, and effective treatment.
To an outside observer, or even a justice who sits on the highest court in the land, psychotherapy might seem like a conversation with someone who is supportive and compassionate.
But the psychological science confirms that this impression is patently inaccurate. Evidence-based psychotherapy is built on the premise that validation, acceptance, and understanding are the keys to alleviating distress, strengthening relationships, and enabling healthier life choices.
Becoming a competent and ethical psychotherapist takes years of specialized training, study, and supervision.
Importance of validation
Just looking at one of these skills, validation, we can see how complex this is. Validation is the focused act of striving to understand a person’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, reflecting the ways their reactions make sense in the context of their lived experience.
Crucially, and something I stress to my own patients, validation is not agreement or approval. True validation allows for curiosity, paving the way for the self-acceptance that is essential for learning and growth. And, importantly, validation requires the therapist to put aside their own wishes, hopes, and beliefs, also not easy or natural.
The entire premise of conversion therapy stands in direct opposition to what comprises ethical practice by therapists.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this month from a lawsuit brought by Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor, against Colorado’s law prohibiting conversion therapy for minors.
Conversion therapy asserts that one’s inherent sexuality, a quality that lacks any evidence of malleability, is pathological and must be altered. This lie is deeply shaming and stigmatizing.
Shame and stigma do not persevere without active promotion from those in power.
A therapist’s position is not that of a mere “conversation partner,” but a person in an official capacity with specialized training.
Any professional who promises a client they can alter their core sexual identity is exploiting that power and acting in the face of the overwhelming evidence that their own training is built upon.
To illustrate, consider a licensed dermatologist consulting with a patient whose natural skin tone is subject to deep societal prejudice. The patient wishes to permanently change their skin color to escape this stigma, and the dermatologist, perhaps due to a shared personal or religious belief, sincerely wishes they could grant this escape.
Despite this shared wish and personal conviction, if the dermatologist were to accept payment and declare, “I will prescribe a treatment that will permanently and fundamentally rewrite your DNA to give you an entirely different skin color,” that doctor would be committing profound malpractice and fraud.
Unethical and immoral
More than just unethical, it is immoral, because it validates and profits from the harmful, prejudiced notion that the patient’s natural, nonpathological trait is a curable defect. Their oath demands they communicate the truth: that such a fundamental alteration is impossible.
The therapist’s scenario is the direct professional equivalent.
A therapist can ethically help a client manage their feelings or behaviors related to their orientation; they cannot ethically promise to remove the orientation itself.
To promise this impossible, discredited service is professionally unethical and morally corrosive, as it actively reinforces the lie that a natural variation of human existence is a defect needing a “cure.”
The distinction is clear: Ethical therapy offers acceptance; malpractice promises an impossible cure.
The debate before the Supreme Court is not about a professional’s freedom of speech; it is about protecting the public — especially vulnerable minors — from emotional violence perpetrated under the guise of professional care.
Keren Sofer is a Philadelphia-based clinical psychologist.
Try as I may, I can’t wrap my head around Chief Medical Examiner Lindsay Simon’s recent ruling that 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg’s stabbing death was by suicide.
You most likely are familiar with the details of the case: In January 2011, Greenberg was found on the kitchen floor of the Manayunk apartment she shared with her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, a politically connected producer at NBC Sports. Greenberg had been stabbed 20 times, and she was discovered by Goldberg, who was never considered a suspect or charged with any crime.
Simon, in her recent review, which was prompted by two lawsuits Greenberg’s parents filed against the city, discovered 20 additional bruises and three additional “perforations of her skin” never before documented, raising the number of bruises to 31 and stab wounds — including one in the back of her neck — to 23. Well, I’m not a medical examiner, a criminal investigator, a police officer, an assistant DA, or an attorney. But I have so many questions.
Although Simon states that all of the wounds and bruises could have been self-inflicted, it seems to me that only a skilled contortionist could accomplish what was described. Did Simon conduct further interviews to validate her conclusions? Did she examine Greenberg’s emails?
Mostly, though, I remain clueless about how, through the long years since Greenberg’s death, her parents, Joshua and Sandra Greenberg, have held on to any semblance of the ability to rest, to sleep — or even breathe.
SaraKay Smullens, Philadelphia
U.S. strikes again
Donald Trump claims he won the election in 2020. He didn’t. He fumes that he didn’t receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, which was given for accomplishments in 2024, a year in which he didn’t serve as president. Trump, who was handed more money at birth than most of us will ever earn, has an overdeveloped sense of victimhood while completely lacking in humanity.
Another six people who were suspected of being drug smugglers were killed on their boat, bringing the total to 27. We don’t know their names. We haven’t been presented with evidence of their crimes. We do know there was no due process. These strikes are accelerating. I worry this might turn inward, as the administration militarizes our cities. Our Congress on both sides of the aisle must wake up and act. We must make sure they do.
Elliott Miller,Bala Cynwyd
Rebuilding the Middle East
The ceasefire in the Middle East brings relief, but there is ongoing pain and trauma to address for those of us who have witnessed it. When I look at the areas to which the people of Israel and Gaza will be returning, it resembles the destruction and loss of life in Western Europe after World War II.
I am reminded of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led initiative that was meant to help rebuild Europe after the Second World War. It seems the world community needs to unite and do something similar now to restore infrastructure, finance reconstruction, and stabilize governments. Can East and West join forces to make life better for the people of Gaza and Israel now?
Mary McKenna, Philadelphia
The ebb and flow
It is starting to really weigh me down — not too much chocolate or an inadequate amount of exercise in the rain, but the day-to-day headlines about everything from American citizens “being disappeared” to drastic cuts in special education funding and the dissolution of a functioning Congress.
Like countless other people around the world, I was so happy for the families of the Israeli hostages who came home. All that elation, though, was not far removed from the prospect of generational wealth exhibited by the very deliberate presence of Jared Kushner and other allies of President Donald Trump. Trump’s plans for a playground for the rich in the ruins of war now seem more likely than ever — the ebb and the flow.
The coming days and weeks will continue to illuminate for us all whether or not we can stand up for the weakest, most disconnected and challenged citizens in this country while we can still vote, or are we already too worn out by all the daily blasphemies toward the oppressed and the routinized dismissal of the rule of law?
Mary Kay Owen,Downingtown
Dems’ stance on ACA
Our national shutdown is a fight about restoring tax credits to the Affordable Care Act marketplace and reversing the pending Medicaid cuts. For a public largely indifferent to health policy, it is a gamble for Democrats, who have to explain how these programs might impact them. Even today, most Americans do not understand Medicaid or the ACA marketplace. A criticism of the Dems is, what do they stand for besides being against Donald Trump? Now is the time to stand up for a policy that goes beyond restoring cuts to a bureaucratic, dysfunctional, irrational system to one that is simple enough that all Americans can understand — a properly funded, national health insurance covering everyone.
Walter Tsou, Philadelphia
The writer is a former health commissioner of Philadelphia.
. . .
I am not surprised to see so many Republican politicians beginning to support the idea of keeping the income caps removed from receiving premium tax credit subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. And this policy, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic, will undoubtedly receive more and more support from them if they consider it thoughtfully rather than reacting impulsively.
However, I find it puzzling that Democrats are making the continuation of this policy part of their platform at all, much less a central component of the government shutdown. Obamacare was designed to expand access to healthcare for low- and middle-income Americans who had previously struggled to afford insurance, and removing the income caps contradicts the original purpose of the law. It also raises questions about fiscal responsibility and equity, as without the income caps, many wealthy families without employers effectively receive five-figure bonus checks each year from Obamacare that are paid for by everyone else.
Meanwhile, due to the Big Beautiful Bill, married couples with student loans on income-driven repayment will now qualify for $0 in Obamacare premium tax credit subsidies if they wish to limit their student loan payments to a 1,000% increase instead of 2,500%, as this requires filing their federal taxes as “married filing separately” — which also disqualifies them from various other benefits, including the child tax credit.
It is baffling how Democrats have become so misaligned with their priorities that they are doing the work of Republicans for them.
Calvin J. Haneline,Paragould, Ark.
