We examine the online debate ignited by Pantone’s Colour of the Year, Cloud Dancer.
This episode dives into the discussion prompted by Pantone, unpacking the uneasy relationship between colour and fascism. From hardline efforts to regulate colour in public life to the ways vibrancy and maximalism reassert themselves, we explore how colour becomes a quiet form of resistance across art, fashion, film, and design.
Presenter: Stefanie Dekker
A deadly cyclone hits Indonesia’s Sumatra, wiping out communities. Al Jazeera examines the scale of destruction.
In late November 2025, a powerful cyclone unleashed days of extreme rainfall across three provinces on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
At least 1,100 people were killed, and more than 100 remain missing. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, and many public facilities were badly damaged. Entire villages have been wiped out by muddy floodwaters.
Al Jazeera’s Indonesia team has followed the story on the ground, hearing firsthand accounts from survivors, as emergency services fight to reach those in need. Weeks after the disaster, the struggle continues. People shelter in flimsy tents, which offer little protection from the extreme heat. Illnesses continue to spread. Survivors and political analysts alike question whether the government’s response has been efficient and coordinated enough.
The escalation of state violence in the United States has been unprecedented. In the span of three weeks, two people were shot dead in Minneapolis during “anti-immigration” raids. Both were branded “domestic terrorists”.
Meanwhile last week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used five-year-old Liam Ramos as bait to get his asylum-seeking father to come out of their home; the two have now been taken to a detention centre in Texas. The administration calls this – the act of locking up children in mass detention camps – “immigration enforcement”. ICE detained at least 3,800 children last year, including 20 babies.
Across the country, the violence inflicted by ICE is creating a culture of fear within migrant communities.
I know this fear; I know this violence. These are the fear and violence that have long devastated my birthplace – Palestine. I hope Americans never have to deal with the scale of death, forced disappearances and violence that generations of Palestinians have had to suffer. But under US President Donald Trump, they are already now experiencing the tactics that are so familiar to Palestinian victims of the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The parallels are impossible to ignore.
In 2025, 32 people, called “illegals”, died in ICE custody, making it the deadliest year in two decades. They died of seizure, heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, infectious disease, suicide or neglect. ICE accepted no responsibility for their deaths. In the occupied West Bank, where I was born, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in two years and four months.
Nearly 75 percent of the 68,440 people ICE detained last year had no criminal record. Thousands of Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons without charge or a trial.
With the latest killings and kidnapping of US citizens, even people who are “legally” here are now afraid. There is a growing atmosphere of insecurity and anxiety that anyone at anytime can be disappeared or harmed.
Across the country, ICE violence is depriving children of education and businesses. For example, in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, 30,000 students, nearly 20 percent of district enrolment, were absent the week after raids began in 2025, and in Los Angeles, shop owners reported a significant loss in sales as customers stayed home.
I know what it feels like to dread passing by armed security personnel who at any moment may shoot you and then call you a “terrorist”. My family members know what it is like to be besieged and stormed; to witness a public execution.
This type of violence has been the daily reality of Palestinians across historic Palestine long before October 7, 2023. After that day, it has just intensified. Just like in the US, children have also not been spared. Of the 240 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank in 2025, 55 were children.
Just this month, Israeli soldiers killed 14-year-old Mohammed Naasan during a raid on his village. They claimed he was running to them with a rock in his hand.
The Israeli military routinely fires live ammunition at Palestinian children and justifies it by claiming they were throwing stones. Apparently, a Palestinian child with a rock poses an existential threat to one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world, to soldiers in full body armour shooting from armoured vehicles.
Palestinian children are regularly used by Israeli soldiers as “human shields” when they raid neighbourhoods; their detention and abuse is often used to put pressure on family members to surrender — just as ICE did with Liam Ramos and his father.
In Israeli detention, at least 75 Palestinians were killed between October 7, 2023 and August 2025, including 17-year-old Walid Ahmad. In at least 12 cases, detainees died after being beaten or tortured by Israeli security forces.
The United Nations has documented systematic torture and ill-treatment including repeated beatings, waterboarding, stress positions, and the use of rape and other sexual and gender-based violence.
More than 300 Palestinian children are currently being held in military detention as of November 2025. These children are detained indefinitely without charge or trial based on secret evidence that is neither disclosed to them nor to their attorneys.
Among them was Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian-American from Florida, who was held for over nine months. Upon his release, he had to be taken to hospital due to his poor condition and malnutrition. Ibrahim told his family he witnessed another teenager die in front of him in detention after being denied medical attention for scabies and a severe stomach virus.
