The Trump administration violated the Constitution when it moved to deport or rescind visas from international students who spoke up for Palestinian rights and criticized Israel's genocide in Gaza, a federal judge ruled on Friday.

Northern District of California Judge Noël Wise, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, said that the administration's actions violated both the First Amendment of the Constitution protecting free speech and the Fifth Amendment ensuring due process.

"Stated plainly, in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government’s to take," Wise wrote.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in the second Trump administration despite holding a green card, celebrated the ruling on Saturday.

"A federal judge just ruled that the Trump admin's use of immigration law to deport me and other noncitizen students for pro-Palestinian speech is unconstitutional. No one should fear speaking up for Palestine," Khalil wrote on social media.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations also welcomed the decision in a statement on Saturday:

This ruling reaffirms a fundamental American principle that the government cannot deport people simply because it dislikes their political views. Students do not surrender their constitutional rights at the classroom door, and international students do not surrender their freedom of expression when they come to study in the United States. Criticizing the policies of a foreign government, including the genocidal government of Israel, is protected political speech.

The lawsuit was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in August 2025 on behalf of The Stanford Daily, Stanford University's student newspaper, and an anonymous female plaintiff. The newspaper argued that student reporters on visas refrained from covering pro-Palestinian protests on campus out of fear of being deported, while the Jane Doe was a noncitizen who had spoken out on behalf of Palestine and now was worried about government retaliation.

"The reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today’s victory means they won’t have to," the paper's editor-in-chief George Porteous wrote on social media on Friday.

In particular, the lawsuit challenged two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to justify seeking the deportations of Khalil, Columbia student Moshen Mahdawi, and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. The first allows the secretary of state to deport a noncitizen for speech if the secretary “personally determines” the speech “compromises a compelling foreign policy interest.” The second allows the secretary to revoke visas entirely at their own discretion.

Wise agreed that the provisions violated the Constitution and offered a rousing defense of free speech.

“In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength," she wrote. "That strength is diminished when members of our society—citizens and noncitizens alike—must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation.”

FIRE said the decision was the "first in the country to squarely rule on the constitutionality of these statutes" and that it would "reverberate in similar proceedings around the country."

“In America, free speech doesn’t just belong to the people who say things the government agrees with,” FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said in a statement Friday. “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.”

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This article by Anahí Del Ángel originally appeared in the August 28, 2026 edition of Contralínea, an independent Mexican investigative magazine.

The scheme of corruption and defrauding of the Mexican state headed by former Security Secretary Genaro García Luna exposes the “hypocrisy” of those who used to defend him and now distance themselves from him, considered President Claudia Sheinbaum, who recalled that, on top of that, the former official is detained by the US justice system over his ties to organized crime.

The president stressed that García Luna committed crimes while he was leading the misnamed “war on drug trafficking” as Security Secretary and later after he left the post.

She also condemned the security strategy of former President Felipe Calderón, and questioned that the fight against criminal groups was called a “war.” “When they call it a ‘war on drugs,’ what does ‘war’ mean? Those are conditions of exception that, by the way, were never declared.”

Sheinbaum Pardo maintained that, although a state of exception was never formally decreed, during that period the authorities acted outside the rule of law. “Back then: there was a criminal and there was permission to execute him — that is the truth.”

No war leads you to peace; peace is built with justice.

President Claudia Sheinbaum

She explained that, contrary to what happened back then, institutions today must follow a procedure that includes investigating crimes, assembling a case file, an arrest warrant, and bringing the alleged perpetrator before a judge.

“There’s an alleged criminal, well, there has to be an investigation, the opening of an investigation file at the Prosecutor’s Office, an arrest warrant from a judge, and the detention of the alleged criminal to bring him to trial — that is the law,” she said.

The head of the federal Executive also questioned the deployment of the Armed Forces during Calderón’s government, considering that there was no legal framework regulating their participation in security tasks: “The Army and the Navy were sent out without a law that allowed them to carry out those activities.”

This situation included the former secretary’s collaboration with the Sinaloa Cartel to combat other organizations: “They allied themselves with one criminal group against other criminal groups; that is, the Mexican state took the side of a criminal group, supposedly ‘because that way they would pacify.’ Just imagine!“

The president noted that the result of that strategy was an increase in homicides, going from 27 a day in 2006 to more than 70 during that six-year term: “That is why, in Calderón’s period, from 2006 to 2012, it goes from 27 homicides a day in 2006 to seventy-something homicides a day. That is the result of the war: more violence.”

