NPR’s C.E.O. Was a Right-Wing Target. Then the Real Trouble Started.

"Katherine Maher has taken an unyielding approach to NPR’s biggest battles — which has sometimes put her at odds with her colleagues in public media.

Dec. 30, 2025

Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, has dealt with plenty of criticism this year. Did she consider quitting? “I really don’t like bullies,” she said.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, has dealt with plenty of criticism this year. Did she consider quitting? “I really don’t like bullies,” she said.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

By Benjamin Mullin

This year, Benjamin Mullin has covered the effects of the elimination of federal funding on NPR, PBS and local stations across the country.

Katherine Maher knew that running NPR was going to be difficult. But since taking over as chief executive last year, she has confronted one crisis after another.

Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired. Congress stripped more than $500 million in annual funding from public media.

She has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the political right but of some within the tightknit world of public broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack. At one point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit.

Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight during political attacks on the organization. Ms. Maher, by contrast, has been more aggressive, refusing to compromise with Congress and taking the Trump administration to court, along with a key ally.

Ms. Maher, 42, stood by her strategy.

“The government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation.”

Ms. Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm footing, generating record donations.

But the loss of roughly $500 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been devastating for other parts of the public media universe. Many local stations, which pay dues to NPR and PBS, are laying off employees.

In other words, Ms. Maher and NPR have managed to hold on to their influence over public broadcasting this year, even as that system was dealt a terrible blow and is far weaker overall. Yet there are emerging challenges to NPR’s sway over public radio. In the wake of the funding fight, a coalition of public media organizations has teamed up to form Public Media Infrastructure, an organization that could eventually provide an alternative to a radio distribution system managed by NPR.

“When I came into this organization, we talked about the first 50 years of public media and the next 50 years,” Ms. Maher said in the interview. “Nobody expected there to be quite as fine a point on it as this moment in time.”

Ms. Maher has appeared on NPR’s airwaves this year, speaking to the “Morning Edition” hosts Michel Martin and Steve Inskeep about government defunding.Jason Andrew for The New York Times

‘She Had Done Her Homework’

Running NPR is a notoriously difficult job. It’s one part politician, managing relationships with hundreds of stations; one part turnaround artist, trying to expand a business with roots in traditional radio; and one part fund-raiser, appealing to foundations and other donors. And NPR’s most important product is its journalism, which its chief executive has no direct control over.

Further complicating matters: NPR is a nonprofit with a majority of its board of directors from local stations, who occasionally have diverging interests.

Over the last 15 years, NPR has had seven chief executives.

NPR’s board members were excited in the fall of 2023 when they found Ms. Maher. She had worked for the World Bank and HSBC. As the chief executive of the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, she oversaw a sprawling, complicated community of volunteer editors. And she was prepared.

“She had done her homework,” said Jennifer Ferro, the former chair of NPR’s board who led the search committee.

In some ways, Ms. Maher was an unusual pick. She had no experience running a professional news organization. And unlike NPR’s recent top leaders, who were media executives in the twilight of their careers, Ms. Maher was relatively young and knew the tech world. She was also telegenic, eventually breezing through interviews with late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jordan Klepper. (“I barter these for groceries,” she said, presented with a “Daily Show” tote bag.)

During one of the most consequential times in NPR’s history, Ms. Maher has been a highly visible C.E.O., holding conference calls with station leaders and delivering direct-to-camera fund-raising appeals.

Clad in bright blazers and sprinkling tech argot into her conversations, Ms. Maher has been crisscrossing the nation to visit NPR’s stations, with recent trips to Bloomington, Ind., and Thousand Oaks, Calif. (“It’ll take me five years to get to all of them,” she said.) While she is out on maternity leave, NPR’s chief financial officer, Daphne Kwon, will fill in as interim president.

In early April 2024, two weeks after she started, Ms. Maher and NPR faced an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its news coverage.

The crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes. (“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.)

NPR’s critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts; she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before she was hired.

