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AMY GOODMAN: Israel has announced it will reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in the next few days as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire. According to the World Health Organization, at least 16,500 sick and wounded people need to leave Gaza for medical care. However, the border will only open in one direction: for Palestinians to exit.

Since the ceasefire began, at least 347 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 889 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In one recent incident, two children were killed by an Israeli drone for crossing the so-called yellow line, which isn’t always well marked. The children were brothers Fadi and Juma Abu Assi, the older of whom was 10 years old. They were gathering firewood for their disabled father. The Israeli military acknowledged the strike, saying, quote, “The Air Force eliminated the suspects in order to remove the threat,” unquote. Palestinians report Israeli forces continue to cross the yellow line on a near-daily basis.

This week, a coalition of 12 Israeli human rights groups concluded in a new report that 2025 is already the deadliest and most destructive year for Palestinians since 1967. On Monday, Israeli forces killed two teenagers in the West Bank in separate attacks as they carried out raids across the territory. In Hebron, soldiers fatally shot 17-year-old Muhannad Tariq Muhammad al-Zughair, whom they accused of carrying out a car-ramming attack that injured an Israeli soldier. Elsewhere, 18-year-old Muhammad Raslan Mahmoud Asmar was shot during a raid on his village northwest of Ramallah. Witnesses say the teen was left to bleed out as Israeli forces barred Red Crescent medics from approaching. The soldiers then seized his lifeless body. Last week, the U.N. reported more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023.

This is Jeremy Laurence, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

JEREMY LAURENCE: Killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank have been surging, without any accountability, even in the rare case when investigations are announced. … Our office has verified that since the 7th of October, 2023, and up until the 27th of November of this year, Israeli forces and settlers killed 1,030 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Among these victims were 223 children.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, by Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer, former program director at Human Rights Watch. Her piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Gaza: The Threat of Partition.” She co-founded Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza.

Sari, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with the latest breaking news, that Israel in the next few days will open the Rafah border crossing, but only for Palestinians to go one way: out. What is your response?

SARI BASHI: So, obviously, people need to leave. You mentioned the numbers, in thousands, of patients waiting to leave. There are also students who have been accepted to universities abroad. This is after all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed. So, it’s half good news.

But the bad news is that the Israeli announcement that it will not allow people to return to Gaza validates the fears that many have, that the ceasefire plan, the American plan and the Israeli plan, is essentially to continue the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, in Trump’s ceasefire plan, he committed to allowing Palestinians to return to Gaza, but that’s not what’s happening on the ground. There has been no construction authorized in the half of Gaza where Palestinians actually live. There has been no ability for people to come back home, and there are people who want to come back home.

And life in Gaza is nearly impossible for people because of very, very bad conditions. Eighty-one percent of buildings have been destroyed. People are living in tents that are now flooding in the rains. And it is very difficult to get construction and other materials approved by the Israeli authorities.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sari, there have also been reports of secret evacuation flights from Gaza. Who is running these flights, and who determines who goes on those flights?

SARI BASHI: I mean, that’s part of the problem. Early in the war, the Israeli government created what it calls the voluntary immigration administration, which is a secret, nontransparent government body that is supposed to encourage people from Gaza to leave, and make it possible for them to do so. There has been almost no transparency about what that organization is doing. There has been deliberate disinformation by Israeli ministers trying to amplify, artificially amplify, the number of people leaving Gaza to make people afraid. And there have been persistent reports about people paying large sums of money in order to leave, and that is after they have reportedly been asked to sign commitments not to return.

On the other hand, there is a very clear statement in the Trump peace plan, which was incorporated into a U.N. Security Council resolution, that people in Gaza are to be allowed to return home. And it’s perhaps not surprising that following the Israeli announcement this morning that Rafah crossing would be opened for exit only, the Egyptian government reportedly issued an objection and said no. It reminded us that the U.S. had promised that people in Gaza would be allowed to come home, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk some about the situation in the West Bank, as we’ve reported these constant attacks by settlers and the military? What’s been the position of the Israeli government on this, and what role have the military played in these attacks?

SARI BASHI: I mean, the concern is that the violence in Gaza, the violence in the West Bank, it’s not random. It’s directed toward ethnic cleansing. It’s directed toward getting Palestinians to leave. Certainly, that’s the case in Gaza, and the devastation and violence there are at a much higher scale than in the West Bank. But in the West Bank, too, just this year, we’ve had 2,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes through a combination of demolitions as well as settler violence. Every single day, Palestinians are injured or their property is damaged by settler attacks.

And to be clear, settlers are Israeli civilians who have been unlawfully transferred to the occupied West Bank by the Israeli government and have been taking over land that belongs to Palestinians. In the last two years, they have become increasingly emboldened in attacking Palestinians, taking over their olive groves, their flocks, stealing, throwing fire bombs into their homes, to the point where, according to the U.N., in 2025, a thousand Palestinians have been injured by settler attacks.