She also recalled that one of the consequences of that period was that thousands of people grew up in a context of violence, while the deaths of civilians were presented as collateral damage: “The young people who grew up back then — well, a very large wave of violence was unleashed and a great many innocent people died in shootouts […] and, incredibly, as if there really were a war, they would say: ‘they’re collateral damage.’ Just imagine! Said by the president of the time, by the authority of the time.”

Another element she mentioned was the entry of weapons from the United States through the Fast and Furious operation, in which tracking devices were placed. However, she noted that these ended up in the hands of criminal groups: “Thousands of weapons entered Mexico, authorized by Mexican authorities, that ended up in the hands of criminal groups with greater firepower than they already had.”

Regarding the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, Sheinbaum considered that it maintained a similar strategy, although with a lower level of US interference than during the previous six-year term.

• 

  News Briefs

  Sheinbaum Denounces the ‘Hypocrisy’ of Those Who Defended García Luna and Now Distance Themselves

  August 29, 2026

  The president tied Calderón’s ‘war on drugs’ to a jump from 27 to more than 70 daily homicides, the Fast and Furious guns, and a state that took the Sinaloa Cartel’s side.

• 

  Analysis

  Wages: Reversing the Neoliberal Damage

  August 29, 2026

  Wages now make up 30.8% of GDP (4.1 points more than in 2018) and labor poverty fell to 31.9%: the Fourth Transformation reversing decades of neoliberal wealth transfer to those at the top.

• 

  News Briefs

  Mexico Recovers $5.8 Million from the Weinberg-García Luna Network; It Will Go to Guerrero Schools

  August 29, 2026August 29, 2026

  The $5.8 million is a first slice of a $578.5 million U.S. judgment against funds the UIF traced through Barbados shell firms like Nunvav on inflated prison contracts.

The post Sheinbaum Denounces the ‘Hypocrisy’ of Those Who Defended García Luna and Now Distance Themselves appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

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The fossil fuel industry isn’t just raking in record profits amid the war with Iran. In California, it’s also spending big to oppose climate and worker-safety legislation. According to analyses by a coalition of environmental groups called the Last Chance Alliance, oil and gas companies spent more than $17 million on California lobbying during the first half of 2026. That includes $10.3…

Source

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On August 9, dozens of Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in Qusra, south of Nablus. They blocked residents from leaving safely, cut water and electricity, damaged water pipes, and prevented food and other essential supplies from reaching the families inside. Days later, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — a longstanding supporter of the Israeli colonial enterprise — called…

Source

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Recent expressions of regret by top Biden administration officials who vehemently defended the United States’ billions of dollars in military aid to Israel as it was bombarding Gaza have not gone far with former diplomat Hala Rharrit, who was retaliated against for speaking out about the US policy before she ultimately resigned, and who condemned her former colleagues recent “PR game” this week.

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This editorial originally appeared in the August 29, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left-wing daily newspaper.

The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) reported that in the first quarter of the year wages represented 30.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), an increase of 4.1 percentage points compared to 2018. In just the 12 months between the January–March 2025 period and the same period this year, wages advanced 1.7 percentage points across the Mexican economy as a whole.

This means that over the past eight years the distribution of wealth has changed in favor of workers, which is also reflected in the figures on labor poverty — the condition in which income from work is lower than the value of the food basket. This indicator stands at 31.9 percent of the employed population, an annual decrease of 3.2 percentage points. While serious lags persist in states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero (with 59.8, 52.9, and 52.2 percent of workers in labor poverty, respectively), in others there were increases in real labor income of up to 20 percent (the State of México and San Luis Potosí) or 30 percent (Morelos).

More than mere figures, the data cited attest to the transformation of the Mexican economy in the previous six-year term and the current one. The scant weight of wages in GDP is also a measure of inequality and a reflection of political decisions. Thus, it is no coincidence that the countries where workers’ incomes represent a greater proportion of the economy are also those that register the highest Human Development Index and are recognized for their high quality of life.

Nor is it by chance that the implantation of the neoliberal model drove this proportion to its lowest level on record, as a result — among other factors — of the fall in workers’ bargaining power through de-unionization and labor flexibilization.

It is estimated that for every percentage point that the wage share of GDP falls, the Gini Index (the standard metric of inequality) rises by between 0.15 and 0.33 percentage points.

