The New York Times 2025-04-16 15:12:59


‘Alien Enemies’ or Innocent Men? Inside Trump’s Rushed Effort to Deport 238 Migrants

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Nathali Sánchez last heard from her husband on March 14, when he called from a Texas detention center to say he was being deported back to Venezuela. Later that night, he texted her through a government messaging app for detainees.

“I love you,” he wrote, “soon we will be together forever.”

Her husband, Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, a musician, had been in American custody for a month, calling every few days to assure his family that he was OK, his relatives said. Now, the couple believed they would reunite and he would finally meet his daughter, Nahiara, who had been born during his brief stint as a migrant in the United States.

But less than a day later, Mr. Suárez was shackled, loaded onto a plane and sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, according to an internal government list of detainees obtained by The New York Times. Around the time Mr. Suárez was texting his wife, the Trump administration was quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping wartime power that allows the government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation.

Mr. Suárez and 237 others, the Trump administration argued after the order became public, were all members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, which was “aligned with” the Venezuelan government and was “perpetrating” an invasion of the United States.

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A gigantic, roiling cloud of black smoke swirled up from a parking lot of burning cars, as residents milled about on a sidewalk in distress, and police and fire vehicles careened past. Then the scene became more chaotic.

“Shelter! shelter!” a policeman yelled. A thin, buzzing noise, like a chain saw running in the distance, wafted down from the sky. Another Russian exploding drone, like the one that had just hit the parking lot, was flying overhead. People ran for cover.

“It’s like this every day,” said the mayor, Artem Kobzar, who had been visiting the site in Sumy, Ukraine, and dashed into the open doorway of an apartment building. “Everybody in Ukraine wants peace,” he said. “But you see, in Sumy, we don’t have a day or night of calm.”

That bombardment came on Monday, a day after two ballistic missiles struck a central neighborhood of the city on Palm Sunday shortly after 10 a.m., killing 34 civilians, including two children, and wounding another 117, according to the Sumy City Council. Russia said it had struck a military target; a Ukrainian regional governor said a military awards ceremony had taken place in the city that day.

The Palm Sunday bombardment came more than two months after President Trump started cease-fire talks with a phone call to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And in recent days it has become an argument in Ukraine and elsewhere that those talks are failing. In Sumy, the attack has set off preparation for a possible new Russian ground assault in this region.

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The latest warning came 10 days before the deadliest air crash in South Korea.

A dozen officials gathered inside a room at Muan International Airport for a meeting of a bird strike prevention committee, where they discussed the number of aircraft being hit by birds, with data showing a jump in incidents over the past couple of years.

One official, from one of the country’s aviation training institutes, expressed concern that planes coming in to land often encountered flocks of birds by the coastline, according to a record of the meeting obtained by a lawmaker. To what extent is it possible to keep the birds away? the official asked.

The answer wasn’t reassuring. There weren’t enough people and cars deployed at the airport to keep birds away, and sounds from loudspeakers used to broadcast noises to scare birds off weren’t strong enough to reach far enough beyond the airport, said an official from the company that managed the airport’s facilities. He noted that they “were trying their best.”

Then, on Dec. 29, the pilot of Jeju Air Flight 2216 declared “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” and told air traffic controllers there had been a bird strike as the plane was making its descent. After making a sharp turn, the jet landed on its belly, slid down the runway and rammed into a concrete barrier, exploding into a fireball that killed 179 of the 181 people on board.


Investigators have not identified the reasons for the crash and what role, if any, a bird strike might have played. But the country’s transport ministry said bird feathers and blood were found in both of the jet’s engines. The remains were identified as being from the Baikal teal, a migratory duck common to South Korea in winter that often flies in flocks of up to tens or even hundreds of thousands.

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Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris famed as an artist’s paradise, is also where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final days and it has long drawn tourists to walk in the tortured painter’s last footsteps. But ever since art experts identified his final work before he took his life, there has been strife in the town.

Van Gogh’s final painting was disputed for decades, because he didn’t date his works. But in 2020 experts concluded that gnarled tree roots protruding from a hillside in Auvers, as depicted in his “Tree Roots,” was made on the day he died. This finding may have settled one dispute, but it immediately stirred another, this one between the municipality and the owners of the property where the roots grow.

The main root depicted in the painting — from a black locust tree and dubbed the “elephant” by enthusiasts — abuts a public road. After the discovery of its historical value, the municipality claimed a section of privately owned land near the road as public domain, saying it was necessary for maintenance. Jean-François and Hélène Serlinger, the property owners, fought the village, and an appeals court recently concluded there was no basis for the municipality’s claim.

But the mayor of Auvers, Isabelle Mézières, has pledged to keep fighting, and she can still appeal to a higher court. After the decision, she insisted that the site should belong to the public, not private owners. “The Roots belong to the Auversois!” she wrote on social media, referring to the citizens of the region.

The continued fight over Van Gogh’s tree roots has cast a pall over what is usually a celebratory season in Auvers, population 7,000, where art tourism is a big business that heats up in the spring.

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An Israeli strike killed a security guard and wounded 10 patients at a field hospital in southern Gaza on Tuesday, according to the director of the medical facility.

The deadly attack at the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital in Khan Younis came two days after an Israeli strike hit one of the enclave’s last functioning medical centers: the Ahli Arab Hospital compound in Gaza City. The strikes highlighted the precarious state of Gaza’s health care sector, which has been decimated by the war.

Israel’s military has said the strike on Ahli Arab hospital targeted a Hamas command center, without providing evidence. On Tuesday, it said it had carried out a strike targeting a Hamas commander “adjacent to and outside” the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital.

Dr. Suhaib al-Hamss, the field hospital’s director, said that the security guard was killed protecting the entrance to the facility. Four of the wounded suffered serious injuries, he added, noting the attack hit the edge of the hospital grounds.

“It was a powerful strike,” Dr. al-Hamss, 37, said in a phone interview. “Everything fell over.”

Others at the hospital said the strike prompted patients to flee the hospital.

“It was a terrifying moment,” said Mohammed Abu Ghali, a field coordinator for HEAL Palestine, an American nongovernmental organization that funds the field hospital.

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