Love for the Phillies
Like letter writer Peter Schmidt, I find I have a new perspective on the epic saga that is the Phillies. For most of my seven decades, I have been only a casual fan of city teams. Still, I’ve acquired that shell so many in our region wear — a shield against disappointment built of cynicism and a grumbling.
But the last few seasons have been different. My daughter lives 700 miles away in Georgia, but we share our thoughts on games almost every night by a stream of text messages, stats, and emoji-decorated cheers and groans.
Though I questioned if the Phils had the stuff to win the World Series, I grew to love everybody involved, heroes and goats alike. When we took my grandsons (13 months and 3 years old) to a game this summer at their aunt’s insistence, the whole family reveled in the boys’ enjoyment. Despite their lack of understanding of the game, they delighted in the general fun at the Bank: the Phanatics’ antics, the massive pile of ice cream in a miniature batting helmet, and the chance to yell “Go Phillies!” without being shushed.
Even at its most serious, the game is just a game, and our disappointment is not tragedy. But the bond fans have with the team — and with each other — bridges gaps of miles, age, and unfamiliarity. That sense of sharing, almost in spite of ourselves, is why I love the Phillies.
Joe Jones,Mount Holly
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Outlined against a blue, gray October sky on a perfect fall morning, Carol Otis, in her Obama-Biden T-shirt, joined more than 1,000 people Saturday who lined both sides of the busy Eagle Road thoroughfare in Havertown to yell, wave signs, and provoke an endless cacophony of car horns against an authoritarian Donald Trump regime.
“I could probably name 7,000 reasons why,” the 77-year-old recent retiree from Drexel Hill told me, “because every day there are 18 things that happen that are just what Trump says — and then there’s the GOP talking about this ‘hate rally.’”
So Otis didn’t make a sign and chose instead — like many in this protest in the heart of suburban Delaware County — to wave an American flag, “because people who carry the flag do not hate America, and as you can see, there are a lot of flags.”
She laughed, then added sarcastically, parrying one of the more absurd GOP talking points: “We’re all paid protesters! George” — Soros, the liberal billionaire — “where are you? I don’t see you. I’m waiting for my handout.”
Carol Otis, 77, a retiree from Drexel Hill, at the “No Kings” protest Saturday in Havertown.
There is a famous quote about mass protest movements — with murky origins (misattributed frequently to Gandhi) — that says, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Saturday’s massive “No Kings” protest that filled Main Streets and public squares from New York and Washington, D.C., to smaller burgs like Havertown showed that the effort to halt and reverse dictatorship in mid-2020s America has already prompted a half-laughing, half-fighting response from an increasingly unpopular White House and its allies.
Ignored at first, the “No Kings” protest movement is rapidly accelerating toward the then-you-win phase. Indeed, the over-the-top alarmism from Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called it a “hate America rally,” or Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who called up his state’s National Guard in Austin to pump up a ridiculous narrative about rock-throwing radicals instead of the peaceful, joyous events in 2,700 different locales — proved that “No Kings” struck a raw nerve.
The day was not only nonviolent but also historic. The estimated nearly seven million who showed up across America marked the second-largest one-day protest in U.S. history, surpassed only by a very different type of event: the first Earth Day in 1970. That was roughly 40% larger than the first “No Kings” event in June, and in talking to protesters Saturday, it seemed the turnout was only boosted by the right-wing rhetoric that anti-Trump protesters must be some kind of domestic terrorists.
“Knowing that they’re feeling threatened makes me know this is what needs to happen,” Gary Fishbein — 65, from Bala Cynwyd, with his American flag T-shirt and Eagles cap — told me. His words were nearly drowned out by the steady honking of supportive cars passing the undulating sea of signs that were as funny as “Does This Ass Make My Country Look Small” or as simple as “Dogs Against Fascism” (held by the canine’s companion) or just “Freedom to Speak.”
The official White House reaction, as related to one reporter, was “Who cares?” But guess what? They clearly cared — a lot. You could see that in the week leading up to the demonstration, with the increasingly insane rhetoric and warnings about “antifa” — a tiny, unorganized sliver of young rock-throwing radicals who were nowhere in sight Saturday — that aimed to neutralize the reality that millions of everyday Americans are sick of seeing a masked secret police snatch people off the streets.
In a maneuver North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un must have surely applauded, Trump’s Pentagon fired some artillery shells over a closed I-5 in the heart of Southern California’s anti-Trump rally as the protests were taking place — ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the armed forces, but alsoas a reminder of the regime’s military might as Trump weighs invoking the Insurrection Act.
Ben Liptock, a 38-year-old Philadelphia public school teacher who lives in Havertown, attended the “No Kings” protest there Saturday with his 9-year-old son, Bobby.
Just a short time after the “Who cares?” comment, Trump himself posted a shocking — to the extent that anything can be truly shocking anymore — AI-created video to Truth Social that showed him piloting a jet fighter wearing a king’s crown (!!) and “bombing” a large U.S. urban protest march with brown, liquid, um, excrement.
I guess that was supposed to be the fascist version of four-dimensional chess, that our 47th and possibly last president could mock, ridicule, and dismiss “No Kings” by confirming everything the largest protest in 56 years was all about: that our government is hijacked by a monarch who defecates on his own subjects. The reality is that Trump’s late-night video reeked more of panic and fear than its crude subject matter.
The biggest American protest doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The reason seven million people are in the streets is that Trump long ago squandered any chance for a honeymoon after his narrow reelection in 2024. His approval rating is just 40% in the latest Gallup poll (even lower in some other surveys). And like the protester Otis said, there are about 7,000 reasons — including higher prices in the supermarket, a looming doubling of health insurance premiums for millions of Americans, and a 20-day-and-counting shutdown of the federal government with no end in sight.
But it was Trump’s mass deportation crusade, and the brutal tactics by those masked and unbadged goons for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies — grabbing migrants (and, in at least 170 documented cases, U.S. citizens) off the street and lobbing tear gas at anyone who protests — that was cited again and again by themarcherswhen I asked them why they are in the streets.
Ben Liptock — 38, who lives in Havertown and teaches in a North Philadelphia public school, and came with his 9-year-old son, Bobby — explained that we need to “continue to show people that you’re not alone in today’s America — it’s scary to protest.” But he said he felt they had to be there for his many immigrant students — some who’ve gone home to find their dads deported — who can’t safely demonstrate themselves.
Emilio Ovalle, a 19-year-old West Chester University student, attended the “No Kings” protest Saturday in Havertown.
“If I looked a little different, I wouldn’t be able to show my face and protest power,” Liptock said. “There are people in the shadows right now, and they’re terrified.”
It arguably cut both ways that the suburban crowd in Havertown was overwhelmingly white, with most older than the median U.S. age of 38. Others echoed Liptock that this breed of protester can use its privilege to speak for those who can’t, and any true mass movement needs the white metro middle class to succeed. But the lack of Black and brown faces, or members of Gen Z (who’ve powered uprisings in parts of Asia and Africa), remains a significant problem for “No Kings.”
Someone like Emilio Ovalle ― a lanky 19-year-old student from West Chester University waving a sign with a Mark Twain quotation — stood out in the crowd on Saturday. The son of an immigrant from Guatemala, Ovalle also cited the deportations as his No. 1 issue, and while he said many of his friends oppose Trump, he also understands their reluctance to protest.
“Part of it has to be the Democrats — they’re not good at getting the young vote,” he said. “The right is very good at appealing to a lot of the insecurities, especially in younger men.”
This would seem to be the next mission for “No Kings” going forward: to build a bigger network with groups such as Gen Z teens and 20-somethings or African Americans. Those groups also have major issues with the Trump presidency, but feel them in different ways and express them in different venues than the ones like Facebook or MSNBC that are popular with the first wave of protesters.
That said, it’s impossible to ignore what the “No Kings” movement has accomplished in a matter of months. By raising their voices, protesters have encouraged Democrats in Washington to at least slightly stiffen their backbones, as shown by the current budget battle. They are winning new converts from the disaffected middle by exposing the depths of Trump’s unpopularity.