Nothing is isolated. Beginning in the 1980s, the decline of the wage share of national income has its correlate in the surge of dividend and interest payments by non-financial corporations. That is, wealth was diverted from payrolls to shareholders, which proves that neoliberalism is, in essence, a mechanism for extracting capital from the lower and middle classes and transferring it to a minority of the ultra-rich.

In this sense, it is significant that the real improvement in the living conditions of salaried Mexicans is achieved in a period of low GDP growth, which belies the well-worn neoliberal fallacy that the only path to reducing poverty runs through sustained economic growth. Once again it is proven that, in the absence of redistributive policies, the products of growth are hoarded by those at the top of the economic pyramid.

The fact that Mexico today runs counter to the neoliberal machinery of dispossession shows that, with its flaws and shortcomings, the economic model of the Fourth Transformation has turned the prosperity of a few into well-being for the majority.

• 

  Analysis

  Wages: Reversing the Neoliberal Damage

  August 29, 2026

  Wages now make up 30.8% of GDP (4.1 points more than in 2018) and labor poverty fell to 31.9%: the Fourth Transformation reversing decades of neoliberal wealth transfer to those at the top.

• 

  News Briefs

  Mexico Recovers $5.8 Million from the Weinberg-García Luna Network; It Will Go to Guerrero Schools

  August 29, 2026August 29, 2026

  The $5.8 million is a first slice of a $578.5 million U.S. judgment against funds the UIF traced through Barbados shell firms like Nunvav on inflated prison contracts.

• 

  News Briefs

  Wages Accounted for 30.8 Percent of Mexico’s GDP in the First Quarter

  August 28, 2026

  Employee compensation’s share of GDP has risen 4.1 points since 2018 while corporate profits fell 7.3 points, a real shift in how Mexico’s wealth is distributed.

The post Wages: Reversing the Neoliberal Damage appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

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As conflicts around the world highlight the vulnerability of global shipping lanes, China and Russia are reportedly weighing the possibility of turning a vast river into an inland cargo route to the rest of the world. At the heart of this ambition is the 4,248km (2,640-mile) Irtysh River, which originates in China’s western Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and runs through Kazakhstan before flowing into Russia’s Ob River and ending in the Arctic Ocean. To China, this river-to-sea shipping route...

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The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)’s Navy says Iranian forces exercise “complete and decisive” control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, rejecting statements by US officials that the waterway remains open.

“The control exercised by the Islamic Republic’s forces over the strategic Strait of Hormuz is complete and decisive,” the IRGC Navy said in a statement on Friday.

It described US officials’ claims that the Strait of Hormuz is open as “an outright lie,” saying they were intended “solely to control oil prices and cover up their own defeats.”

The strait is closed to vessels seeking to transit without prior coordination with the Islamic Republic, the statement added.

The IRGC Navy said the situation would remain in place until the end of the United States’ “terrorist army’s aggression” against the Islamic Republic and until the relevant obligations had been fulfilled.

Iran closed the chokepoint following the launch of the latest bout of unprovoked American-Israeli aggression against the country on February 28.

A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique of ´an Open Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners´

The Islamic Republic and the United States agreed on a 60-day reopening period as part of a Pakistan-mediated memorandum of understanding in June, but American violations forced Tehran to reestablish the closure.

Tehran has conditioned reopening of the waterway on realization of a number of prerequisites, including cessation of American interference in regional maritime traffic.

On Tuesday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs said the demands include the complete lifting of the US’s illegal economic blockade against the Islamic Republic, durable cessation of aggression on all fronts, including Lebanon, and clarification of the situation concerning the blockade of Yemen.

Gharibabadi attributed the enhanced position of the strait in Iran’s view to the developments that took place following the launch of the unprovoked American-Israeli aggression. “Following the 40-day war, the Strait of Hormuz has become a matter of Iran’s national security,” he said.

The official was apparently referring to how Iran’s adversaries and their allies would use the waterway to meet their military and economic needs at the same time as they were targeting the Islamic Republic.

(PressTV)

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Washington could gain access to 90 billion barrels of oil reserves, while Caracas is weighing an OPEC exit

The US is moving to lock in long-term access to the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves by discussing a 100-year deal with Venezuela, as Caracas plans to leave the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), several outlets have reported.