Steve Inskeep, a host of “Morning Edition,” published a rebuttal to Mr. Berliner’s essay, accusing him of errors. NPR noted in a statement that Ms. Maher wrote her posts before she joined the news industry.

Did she consider quitting? “I really don’t like bullies,” she said. She remembered thinking, “My view is that the overall goal of what I was brought in to do was far greater than that five-week mark.”

Ms. Ferro, who was in touch with Ms. Maher frequently during that period, was determined to keep her at NPR. She was the right leader, she said. And she believed getting rid of an executive because of political pressure 40 days after she joined would only weaken the organization.

The furor surrounding her posts subsided. But they would come up again a year later.

An ‘Asteroid’ Looms

In November 2024, weeks after President Trump was elected, an ominous memo on the impact of federal defunding written by two public media leaders began circulating among station directors. It raised the possibility that Congress could eventually claw back all funding for NPR and PBS.

“This is a scenario akin to an asteroid striking without warning,” the report said. It included a diagram showing that money from Congress is allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which then doles it out to NPR, PBS and local stations across the United States.

For NPR and PBS, defunding would be survivable. Most of NPR’s revenue comes from membership dues, sponsorships and donations. But for local stations, many of which rely on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a majority of their budget, this was catastrophic.

In March, Ms. Maher and Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, were called to testify before Congress in a hearing whose title seemed to presage its conclusion: “Anti-American Airwaves: Accountability for the Heads of NPR and PBS.”

The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Democrats praised NPR and PBS and mocked the proceedings (“Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”).

The hearing made it clear that Republicans in Congress, which had tried to pull NPR’s funding for a half-century, might finally make good on their threat.

‘How Big of a Cut Could We Tolerate?’

In April, as Congress was gearing up to claw back funding from the public media system, America’s Public Television Stations, an influential nonprofit advocacy group, sent a document to leaders of NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The document listed several scenarios that might allow NPR and PBS to save funding for local stations by agreeing to give up money for national programs. It even included a “save-face rationale” for some Republicans in Congress who wanted to justify their support of public media.

“How big of a cut could we tolerate?” the document asked.

At a meeting soon after, Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher expressed support for such a compromise. It seemed, briefly, like the heaviest hitters in public broadcasting were on board with the plan.

But there were also signs of major strain.

On a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks.

Ms. Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased, and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person familiar with her thinking. After she refused, months of simmering tension between the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR came to the surface. Ms. Harrison told Ms. Maher she should resign her position for the good of public media.

Things got more tense when, on May 1, Mr. Trump issued an executive order banning government funding of NPR and PBS. NPR sued the White House, arguing that the order violated the Constitution. And it added the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a defendant, since Mr. Trump’s order directed it to deny NPR funding.

NPR also changed its position on the funding compromise: It now viewed any cuts as a violation of the First Amendment, essentially arguing that cuts amounted to government discrimination against NPR based on its viewpoint.

Ms. Maher said that once the Trump administration attempted to tie the organization’s ability to receive federal funding to its editorial decisions, the compromise “was no longer an option.”

In July, the Senate officially voted to defund public media, 51 to 48. In a somber meeting with employees days after the vote, Ms. Maher said NPR and its member stations had waged a “David-and-Goliath-style” fight that included 191 meetings during a trip to Washington, D.C., 40 of which were directly with elected officials.

“We put up a really good fight as a team, as an organization, as a network, and we should be damn proud of it,” she said. She also appeared in a fund-raising appeal from NPR. “We need your help,” she said. Donations poured in.

Then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting took a step that ratcheted up tension with NPR. For years, the corporation had funded a radio distribution system managed by NPR.

Instead, in September, it announced it was awarding a major grant to Public Media Infrastructure, the new entity formed by a group of five public media organizations including WNYC, PRX and the Station Resource Group.

After that, the legal battle between NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting erupted.

‘Mom and Dad Are Fighting’

In late September, NPR’s board of directors gathered on a video call to discuss a highly unusual move championed by Ms. Maher: seeking a restraining order against public radio’s biggest supporter.

