TV News LIES

Dear Leqaa,

Ramadan Kareem. I say it with a heavy heart, knowing these words reach you in a place that has tried to strip them of meaning.

It has now been one full year. One year since that dreadful night that marked the beginning of a brutal wave of arrests targeting protesters for nothing more than speaking the truth. Though we have never met in person, I have carried you with me every single day since Noor called me while I was detained in Jena, Louisiana, to tell me that you had been taken. I remember thinking: not again, not another one of us. From that moment, a piece of my heart has been tied to your struggle.

Leqaa, this is your second Ramadan in detention. I need to say that plainly, not as a detail but as a measure of what has been stolen from you. Ramadan is the sound of your mother’s voice calling you to iftar. It is the particular smell of food being prepared with love after a long day of fasting. It is the feeling of breaking bread with family, of praying together, of being held by community in the holiest time of the year.

But they denied you halal food in that facility. They denied you the basic dignity of practicing your faith. Last Ramadan you endured this, and now another has come and found you still caged, still waiting, still being told that your faith, like your grief, is something to be managed rather than honored.

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A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”

The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.

However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.

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Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel had a biblical right to a vast swath of the Middle East.

Huckabee, a former Baptist minister and a fervent Israel supporter, was speaking on the podcast of Tucker Carlson.

In an episode released on Friday, Carlson pushed Huckabee on the meaning of a biblical verse sometimes interpreted as saying that Israel is entitled to the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.

In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

When pressed, however, he continued that Israel was “not asking to take all of that”, adding: “It was somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”

The backlash widened sharply on Sunday as more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments – alongside three major regional organisations – issued a joint statement denouncing the US diplomat’s comments as “dangerous and inflammatory”.

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The Israeli Prison Service has begun preparations to introduce the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

According to Israel's Channel 13, preparations include the creation of a facility dubbed "Israel's Green Mile", where executions will take place. 

Training and procedural preparations have also started, while a delegation from the prison service is expected to visit an East Asian country to study the legal and regulatory framework for implementing capital punishment, the report added.

The move follows the Knesset’s approval of the death penalty bill in its first reading last year, with 39 MPs in favour and 16 against.

The bill must pass two further readings before becoming law.

The report added that executions will be carried out by hanging, with three guards pressing the trigger simultaneously.

Specialist teams, composed entirely of volunteers, will be assigned to the task.

An Israeli source told the channel that death sentences will be carried out within 90 days of the final verdict.

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Israeli forces have detained two journalists, two foreign solidarity activists and a Palestinian anti-settlement activist in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron while they were documenting attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers, according to local sources.

Osama Makhamera, a Palestinian activist involved in resisting settlement expansion, told Anadolu on Friday that Israeli forces stormed the Rujum al-Aala area after illegal settlers attacked residents of the Masafer Yatta region, south of Hebron.

He said the forces detained two journalists working with a foreign media outlet, along with two foreign activists and Rateb al-Jbour, coordinator of the popular and national committees opposing illegal Israeli settlement activity in southern Hebron, as they were documenting the settler assault.

Makhamera added that the detainees were taken to a nearby Israeli settlement in the area. Al-Jbour was later released, while the fate of the journalists and foreign activists remains unknown.

He said the Rujum al-Aala community has faced repeated attacks by illegal settlers, with incidents escalating in recent days.

The assaults have left residents wounded, including women and children, caused extensive damage to homes and property, destroyed crops, and prevented residents from accessing their farmland and grazing areas.

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) warned Tuesday that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s detention could be far from an isolated case.

“Here’s the thing, we don’t know how many others are in the same situation that didn’t get a photo that went viral,” Walz said during a Tuesday press conference as he denounced the ways ICE had targeted schools and students.

In a letter he sent this week, Walz also pressed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reveal the number of children who’ve been detained in Minnesota.

“Incredibly, his case is only one of many. Each day brings new reports of children detained by ICE,” Walz wrote.

Walz’s statements underscore how the detention of children has skyrocketed under the Trump administration, and also point to how limited the oversight is of the treatment of kids in federal detention.

According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, ICE held roughly 170 children on an average day during President Donald Trump’s second term, a major uptick compared to the last year of former President Joe Biden’s administration. In the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held about 25 children per day.

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