This is decentralized violence, but it is also state-sponsored violence. It is the government who put those settlers in the West Bank unlawfully, and quite often this violence takes place when Israeli soldiers either stand nearby and do nothing or even participate. The very ultranationalistic, messianic ideology has been infiltrated into the Israeli military, where you have soldiers whose job it is to protect everybody, including Palestinians, who are also settlers. And on the weekends, they come out in civilian clothing and attack and sometimes even kill Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the Jewish and Israeli Jewish activists who stand alongside Palestinians to prevent the olive harvest from being destroyed, to prevent people from being attacked, the response of the Israeli military and the settlers?

SARI BASHI: You know, it’s an indication of just how badly things have gotten, how many red lines have been crossed, because it used to be that Jewish settlers would be reluctant to attack Jews, because their ideology is racialized. They believe that they are acting in the name of the Jewish people. But recently, they have attacked Israeli Jews, as well, when Israeli Jews have come to accompany and be in solidarity with Palestinians.

So, we just finished the olive harvest season. It’s a very important cultural and also economic event for Palestinians. And this year it was particularly violent, with Israeli settlers coming, attacking people as they try to harvest, cutting down and burning down trees, intimidating people. And there have been cases even where Israeli Jewish activists came to be a protective force by accompanying Palestinian harvesters, and they, too, were attacked and even taken to the hospital with injuries. It is much more dangerous to be a Palestinian than to be an Israeli Jew in the West Bank, but the fact that settlers are also attacking Jews is an indication of just how violent, messianic and ultranationalistic this movement has become.

AMY GOODMAN: The death toll from Israel’s more than two-year assault on Gaza has been reported as 70,000. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany said the death toll likely exceeds 100,000. Our next guest, Ralph Nader, has talked about The Lancet report saying it’s probably hundreds of thousands. Life expectancy, says the Max Planck Institute, in Gaza fell by 44% in 2023, 47% in 2024. If you can talk about this? And also, what is going to happen in Gaza now, where the truce stands?

SARI BASHI: I mean, the violence against people in Gaza has been unprecedented. It’s been genocidal. And, you know, we have confirmed 70,000 people whose names and ID numbers have been reported by their families to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. There are thousands more people believed to be buried under the rubble, and thousands or tens of thousands of people who died from indirect causes. So, these are people who, because of a deliberate policy of starvation, died of malnutrition, died of communicable diseases, died of want. And I don’t know that we will ever know how many people died indirectly. This is for a very small population. It’s a population of 2 million people.

In Gaza right now, life has remained nearly impossible. The ceasefire promised reconstruction. It promised the crossings to be open. But the U.S. government introduced a number of caveats, and it actually, unfortunately, got those caveats approved by the U.N. Security Council. And an important caveat was that the reconstruction elements of the ceasefire would be limited to areas where Hamas had disarmed. And if the Israeli military was not able to disarm Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in two years of war, it’s not clear how they’re going to be disarmed now. So, conditioning reconstruction on Hamas disarmament is basically saying reconstruction will be impossible.

The only place where the U.S. has said it will allow reconstruction is in the more than 50% of Gaza that is directly occupied by Israel, that is off-limits to Palestinians on penalty of death. So, that doesn’t leave people in Gaza with any options. Six hundred thousand schoolchildren have no schools. The hospitals are barely functioning. There’s nowhere to live. A million-and-a-half people are in need of emergency shelter supplies. The concern is that the way the ceasefire is being implemented is only going to contribute to ethnic cleansing, because anybody who can leave Gaza will leave, because it’s very clear that there’s not a future being allowed there.

And the United States has an opportunity to make good on its promise in two ways. First of all, it can make it clear that reconstruction has to be authorized in the part of Gaza where Palestinians live, not in the half of Gaza that’s off-limits to them. And second of all, it should demand, as per the ceasefire agreement, that Rafah be open in both directions, also to allow people to come home.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you how the Israeli media is reporting both the breaches in the cease — the constant breaches in the ceasefire agreement, as well as the constant attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. And what’s been the impact on public opinion since the ceasefire came into effect, Israeli public opinion?

SARI BASHI: You know, I’m very sorry to say that there’s been a long-term trend of the Israeli media becoming more nationalistic and less critical. And that’s been matched by a number of government moves to coopt and take over both public and private media. So, particularly since October 7th, 2023, the Israeli media, with a few notable exceptions, has been reporting government propaganda uncritically. So, what you will hear in the Israeli media is that suspects were shot in Gaza for crossing the yellow line or approaching troops. You won’t hear that those suspects were 10- and 12-year-old boys who were collecting firewood, and that under international law, you can’t shoot children because they cross an invisible line. In the West Bank, you will hear that terrorists were taken out, when you mean ordinary civilians who were trying to harvest their olive trees. Haaretz and a few other media outlets have been offering a different view of what’s happening, a more realistic view. But right now many Israelis choose not to — not to see what’s happening either in the West Bank or Gaza. And interest in what’s happening in Gaza has gone way down since the majority of Israeli hostages have been freed.