The reason why the violence we see in the US is so reminiscent of what happens in the West Bank is because what we face: Security structures shaped by white supremacy and a colonial mindset.
The Israeli state perceives the Palestinian people as less than human and an immediate threat; that is why, in the Israeli state’s logic, they need to be kept in an apartheid system where they are surveilled, subjugated and eventually forced out.
Palestinians are murdered for simply being Palestinian, for refusing to leave their ancestral land, for serving as a testament that Palestine was never “without a land without people”.
In the US, too, the state has decided that there are some people who are less than human and pose an immediate threat. It too has deployed a heavily militarised force to spy on, subjugate and force them out, using technology first tested on Palestinians and imported to America.
Both repressive systems operate on the same principle that brown bodies and their allies can be detained without cause, shot without consequence, and left to die.
Of course, we cannot make a full parallel between the violence in the US and in Palestine.
The Israeli state has expressed through both actions and words a clear intent to fully eliminate the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians are currently facing a genocide in Gaza and at a slower rate in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli state has a clear project of erasure that seeks to wipe out even the historical records of Palestinian existence.
Nevertheless, it is clear that today Americans are getting a taste of what Palestinians have experienced for decades: state terror. This is what deploying armed forces who shoot citizens, who use five-year-old children as tactical bait, who let detainees die at unprecedented rates is called. In the United States, in Palestine and wherever power decides that certain lives do not count, the patterns of state terror repeat.
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that the Party’s final, most essential command was to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Before he died, his publisher released a statement: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
We are living that nightmare now, watching videos of executions and being told they were self-defence. We must be the ones to fight for change. Everywhere, we must be the ones who take the struggle for freedom into our own hands.
Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan have cast doubts over their participation in the T20 World Cup after Bangladesh were kicked out of the tournament by the International Cricket Council (ICC).
Bangladesh, whose spot in the upcoming global tournament was confirmed in June 2024, were expelled from it on Saturday after a weeks-long impasse with the ICC over the demanded relocation of their fixtures from India to Sri Lanka. The ICC gave Bangladesh’s berth to Scotland, the next best-ranked T20 team.
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The ICC was accused of practising “double standards” in its extraordinary move to oust a full member nation on the basis of a logistical deadlock.
The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) swiftly threw its weight behind Bangladesh and said it will not make a “final decision” on its team’s participation until next week.
PCB Chairman Mohsin Naqvi met Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday to discuss the issue but did not clarify whether Pakistan would travel to the tournament, which begins on February 7.
“It was agreed that the final decision will be taken either on Friday or next Monday,” Naqvi, who is also Pakistan’s interior minister, said in a post on X.
All of Pakistan’s World Cup matches have been scheduled in Sri Lanka because of the fraught relations between New Delhi and Islamabad.
The controversy involving the three South Asian nations began three weeks ago when the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) requested that all of its team’s matches scheduled to be played in India be shifted to Sri Lanka. It cited concerns over its players’ safety and security.
It followed the abrupt removal of Bangladeshi fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman from his Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise, the Kolkata Knight Riders, upon a directive from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
The reason the BCCI gave was “developments all around”. That might refer to the deteriorating ties between Dhaka and New Delhi since August 2024 when Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted from power and fled to India, where she continues to live.
Bangladesh reasoned that if one of their players was not safe in India, it could not jeopardise the safety of the entire squad and support staff.
However, the ICC, currently led by Jay Shah, the son of Indian Home Minister Amit Shah and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, rejected the relocation request. The governing body said there were no “credible” or “verifiable” threats to the Bangladeshi team.
After a further back-and-forth between the BCB and the ICC – during which neither party moved from its original position – Bangladesh were ousted from the tournament and replaced by Scotland.
In late 2024, the ICC brokered a three-year agreement between India and Pakistan that allowed both countries to play their matches at neutral venues whenever their neighbour hosted an international tournament.
The decision came after India’s refusal to travel to Pakistan for the ICC Champions Trophy over security concerns raised by the Indian government. India played all their matches, including the final, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
For the ICC Women’s World Cup 2025, cohosted by India and Sri Lanka, Pakistan played their fixtures in Sri Lanka and are scheduled to do the same at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026.
BCB President Aminul Islam pointed at this agreement and accused the ICC of “hypocrisy” for dismissing a similar request from Bangladesh.
While the BCB and the ICC were stuck in an impasse, the PCB decided to partake in the dispute by supporting Bangladesh’s request for a neutral venue.
At an ICC board meeting called to discuss the issue last week, Pakistan were the only full member nation to support Bangladesh’s position. Other board members endorsed the idea of replacing Bangladesh if they refused to play in India.