And they are reassuring their friends and neighbors to keep the faith in a dark moment — that there are far more Americans who want democracy than dictatorship. “It makes you feel good that you are not alone, that a lot of people feel the same way,” Michael Tempone, a 73-year-old from Upper Darby, waving American flags with his wife, Stephanie, told me.
There were thousands of American flags across the nation Saturday, and no reported violence, and close to no arrests — zero in New York City (where the New York Police Department is not known for its restraint) or San Diego or fearmongered Austin. That is driving the Trump regime bat-guano crazy, because it has not crushed the resistance, and it knows its days are numbered. As I walked back to my car, I heard one protester chuckle to his partner, “This is the best ‘hate America’ rally that I’ve ever been to.”
This week’s Shackamaxon is about field trips, political systems, and state budget shenanigans.
Perspective vs. parochialism
Five members of City Council, several Council staffers, three state representatives, and the head of the Philadelphia Parking Authority are taking a field trip up to Hoboken, N.J., next week, with the aim of learning more about how that city managed to eliminate traffic deaths. Hoboken hasn’t just done so forone year or two — the Mile Square City has gone without a vehicular fatality since 2017. Council President Kenyatta Johnson deserves credit for being willing to learn from other places, something Council has traditionally been hostile to.
Still, if our local legislators want to truly have their minds blown, they should head farther north. No, not Boston. The city they should learn from is Montreal, where my wife and I spent last weekend.
The city known as “Le Belle Ville” shares a lot in common with Philadelphia. Unlike Hoboken, which is ultimately a satellite city of Manhattan, Montreal is the center of its own metropolitan area, and the biggest city in Quebec. While there are zip codes in Philadelphia that have more residents than the North Jersey hamlet, Montreal has over 1.7 million inhabitants. It also has a riverside Old City, a park named for Marconi, an often contentious relationship with their state provincial government, a plethora of Second Empire architecture, a storied Chinatown, an expansive urban park that’s a bit of a hike to get to, and they call their downtown “Centreville,” or Center City.
Unlike Philadelphia, however, Montreal’s leaders embrace being a city, rather than trying to plug their square suburban preferences into a round metropolitan hole. The difference in quality of life is easy to see, even on a short trip.
People gather next to the Lachine Canal on a warm spring day in Montreal in 2021.
As my colleague Stephanie Farr pointed out, Philadelphia lacks even a single regularly pedestrianized corridor, while in Montreal, you’ll find them all over the place. Montreal’s mayor, Valerie Plante, credits its pedestrianization program with attracting additional tourists and boosting the local economy. There are more cyclists in Montreal than here in Philadelphia, and yet, you were less likely to encounter them speeding past you on the sidewalk, with even older riders and parents of small children feeling comfortable and safe riding in the street, thanks to traffic calming in residential areas and abundant paths elsewhere.
Additionally, their embrace of city life means a much more pleasant transit experience. In the four hours I spent riding the rails in Montreal, I did not notice a single person smoking cigarettes or marijuana on board a train or inside a metro station. I smelled both on my first trip back on SEPTA. Many Montrealers smoke. You’ll even find a recreational cannabis dispensary along Rue Saint-Paul, their historic thoroughfare, but they respect their transit system enough to refrain while on board. Imagine that!
Real choices
It would be easy to cite cultural differences as the primary reason why things seem to work better up north. But culture is not stagnant; it interacts with politics and policy. There are differences in electioneering between the City of 100 Steeples and the City of Brotherly Love, as well.
Since Philadelphia enacted the 1951 Home Rule Charter, the Democratic Party has dominated city politics. Many Council members are reelected without facing a credible challenge. Local Republicans stand little chance, especially with their colleagues in Washington and Harrisburg routinely demonstrating their contempt for our city.
A sign in the Fairmount neighborhood in May.
The city’s new, progressive opposition, the Working Families Party, is often more focused on national issues than things city government has direct control over. In fact, it urged people to vote for it in order to stop Donald Trump. Neither opposition party has been willing to tackle local good government priorities like councilmanic prerogative or eliminating row offices. This makes achieving change in this city feel impossible, which probably contributes to what former Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas famously called “the Philly Shrug.”
In Montreal, however, voters have a real choice. They even have municipal political parties, meaning voters have to form their own opinions about local issues.
Budget blame game
Harrisburg Democrats are increasingly convinced state Senate Republicans are holding up the budget to boost state Treasurer Stacy Garrity’s chances in next year’s governor’s race. Garrity is currently behind by about 16 points in the polls. Republican consultant Chris Nicholas, one of the more reasonable members of his party, insists this is not the case, claiming that if it were, the treasurer would have unveiled her loan program earlier for Pre-K Counts programs and groups that provide rape and domestic violence prevention and response services.
State Treasurer and Republican candidate for governor Stacy Garrity holds a rally in Bucks County at the Newtown Sports and Events Center in September.
Still, it is hard to avoid thinking a Josh Shapiro landslide in 2026 could have an adverse effect on the campaigns of Republicans who are up for reelection next year.
Of course, holding up needed state cash might only make things worse. The county commissioners in state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward’s Westmoreland County canceled their public meetings because there’s no money to spend. As Spotlight PA’s Stephen Caruso has outlined, nonprofit service providers are already feeling the pain, taking on debt that will hurt their ability to provide care for years to come.
It’s too bad that kind of pain has not been felt by our representatives.
Clashes between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and members of targeted communities continue to intensify as the Trump administration gleefully condones a dangerous mix of heavy-handed enforcement tactics and zero accountability.
Recent examples of intimidation, harassment, and excessive use of force by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have been piling up, ranging from a praying minister being shot in the head with a pepper ball to a woman allegedly taunted to “do something” before an officer opened fire.
Americans who care about the rule of law — whether they support mass deportations or not — must speak out against the inhumane theater of cruelty put on by Donald Trump’s secret police.
Yet, beyond the daily outrage of immigrants being disappeared off the street, or citizens detained without reason by jeering masked thugs, there is another insidious level to the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts.
From the moment Trump came into office, he has shut down or obstructed the country’s legal immigration pathways. No shots have been fired in this cold war, but the long-term economic damage will leave most Americans worse off.
Starting in January, the administration froze the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, leaving more than 100,000 highly vetted immigrants who had already been approved for resettlement stuck in limbo.
According to reports, the program will restart in 2026, but the cap will be lowered from the 125,000 set under President Joe Biden to 7,500. Not only that, but many of those limited slots will be reserved for white South Africans.
You have to give it to white supremacists in the administration; they are not subtle.
The refugee freeze may not be the largest cut to legal immigration, but it is the most significant, said David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“All these people who would have been here with a path to permanent residence and citizenship — it’s just gone,” he told me. “Over the next four years, it’s basically the equivalent of half a million people who are going to be lost as a result of that decision.”
Refugees are fleeing from persecution, have gone through extensive background checks, and likely waited for years for a chance to come to the U.S. — all of which is meaningless to an administration for whom a foreigner is just an “illegal” who hasn’t overstayed their visa yet.
Federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection walk north on North Clark Street in the River North neighborhood of Chicago in September.
And, if and when Trump leaves office, the system itself will be damaged, atrophied after years of disuse and partner agencies that have moved on.
The administration has also ended all humanitarian parole initiatives launched during the Biden years, which allowed some immigrants who had a sponsor in the U.S. and who passed a background check to come to America for a period of two years to live and work lawfully.
International students, long a wellspring for high-skilled workers in the U.S. and a major revenue driver for colleges and universities, have also been targeted by the administration. As the new academic year began in August, the number of international students declined by almost 20% from 2024. Difficulties getting visas, fears of getting caught up in the wider immigration crackdown, or ending up in jail for saying the wrong thing played a part in the drop, according to reports.
These are no idle concerns. The best and brightest around the world can quickly find validation for their worries in what happened to Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained after leading pro-Palestinian protests, or Tufts doctoral candidate Rumeysa Öztürk, who spent six weeks in custody over an op-ed she wrote for her student newspaper.
There are also travel bans targeting 19 countries and a proposal to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas for skilled workers. Meanwhile, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the agency tasked with overseeing legal immigration, including legal permanent residence and citizenship applications — is being weaponized against the people it’s meant to serve.