The idea of quitting OPEC has been discussed during talks with US officials, according to Bloomberg’s sources, although no final decision has been made.

Venezuela was one of five countries that founded OPEC in 1960, alongside Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It has effectively operated outside the group’s production quota system for years, while decades of US sanctions and domestic economic turmoil have battered its oil industry and diminished its influence within the organization.

A withdrawal from OPEC would mark a major realignment in Caracas following the January 3 US operation that kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Washington has since taken control of Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, with proceeds deposited into US-controlled accounts and Caracas’ access to the funds subject to decisions in Washington.

The US is also seeking a steady flow of Venezuelan crude to its refineries while encouraging American companies to expand their presence in the country’s energy industry. Venezuela currently produces around 1.25 million barrels of crude per day, well below its historic output.

Us pushing for ‘massive’ century-long oil lease
Talk of a potential OPEC exit comes as Washington pushes for a major stake in Venezuela’s oil fields. A deal under discussion could lock in several fields for American companies under a 100-year lease and guarantee the resulting crude supplies to the US.

“This is real and being discussed at the highest levels of the US and Venezuelan governments,” one source told Reuters. A lease is among the legal models under consideration, with individual fields potentially allocated to US producers through auctions or tenders.

A list involved in the negotiations includes 17 fields, spanning undeveloped sites in the vast Orinoco Belt and mature fields around Lake Maracaibo containing roughly 90 billion barrels of proven reserves. Some are currently operated by a small Chinese company under a contract signed during Maduro’s presidency.

The historic deal could essentially more than double US oil reserves by tapping Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves. “Calling this deal huge would be an understatement,” one US official told Axios. “It is massive.”

The Truth Behind Trump’s Trade War With Canada: It Will Blow Back

‘Donroe doctrine’
Taking a stake in Venezuela’s reserves would amount to an almost unprecedented US intervention in another country’s economy, Bloomberg noted, while fitting Donald Trump’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine” of expanding American influence across the Western Hemisphere.

Trump has repeatedly asserted US control over Venezuela’s oil since Maduro’s capture in January. Speaking to oil executives that month, he said Washington would decide which companies would rebuild the sector: “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all.” He went further in the spring, publicly floating the idea of turning Venezuela into the “51st state.”

The proposed arrangement could, however, run into legal hurdles. Venezuelan law does not currently provide for leasing oil acreage, while the constitution reserves core industry activities for the state. Recent reforms allow foreign participation through joint ventures and production-sharing contracts, but Caracas has for decades prevented foreign producers from booking Venezuelan reserves as their own.

With details still being negotiated, legal experts say the proposed deal could face constitutional challenges. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright is reportedly expected to travel to Caracas as soon as next week as talks continue.

Another blow to OPEC
Venezuela’s departure would also hand Trump a small victory in his long-running confrontation with OPEC. The US president has repeatedly criticized the group for wielding too much influence over global oil prices and driving up fuel costs for American consumers.

The push comes as the Trump administration faces pressure over high gasoline prices ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Cheaper Venezuelan crude could help ease fuel costs and replenish the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which currently holds around 290 million barrels – about 41% of its capacity.

A Venezuelan departure would come just months after the United Arab Emirates quit OPEC on May 1, seeking greater freedom over its oil production. The move left the organization with 12 members, while UAE state oil company ADNOC subsequently moved to boost crude sales.

Other producers have also pushed back against OPEC restrictions. Iraq reportedly threatened to leave in June unless it was allowed to increase output, although Baghdad later said it had no plans to withdraw. Venezuela and Iran remain exempt from OPEC+ production quotas because sanctions have constrained their output.

(RT International)

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More water does not necessarily produce more alfalfa seed. A five-year trial near Keith, South Australia, found that strategically delaying irrigation until plants showed early signs of leaf drop generally increased seed yield and consistently delivered the highest gross margin.

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This story was originally published by Daily Montanan.

Micah Drew
Daily Montanan

The Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission this week adopted new wolf hunting and trapping regulations, with a 300-wolf limit for the upcoming season, reflecting the state’s lower population estimate for the species.

The decision on Wednesday took a middle-of-the-road stance between a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department recommendation of 250, and last year’s quota of 452 wolves.

“Why not split the difference?” said Commissioner Ian Wargo. “We’re bound by the law on one side, we’re bound by relisting on the other. I don’t know why we’re not trying to thread that needle a little bit more.”

