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In a federal lawsuit filed by the Democratic-run state, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quickly disputed the state’s order to send 200 Oregon National Guard soldiers to the state of Oregon.

The troops would be “called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days,” according to a memo signed by Hegseth and delivered to the state’s top military officer, the day after US President Donald Trump declared he wanted to send soldiers to “worship-ravaged Portland, the state’s capital.”

In a conversation with the president on Sunday, Oregon’s governor, Democrat Tina Kotek, admitted to having an objection to the deployment.

She stated in a statement that “Oregon is our home and not a military target.”

Soon after state officials received the memo, Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield sued Hegseth, Trump, and US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in federal court in Portland on Sunday.

“What we’re seeing is not about public safety,” Rayfield&nbsp asserted. The president is using his political slam dunk to attack the media at the expense of our community, according to the article.

In the US, the National Guard is a state-based reserve military force that can be called upon to perform active duty. It also supports military operations abroad and typically responds to domestic emergencies like civil unrest and natural disasters.

Trump stated in a social media post on Saturday that he had directed the Pentagon to send all necessary Troops to protect Portland, and any of our ICE facilities under siege from attacks by Antifa and other domestic terrorists, despite the fact that the memo does not specifically mention Portland as the target of the proposed deployment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s division is under the Homeland Security Department.

Trump continued, “I am also allowing Full Force,” if necessary.

According to the CATO Institute, people with right-wing ideologies have been to blame for 54 percent of politically motivated murders in the nation since 2020, more than double the number that has been attributed to the left, despite the Trump administration’s pledge to crack down on Antifa, a loosely affiliated left-wing anti-fascist movement.

A deadly shooting occurred at an ICE facility in Texas just days before Trump’s announcement on Saturday. Trump blamed the “radical left” for the attack, which claimed one detainee was killed, and two others were seriously hurt in it, without providing any evidence.

Trump has mandated troop deployments to several states and cities where his political rivals, the Democratic Party, are in power.

After previous deployments to the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California, he has also ordered troops to be sent to&nbsp, Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois.

Despite the crackdown, protests against the US government’s anti-immigration policies continue outside ICE facilities, where advocates claim that people are being held in degrading and crowded conditions as the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations.

Over the weekend, protesters gathered outside of an ICE building in Portland, some of whom wore colorful costumes.

After an earlier crowd had begun to disperse, less than 100 people were present at the protest outside the federal building in the city, which is home to some 635, 000 people.

Meghna Gupta*, a graduate from age 23, a few years of work in India, and a move to the United States before she turned 30 to settle there, had planned it all.

So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited until the promotion, which would have taken her to West Coast in California.

Now, Gupta is 29, and her dreams lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech firms have used for more than three decades to bring skilled workers to the US.

Companies that sponsor these applications have had significant new costs as a result of Trump’s decision to increase the fee for visas from about $2,000 to $60,000 in many cases. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60, 000. However, the minimum wage for the employer now increases to $ 160, 000, and in many cases, employers will likely find American workers with comparable skills for lower pay.

This is the Trump administration’s rationale as it presses US companies to hire local talent amid its larger anti-immigration policies. This is a blow, however, for the thousands of young people who are still enthralled by the American dream. And nowhere is that more so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, despite an economy that is growing faster than most other major nations, has still been bleeding skilled young people to developed nations.

Indian IT companies have sponsored the most H-1B visas of all companies for years, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and contracting out their expertise to other companies as well. This changed: In 2014, seven out of the 10 companies that received the most H-1B visas were Indian or started in India, In 2024, that number dropped to four.

In a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company in the top ten H-1B visa recipients in the first six months of 2025.

But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. In 2024, over 70% of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals, including those in the medical and tech sectors. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent.

Thousands of people in India are now concerned that the US is being blocked by this route.

“It has left me heartbroken”, Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump’s fee hike.

Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 in Uttarakhand, said, “I planned for this all my life. Everything revolved around this goal for me to move to the US.”