The situation was complicated. NPR had already sued the Corporation for Public Broadcasting alongside the Trump administration, but the restraining order went a step further. In court, NPR would argue that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had changed its mind about funding a radio distribution system managed by NPR because Mr. Trump issued his executive order in May — essentially helping him violate the First Amendment. The restraining order sought to keep the funding from going elsewhere.

The corporation, for its part, argued that it had funded the new entity because NPR had a monopoly over its radio distribution grants, and it wanted those efforts to be more independent. It also told a judge it was acting on an independent recommendation that predated the funding fight.

At stake were millions of dollars and the possibility of widening the rift between NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As one public media executive put it at the time: “Mom and Dad are fighting.”

In the end, only three members of NPR’s 23-person board of directors voted against the restraining order or abstained from voting. Ms. Maher had rallied the board with an impassioned speech about the importance of standing firm on First Amendment issues.

The legal action inflamed a painful internecine battle, as emails from NPR and the corporation became public in discovery. “There is a dream scenario — we get the money and CPB goes away by the action of Congress,” wrote one NPR executive, referring to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in April.

In one email, an executive with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suggested that the organization hadn’t funded an NPR project because of the “political challenges” that came with doing so, although they couldn’t “own it” in public.

In November, the two sides reached a settlement, with the corporation agreeing to direct some of its remaining funding toward the satellite system managed by NPR and declaring Mr. Trump’s executive order unconstitutional. Both sides issued statements declaring victory, with NPR citing a judge’s remarks stating that the organization had made a “very substantial showing” to support its argument.

In tandem with the settlement, Ms. Maher decided that NPR would give stations relief on some of their fees, earning her some goodwill among station managers across the country.

But a bigger chunk of money was never coming back. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is scheduled to wind down in January.

‘You Have to Make a Decision’

Though the public broadcasting system is reeling, NPR’s business remains stable. Ms. Maher said NPR was expected to generate record donations this year and would deliver $22 million in financial support to members of its network, which has around 200 newsrooms. (Local stations’ fund-raising has also increased.)

While web traffic to NPR.org has declined this year, according to Comscore, a spokeswoman for NPR said the network’s total digital reach was up, factoring in platforms like YouTube, where NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts are popular. And NPR’s broadcast audience has increased roughly 8 percent this year, according to Radio Research Consortium.

The end of government support has raised questions about the future of public radio, with some stations choosing to disaffiliate with NPR and PBS entirely. Ms. Maher borrowed an analogy from a station manager, comparing public broadcasters to a family that now has to figure out where to host Thanksgiving after the loss of a parent.

“Now you have to make a decision as a family: Do you still want to come together every year for the dinner party?” Ms. Maher asked."

BREAKING: Justice Department makes BOMBSHELL announcement

Opinion | One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt - The New York Times

One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt

Dec. 29, 2025

(This is the real America with many ignorant people who have not even heard of and have not read the Jefferson Bible. You have to be incredibly ignorant to believe that America has ever been a"Christian Nation" but this is Texas, my mother's birthplace and the place where a racist police officer for no reason except the color of my skin, stuck a rifle in my stomach in 1970.)

Indian immigrants in the United States have found success, and unexpected hostility.Miraj Patel for The New York Times

It was a joyous day, the fulfillment of a quarter-century of hard work and relentless fund-raising. Srinivasachary Tamirisa, a retired doctor living in Sugar Land, Texas, beamed with pride as his dream — to erect a statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman on the grounds of a temple he had helped found — came to life.

A helicopter circled overhead, blanketing flower petals on the glittering likeness of the god, revered for his strength, selflessness and devotion to faith. Priests in white and saffron robes mounted a crane to anoint the 90-foot-tall statue and drape it with garlands of flowers. A crowd of hundreds gathered as both India’s national song, “Vande Mataram,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” were played, a perfect encapsulation of Indian Americans’ easy blending into the mores of their adopted home even as many maintained their own traditions.