AMY GOODMAN: Sari Bashi, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Israeli American human rights lawyer, former program director at Human Rights Watch. We’ll link to your New York Review of Books article, “Gaza: The Threat of Partition.”

When we come back, a group of eight senators, led by Bernie Sanders, form a “Fight Club” to challenge Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s handling of Trump. We’ll speak with Ralph Nader, who’s been taking on the Democratic Party for decades. Sixty years ago, he published his landmark book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Ishhad Ya ’Alam,” “Bear Witness, O World,” performed by the Palestinian Youth Choir on the B train here in New York. The choir is debuting at Widdi Hall in Brooklyn this evening.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump has gutted AIDS healthcare while ordering an end to commemorations of World AIDS Day, which is observed around the world Monday, December 1st.

For more on this, we’re joined by journalist Steven Thrasher in Kampala, Uganda. But first, we want to go to a clip Steven shared with us of one of many Kampala residents who congratulated incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after his election victory last month. Mamdani was born in Kampala.

TURINAWE SAMSON: Hello. My name is Turinawe Samson. I’m here in Uganda, Kampala. I would like to congratulate you, Mamdani, upon winning that seat of mayor in New York City. In Uganda here, we are very happy and grateful for this milestone you’ve made, and we understand that you will serve people genuinely from your heart as you have been promising. We trust you, and we believe something will happen positive to everyone, that makes New York City a better place for each and every person. No matter the problem, something can be done. Thank you, Mayor Mamdani.

AMY GOODMAN: For more from Kampala, Uganda, we’re joined by Steven Thrasher, acclaimed journalist, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. He’s the inaugural Daniel Renberg chair for social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism and a faculty member of Northwestern University’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, working on a series called Global Stop Work Order about how the Trump administration’s cuts are affecting LGBTQ+ health and HIV/AIDS in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America. The series is supported by a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. He has a new piece for The Intercept with Afeef Nessouli. It’s called “Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time.” If you can lay out what you found, Steven? Thanks for joining us from Uganda.

STEVEN THRASHER: Thanks for having me, Amy.

As you showed from that clip, Uganda is the home of Zohran Mamdani, who’s been very good on LGBT issues, but Uganda is a very, very difficult place. They have a law called the AHA Act, which makes, quote-unquote, “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by death. And so it’s extremely difficult to get LGBTQ people the healthcare that they need, and it’s very difficult to deal with HIV/AIDS. And the Trump administration has made it even worse, because a lot of USAID money was being used to pay for outreach.

And the things that we found so far as globally, here in Uganda — Afeef has seen the same thing in the Middle East; I’ve seen it in South Africa, as well, and in the United States — is that this is an immediate crisis of LGBTQ employment. There are people who’ve been harmed very immediately, people who are trans, who have been forced into — off their medications, and they experience body dysmorphia. Trans men might begin periods again. This is extremely distressing, causes depression and suicide. And there are people who’ve had advanced issues around AIDS that have died, unfortunately. But for the most part, HIV is a very slow-acting virus, and so if somebody becomes infected at age 20, it might be 10 years before we know that they’re sick. But that same 20-year-old who’s losing their job right now are thrown into an immediate distress.

And the Trump administration has really attacked LGBTQ employment around the world. In the same way that the federal workforce has seen a huge, disparate impact on Black women in the United States, that dynamic is playing out around the world, because often the only kind of employment that LGBTQ people, especially trans women, can get is working in the healthcare sector, the kind of work that USAID supported, and they’ve been thrown out of jobs in devastating numbers over the last year.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve, could you talk about some of the particular examples? You mentioned South Africa, also Lebanon. What’s been happening on the ground with these cuts?

STEVEN THRASHER: So, in South Africa, I met with a colleague who worked at an HIV prevention organization that went from a staff of 86 people to just four people. Ninety-five percent of them were let go. And my colleague told me that if I were to go on a gay meetup app called Grindr, that I would see many of his colleagues working there, because they have nothing else to do. South Africa has 36% or so unemployment for the general population, but it’s well into the majority for LGBTQ people. And so, these people have nothing else to do but sex work. And there’s nothing wrong with sex work, but it’s also a real tragedy that these are people who have been trained to do important work. They’ve been doing really important epidemiological work, public health work, going into communities where rates of HIV are very high, and now they have nothing to do. And maybe they can only do sex work, or they’re not doing anything at all. So, that’s been really disastrous.

The person in the clip that you showed, Samson, at the beginning, he works with a group called Universal Love Alliance, that I’ve gotten to shadow and volunteer a bit with. I’m a phlebotomist and helped out with lab tech work on outreach we did. And we went to a place where we saw 200 sex workers and were able — and this is in Uganda — and were able to give them all condoms and lubricants, which are in very short supply since USAID was cut off.