“The so-called ‘ American Dream ‘ looks like a cruel joke now”.

‘ In the hole ‘

Gupta’s crisis highlights a wider contradiction that currently defines India. On the one hand, the country — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention — is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

After surpassing Japan earlier this year, India currently has the fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, behind only China, India, and the US. But the country’s creation of new jobs lags far behind the number of young people who enter its workforce every year, widening its employment gap. The biggest cities in India are creaking as a result of inadequate public transportation, potholed roads, traffic jams, and growing income inequality.

The result: Millions like Gupta aspire to a life in the West, picking their career choices, usually in sectors like engineering or medicine, and working to get into hard-fought seats in top colleges – and then migrating. In India, there has been a significant increase in the migration of skilled professionals, particularly those in STEM fields, to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US in the past five years.

As per the Indian government’s data, those numbers rose from 94, 145 Indians in 2020 to 348, 629 by 2024 — a 270 percent rise.

Trump’s new visa system could now effectively close the entryway for those skilled workers. The fee hike comes on the back of a series of tension points in a souring US-India relationship in recent months. New Delhi is currently subject to a steep 50% tariff on US exports, half of which is used to purchase Russian crude, which the US claims is used to fund the Kremlin’s conflict in Ukraine.

Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian trade officer and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the new visa policy will be “the ones that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT services jobs, software developers, project managers, and back-end support in finance and healthcare”.

Sponsorship is unprofitable, especially for smaller businesses and startups, according to Srivastava, because for many of these positions, the new $100, 000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee’s annual salary. “The cost of hiring a foreign worker now exceeds local hiring by a wide margin”, he said, adding that this would shift the hiring calculus of US firms.

According to Srivastava, “American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-filling specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs.”

“The market has already priced in this pivot”, he said, citing the fall of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “as investors brace for shrinking US hiring”.

He argued that Indian STEM graduates and students “must completely reevaluate their career paths in the US.”

To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, a body with members across 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and distress among H-1B visa holders and other immigrant visa holders”.

According to Kaushik, “to remind them that they don’t belong.” “And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible”.

The announcement was made shortly after the new academic year’s start of classes, with many international students, including those from India, which sends the majority of foreign students to the US.

Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. According to an analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates, 41% of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 will still be residing in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent.

However, Kaushik claimed that their hotline has received more than 80 inquiries from students who are now concerned about what the future holds.

“They know that they’re already in the hole”, he said, referring to the tuition and other fees running into tens of thousands of dollars that they have invested in a US education, with increasingly unclear job prospects.

According to Srivastava of GTRI, the current US landscape reflects “less opportunities, tougher competition, and shrinking returns on US education.”

Nasscom, India’s apex IT trade body, has said the policy’s abrupt rollout could “potentially disrupt families” and the continuity of ongoing onshore projects for the country’s technology services firms.

The new policy, it added, could “ripple effects” on the global job markets and the US innovation ecosystem, noting that “additional cost will require adjustments” for businesses.

They “do not care about people at all.”

Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one in a chain of India’s most prestigious engineering school, and landed a job with Facebook soon after that.

He currently drives a BMW sedan to work while living with his wife in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, US. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas.

He was agitated by the White House news of last Saturday.

He spent that evening figuring out flights for his friends — Indians on H-1B visas who were out of the country, one in London, another in Bengaluru, India — to see if they could rush back to the US before the new rules kicked in on Sunday, as major US tech firms had recommended to their employees.

The Trump administration has since clarified that existing H-1B visas and renewals will not be subject to the new fees. For now, Ansh’s job and status in the US are secure.

He claimed that this isn’t much of a reassurance.

“In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India”, Ansh told Al Jazeera. However, people make those life changes because of this type of instability. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India”?

Ansh claimed that moving back to India, despite causing a dramatic change in their lives and plans, was at least something they should think about because they are not expecting, was at least something they should think about. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked?