But just outside the temple walls, dozens of conservative Christian protesters gathered, castigating what they called “a demon god.” Local right-wing politicians seized on the topic. “Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation,” a U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media.

A 90-foot tall statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman stands on the grounds of a temple that has earned the enmity of conservative Christian protesters.Miraj Patel for The New York Times

Tamirisa, who emigrated to the United States from India as a young doctor 50 years ago, was stunned. He had built a life that seemed the epitome of the American ideal: a successful career as an OB-GYN, delivering about a dozen babies a month. He paid his taxes faithfully, raised his children in this tidy, affluent suburb of Houston, then sent them off to attend elite colleges and become doctors and investment bankers. He had proudly become a citizen. And this is how his adopted country repaid that devotion?

“I thought this was heaven on earth,” Tamirisa told me as we toured the temple grounds. Now, suddenly, his neighbors were taunting his faith and questioning his right to be an American. “The guys came here and said: This is a devil,” he told me. “This is not a devil; this is a guru, the teacher telling you to be fearless.”

These experiences have led him to question everything about his adopted home and wonder whether future generations of Indians should set their sights on a life in America. If he had his way, he’d return to India himself and live out his old age among old friends and family. But he’s staying to dote on his four grandchildren.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “Why am I here? I question that to myself.”

Srinivasachary Tamirisa, a retired doctor in Sugar Land, Texas, helped found a Hindu temple.Miraj Patel for The New York Times

Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian animus, it’s a question many Indian Americans are asking. In its crudest form, mostly expressed on social media, this antipathy shows up as gutter racism and religious bigotry — an endless stream of invective declaring that Indians have low I.Q.s, worship devils, cheat their way into the country and commit terrible crimes. But it is fostered, in barely cloaked forms, by top Republican officials who accuse Indians of stealing American jobs.

“They engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers,” Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida referred to the H-1B visa program that allows highly skilled immigrants, many of them Indian tech workers, to come to the United States with their families as “chain migration run amok.” Many Indian Americans took umbrage when JD Vance, who is married to a Hindu daughter of Indian immigrants, expressed his hope that his wife would someday convert to Christianity.

It is a startling turn in one of the most successful migration experiments in modern history. Since 1965, when civil rights immigration law opened the United States to migrants from countries across the globe, hundreds of thousands of Indians have immigrated to the United States. No group has made a bigger success of its opportunity. Indian Americans’ median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans overall; about three-quarters of Indian American adults have at least a college degree and many work in high-status, well-paying professions in places like Houston, New York and Silicon Valley.

In public life, Indian Americans have rocketed to prominence. They have led iconic American companies like Google, Microsoft and Pepsi, and are major players in culture and science — several have won a Nobel Prize. They are a growing political force in both parties, too: Three major candidates in the 2024 presidential election were of Indian ancestry. After decades of voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, last year Indian Americans, like many immigrant groups, seemed to swing right, making them a crucial sliver in the fragile coalition that elected Donald Trump.

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“I​​ndian Americans have really been, in many ways, the poster children for America’s legal skilled immigration regime,” Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has studied Indian Americans and grew up in Houston, told me. “It’s hard to think of other groups that have been as wildly successful as Indians in America.”

Now, all of a sudden, six decades of mutually beneficial migration are coming to a shuddering halt. Most Americans have quite positive views of Indian Americans. But the combination of anti-Indian rhetoric and government visa policies — not least the chaos that has enveloped the H-1B visa — has already had a powerful chilling effect. Indians last year became the largest contingent of foreign students at American universities, but this year arrivals of Indian students fell by 44 percent.

Over the past decade, migration has become the biggest political fault line in much of the rich world. Fights over whether and how to welcome migrants, or how brutally they might be repulsed, have led to a surge in support for far-right parties in many countries and helped propel Trump back to the White House. Throughout, much of the focus has been on refugees and asylum seekers from troubled, impoverished nations and those who cross borders without authorization. But increasingly, right-wing parties are taking aim at legal, highly skilled migration too.