And to put into perspective how necessary and how out-of-reach these things are, when Trump was inaugurated — and not even when he was inaugurated, when he was elected, that empowered the government in Uganda to get even more regressive, because they knew what was coming, and they saw the Trump administration as supporting a very moralist standpoint from the government. So they stopped the importation of lubricants, because they said that that was being used for immoral sex, being used by sex workers and by homosexuals. And lubricants are very important to make sure that people have healthy sex, that there’s not tearing, that condoms don’t break. So, that object has basically been barred from being imported into the government, and they don’t manufacture it here, so it’s very hard for people to get it. Condoms are also extremely expensive. A condom can cost 50 cents or $1. And I found in my outreach trips that I’ve gone on that sex workers are sometimes only making 50 cents or a dollar, so it’s prohibitively expensive, and they’re less likely then to be able to use condoms now that USAID money has been taken away.

And on this outreach where we went and gave away these resources to 200 people, we also were able to test 86 people for HIV and a host of STIs. And for me from the United States, this was an incredibly, you know, successful outreach, to be able to reach so many people at once. We found three positive HIV cases, six inconclusive and 77 that were negative. And most of those who were negative — 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Steve —

STEVEN THRASHER: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Steve, I hate to interrupt you, but we only have about a minute left, and I wanted to ask you about something closer to home. Northwestern University, your university, on Friday announced a $75 million — a deal to pay $75 million to the federal government to settle allegations of antisemitism and to reverse all policies implemented in something called the Deering Meadow Agreement. Could you lay out what that is and your response to that, for Northwestern to get back its more than $700 million in federal funding?

STEVEN THRASHER: Yeah, it was a real travesty for Northwestern to do this. The students made a good-faith agreement and really solid principles that the university has just rejected and kind of, on Thanksgiving weekend, shown how the United States government is known for breaking agreements with groups.

But these two stories are actually quite — you know, quite connected. I was saying that there are ways that we could be giving more resources to help deal with HIV public health in the United States and around the world. Scientists at Northwestern University and other universities and U.S. pharmaceutical companies are making lots of money that is dependent upon this kind of work that’s being done. And so, Northwestern is throwing away tens of millions of dollars. The money that was given for the LGBT chair that I hold has basically been wasted because I haven’t been allowed to teach for two years.

And it’s — you know, it’s a real tragedy to see how people around the world, LGBTQ people of color usually, have been doing really, really important work on behalf of U.S. universities, on behalf of the United States government — this isn’t just aid; this is, you know, payment for the ways that people are doing research and volunteering their bodies to be tested for medications. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a university like Northwestern is just throwing away tens of millions of dollars to a fascist regime.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Steven Thrasher, for joining us, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. We’ll link to your Intercept piece, “Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time.”

A belated happy birthday to Deena Guzder. On Thursday, December 4th, I’ll be at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, doing the Q&A after Steal This Story, Please! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

On Monday, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders joined striking workers on a picket line outside a Starbucks in Brooklyn. The rally came shortly after New York City announced Starbucks had agreed to pay more than $35 million to some 15,000 workers in what’s been called the largest worker protection settlement in New York City history.

This is Zohran Mamdani, who will be sworn in as mayor January 1st.

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Good afternoon, everyone.

CROWD: Good afternoon!

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: It is a pleasure to be here at a picket with Starbucks workers like the ones on my right and the ones on my left, workers who are braving the December cold and the much deeper chill of unfair labor practices in this city and across this country, and the fear that has come with that of union busting, while they demand the better working conditions that they deserve, like so many working people across this city. These are not demands of greed. These are demands for decency. These are workers who are simply being asked to be treated with the respect that they deserve. They’re being asked that their labor be repaid in a manner that allows them to build a dignified life. And I join them because I want to do everything that I can to show my solidarity, but also because I know that far too often the voices of everyday working people are not amplified with the volume that management so easily receives.

So, I want to share a few numbers with you here this afternoon, numbers that I hope will place this struggle into some sense of perspective. Thirty-six-point-two billion. That is the amount of money that Starbucks made in revenue just last year. Ninety-five-point-eight million. That’s the compensation package that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol earned for four months of work last year. Six thousand six hundred and sixty-six. That is how much times larger Niccol’s pay was than the average Starbucks barista’s salary. Four hundred. That is how many labor law violations the NLRB has found that Starbucks has committed.

CROWD: Shame!

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: One hundred and twenty. That’s the amount of stores that are on strike, and 85, the number of cities that they are taking place in.

Now, what these numbers show us are a two-pronged picture: on one side, corporate greed and self-enrichment at the cost of its own workers, and on the other, remarkable solidarity by those workers who have been exploited and mistreated time and time again.

Solidarity, as much as we speak of it, we have to remember, is not an abstract concept. It is measured in picket lines stood on in the rain and in the sleet. It is measured in rent payments that workers do not know if they will be able to meet, child care bills they do not know whether they will be able to afford. And it is measured in strangers, who have never met one another, linking arms to fight for a shared goal and a fair future.