The Fish and Wildlife Commission, which sets department regulations, established a 452-wolf quota for last year following legislative directives to bring down the population, despite wolf advocates saying it was too risky to kill that many animals.

Earlier this year, Montana FWP released a new versionof its integrated Patch Occupancy Model, or iPOM, for estimating the statewide wolf population that showed a drastically smaller wolf population than previously thought — 725 instead of 1,094.

Molly Parks, carnivore coordinator for FWP, gave the commission a presentation on how the new model incorporated different amounts of data about wolf observations, pack sizes and pack ranges, which includes a lot of modeling as wolves are a hard species to accurately count individually.

The new estimate by the department doesn’t mean the population has suddenly experienced a decline during the last year, but rather that wolf populations have likely been overestimated for years.

Gray wolves were removed from the endangered species list in 2009 with the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming taking over wolf management in each state.

Montana FWP has set a 450-wolf management baseline to ensure the population remains high enough to avoid a federal government takeover.

In response to the new data showing a lower population in the state, FWP recommended dropping the hunting and trapping quota from 452 to 250.

During the 2025-26 wolf season, which ended on March 15, harvest totaled 247 wolves, including 145 by hunters and 102 by trappers. The number was the lowest since 2016. The new season with new quota starts Sept. 15.

Wargo asked for an amendment to bring it up to a 300-wolf quota statewide, with regional sub-quotas, pointing out that the department’s forecasting models show killing 300 wolves won’t reduce the population to risky levels.

“iPOM 2.0 is overly conservative,” Wargo said of the new model. “We have layers upon layers, safety factors on safety factors.”

The great wolf debate

Dozens of members of the public showed up in person and online to comment on the new hunting and trapping regulations, many criticizing the department’s population models — either for vindicating wolf advocates who have long argued the state’s method overestimates wolves, or from detractors who say the new model is overly cautious and hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.

Mark Cooke, with Wolves of the Rockies, said while the new population model is being scrutinized, the department should manage wolves with a higher level of caution.

“We aren’t asking Montana to not manage wolves. We’re asking Montana to manage them carefully, transparently, and with the best available science,” he said. “And I’ll close with one comment: Uncertainty should lead to caution, not greater killing.”

Montana Rep. Jedidiah Hinkle, a Belgrade Republican wholeads the House Fish and Game Committee and has pushed for drastically reducing wolf populations, called the whole plan “a mess.”

During the Legislature when lawmakers debated several bills authorizing killing a much higher number of wolves, Hinkle said the department “vigorously defended” its original iPOM model.

“By just changing the pack size and the distribution of the territory, we’re able to knock off 400 wolves,” he said. “The only thing that happened between that time is a lawsuit over the management of wolves. Looks pretty fishy to me.”

Several commenters pointed out that wolves are an economic driver in the areas near  Yellowstone National Park, and reducing the population in Montana could affect that area.

But ranchers from around the state offered a different view: The economy they participate in takes a bigger hit from having more wolves around.

“No one’s coming to Ovando, Montana, to watch wolves,” said rancher Bob Rowland. “They’re all going to the park, and so our economy is based on livestock, hunting, big game.”

According to Montana FWP’s annual wolf report, the state Livestock Loss Board paid out more than $90,000 to reimburse livestock producers for wolf kills in 2025 — half the amount paid out for grizzly bear kills.

Lance Fourstar, a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine Tribe, asked for the commission to consider a 200-wolf quota, drawing on his perspective as an Indigenous person “whose ancestors shared this land with the wolf for thousands of generations.”

“To our people, the wolf is not a trophy, a pest, or a number on a spreadsheet to be manipulated for political motives,” Fourstar said. “The wolf is a sacred relative, a teacher of family unity, and a crucial balance keeper of the natural world.”

Diane Boyd, a retired wolf and carnivore specialist with FWP, said the department’s revised modeling was a good start, but killing more than 200 wolves next year would likely lead to a declining population.

“If Montana continues along the ‘kill more wolves’ paradigm instead of science, Montana’s wolf population will continue to decline and will likely fail to maintain its stated population goal of 450. Montana will then lose control of wolf management as the federal government takes over,” Boyd said. “You can change its trajectory with significantly lowering quotas and more conservative management objectives.”

Unlike most species, the wolf hunting and trapping regulations are reviewed annually.

At the end of the meeting, the commission unanimously approved a 300-wolf limit for the upcoming season, along with sub-quotas that include just one wolf in each of the two management areas outside Yellowstone National Park.