In a way, this makes sense. Vance and other Trump administration officials blame illegal immigration for just about every difficulty Americans face — the housing shortage, unemployment, inflation, health insurance premiums and more. But Americans face their stiffest competition for jobs and homes from immigrants here legally. Because voluntary migration is such a rare and self-selecting phenomenon — over 96 percent of the world’s people live in the country of their birth — Americans are often competing against the best educated and most ambitious people from countries across the globe.

This is especially true for India, home to 1.4 billion people. It has a formidable tradition of elite science, engineering and medical education, accessible only to those who can ace a pitiless gantlet of extremely competitive tests. For decades, the United States has welcomed those graduates, who have contributed much to American prosperity and been rewarded for it with handsome salaries and comfortable lives in the suburban idylls that typify the American dream.

But as that dream feels increasingly out of reach for many young Americans, stoking resentment at perceived outsiders who are actually achieving it makes for good, if cynical, politics. The turn against highly skilled legal immigrants, especially those who worship differently and have darker skin, was perhaps an inevitable escalation of Trump’s anti-immigration movement.

For America, though, the cost may be high. The United States has been profoundly changed by Indians coming to the country. It stands to reason it will be changed by their not coming, too.

For decades, Indian students with degrees in highly sought-after technical fields have followed a glide path to a life in the United States: win acceptance to a good American university, secure a student visa and, after graduating, find work at an American company. When Sai Sushma Pasupuleti arrived at the University of Houston in 2023 to pursue a doctorate in electrical engineering, that path was wide open.

Now, it is all but blocked. A couple of months ago, Pasupuleti attended a job fair at the university. She approached booth after booth, résumé in hand. But each representative asked one question: Are you a U.S. citizen? When she said she was not, they sent her away.

“I did a lot of hard work,” she said, crestfallen. “It’s crazy how they didn’t even look at my résumé.”

She had been a star student back home in Hyderabad, winning a prize for her master’s thesis at one of India’s prestigious institutes of technology. Her professors encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. abroad, something she had never considered because she assumed that she could not afford it. Her parents had divorced when she was a young child and her mother, who works in sales at a pharmaceutical company, raised her on her own.

“We are lower middle class,” she told me. “My mom struggled a lot, but she sent me to the best school. She tried to give me the best education, and she always believed that education is what is going to feed us.”

She had hoped to go to Germany, a leader in cutting-edge electrical engineering, but did not get a scholarship. She was offered scholarships to universities in both Britain and the United States. America, she said, had a special allure.

“Whoever goes to the U.S., the person would be shaped into a leader and a technical expert,” she said. “Anyone who has done a higher degree from America is considered very skilled worldwide.”

With a job and visa seeming out of reach, she has been focusing on commercializing her research. Along with her adviser and fellow students, she has been developing a smaller, more versatile version of a pulse power converter — a heavy, expensive device used in research, medical and military settings, that sends powerful and precise jolts of electricity. Together, they are trying to start a company. But even if they succeed in raising money, Pasupuleti may still struggle to get a work visa to remain in the United States.

“The place where I landed is like a shaky ground,” she said. “I would like to find some secure place.” Perhaps, she said, she could find a job in Europe.

She doesn’t regret the decision to come to America and said that her degree will be valuable wherever she goes. But given how much this country has invested in her education, it is puzzling that it seems determined to send her away. Three of her fellow Ph.D. students are also from elsewhere — two from China and one from Ivory Coast, Pasupuleti told me.

That is not unusual. According to the National Science Foundation, foreign students have been awarded more engineering and computer science doctorates than have U.S. citizens and permanent residents for over two decades. Top programs usually include tuition and a stipend, so American universities are spending considerable sums educating engineers who may have no choice but to leave the country rather than build their careers in America.

“Obviously we’re all grateful for the scholarships, but if they don’t want us to work here,” Pasupuleti said, her voice trailing off. “I mean, I’m sure they have their reasons.”

As the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India have had a surprisingly fraught relationship as nations. But as peoples, Americans and Indians have enjoyed a long, mutually fruitful engagement.