And I’m proud to stand here alongside incredible elected officials at the city level, at the state level and also, to my left, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, because all of us are united in the belief that we must build a New York where every worker can live a life of decency. We must build a New York where our words do not ring hollow as we say that this is a union town. And we must build a New York where the workers who power it are able to afford to live in it. Thank you so much. And now Senator Bernie Sanders.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, it is an honor for my wife and me to be here with you to stand with striking Starbucks workers who are telling this company they are sick and tired of corporate greed and sick and tired of union busting.

What the mayor-elect just pointed out is that what is happening here on this picket line is happening all over this country. We are living in an economy where the people on top have never, ever had it so good. You’ve got one man owning more wealth than the bottom 52% of American households.

CROWD: Shame! Shame!

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And while the CEOs make unbelievable salaries, 60% of our people, in Vermont, in New York City, all over this country, are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay the rent, struggling to pay for healthcare, struggling to put food on the table. And what Zohran and I are dedicated to is creating a nation and an economy which works for all of us, not just the 1%.

So, I just want to thank the Starbucks workers for their courage here and around this country. We are going to prevail. Thank you very much.

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You know, as I was walking in, Bernadette was asking me: When am I going to stop attending protests and be the mayor? And I said, “Technically, January 1st, I will be the mayor.” But I also — I also want to make a point, which is that when I become the mayor of this city, I’m going to continue to stand on picket lines with workers across the five boroughs.

And I have said this to many of the unions that are here today, many of the rank and file, which is that we want to build an administration that is characterized by being there for workers every single step of the way. And sometimes in the fight for decency and dignity that workers are waging, their voices are drowned out. And when you are the mayor of New York City, you have with that a platform, a platform where you can speak about the hundreds of times that Starbucks has violated labor laws, a platform where you can speak about the fact that, yes, we celebrate what DCWP was able to accomplish in the largest-ever settlement that has been won in this city, $28 million, and also that we will continue to commit funding, both of a fiscal kind and also of our own sustained commitment in terms of the political will necessary, to ensure that we hold these kinds of corporations accountable.

Just before we take a question, since I know we have some friends here with us, if we can first have a round of applause for the Starbucks workers themselves?

CROWD: [cheering]

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We have Kai Fritz on my left, Noor Hayat on my right, and we have so many workers who have inspired us every single day. And I just want to say thank you, before we even start the Q&A portion of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Zohran, can I ask a question about — many of the workers in this city are immigrants. When you met with President Trump, did you get a concession from him around ICE raids and not moving into this city? And then I have a question for Bernie Sanders. And that question is: Do you think if you succeed with your fight club, and other senators — 

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: With our what?

AMY GOODMAN: — if you succeed with the fight club, and other senators who support your mission to unseat the Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, it will open up space for progressive candidates that represent what the two of you stand for today?

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: When I met with the president, I made very clear that these kinds of raids are cruel and inhumane, that they are raids that do nothing to serve the interests of public safety, and that my responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home, and that includes millions of immigrants, of which I am one. And I am proud that I will be the first immigrant mayor of the city in generations, and prouder still for the fact that I will live up to the statue that we have in our harbor and the ideals which we have long proclaimed as being those of the city, but which have too often been ones we do not actually enforce and celebrate on a daily basis. And that is who I will be as the mayor of this city.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: In terms of what we’re trying to do in the Senate, I think it is no great secret there are differences of opinion in the Democratic caucus in the Senate. I’m an independent, and I caucus with the Democrats. And the difference is really manifested right here in New York City, in the mayor’s race that just took place.

In my view, Zohran Mamdani ran one of the great campaigns in the modern history of this country. He started off at 1%, and he won. And how did he win? He won because he put together tens and tens of thousands of volunteers, who knocked on doors. He won because he had the guts to talk about the oligarchs and saying that when he was going to become mayor, and when he will become mayor, he’s going to stand with the workers here at Starbucks and workers all over this city.

And what we are seeing in America right now, in congressional races, in Senate races, you are seeing more and more candidates standing up exactly the same way that Zohran did. And they are standing up and saying that we need an economy that works for all; we’re not going to let the billionaires get tax breaks while people lose their health insurance. We’re going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage rather than a starvation wage. We’re not going to be the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, etc., etc. So, you’re seeing that evolve, and I think it’s a good thing. And I think we have the grassroots of America behind us. What Zohran did inspired people all over this country, all over the world, and we’re going to keep going forward in that direction.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani speaking Monday as they joined striking Starbucks workers on a picket line in Brooklyn. At the rally, I questioned them, but also talked to workers and organizers on the picket line.