The agency will now have armed special agents engaged in immigration enforcement, even as its backlog hits an all-time high and fee-paying applicants face worsening delays for USCIS services.
It’s going to be some time before the full economic effects of mass deportation, plus legal immigration being throttled so aggressively, manifest themselves, but the math is clear. The consequences of Trump’s legal immigration crackdown will not play out in the streets, but around people’s kitchen tables.
“It’s going to mean less economic growth for the United States,” the Cato Institute’s Bier said. “You’re reducing business creation and entrepreneurship and innovation, which drives improvements in economic growth over the long term.”
With less economic growth, it means lower living standards for the U.S. population, Bier added. “It’s a bleak picture.”
Much as the reality of who’s being targeted for deportation puts the lie to the administration’s claims that they are focusing on “criminal” immigrants and “the worst of the worst.” So the gutting of legal immigration removes all doubt over what this is really about, or for whom it’s really for.
With a government shutdown looming, Jimmy Kimmel coming back, and former FBI Director James Comey being indicted, it would be easy to miss that the Trump administration has promised billions in taxpayer money to bail out one of the president’s buddies after he got in trouble down south.
Argentine President Javier Milei, who you may remember gave Elon Musk a “bureaucracy chain saw” onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, has put the power tools down and brought out the collection plate.
“As President [Donald] Trump has stated, we stand ready to do what is needed to support Argentina and the Argentine people,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on X Wednesday. “The Treasury is currently in negotiations with Argentine officials for a $20 billion swap line with the Central Bank.”
That influx of cash is, of course, timed to the forthcoming midterm elections, as Milei is challenged over his poor handling of the economy and other political woes. Elected in 2023, the brash self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist has cut a Trumpian path, governing by decree and force of personality. But corruption allegations surrounding his sister, growing wage stagnation, and rising unemployment have him on the ropes.
Now, helping a neighbor facing hard times is not a bad thing. I was in Mexico when President Bill Clinton took it upon himself to approve a $20 billion loan in 1995 to help stabilize the peso after that country’s economic collapse. But helping the nation next door was also in America’s best interest.
Elon Musk holds up a chain saw he received from Argentina’s President Javier Milei (right) as they arrive to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md.
The U.S. had just entered into a trade agreement, and there were American jobs dependent on exports. Clinton also pragmatically argued that a broke Mexico would likely lead to more illegal immigration and destabilize the southern border.
The gamble worked. Mexico ended up paying back the loan, along with half a billion dollars in interest, ahead of schedule. The country also continued down the road to true democracy, with an opposition party winning the presidency in 2000 for the first time in more than 70 years. But Argentina is not Mexico.
The country is hardly a top export destination for American goods (imports from China almost double what U.S. producers sell there), and Milei has already burned through $15 billion in International Monetary Fund money. Not to mention Argentina owes another $45 billion from an IMF loan taken out in 2018.
Those are a lot of hopes and dreams riding on the right-wing Milei. As U.S. Rep. French Hill, the GOP chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, wrote after a trip to Argentina recently, if Milei’s policies are successful, they could “reverse 150 years of macro financial disappointment to creditors.” I believe in long shots, but I’m not taking that bet.
Oh, wait. As a taxpayer, I guess I am.
Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury secretary, (left) and Argentine President Javier Milei during the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Awards in New York on Wednesday.
What’s maddening about this situation is that it’s part of the cronyism that defines Trump’s second term. The president has made no secret, as usual, of what his motivations are, calling Milei “a very good friend, fighter, and winner” on Truth Social, and telling Argentines their president has his complete and total endorsement and “will never let you down!”
We can argue on the merits of propping up Argentina’s economy, but this is no way to run foreign policy in Latin America.
Not while the U.S. cozies up to the “world’s coolest dictator” (and America’s jailer) Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Nor when we’re imposing 50% tariffs on Brazil — a country with an economy more than three times the size of Argentina’s — for convicting former president (and Trump pal) Jair Bolsonaro over a coup attempt after his electoral defeat in 2022.
Nor when Trump continues to order the extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans — at least 17 people — the White House claims were drug running in the Caribbean.
The little Republican pushback over the administration’s efforts to rescue Milei’s political career has come from U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who objects to Argentina’s undercutting of U.S. farmers trying to sell to China. “Why would USA help bail out Argentina while they take American soybean producers’ biggest market???” Grassley posted to X on Thursday.
Not exactly a clarion call to action, but it’s a start. Maybe if we put soybeans on those Venezuelan boats the U.S. keeps blowing up, we’ll get some needed outrage from the right.
Too many people in this country think free speech comes with no consequences. A constitutionally protected free pass to say whatever you want with zero repercussions. But that’s not true. There is a cost to speaking out.
On the left, think Colin Kaepernick being blackballed by the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem. On the right, think every yahoo who’s ever been fired from their job over some racist/sexist Facebook post.
If you think that’s an unfair comparison, write about it. Yell at me about it. That’s how free speech works. I say something, and you can say something back. How it definitely does not work is when the government steps in. The courts have been very clear that the First Amendment protects us from government censorship.
That means calls to boycott comedian Tony Hinchcliffe after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a Donald Trump rally? Legal. ABC firing comedian Bill Maher for insensitive comments after 9/11? Legal. However much you or I can loathe so-called cancel culture, it’s legal.
What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is something else.
On Wednesday, Disney-owned ABC put the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! on indefinite hiatus. This happened soon after Nexstar Communications Group said it would pull the program from its 23 ABC-affiliated stations over a joke Kimmel had made Monday about the MAGA reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk. The leaders of the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group also announced they would be preempting the show.
So far, so wrong, but within these private companies’ rights. The problem is that also on Wednesday, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went on the right-wing podcast The Benny Show and laid out how the government could go after those who gave the late-night comedian his platform.
“There’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. You can certainly see a path forward for suspension over this. And again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at,” Carr told host Benny Johnson. “Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up.”
Now, the FCC cannot go after ABC because, like the other national networks, it does not hold a broadcast license to transmit over the public airwaves (although Disney owns a few stations), but it can absolutely go after local affiliates.
Not only that, but much like in the case of CBS’s cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — which put the Trump-mocking show on the chopping block after the network’s parent company needed government approval for a merger — Nexstar is also in merger talks.
Brendan Carr, then a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, in 2020.
With The Late Show, CBS executives could at least make the case (transparent as it was) that their decision was justified because ratings were down, and they would allow the show to run until the end of the host’s contract next year.
But for Kimmel, there hasn’t been even an attempt at that kind of pretense. He’s been suspended following a barely veiled threat by the guy in charge of allowing TV stations to do business. Now, I think what Nexstar did is cowardly, but it is by no means nonsensical.
Add it to the list of companies, universities, and law firms that have sold out American principles and are fully on board with endangering democracy by enabling Trump’s worst instincts — all for the sake of doing business.
Also, add this incident to the long list of examples of hypocrisy from the Trump administration and the right-wing commentariat. Unsurprisingly, back in 2023, Carr posted on X that “Free speech is the counterweight — it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” The same day Kimmel was suspended, Trump criticized England’s laws limiting speech (he’s right) while praising ABC’s decision.
The president has repeatedly threatened networks over their news coverage, and raged against late-night comedians like Kimmel and Colbert for making fun of him. Of the Big Three networks (sorry, kids, I’m old), Comcast-owned NBC has so far stood its ground.
This is important because Saturday Night Live alone has produced some definitive presidential portraits that have stood the test of time. In my late-night TV-watching lifetime, we’ve seen George H.W. Bush as awkward and out of touch (Dana Carvey), Bill Clinton as hungry horndog (Phil Hartman), George W. Bush as clueless bro (Will Ferrell), Barack Obama as professorial but cool (Jay Pharoah), and Donald Trump as game cue card reader desperate for love and attention (Donald J. Trump).
The show may want to amend Trump’s portrayal, though, to a thin-skinned demagogue who lost his sense of humor about the same time he found love and attention among the vilest peddlers of right-wing vitriol and hate on his way to authoritarianism.
As to what those of us who consider free speech one of the vital ingredients in the American Experiment can do, well, that’s easy.
Speak out, loudly and often — ideally respectfully, but the Constitution doesn’t say you need to be nice. What’s happening is not right, and we need to say so. Damn the consequences.