The Indian American writer Suketu Mehta describes this as a game of transcontinental Ping-Pong. First, the New England transcendentalists were inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads. Then, a young Indian lawyer in South Africa by the name of Mahatma Gandhi read Ralph Waldo Emerson, helping to inspire the movement for Indian independence. In turn, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement, which itself led to the opening of America to Indian immigrants, including Mehta and his parents.

“Every year since I came to this country in 1977, I felt more assured of my place in America,” Mehta told me. “And now for the first time, that’s been thrown into doubt.”

A number of Indian Americans in his circle have been applying for status as overseas citizens of India, which gives people of Indian descent the right to live permanently in India and a backup plan should things truly go awry in the United States. Racialization has come as a rude shock.

But Mehta also wondered whether Indian Americans had become a bit smug about their spectacular success in America over the past six decades, trusting that their wealth and status would shield them from the kind of bigotry that once barred them from entry and citizenship. Indian Americans, he said, tell themselves: “We are the richest, best educated people. We don’t commit crimes. We go to good schools. We came here legally. We’re not like the Mexicans.”

Mehta finds this exceptionalism both understandable and dangerous. The Indians who come to the United States are not just the most ambitious and educated. They also are mostly the beneficiaries of the durable hierarchies of caste, class and religion that stratify Indian life.

“If Indians are so great, what explains India?” he quipped.

India is changing, too. It is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, home to the world’s biggest population and an important consumer market. Given the demographic challenges the West faces, India will continue to be an important source of human talent. But it will increasingly become a consumer of it, too. In just the past few months, for example, American tech giants have announced a combined $67.5 billion in new investments in India. As foreign countries compete for opportunities, highly educated Indians will have options.

In time, it will be little wonder if a graduate from a top Indian university finds employment at home more appealing than the volatility of U.S. visa policy and the barrage of anti-Indian sentiment on offer here. One-fifth of all migrants worldwide are born in India. But despite the country’s many problems, Indians are unusually averse to leaving — only about 1 percent of Indians live outside India, a third of the global average.

Arguments in favor of migration tend to focus either on its economic benefits or its moral claim on the American psyche. But from the nation’s founding these two have been intertwined in ways both productive and confounding. Over the past year, as I’ve written about migration across the globe, I have often asked opponents of migration whether they would prefer to live in a country people flee from or flee toward. The answer, invariably, is the latter. The recent surge in support for immigration reflects, I suspect, that America’s status as the destination of choice for the world’s best minds is an intense source of pride.

It is also a source of strength. Trump clearly prefers the menacing snarl of hard power, but America’s openness to the world’s most ambitious people — and its unique ability to absorb and make use of human talent — has perhaps been its most potent form of soft power. Why try to defeat the world’s richest country when you might have the chance to join it and reap its ample rewards?

That is not the Trump administration’s way of thinking. For all the talk about abolishing D.E.I. in favor of merit, it seems to believe that for Americans to compete with the best of the world, merit must be redefined in nationalist terms, if not entirely set aside. Its National Security Strategy said so explicitly.

“Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense and innovation will evaporate,” the document states. However, it continues, “we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.” Trumpism seems to be seeking a form of talent autarky.

This is a radical change, and one that will surely leave the United States poorer, weaker and more isolated. I cannot help but detect in these nativist outbursts against Indian immigrants and their descendants a profound loss of confidence. The protesters repulsed by the towering Hanuman statue saw it as a threat to their culture, religion and traditions. But to me, that glittering hulk of alloyed metal symbolizes something else: the enduring magnetism of America’s promise, tarnished though it may be."

Opinion | One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt - The New York Times

Grim Evidence of Trump’s Boat Strikes Washes Ashore on a Colombian Peninsula - The New York Times

Grim Evidence of Trump’s Airstrikes Washes Ashore on a Colombian Peninsula

(Trump is a murderer, plain and simple and no decent person can deny it!)