GABRIEL PIERRE: So, my name is Gabriel Pierre. I am a shift supervisor in Bellmore, Long Island. At Starbucks, I am usually running the floor and making sure that customers and my co-workers are all set. We are out here today to fight the company’s unfair labor practices, as well as get them back to the bargaining table for a fair contract.

AMY GOODMAN: And what would that look like?

GABRIEL PIERRE: So, what that would look like, them ending their unfair labor practices. Right now we have 400 open lawsuits for labor practices, as well as 650 pending, including, but not limited to, the unguaranteed scheduling, the mistreatment of co-workers, trans and gay, and the unfair wage, hourly wages, as well as, like, not guaranteed hours. Starbucks has not recognized any union in any shop in the four years that we have been organizing. So, it’s pretty scary not to have that done, and we’re hopefully expecting that this is what gets them to come back to the table.

MELANIE KRUVELIS: My name is Melanie Kruvelis. I’m an organizer with New York City DSA. And, you know, I think it’s really powerful to have the mayor out here today. Just today, city workers recovered tens of millions of dollars to Starbucks workers who have been denied fair pay. And I think in a moment where people are really struggling to put food on the table, to buy presents for the holidays, it means a lot to recognize that people are putting, you know, their lives on the line every day. They’re working every day, and they’re not getting what they deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see that same 104,000 volunteers continuing to work and organize? And what would they do?

MELANIE KRUVELIS: Absolutely. I’m hopeful that — you know, there’s a strong movement that got Zohran into office in November, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to keep that movement going. You know, I think it matters a lot that we had such a full house out here today in front of Starbucks. And he’s activated tons of folks across the city and people across the country. So, I think it’s, you know, generating a lot of hope for folks who haven’t had a lot of that this year.

GABRIEL PIERRE: I think having Zoran Mamdani definitely gives our chances a lot better. He has been very forward-thinking, and I’m excited to see what he does when his first day of, like, being the actual mayor starts.

AMY GOODMAN: Stabucks workers and organizers on the picket line in Brooklyn Monday, where they were joined by Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Special thanks to Sam Alcoff. On Thursday, there is a major protest planned in front of the Empire State Building from 1:00 to 3:00. The motto of the group is “no contract, no Starbucks.”

When we come back, President Trump cancels World AIDS Day commemorations while gutting AIDS healthcare across the globe. We’ll go to Uganda. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Snake Hoop” by Mariee Siou, performing at the Brooklyn Folk Festival in November.

AMY GOODMAN: The White House is facing growing bipartisan criticism over its targeting of boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that it says are carrying drugs, though have not presented a shred of evidence. The Washington Post recently reported Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the killing of two people who survived an initial strike on a suspected drug boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2nd. According to the Post, Hegseth gave a verbal order to, quote, “kill everybody,” unquote.

Many legal experts and lawmakers said such an order would be a war crime. This is independent Maine Senator Angus King on CNN Monday morning.

SEN. ANGUS KING: The law is clear. If the facts are as have been alleged, that there was a second strike specifically to kill the survivors in the war — in the water, that’s a stone-cold war crime. It’s also murder.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday afternoon, the White House confirmed the second strike on the boat did occur, but claimed the order came not from Hegseth, but from Admiral Frank “Mitch Bradley, who at the time was the head of JSOC — that’s the Joint Special Operations Command. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was questioned about the strikes.

GABE GUTIERREZ: To be clear, does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: The latter is true, Gabe, and I have a statement to read for you here. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narcoterrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war. With respect to the strikes in question on September 2nd, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday night, Secretary Hegseth wrote online, “Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” unquote. While he was showing his 100% support, many took his statement to make a distinction between him, Hegseth, and Bradley himself as to who gave the order.

This all comes as Hegseth is threatening to court-martial Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, who’s a former naval officer. Kelly and five other Democrats, all military or intelligence veterans, recently appeared in a video urging soldiers to disobey illegal orders.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: I’m Senator Elissa Slotkin.

SEN. MARK KELLY: I’m Senator Mark Kelly.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: Representative Chris Deluzio.

REP. MAGGIE GOODLANDER: Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander.

REP. CHRISSY HOULAHAN: Representative Chrissy Houlahan.

REP. JASON CROW: Congressman Jason Crow.

SEN. MARK KELLY: I was a captain in the United States Navy.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: Former CIA officer.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: Former Navy.

REP. JASON CROW: Former paratrooper and Army Ranger.

REP. MAGGIE GOODLANDER: Former intelligence officer.

REP. CHRISSY HOULAHAN: Former Air Force.

SEN. MARK KELLY: We want to speak directly to members of the military.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: And the intelligence community.

REP. JASON CROW: Who take risks each day.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: To keep Americans safe.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now.

REP. CHRISSY HOULAHAN: Americans trust their military.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: But that trust is at risk.

SEN. MARK KELLY: This administration is pitting our uniformed military.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: And intelligence community professionals.

REP. JASON CROW: Against American citizens.

SEN. MARK KELLY: Like us, you all swore an oath.