As Vladimir Putin blocks peace talks, Kyiv wants to share with the U.S. and Europe how to counter the AI-driven weapons of the future.
Betsyk, commander for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade's special battalion for intercepting enemy drones, sits beside downed Russian reconnaissance drones.3rd Separate Assault Brigade
DIRECTION POKROVSK, Ukraine — In a warren of rooms filled with computers, 3D printers, colorful wires, and drone frames, the atmosphere was casual, but the intentions were deadly.
The young men in their 20s and 30s, dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Silicon Valley start-up. Except they were fighting for their lives — and their country’s survival.
In the basement command center, three of the soldier-techies stared at multiple screens with dozens of views delivered by Ukrainian-made surveillance drones. They were looking for Russian targets in a war that had lasted for three and a half years.
As I peered over their shoulders during a June visit to the rear of the front lines, a moving car was spotted.
Orders were quickly passed to a frontline drone navigator and pilot in a trench or basement who would make the final call as to whether the target was clearly visible and worth destroying — at which point the pilot’s goggles would let him watch the little exploding drone descend until a flash signaled another kill.
It was a slow day, and everyone’s attention had turned to other screens before I could learn the fate of the car. But there were always more targets to find.
By my side, the 31-year-old commander of an elite drone battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade, call sign Condor, told me there are up to 300 targets a day, which can range from a single fighter in the grass to a moving motorcycle to a small Russian dugout covered with branches or nets.
“The orcs outnumber us, and they don’t care about loss of lives,” Condor said, using the name of the grotesque enemy warriors in the Lord of the Rings series to refer to the Russians. “In this new way of war, infantry and artillery and mortars still matter, but everything is controlled by air. Now, a military is just a way of supporting drones.”
For Ukraine, drones are an essential part of why the country has been able to hold out so long against an army four times its size.
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project.John Duchneskie/Staff Artist
The technology of unmanned weaponry is advancing at a pace that appears revolutionary — from aerial drones to drones that move by sea, robotic land drones, and long-range drones carrying missiles — all increasingly directed by artificial intelligence.
Sea drones drove Russian ships out of the Black Sea along the Ukrainian coast, and continue to strike at the critical Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. In June, Ukrainian security services conducted the amazing Operation Spiderweb, which damaged or destroyed up to 40 Russian warplanes worth billions of dollars, deep inside Russia — all with 117 small drones costing $500 each.
But Russia is catching up. Ukraine needs the funds to massively scale up drone production.
That’s why the most important moment of President Donald Trump’s Monday meeting with Ukraine’s president and top European leaders may have been when Volodymyr Zelensky proposed to share his country’s breakthrough drone technology with the Pentagon.
Kyiv would sell tens of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Ukrainian-made drones to America, and, in return, would buy double that dollar amount of U.S. weapons systems, financed by Europe. Both countries would then be far better equipped for the challenges of modern conflict.
The success of that proposal could bolster American preparedness for future tech wars, while helping Ukraine survive as a free, sovereign state.
More on Ukraine
Trump’s deference to Putin means only more bloodshed in Ukraine
The president could have used America’s power to force Vladimir Putin to negotiate seriously. Instead, he opened the door to blaming Ukraine for any failed "peace" talks.
Why so? Peace talks are going nowhere. Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace. He thinks he’s winning.
The Russian dictator “has no reason to compromise so long as the president refuses to apply any pressure on Moscow,” as former Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza bluntly told MSNBC. “You cannot make peace by placating Russia.”
Despite the effusive red-carpet welcome Trump gave Putin at their recent Alaska summit, the Russian leader has rejected every one of the president’s proposals to end the war.
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No ceasefire. No strong security guarantees for Kyiv, as the naive White House negotiator Steve Witkoff claimed Putin had accepted. The Kremlin has already rebuffed a possible bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky that Trump has been touting.
Peace talks will become plausible only if the U.S. joins Europe in putting maximum pressure on Russia, convincing Putin he can’t win and can’t afford to fight any longer.
But that would require Trump to recognize what the Europeans already know: Ukraine has been able to hold off the Russians until now because it has pioneered a revolutionary new way of warfare — the war of drones.
So Zelensky’s proposal is in both countries’ interests. The U.S. is way behind in small drone production, but it has weapons systems crucial to Ukraine. A swap would signal to Putin that Trump is not a pushover.
If Trump wants to be a peacemaker, he must recognize that the Ukraine war is about far more than real estate. It is a battle over freedom, geopolitics — and who will win the tech wars of the future.
As I was told by former Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin: “This war started like the Second World War with drones. But it will finish as the First World Drone War.”
A pilot with the elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, demonstrates drone control.Trudy Rubin/Staff
In the air
My latest Ukraine visit — my fifth since the fighting began in February 2022 — showed me what it means when unmanned drones take over the battlefield.
Last year, I could still visit artillery emplacements and destroyed villages near the front where army units lived, showered outdoors, and ate outdoors. I could drive on roads to and from towns near the Donetsk front line inside the contested parts of the eastern Donbas region that Ukraine still controls. Military vehicles still sped along those roads.
Those days are over.
The 15 kilometers (roughly nine miles) on each side of the front line have become a kill zone where almost nothing moves on land because it is at risk of being hit by the other side’s drones.
The size of the kill zone keeps expanding.
Tanks are sitting ducks. So are medical evacuation vehicles. Indeed, military vehicles of any kind. No longer are the soldiers who man frontline positions or drone pilots rotated every day or two; they stay in place for days because the roads in and out are so risky.
Supplies are brought in and the wounded taken out by unmanned robotic carts, known as land drones. These robots also lay mines, and some are equipped with machine guns or rockets.
As for Ukraine’s cities, Putin is demonstrating how drones can be used as a cheap, terrifying tool of terror against civilians.
During my stay in Kyiv, the nightly Russian barrage of Shaheds — drones designed in Iran and gifted by the thousands to Putin by the ayatollahs — rained down nightly on civilian targets. I was lucky to be in a hotel with a comfortable basement shelter, but my Ukrainian friends and contacts were up each night huddled in their hallways or bathrooms. They still are.
Natalya Dubchek stands next to a minibus destroyed by a Shahed drone. The fire from the explosion torched her home in Odesa, Ukraine.Trudy Rubin / Staff
In Odesa one morning, I visited a neighborhood where a family of three was incinerated when a Shahed sheared off the top floor of their apartment building in a residential neighborhood. I spoke with a woman whose bungalow burned to its concrete walls, and who barely escaped the flames.
Even after my return to the U.S., I have kept the air raid alerts on my iPhone, which can be set to any city or region. My phone buzzes every time Russia launches another swarm of Shaheds (along with cruise and ballistic missiles) against Kyiv. For hours, the alerts go off every 20 minutes.
Each buzz means Ukrainian civilians, including the elderly and mothers with small children, must decide whether to descend to an underground shelter and spend miserable hours or the entire night there.
The Shaheds, which give off a chilling whine as they fly, are now copied and manufactured inside Russia with Tehran’s technical help. They have been made more lethal with the addition of jet engines, which enable them to fly higher and faster and elude countermeasures. They are meant to terrorize, exhaust, and kill civilians in Ukrainian schools, hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings.
The number of Shaheds in the skies has jumped dramatically since Putin concluded that Trump will never be serious about punishing Russia for its refusal to accept a ceasefire or engage in serious peace talks. And they are affecting morale. If the Russian barrage continues, more Ukrainians may try to leave for abroad.
A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge from a downed Shahed drone in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine in 2024.Efrem Lukatsky
Yet, despite the daily Shahed carnage and recent Russian gains on long stalemated front lines, Moscow is still not winning this war.
A prime reason is that Ukraine’s war of technology has so far enabled Kyiv to hold its defensive line, but not to take back territory.
Former Ukrainian commander in chief, now ambassador to the U.K., Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told a video forum in Kyiv that the only war Ukraine can wage is a “high-tech war of survival” until it destroys Russia’s military and economic ability to keep fighting over the long run.
The bad news is that Russia is learning from Ukraine and receiving large-scale tech aid, components, and ready-made drones not only from Iran, but from its other allies, China and North Korea.