"First came the scorched boat. Then the mangled bodies. Then the packets with traces of marijuana. Now, fishermen fear the ocean that feeds them.

Dec. 29, 2025Updated 3:00 p.m. ET

A thunderous boom rang out through the windless late-afternoon air. Seconds later, smoke began rising out of the sea as if the horizon were on fire.

Watching from the shore on Nov. 6, Erika Palacio Fernández whipped out her phone, she said, unwittingly recording the only verified and independent video known to date of the aftermath of an airstrike in the Trump administration’s campaign against what it calls “narco-terrorists.”

Two days later, on that same shore, a scorched 30-foot-long boat itself would wash up. Then, two mangled bodies. Then charred jerrycans, life jackets and dozens of packets that were observed by The New York Times and were similar to others that have been found after anti-narcotics operations in the region. Most packets were empty, though traces of a substance that looked and smelled like marijuana were found in the lining of a few.

The assortment of singed flotsam appears to be the first physical evidence of the U.S. campaign, which has destroyed 29 vessels and killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Every other struck boat is presumed to have sunk along with its crew and cargo. The U.S. military has offered no evidence that the boats it has destroyed were transporting illicit substances or belong to criminal networks.

Remains of a burned boat on the beach near Puerto López on the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia.

A Times analysis matched the wreckage of the boat to the one in a video posted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the night of Nov. 6, hours after Ms. Palacio took her video. Mr. Hegseth described the strike as having targeted a vessel in the Caribbean operated by an unnamed “designated terrorist organization.” He said the strike killed three people and took place in international waters.

Territorial waters

guAjira

peninsula

Gulf of 

Venezuela

The Times analysis of Ms. Palacio’s video indicates the strike took place in the Gulf of Venezuela, where Colombia and Venezuela have long disputed their maritime boundary. The analysis could not determine the exact location of the strike.

Video Captures Aftermath of U.S. Airstrike on Boat Off Venezuela

A resident on the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia captured a large plume of black smoke rising from the Gulf of Venezuela. The video, in which a ringtone plays in the background, is the only known independent footage of the aftermath of U.S. military strikes on boats the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs.Erika Palacios Fernández

The shape of the wreckage, a slender design typical of speedboats, matches that of the boat targeted in the video shared by the Defense Department, the Times analysis found, and shows damage to the boat’s hull and interior structure consistent with the impact of an airstrike. The military video shows the boat exploding and on fire beneath a large plume of smoke.

That such rare, tangible evidence is coming to light nearly two months after the early November strike is a testament both to the remoteness of the Guajira Peninsula, where the wreckage was found, and the lack of a sizable presence of the Colombian state in the area. The region is governed semiautonomously by an Indigenous community, the Wayuu, whose more than half a million people straddle the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

The U.S. military’s campaign against boats that the Trump administration claims are smuggling drugs has shifted largely to the Pacific since November. The Nov. 6 strike off the Guajira Peninsula took place during an earlier phase, when the campaign seemed to be aimed at Venezuelan, rather than Colombian, vessels.

A wide range of legal experts say the U.S. strikes are illegal because the military is prohibited from deliberately targeting civilians, even if they are believed to have committed a crime, unless they pose an immediate threat. Venezuela plays a smaller role in the global drug trade than other countries in the region. In private, Trump administration officials say their main goal is to drive Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power.

The arid Guajira Peninsula is South America’s northernmost jut of land, and has long been known as a smuggler’s launchpad for various contraband, from coffee to electronics to illicit drugs. Reaching it by land requires traversing a labyrinth of rutted dirt tracks that are entirely unmarked, making passage without a local guide impossible. Vultures prowl the sky and rattlesnakes hide in the scrub.

The speedboat’s wreckage and then the two bodies were found on Nov. 8 by fishermen who called Aristótele Palmar García, a Wayuu police inspector responsible for that stretch of beach. Mr. Palmar said he has little training or tools and when he arrived on the beach he had medical gloves only because his sister worked at a local clinic.