REP. MAGGIE GOODLANDER: To protect and defend this Constitution.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: Right now the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad.

REP. JASON CROW: But from right here at home.

SEN. MARK KELLY: Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: You can refuse illegal orders.

REP. CHRIS DELUZIO: You must refuse illegal orders.

SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN: No one has to carry out orders that violate the law.

REP. CHRISSY HOULAHAN: Or our Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump accused the Democrats appearing in that video of engaging in, quote, ”SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

On Monday, Senator Mark Kelly revealed he and his wife Gabby Giffords have received death threats following President Trump’s threats. Yes, that family knows violence well. Gabby Giffords is the former Arizona congressmember who was shot in the head in a mass shooting in a Tucson shopping mall when she was meeting with constituents years ago.

We’re joined now by David Cole, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, former national legal director of the ACLU. His recent piece for The New York Times is headlined “Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth.”

We last spoke to you in October after your widely read piece in The New York Review of Books headlined “Getting Away with Murder,” about the boat strikes. So, these two issues, to say the least, are coming together very strongly this week. One, you have the revelations in The Washington Post of the second boat strike killing the shipwrecked, the two men who were hanging on for dear life to this boat when they hit it again, and you have the attacks on Mark Kelly to court-martial him, after he and others talked about soldiers not obeying illegal orders. Talk about the merging of these two issues, and specifically what’s happening to Kelly right now.

DAVID COLE: So, you know, this entire operation, from the outset, is illegal. It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. We have a system in this country for trying people, convicting them, sentencing them. Even if you are found to have been guilty of smuggling massive amounts of drugs, you cannot be executed. The death penalty is limited for people who have actually committed a homicide.

The president says this is a war, but he’s mixing metaphor with reality. The “war on drugs” is a metaphor, like the war on cancer. It doesn’t allow us to kill people who are carrying drugs, just as the war on crime doesn’t allow us to kill people who are criminals.

What we’ve now learned is that not only is the entire operation illegal from the outset, but it is — they’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood. It is getting closer and closer to My Lai.

And yet, when members of Congress say to members of the military, “You know, you have an obligation not to follow illegal orders,” what does the president do? Not say, “Hey, that’s right. These orders are problematic. We should rethink them. We should pay attention to all the lawyers who told us they were illegal before we pushed them off the table.” Instead, he goes after Mark Kelly, a senator, a former — a combat veteran, for merely — 

AMY GOODMAN: Former astronaut.

DAVID COLE: — telling the truth. And a former astronaut, for merely telling the truth. It is a true statement that following orders is no defense to a war crime. And killing civilians who are not engaged in armed conflict against us is a war crime. This is criminal activity from the get-go, doubly criminal when you start targeting survivors. They have to rethink this policy, not claim that their critics are engaged in sedition.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, David, I’m wondering, all of these — all of these boat attacks are actually creating a climate where, basically, the United States — the people of the United States get used to the fact that the United States is going to war, in essence, is going to militarily attack Venezuela. And, for instance, The Guardian just reported recently that Trinidad and Tobago, which is right next door to Venezuela, has a hundred Marines that have installed radar. And there was a quote from a political leader in Trinidad and Tobago, David Abdulah of the Movement for Social Justice, that accuses their government of being complicit in these extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. I’m wondering: Under what pretext do you think the United States will use to actually militarily attack Venezuela?

DAVID COLE: Well, this entire operation is a pretext. There is no war going on. We are not under attack. You know, no one has been drafted to fight the enemy. President Trump has taken a crime problem and has said, “I’m going to use the military to solve the crime problem. How? By killing people in cold blood.” And Pete Hegseth translates that to say to his folks, “Kill everybody.” And so, then Admiral Bradley responds to that by ordering the killing even of survivors who are merely holding on for dear life. This is crimes that the government is trying to justify as acts of war.

If they go to war with Venezuela, that, too, will be a war crime. It will be an act of aggression against a country which has not attacked us. The fact that people are maybe — probably are — smuggling drugs into this country from Venezuela doesn’t distinguish that country from Mexico, from Canada, from many other countries into which drugs are — from which drugs are smuggled. It doesn’t give us the authority to kill Canadians. It doesn’t give us the authority to kill Mexicans. It doesn’t give us the authority to kill Venezuelans. And it certainly doesn’t give us the authority to go to war with a country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering also about another major legal battle of the Trump administration: the admission of the Justice Department that it was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem who made the decision to deport a group of Venezuelan men to the notorious mega-prison complex in El Salvador, ignoring a judge’s order to keep them in custody. What do you — what do you make of this?

DAVID COLE: Outrageous. Outrageous. We are a country of law. That means that government officials, just like you and I, have to follow court orders. In this case, the Trump administration, again using this pretext of a war, said we’re going to deport hundreds, several, a couple — more than a hundred Venezuelans, on the assertion that they are part of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan drug gang, which Trump says is engaged in armed conflict against us, notwithstanding the fact that no one ever heard of this group before Trump made this ridiculous assertion.