The US government’s approach shows that they don’t care about people at all, he said. “These types of decisions are like … brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed”.

According to Ansh, the new visa policy also has a chance of causing the US to lose. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success”, he said.

He claimed that innovation won’t occur once talent is lost. “It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Everyone would benefit from its impact, in some way or another.

India’s conflict

After the announcement from the White House on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, said that the government was encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.

Some experts concurred with Mishra’s assertion that the H-1B visa suspension might offer an opportunity for India because it could theoretically stop the nation from experiencing the brain drain it has long experienced.

GTRI’s Srivastava said that US companies that have until now relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B might now explore more local hiring or offshore some jobs. According to him, “Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery because the $100, 000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive.”

“US postings will be reserved only for mission-critical roles, while the bulk of hiring and project execution shifts to India and other offshore hubs”, he told Al Jazeera. This “encouraging” reliance on offshore teams, which raises well-known questions about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination, is what US clients are seeing as costs rise.

Srivastava noted that India’s tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return.

But that won’t be simple. He said that even though hiring in India’s IT and services sector has been growing year-on-year, the gaps are real, ranging from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and data science. Additionally, returning students who have received US training should anticipate salaries that are well above Indian benchmarks.

And in reality, Kaushik said, many H-1B aspirants are looking at different countries as alternatives to the US — not India.

The senior engineer at Meta, Ansh, concurred. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology”, whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services.

As world leaders gathered in New York City for the 80th General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City over the past week, Gaza and Palestine have been the main topics of conversation at the UN.

Many nations urged the end of Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian state during UN Security Council (UNSC) meetings, sideline events, and media briefings.

Israel killed at least 661 Palestinians in Gaza and continued to push on unabated with its ground assault on Gaza City as the majority of the world rallied around Palestine during the UNGA’s first week.

Diplomats and analysts contend that only rhetoric and diplomatic maneuvers, such as the establishment of a Palestinian state, can’t change the situation of the Palestinians under bombardment and occupation.

To compel Israel to put an end to its abuses, rights advocates are urging an arms embargo and imposing sanctions on the country.

The Hague Group’s executive secretary, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, claimed that the “situation keeps getting worse” because Israel continues to have access to weapons and resources.

“The genocidal machine’s economic might has not yet diminished. Gandikota-Nellutla told Al Jazeera, “Israel continues to receive arms.”

recognition of Palestine

Difficulty nations convened for a summit during the UNGA to support the establishment of a two-state solution, while several Western nations, including Australia, France, and the UK, formally recognized Palestine.

Protesters outside the UN complex banged on pots to protest the deadly hunger in Gaza as the meeting was about to begin.

The increasing recognition of the state of Palestine by the world’s citizens is a positive development, according to Maamoun Hussein, one of the demonstrators.

According to Hussein, “It’s a testament to the Palestinian people’s perseverance over the past 78 years of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Hussein said of the increasing number of nations now recognizing Palestinian statehood.

However, these nations are authorized to place an arms embargo. They are able to impose pressure on Israel. Instead, the current Arab nations are in danger of extinction. Because they are changing the legal system to favor Israel, a terrorist, genocidal state, the entire world is in danger.

Israel has recently attacked Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar in addition to ravaging Gaza and intensifying its attacks and annexation efforts in the occupied West Bank. A humanitarian boat bound for Gaza is also widely believed to have been struck by the Israeli military in a Tunisian port.

Gandikota-Nellutla added that more needs to be done, despite acknowledging the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

She told Al Jazeera, “The risk is that countries stop here, that nations pat themselves in the back and declare, “We’ve done our bit,” and move on without severing the material arteries of the genocide at this time.”

Algerian Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmed Attaf made the warning that global stability will depend on whether the international community can bolster Israel and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state based on borders established before the 1967 war at a UNSC meeting.