“The boat itself smelled like burned meat,” Mr. Palmar, 31, recalled. “And the bodies — we had to bury them because the vultures and stray dogs were beginning to eat them.”

He said he called the regional police, “but nothing happened for days, or even weeks.”

One body had been reduced to skin and bones, Mr. Palmar said. He described the other as bloated, sun bleached and significantly burned, with no ears and one arm severed at the elbow.

Mr. Palmar said he and local fishermen used sticks to push the remains toward five-foot-deep graves they had dug on the beach. In keeping with Wayuu tradition, they sprinkled chirrinchi, a local liquor distilled from cane, over the graves. Then they laid thorny cactus over them to keep dogs from digging them up.

The regional director of Medicina Legal, which is Colombia’s national government-run network of forensic laboratories, Erika Patricia Vargas Sánchez, told The Times that the remains of two people had been disinterred from the same area described by Mr. Palmar and were transferred into Medicina Legal’s custody in the city of Barranquilla on Dec. 16 and 17, five weeks after they washed ashore. She said an autopsy had not yet been performed on either body.

The plastic packets that washed up in Castilletes, a beach community a few miles south of the wreckage that sits right on the Venezuelan border, left locals confused. Most of those seen by Times journalists who traveled to the area had been partly burned or melted and were empty except for sand. They were reinforced with packing tape and appeared to have had labels that had faded. 

Several packets had traces of marijuana inside their lining, including a packet that was lodged inside a burned life vest. An official with Colombia’s anti-narcotics police in the capital, Bogotá, who asked to remain anonymous because she was not authorized to speak with the press, said neither she nor counterparts in La Guajira whom she had spoken to had any knowledge of the packets.

Experts on the local drug trade said smuggling marijuana and cocaine together was common on the Guajira Peninsula and in other areas along Colombia’s coastline. Transporting the two drugs together, they said, often indicated that the smugglers were operating on a smaller scale, rather than as part of large cartels. At least half a dozen interdictions of smuggling boats by the Colombian authorities in the past year have found both drugs, according to local news reports.

“The cocaine and marijuana market in La Guajira is operated by small community-based ventures as much as it is by armed groups,” said Estefanía Ciro, who leads a Colombian research institute studying narcotics trafficking. “This narrative of cartels, of Pablo Escobar, doesn’t allow us to see that in many places this is everyday life. One day they carry marijuana, another cocaine, another fish.”

Most people in La Guajira, however, are not tied to the drug trade, but instead fish and herd livestock for a living. Mexi Misael Rincón, a fisherman, uses a boat nearly identical to the vessel struck on Nov. 6 that was anchored just a few yards from where the wreckage lay on the beach. Since the attack, he has dared to venture only into shallow waters, where he traps lobster.

Mr. Rincón’s mother, Carmelena González, 76, said that since the boat strike four of her other sons, who also fish, had left Guajira for distant urban centers to find other ways to make money. That’s in part because fish essential to making a living are farther out.

“In normal times we’d go out eight, 10, 12 miles for the tuna that fetches a better price,” said Vicente Fernández, another fisherman from the area, and uncle to Ms. Palacio, who took the video of the strike’s aftermath. “We’ve left our nets out there for weeks because we’re too afraid to retrieve them.”

Mr. Fernández said the price of seafood in the local markets had plummeted because locals, owing to superstitions, were afraid of consuming any animal that might have eaten human flesh. 

Nor, he added, was he going to risk sailing farther than a few miles from shore. He said that in the weeks since the November strike, he’d occasionally seen drones flying above his boat.

“They look like avioncitos,” he said, using a colloquial term for little airplanes. “They look like birds tracking down prey.”

Remains of a burned boat on the beach near Puerto López on the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia.

Max Bearak is a reporter for The Times based in Bogotá, Colombia.

Christiaan Triebert is a Times reporter working on the Visual Investigations team, a group that combines traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and analysis of visual evidence to verify and source facts from around the world."

Grim Evidence of Trump’s Boat Strikes Washes Ashore on a Colombian Peninsula - The New York Times