The ACLU went to court to challenge that on an emergency basis. The judge held a hearing. He told them, on no uncertain terms, “Do not remove these people. And if the planes have taken off, turn the planes around. And if they land in El Salvador, do not let the people off. Bring them back.”

And instead, Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, tells her people to defy that order and to continue the plane flights to El Salvador and to turn these men over to the El Salvadoran authorities, where they were put in, essentially, a torture prison.

That is not how the rule of law is supposed to operate. I think it’s going to lead to contempt charges against Kristi Noem and the others who engaged in that blatantly illegal disregard of the judge’s order.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to continue on that line of the deporting of people. You have Kilmar Abrego Garcia — right? — who a brave Justice Department lawyer said in court — because he had to tell the truth — that it was not clear why he was even sent to CECOT. Now he’s being faced with being sent to one African country after another, a continent that he is not from. They are not backing down on deporting him. I wanted to ask about that.

And also on this issue, we just had a headline yesterday on this young woman, a Babson College student, deported to Honduras this weekend while she was trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. Nineteen-year-old Any Lucia López Belloza was told there was an issue with her boarding pass at the gate, before she was detained by immigration officials. The day after she was arrested, a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting the government from removing her from the United States for 72 hours. But instead, she was deported and is now in Honduras, where she hasn’t been in many years. She did not grow up there.

DAVID COLE: So, I think we have to ask President Trump: Have you no sense of decency? Have you no shame? The kinds of cruelty that he is imparting on people who have lived here their entire lives, on Mr. Abrego Garcia, who was admittedly a mistaken deportation. And instead of admitting their mistake and saying “sorry,” they’re now seeking to send him to a third country, to Africa, a place that he does not know, has never lived. This is — this is just beyond the pale. It is absolutely beyond the pale.

And I think the American people recognize that what the administration is doing in the name of immigration enforcement is far too harsh, far too cruel. It is not singling out criminals. It is not singling out people at the border. It is taking college kids. It is taking people turning up to their interviews and to their court appearances and spiriting them off to countries they never came from.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cole, we have this breaking news. The former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was just released from prison in the United States, where he was serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and firearms charges. His brother, Tony Hernández, also serving a life sentence here in the United States. He was convicted, the former president, of sending in tons of cocaine into the United States. Put this against what the U.S. is doing in the Caribbean, bombing so-called drug boats to prevent drugs from coming into the United States.

DAVID COLE: Again, have you no shame? Here’s somebody who was essentially a drug kingpin, someone who used the authority of his office to ensure that drugs, in massive quantities, were brought into the United States. He is prosecuted, he is convicted, and he is sentenced. And what does President Trump do? He lets him out of jail.

Meanwhile, fishermen on boats in the Caribbean, who have never been tried or charged with anything, are shot and killed from the air. And when people are holding on for their lives, they follow through and shoot and kill those people.

It is — this is not about fighting to stop drugs from coming into this country, because then you would not see the pardon of somebody who was convicted for that offense. This is pure politics, and it is playing with people’s lives, ending people’s lives, for partisan political advantage.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Cole, I’m wondering, Trump’s use of the pardon. Most presidents wait ’til their final year in office, and around Christmas time they they do a bunch of pardons, but Trump has been on a rampage with these pardons. Could you talk about what the message that this sends about presidential power?

DAVID COLE: Well, the pardon power is one power in the Constitution that was given to the president without check. We’ve generally relied on, you know, the principles of presidents to use it in wise ways, use it to dole out mercy in appropriate cases, not to award donors, not to award the kids of donors, not to award those who have violated laws in the same way Trump violated laws.

Trump is using — is abusing the pardon power as no president before ever has, and I hope no president afterward ever will again. But it really raises questions about giving the president absolute power. Absolute power corrupts, and President Trump has proved that with his use of the pardon power. He’s pardoning people who do — you know, do good to his business interests. He is essentially using it to line his pockets and to let people off who he identifies with, not to engage in any kind of principled grants of mercy.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cole, we just have 30 seconds. The judges finding the U.S. attorneys that President Trump appointed, his personal attorneys, Alina Habba in New Jersey, Lindsey Halligan, finding that they are illegally serving, the significance of this?

DAVID COLE: Well, this is — this is what happens when the president insists on hiring loyalists who can’t get Senate confirmation, even from a Senate that the Republicans control. He instead tries to use these tricks, calling them interim, calling them acting, etc. And now two courts have held that that kind of back-to-back appointment to avoid Senate confirmation is unconstitutional.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cole, I want to thank you for being with us, professor at the Georgetown University of Law Center, now a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, former ACLU national legal director. We’ll link to your piece, “Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth.”

When we come back, Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani join striking Starbucks workers on the picket line in Brooklyn. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: Down Hill Strugglers, performing at the Brooklyn Folk Festival in November.