This alliance of dictators is growing stronger, and its members are watching the Ukraine war for lessons in future drone warfare with the West. Think China and Taiwan.
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To shake up the Kremlin, Kyiv needs to vastly scale up its drone production and race to outdo the Russians with innovation, especially interceptors that can destroy Shaheds and fiber-optic drones.
European governments and private companies are entering agreements to jointly produce drones, both in Ukraine and in Europe. They are studying Kyiv’s technological advances, including on the front lines.
Ukraine wants to share its invaluable battle-tested knowledge with Washington, yet Trump still appears hung up on the vain hope that Putin “wants a peace deal,” which he mistakenly believes would entitle him to a Nobel Peace Prize.
So long as he refuses to recognize Kyiv’s importance as a strategic ally, the president undermines not only Ukraine’s security but ours.
A Ukrainian serviceman of 57th motorised brigade controls an FPV drone at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine in August.Andrii Marienko
Drone expansion
In June 2024, when I first met with then-infantry commander Condor of the 59th Assault Brigade in one of the hottest combat zones in eastern Ukraine, he was struggling to arm his depleted battalion. They were suffering through a terrible “shell hunger,” he told me, after the U.S. Congress had frozen military aid for six months. His men were often reduced to firing one artillery shell for every 10 fired by the Russians.
“Every day of [congressional] delay cost broken lives and deaths,” the former history teacher turned soldier said bitterly, as we sat in a dark, virtually empty cafe in the countryside near Pokrovsk. “So, we had no other choice but to be creative.”
To fend off a brutal Russian adversary with four times their population and massive industrial might, the nation’s techies and grunts turned their front lines and hidden basements into a tech incubator for modern war.
Desperate fighters, like Condor’s unit, were already using simple Chinese-made commercial drones to spy on Russian forces in 2023 and 2024.
Every unit I visited near the front during those years had guys working on benches in abandoned farmhouses or workshops, putting together drones from parts purchased on Amazon with their own salaries, or donated by families, friends, or private charitable foundations.
While Ukraine was well known in peacetime for talented engineers and a deep tech sector, many of those early do-it-yourself builders had no such background, but figured things out as they went.
By the summer of 2024, the men of Condor’s unit had come up with how to turn small commercial or DIY drones into little exploding drones.
Call sign Condor, commander of the UAV Forces Battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade.Trudy Rubin / Staff
“We cut sewage pipes and stuffed them with explosives,” Condor explained. “We did the same with energy drink cans.”
These makeshift mini bombs were then affixed to UAVs, the shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicles, mostly small Chinese DJI MAVIC quadcopters, the kind Americans use to record panoramic overhead views of weddings. The Ukrainians launched them at Russian tanks, artillery positions, and trenches.
“This is the art of war,” Condor said, with a grim smile. “When you have no supplies, you have to innovate.”
The turning point came in 2024, when the U.S.-induced shell hunger spurred a massive expansion of drone use to save Ukraine’s army. The goal was to protect and preserve precious frontline man power in a war in which Russia treats soldiers like cannon fodder — and to do so with weapons far cheaper than what they destroy.
Government and private companies produced two million drones in 2025, and are set to manufacture more than four million next year. They could produce eight million to 10 million, Zelensky has said, if they had enough funds.
Other weaponry still plays an important role, especially air defenses. While drones can hold the defensive line, taking territory still requires infantry. But 80% or more of the Ukrainian strikes on the front line are now made by drones.
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Those early exploding drones have evolved into larger attack drones with bigger payloads, including sea drones that resemble large rowboats filled with electronics and sometimes carrying rockets. Robotic ground drones are now mounted with machine guns, and larger long-distance drones can carry small missiles. All of these drones are unmanned and directed by pilots and navigators using goggles and tablets.
Anything that can be viewed by FPVs — first-person view drones in which pilots wearing special goggles can see exactly what the drone sees — is now vulnerable to drone attacks, including men, artillery, ships, helicopters, and low-flying planes.
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In the process, Ukraine has rewritten the rules of ground, sea, and air conflict.
As the war continues, artificial intelligence is certain to take on more of the piloting responsibilities (although target decisions will still be made by pilots and commanders, for now).
So crucial have drones become to modern warfare that the Ukrainian military has a new branch up and running whose task is coordinating drone warfare, called the Unmanned Systems Forces.
“We are the first country with an unmanned forces command,” I was told by Hanna Gvozdiar, deputy minister for Ukraine’s Ministry for Strategic Industries. She estimated Ukraine now produces 300 different varieties of drones.
Moreover, special drone units within most Ukrainian battalions have become central to every element of the conflict. Not only do many of them design their own drones, but they also provide constant updates to private drone manufacturers so they can stay ahead of Russian defenses.
As for Condor, he moved from commanding infantrymen to leading the UAV Forces Battalion of the same 59th Assault Brigade, one of the top drone units in the country. By the time I saw him in June, he was fighting a totally different war.
A worker inspects a combat drone at Fire Point's secret factory in Ukraine in August.Efrem Lukatsky
Advantage Ukraine
In the “genesis space” of a modern, glass-fronted office building in Kyiv, a group of start-up Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs has come to pitch their products to guests from the European Union — and to anyone who might fund them to scale up.
The program is sponsored by Brave1, a government-supported tech incubator that helps connect drone start-ups with investors and provides seed money for promising new projects.
“We are in a race with the Russian drone ecosystem,” I was told by Artem Moroz, Brave1’s head of international investment. “The Russians don’t need to fundraise for drone production,” he noted, with bitter irony.
“We want to win the war with the help of technology because we can’t compete with man power,” he continued. “Most of the innovation comes from the private sector. We unite 1,500 companies, some in apartments, some operating at a huge scale, providing thousands of drones.”
Before the show-and-tell, I listened to Oleksiy Babenko, one of Ukraine’s best drone producers, make his pitch to foreign investors. Babenko’s company, Vyriy — named for a paradise in pre-Christian Slavic mythology — makes a small FPV drone called Molfar, which can function in swarms and evade Russian electronic jamming.
“Practically every Ukrainian university has a polytech [division] that graduates a lot of talent. We are a technical hub for software development, and young tech entrepreneurs are migrating to the battlefield,” he told the group.
A technician prepares a Shrike drone at the Skyfall military technology company in Ukraine.Andrew Kravchenko
“But this brilliant talent needs investment, domestic or foreign, to scale up production. If we don’t do this, we will die.”
After Babenko came the young entrepreneurs with slide decks and videos: Bravo Dynamics promotes a radio-based mesh network that can connect drones, but could also have civilian uses. Farsight Vision produces software that digests visual data, which could help drone targeting or serve business uses. VMP has a robot model “that will be the main tool for logistics on the front line,” but could be used for civil defense.
There is both pride and a sense of frustration in the room. Ukraine is a start-up nation. These talented innovators, not Ukrainian government bureaucrats, have sparked the drone revolution.
Right now, Ukraine produces 94% of its own drones and is reducing its dependence on Chinese parts. Kyiv is also manufacturing 40% of its other weapons inventory.
But Ukrainian factories are operating at only one-fourth of capacity, according to Kamyshin, the former government minister. “We need $10 billion to $15 billion of necessary capital to produce what is needed,” he told me as we fast-walked through a park near his office so he could work off some of the daily tension. “We are much better innovators than the Russians, but we need to scale up.”
More on Ukraine
Ukraine’s drone attack was more than a morale booster, it showed the new face of modern war
Operation Spiderweb illustrated the brilliance of Ukraine’s technological skills and the flaws of the Russian military.
Private Ukrainian firms lead Europe and the U.S. in producing battle-tested drones, from mass-produced FPVs to highly secret deep strike missile drones. Ukraine seeks not only to intensively scale up its own drone production but to become an international hub for dual-use technology.
However, unlike Russia, which can draw on billions from its (dwindling) sovereign wealth fund, Ukrainians must raise funds to increase government and private drone production to keep up with Russian drone output — which has now expanded to industrial scale.
“Our only chance is to become our own arsenal and the arsenal for Europe,” argued former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk over coffee. “The question is, how to organize that.”