The post Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission takes middle ground on wolf hunting quotas appeared first on ICT.

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By Rosa Miriam Elizalde  –  Aug 27, 2026

Some laws have been around for a long, tedious time.

On August 20, Donald Trump once again invoked legislation dating back more than a century by extending the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) applicable to Cuba through September 14, 2027. The executive order did not impose a new sanction. It did something worse: it kept in place a legal exception dating back to 1917.

Wayne S. Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, called the law “ridiculously obsolete.” Not because all old legislation is necessarily absurd, but because of the gap between this instrument and the reality to which it still applies.

The Trading with the Enemy Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress on October 6, 1917—almost 109 years ago. It grants the head of state the authority to restrict trade with so-called “hostile” countries to a minimum and to dispose of the “enemy’s” property on U.S. territory.

The legislation was so literally war-oriented that it went so far as to define when a war began and when it ended. The beginning depended on a declaration by Congress; the end, on a peace treaty.

It regulated telegrams and wireless messages, required English translations of certain articles published in foreign languages, and granted jurisdiction to courts in the Philippines and the Canal Zone, then under Washington’s jurisdiction. These are not museum curiosities, but the coordinates of the world for which it was conceived. That world disappeared long ago, but the exceptional treatment applied to Cuba has not.

In an article published in the Michigan Law Review in the midst of World War II, attorney Samuel Anatole Lourie argued that the law was already outdated by 1941 and considered it preferable to pass an entirely new TWEA rather than continue patching up the 1917 version.

Even those who advocated expanding these powers recognized the problem of applying them in peacetime. Their argument was that a modern war could begin economically before the first soldier fired a shot. It was an understandable explanation while Rommel was fighting in Africa and German submarines were patrolling the Atlantic. In other words, the legislation that the United States continues to invoke against Cuba in 2026 was already described as outdated 85 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and Hitler still ruled Germany.

That legal relic was given a new lease on life with Cuba. The 1962 embargo decreed by John F. Kennedy prohibited trade; what remained was to control the flow of money.

A year later, Washington invoked the powers of the TWEA to freeze Cuban assets and subject financial transactions to authorization. The paradox was set: legislation conceived for war provided the legal machinery for an economic war against a country with which the United States was not formally at war.

In 1977, Congress itself recognized that the emergency economic powers accumulated by the presidency needed a new framework. It passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—which Trump has now invoked against Iran—and once again restricted the TWEA primarily to the realm of warfare. But it left a door ajar: existing programs could continue through annual renewals. Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea passed through that door. Over the years, those exceptions gradually disappeared.

All but one: Cuba remained the only country still subject to a legal authority created for wartime emergencies.

Here, the word “emergency” must be placed in significant quotation marks.

OFAC Recognizes Venezuelan Law in Revised Sanctions Waivers

When an exceptional mechanism persists for generations, perhaps what is extraordinary is no longer the threatened danger, but rather the continued existence of an instrument that has demonstrated no effectiveness whatsoever, except as a means of punishing a people.

Because, as everyone knows, the succession of harassment and the entrenchment of U.S. politicians have proved futile, beyond merely multiplying the hardships.

The Cuban Revolution is still standing more than 60 years later, but for decades the regulations stemming from this framework have affected banking operations, travel, academic exchanges, remittances, and business decisions that rarely appear in the solemn prose of a presidential executive order. For a Cuban family, geopolitics can take on far less abstract forms: oil tankers that never arrive, 20-hour power outages, a food supplier that pulls out, a medication that becomes difficult to obtain, a patient who needs hemodialysis and doesn’t know how long they have to live because their catheters are inside a container held up at a port.

The discussion, therefore, extends beyond the island.

It speaks to something both ancient and contemporary: the ease with which exceptional powers outlive the circumstances that gave rise to them. Washington is often more effective at declaring emergencies than at ending them.

Trump’s 2026 signature fits on a single page, but behind it lie two world wars, Hiroshima, the defeat of fascism, a revolution, a Cold War that ended decades ago, and nearly half a century of legislative emergency powers that have outlived all but one of their original members. And the question, so many years after this “ridiculously obsolete” law, is elementary: What war is the United States waging against Cuba that requires the annual renewal of a power created to administer the enemy’s assets within its own borders? And I emphasize: What assets? What enemy?

(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)

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