According to Attaf, who cited the recent UN Commission of Inquiry report that accused Israel of genocide, “there is no room for denial that what Gaza has been enduring is a comprehensive war of annihilation.”

“We are not yet there.”

About 20 000 Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023, according to diplomats from various nations who have met the day after their meeting to reiterate their calls for their protection.

This suffering is not unavoidable, he said. Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot stated at the event that choices are a result of choices, actions, and inaction, and that choices can change.

Brazil, Jordan, and Spain led a campaign to mobilize political and financial support for UNRWA, a UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which Israel has unilaterally outlawed, on the UNGA’s sidelines.

Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank are in dire need of assistance from UNRWA, according to Philippe Lazzarini, the organization’s head.

There have been many acknowledgements and outrages, but none of them have transcended that, Lazzarini claimed.

What is the real question, then, about how much influence will be required to affect the ground situation? He continued, “We are not yet there.”

Lazzarini claimed that the Gaza crisis has reached its impasse today as a result of Israel’s “impunity,” suggesting that Palestinian lives have been “devalued” by the rest of the world.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, delegates from more than 50 nations took the podium as they left the UNGA hall on Friday.

Representatives of 34 nations gathered nearby as part of the Hague Group to discuss possible measures to stop Gaza’s atrocities, including imposing an energy embargo on Israel and preventing Israeli weapons shipments from their ports.

Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Iceland, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Spain, and Qatar were among the participants at the gathering, which included nations from four continents.

International collective action is the best way to end Israeli impunity, according to Gandikota-Nellutla, the head of the Hague Group.

Donald Trump promises to address a gathering of US admirals and generals in Quantico, Virginia, stating his commitment to being strong and resilient.

United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from all over the world to the Marine Corps base without giving any notice. Senior commanders of the one-star rank or higher and their top advisers are among the summons.

Trump told the Reuters news agency in an interview that “we love them, they’re cherished leaders, to be strong, tough, smart, and compassionate.”

“That’s it, esprit de corps,” the statement read. He continued, “It’s about time someone did that.”

Trump’s presence may outweigh Hegseth’s discussion of the need to a “warrior ethos” throughout the military, which was expected to include topics in other fields. Two-, three-, and four-star generals and admirals command US troops all over the world, including in remote areas like South Korea, Japan, and across the Middle East.

Trump claimed in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that those present would be “talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being great, talking about a lot of good, positive things.”

Unsurprisingly, no explanation was initially given for the unusual gathering’s initial report about the summit.

Trump initially appeared unaware of it when reporters asked him during an Oval Office interview.

Why is it such a big deal that they will let me go? Trump posed a question.

In front of a non-partisan audience of military leaders, Trump’s participation in the meeting increases the chance of a politicized event.

For instance, he attacked Joe Biden, the Democratic president, in campaign-style remarks made to uniformed personnel at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in June.

The Republican president also plans to use the military more frequently in US cities, arguing that fighting crime where Democratic leaders are failing to protect the public is necessary.

In the District of Columbia, the National Guard is still conducting patrols, and Memphis, Tennessee is anticipated to have a smaller deployment.

Trump also approved sending troops to Portland, Oregon, to fight “domestic terrorists” on Saturday.

Trump previously sent the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, where there were protests against immigration raids, over the objections of local and state officials.

There are ongoing lawsuits in California and Washington, DC over the deployment of troops, and by law, the National Guard can only be deployed at the governor’s request.

Hegseth will speak to his senior military leaders early next week, according to a top spokesman for the Pentagon.

800 generals and admirals of all ranks are present in the military. Many of the world’s more than a dozen countries and time zones have commanding officers and thousands of service members.

Former Fox News host Hegseth has made a number of changes since taking office, including changing the Pentagon’s name to the Department of War and enforcing a pledge to journalists covering the Pentagon to stop publishing unauthorised information.

At least 17 people were killed in three attacks, according to reports that the US is considering attacking the South American nation, and Trump has recently ordered air strikes on ships leaving Venezuela.