European governments are seriously addressing this question of scaling up Ukrainian production, and some private investors are hovering. The question is whether they can act quickly enough to fund joint projects inside Ukraine or based in Europe. Especially now that Trump has decreed Washington will no longer give military aid to Kyiv, but will let Europeans buy weapons to transfer.
There’s no time to waste, as Russia is scaling up its drone output at a frightening rate.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in May, Russian servicemen train to operate military drones in an undisclosed location.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Advantage Russia
Putin has rallied Russia’s entire state-run industrial machine behind the war effort, and the total drone output of its state-run industrial machine now exceeds Ukraine’s. Long-range drone production more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, and has increased fivefold since then.
Prodded by Ukraine’s success in drone technology, Moscow is rushing to build a drone empire, even introducing school curriculums about the development and operations of drones.
Moreover, while Russia receives support from its ever-tightening alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran, Trump is too transactional to see the broader geopolitical threat this drone quartet poses to the United States.
Tehran was the first to partner with Moscow by sending thousands of its long-range Shaheds to Russia in 2022. Since then, Shaheds have become the go-to UAV for terrorizing Ukrainian cities.
Iran also helped Russia set up its own production facilities in Tatarstan (now spread out over the whole country), which mass-produce the killer drones, along with decoy copies to confuse Ukrainian air defenses.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in August, a soldier launches a reconnaissance drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Equally dangerous, Russia is giving North Korea the technology and production skills to start producing the Russian variants of Iran’s Shaheds, according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov. This will enable the North to strike targets across South Korea, changing the balance of power between the two nations, Budanov warned in an interview with the military news site the War Zone.
Meantime, China, despite its denials, is actively enabling Russia’s drone production, providing basic drones and many critical components. “China uses Russia as a research base,” I was told by Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security Committee. “China watches aspects of the new warfare. It is about geopolitical vision on both sides.”
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Without Beijing’s aid, Russia would probably be unable to rapidly scale up its production of long-range UAVs.
Moreover, top experts on Russia and China warn that the quartets’ mutual interest in undermining the West should shatter any Trump illusions of splitting Russia from China.
Trump’s coddling of Putin only speeds Russia’s advancement in the new global drone wars, which could boomerang against Washington all too soon.
“The U.S. will be drawn in,” insisted former defense minister Zagorodnyuk. “China and Russia want to destroy Western dominance, starting with Europe and NATO, and leading to a clash with the United States.
“This war is not going to end, but is going to get worse.”
Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen lays a wreath during a memorial ceremony, as her husband Bo Tengberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, stand behind her at the Field of Mars at Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2024.Mads Claus Rasmussen
What Europe understands
On Aug. 3, as Denmark took over the rotating European Union presidency, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on Europeans to “change our mindset” about helping Kyiv.
“Instead of thinking we are delivering weapons to Ukraine,” she stated bluntly, “we have to think of it as a part of rearming ourselves — because right now it is the army of Ukraine that is protecting Europe. I see no signs that Putin’s imperial dreams stop with Ukraine.”
The tough-minded Frederiksen, who stood up to Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland, is now echoed by most other European leaders, none of whom harbor illusions about Putin’s aims. They understand that Ukraine’s army is defending the line between Western democracies and Eurasian adversaries, as Europe’s NATO members struggle to beef up their weak defenses.
Russia has been conducting assassinations, sabotage, and cyberwarfare against European nations for the past several years. The Kremlin clearly seeks to militarize and control the Arctic, which impacts the Nordic states, and to exert its power in the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic.
The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — along with other European nations that suffered under Soviet domination, all worry that Putin’s first move should Ukraine fall would be to move on them, perhaps using drones.
The aim would be to prove NATO was a paper tiger and would not come to its members’ defense, leading to the collapse of the alliance.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, left, shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.Efrem Lukatsky
Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and current secretary-general of NATO, has gone one step further, warning that “Russia is reconstituting itself at an incredible pace, and the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe, and the Arctic are not secured.”
Rutte has also cautioned that if China’s Xi Jinping attacks Taiwan, the Chinese leader might ask Putin to open a new front in Europe to distract NATO and the United States.
With Trump favoring Putin, the Europeans are moving to bolster Kyiv’s military production, including drones. They know they need Ukraine’s army as a buffer against Moscow. As Zelensky said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February, referring to the Russians: “Right now, Ukraine stops them. If not, who will stop them?”
Good question.
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Europe is far from ready to defend against drones or other Russian mischief now that the United States has turned its back. “The Europeans are really changing. They are buying time for themselves,” said Zagarodnyuk. “They realize they will be next.”
With that in mind, Frederiksen has pioneered the “Danish model,” a framework whereby Europeans fund drone production by private Ukrainian manufacturers, with Copenhagen vetting the contracts and effectiveness.
Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, and the European Union are following suit, as is a special fund set up by NATO. Private European weapons manufacturers are looking into joint production and sending representatives to Ukraine to test drones and components. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered its front line for companies to “Test in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian drone units near the front line tell me they often host European military or civilian manufacturers looking to test drones or components. Few Americans come, they said, and U.S. special forces no longer visit. If Europe coordinates its efforts, that may suffice to fund Ukraine’s drone scale-up and block Russia’s push to dominate drone warfare.
But that goal will be Herculean if Trump continues to back Putin over Europe and Ukraine.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Aug. 18 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What Trump doesn’t understand
Last fall, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt sounded the alarm over America’s lack of readiness for the wars of the future.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the two men warned: “Future wars will no longer be about who can mass the most people or field the best jets, ships and tanks. Instead, they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems (largely drones) and powerful algorithms. Unfortunately, this is a future for which the United States remains unprepared.”
Five days after Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb garnered huge international publicity, Trump signed an executive order calling for “continued American development, commercialization and export of drones.” He called for American “drone dominance.”
What the president did not do was turn to Ukraine, which has extensive combat experience with drones that the U.S. military and its nascent drone manufacturers lack.
To understand whether that makes sense, I turned to Michael Horowitz, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, who served in the Biden administration as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. Translated, that means he is an expert on the new drone warfare, where large masses of relatively cheap unmanned drones can deliver precise and deadly strikes.
“The Ukraine war has been transformative to the U.S. military in a couple of ways,” he told me. “It showed how attack drones are now a ubiquitous part of warfare, and ready to scale up today.”
A Ukrainian serviceman operates a drone on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in 2024.Andriy Andriyenko
While the Pentagon has used thousands of drones against militants such as the Yemeni Houthis, the new warfare will demand millions, which “requires the U.S. to find a different model than the war on terrorism … drawing from the lessons from Ukraine,” Horowitz said.
There is another lesson at hand. The Pentagon is a slow-moving bureaucracy that normally deals with only a handful of defense contractors that take years to produce small numbers of very expensive ships, tanks, and planes — most (not all) of which are now vulnerable to cheap drones.
Moreover, the U.S. military structure generally emphasizes a rigid top-down command when it comes to weapons, which can make change difficult.
Ukraine, out of necessity, has cast aside this inflexible model, as small military units now do critical drone R&D and modify drones daily to adjust to changes in battlefield conditions. Moreover, private drone firms and their brilliant techies interact directly with the military and test on the battlefront.
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These are lessons yet to be absorbed by a Pentagon roiled by internal politics and reluctant to commit sufficient funds to scaling up small, inexpensive drones and robots that will be at the forefront of new wars.
Yet, lo and behold, a U.S. change agent has entered the picture.
Schmidt, the former Google CEO, has signed an agreement in Denmark with the Ukrainian government to produce hundreds of thousands of AI-enhanced drones this year, and more next year — particularly the desperately needed Shahed interceptors.
Schmidt’s secretive firm, Swift Beat, has already been supplying Ukraine with drones that have downed many Shaheds. Ukraine will have priority on the interceptors, which will be sold at cost.
This major project by a big name like Schmidt may give other U.S. drone firms — and even U.S. investment funds — the needed encouragement to take advantage of the talent and testing opportunities in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Trump’s blindness to Putin’s motives will probably deter the U.S. military from making use of Ukrainian expertise in confronting Russia’s strategic army of drones. If he rejects cooperation with Ukraine and Europe — including giving a thumbs-down to any form of Zelensky’s proposed drone deal — it will help Russia surge ahead of the U.S. in drone dominance.
