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We get an update on protests at Newark, New Jersey's Delaney Hall, an ICE facility owned and operated by the private prison company GEO Group, where hundreds of immigrant detainees have been on a hunger and labor strike for the past week demanding their immediate release. New Jersey Congressmember Analilia Mejía recently toured the facility and spoke to people who described being arrested and detained after attending routine ICE check-ins, being held for months in appalling conditions even after signing voluntary deportation orders, and being hospitalized after they were beaten and pepper-sprayed by armed ICE agents. "What we need to understand is that this is a for-profit model, and they are failing human beings," she says. "The reality is that this is a rogue administration that has handed undue power to agencies, to ICE agents and to entities like GEO Group [that] are now acting with impunity."
Meanwhile, says Li Adorno, a community organizer with the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha, protests outside the facility in solidarity with the strike have grown increasingly contentious. Local investigative journalist Bob Hennelly explains that the Trump administration's targeting of Newark for immigration enforcement has escalated since federal agents arrested and charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Congressmember LaMonica McIver with trespassing after inviting them into Delaney Hall last May. Hennelly says "there's a much broader implosion of the administration of law in New Jersey … [and] a collapse of federal law enforcement in Newark."
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Nearly two months after the United States and Iran agreed to a ceasefire, are the two sides any closer to a lasting peace deal?
We speak with Robert Malley, the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, who worked in multiple Democratic administrations and helped negotiate the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal with Iran. He says Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of that deal in 2018 "was a completely reckless and absurd one," with the Trump administration renegotiating many of the same issues, as well as pushing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran did not previously control. "We should never have been in the position we're in now."
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U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump's first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it's not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification," he says.
We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China's position.
"China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran," says Werner. "So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace."
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