Should this course remain unchanged, sooner rather than later, Americans, Europeans, and Ukraine will pay a very high price.
On July 18, more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants held since March in a Salvadoran prison at the behest of the Trump administration were released in a prisoner swap for 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents jailed by the Venezuelan government.
For the men and their families, it could not have been a more joyous moment. It had been months since they last heard from their loved ones, not knowing if they were alive or dead.
For the respective governments involved, it was also a time to crow.
Even self-described “world’s coolest dictator” (and apparently America’s next top jailer), Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, got a little self-love in, boasting on X of the “months of negotiations with a tyrannical regime” that El Salvador had engaged in to help get the Americans home.
Well, bully for authoritarianism.
For the rest of us — for those who believe in the rule of law and still hold out hope for the American Experiment — July 18 may be remembered as a dark day.
Unless the administration is held accountable for the blatantly illegal way it upended these immigrants’ lives, the episode will mark a new low in America’s slide toward illiberal democracy under President Trump.
As prisoners stand looking out from a cell, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
Undue process
To be sure, the release of all these men is good news. Most of the freed Americans were wrongfully detained and accused of being involved in plots to destabilize Venezuela.
Their arrests were part of a transparent, cynical ploy by the Maduro regime to use these men like bargaining chips as the country struggles to get out from under oil sanctions that have contributed to the nation’s deep economic problems.
The illegal detentions were also par for the course for a government where every branch is controlled by Maduro loyalists, and which routinely jails its own dissidents. (The swap included 80 political prisoners, but there are conflicting reports on whether they have all been released.)
There is no question that Venezuela’s actions are morally and legally indefensible. But what about America’s?
The more than 250 Venezuelans who ended up in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, were sent there by the Trump administration on March 15. They were deported with little or no due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, accused of being dangerous criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump declared a terrorist organization.
But reporting by several media organizations quickly put the lie to those claims, with ProPublica finding the government’s own records show that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of any violent crime in the U.S., and only a few had committed crimes abroad.
Most of the men were also not very hard to find, as they were either never released from immigration custody while they pursued asylum claims or their cases were moving through the immigration system.
Take the four Venezuelans identified as having ties to Pennsylvania before they were sent to CECOT.
Inmates exercise under the watch of prison guards during a press tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecololuca, El Salvador, Oct. 12, 2023.
Joén Manuel Suárez Fuentes, 23, was detained during a traffic stop and charged with driving without a license. Ileis Villegas Freites, 28, had been sentenced to one year of probation for retail theft in Montgomery County.
Miguel Gregorio Vaamondes Barrios, 32, had a series of shoplifting arrests, including an open theft case in Pennsylvania, and was convicted of petit larceny in Nassau County, N.Y. Luis Jean Pier Gualdrón, 22, had a pending asylum application when he was deported. He had pleaded guilty to harassment in Northampton County, Pa., and was sentenced to three to six months in jail.
While some may argue that only people of unimpeachable moral character should be welcomed in America — and having a criminal record can disqualify immigrants from being granted legal status — these men were far from the “monsters” and members of a gang who the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said “rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
And even if they had been charged with being the worst of the worst, under the Constitution, the government still has to prove its case against anyone it seeks to deprive of “life, liberty, or property.”
In deporting the Venezuelans, the administration acted recklessly and lawlessly, ignoring not only the letter of the law but also directly disregarding an order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, barring the government from transferring the men to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
That the men are now free — although it is highly likely some have been placed right back in the dangerous situations under an oppressive regime they were fleeing in the first place — does not absolve the Trump administration of wrongdoing.
Migrants deported months before by the United States to El Salvador under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown arrive at Simon Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetia, Venezuela, July 18, 2025.
Test case
Throughout the entire ordeal, the government has placed itself above the law.
Seeking to make good on Trump’s promise of mass deportations and tall tales of criminal immigrants running rampant, administration officials engaged in the kind of abuse of power that is un-American on its face.
The government selected a group of men under suspect criteria, identifying many of them as gang members based on the discredited belief that they had identifying tattoos. It then disappeared them, sending them to a foreign prison known for its brutal conditions, where they were unable to communicate with their families or lawyers.
To this day, officials have not even released a full list of names of the people they sent to El Salvador. What is publicly available has been cobbled together from families speaking out and media reports. It is unclear if everyone deported has been accounted for.
The government consistently defied court interventions, claiming that once the men were in El Salvador, they had no direct control over what would happen to them. The prisoner swap makes this particular lie only more blatant.
Most alarming is that there is nothing stopping them from doing it again — or keeping them from doing it to whomever they want. Already, Trump has mused about sending Americans to El Salvador.
“The homegrowns are next,” he told Bukele during the Salvadoran leader’s April visit to the White House. “You gotta build about five more places. … It’s not big enough.”
Having already violated the Fifth Amendment guaranteeing due process, it’s not much of a stretch for the administration to ignore the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
America cannot move on from what happened to the Venezuelan immigrants. Their plight cannot be swept away in the flood of scandals and outrages that regularly flow from the White House.
The Trump administration cannot be allowed to do this to anyone ever again.
As Donald Trump intensifies his push for mass deportations, and communities rightfully protest in defense of their immigrant members, local and state leaders must be ready to stand up and defend the rule of law — including civil rights — against a president who is increasingly bent on using authoritarian tactics.
The United States is a nation of laws, and those who are in the country illegally should understand there are consequences. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and the way the Trump administration has engaged in enforcing immigration has leaned into the kind of cruelty and brutality that is anathema to American values.
During his presidential campaign, Trump was clear that if elected, he would seek to deport the estimated 11 million people in the country without authorization. Thanks to misinformation, propaganda, and the Biden administration’s inability to pursue a coherent asylum strategy, many voters were sold on Trump’s promise of mass deportation as a viable solution to what they saw as a crisis on the border.
The U.S. has every right to control who enters the country, and detaining and deporting immigrants who commit violent offenses has near-universal support. But mass deportation is a morally bankrupt policy whose execution, even if done within the boundaries of the law, results in families and communities being torn apart, to no discernible benefit.
Protesters confront police following an immigration raid protest the night before. Mass deportations tear families and communities apart, to no discernible benefit, the Editorial Board writes.
If the president were serious about ending illegal immigration, he would begin by lobbying Congress to reform a system that is deeply broken and works only for those who seek to exploit people who are looking for a better life in the land of opportunity.
The old saw that immigrants in the country illegally should “get in line” cuts to one of the biggest misconceptions about immigration, and that is that for most people seeking to come to the U.S. legally, or to adjust their status once here, there is no line.
Immigrants toil under difficult conditions in construction, meat processing, and dairy farming. They take care of our children and our elderly, and pick the fruits and vegetables that end up on our tables. They help revitalize blighted and economically depressed commercial corridors with their small businesses. They are also easy to demonize and scapegoat whenever politicians need to find someone to blame.
There is a stunning hypocrisy in the Trump administration’s claim that it is righteously enforcing the law to protect America from immigrants, even as it engages in the kind of lawlessness that truly endangers the union. The government has clearly violated the Constitution, denying due process to immigrants it has accused of serious crimes and summarily deported to foreign prisons renowned for torture.
The president also continues to coyly ignore the courts, endorse U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hiding their identity and acting like de facto secret police, and flirts with disaster by entangling troops trained for deadly combat in civilian law enforcement surrounding immigration protests.
Those protests are only expected to grow, yet Trump is fanning the flames, extending his dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric from immigrants to those who would defend them. During a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday, the president called protesters in Los Angeles “animals” and a “foreign enemy.”
“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” he told gathered soldiers, in a deeply troubling display of politicizing the military.
Philadelphia has already been targeted by the administration as a “sanctuary city,” and ICE tactical teams are reportedly on their way. What happens if Trump decides the city also needs to be “liberated”?
While we must all continue to demand thatthe courts and Congress hold the president accountable for any abuses, elected officials must do all they can within the law to protect all Philadelphians — including immigrants.
A government that is allowed to run roughshod over the rights of some will not hesitate to trample the rights of all.