While the controversy has to do with sport, the underlying tensions are deeply political, and the three nations share decades-long fractured ties.
After the 1947 partition of British India, India emerged as an independent state while a Muslim-majority Pakistan was created with eastern and western wings separated by more than 2,000km (1,300 miles).
Less than 25 years later, the eastern wing broke away after a bloody war to become Bangladesh. Indian troops played a decisive role in supporting Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founder and Hasina’s father.
Fast forward to 2024 – the once-close ties between India and Bangladesh were fractured with Hasina’s ouster, and the ties between Bangladesh and Pakistan, previously near rock bottom, improved rapidly.
So as Bangladesh were locked in negotiations with the ICC, Naqvi, Pakistan’s cricket chief, publicly criticised the governing body.
“You can’t have double standards,” Naqvi said on Saturday.
“You can’t say for one country [India] they can do whatever they want and for the others to have to do the complete opposite. That’s why we’ve taken this stand and made clear Bangladesh have had an injustice done to them. They should play in the World Cup. They are a major stakeholder in cricket.”
Within days of the BCCI’s decision to remove Mustafizur from the IPL, the PCB reacted by offering the star Bangladeshi bowler an option to register for the Pakistan Super League, the country’s premier franchise T20 tournament.
Despite reports in Pakistani media that the PCB may pull out of the T20 World Cup, Naqvi has not indicated that might be the case.
There has also been speculation that Pakistan may forfeit their match against India on February 15 in Colombo as a symbolic gesture in support of Bangladesh.
With a final decision expected on Friday or Monday, the ongoing uncertainty could disrupt Pakistan’s preparations for the tournament. They are scheduled to play the tournament’s opening game on February 7 against the Netherlands.
Ehsan Mani, former chairman of the ICC and the PCB, has warned the PCB against withdrawing from the World Cup.
“This brings politics into the game, and I have always advocated that the two should be kept strictly separate,” he told Al Jazeera.
The rivalry between Pakistan and India on the political pitch has long spilled over onto the cricket field, which has increasingly become a proxy battleground, especially since tensions escalated drastically after a four-day military confrontation between the two neighbours in May.
India’s refusal to travel to Pakistan for the Champions Trophy, which they went on to win unbeaten in the UAE, further strained relations.
When the teams met again at the Asia Cup in September, Indian players declined to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts. After a tense final, which India won, the Indian team also refused to accept the trophy from Naqvi, who also heads the Asian Cricket Council.
Ali Khan, a professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences and author of Cricket in Pakistan: Nation, Identity, and Politics, described Pakistan’s support of Bangladesh as “absolutely the principled stance to take”.
“If India and Pakistan can both be accommodated in similar situations, then why not another full ICC member [Bangladesh]? It is also important for Pakistan to stand up for the way the ICC is operating now,” he told Al Jazeera.
Khan cautioned, however, that threatening a boycott was a step too far.
“It veers towards performative and petty point-scoring then. Pakistan should continue to bring up the inequity within the ICC at every meeting forcefully, persuade and shame others to speak up as well. That requires strong diplomacy rather than chest-thumping.”
Meanwhile, veteran Indian cricket writer Sharda Ugra said Pakistan’s intervention appeared aimed at building an alliance.
“If Pakistan does back out of the tournament, it will obviously disappoint the cricket community,” she said.
Ugra believes Naqvi’s move is aimed at “annoying the ICC and the BCCI and putting them on the back foot”, especially as he is also Pakistan’s interior minister.
“But if Pakistan pulls out, it could have enormous consequences.”
Khan argued that while the ICC has taken principled positions in the past, including the reintegration of apartheid-era South Africa, its balance has shifted.
“Sadly, India’s enormous financial clout in cricket has unbalanced the body so much that it has simply become a mouthpiece for the Indian government with other member nations also responsible for this through their timid acceptance of Indian diktat,” he said.
Ugra also criticised the England and Wales Cricket Board and Cricket Australia for their respective silence on the matter.
United States President Donald Trump’s $5bn lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase resurfaces his accusations of debanking – the act of removing a person or organisation’s access to financial services.
The complaint, filed in a Florida court on Thursday, alleges that the bank singled him out for political reasons and closed several of his accounts following the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which was perpetrated by his supporters.
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“JPMC does not close accounts for political or religious reasons. We do close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company. We regret having to do so, but often rules and regulatory expectations lead us to do so,” the bank said in a statement.
While the lawsuit was filed in his personal capacity, the concept of debanking has long been in the crosshairs of the Trump White House.
Late last year, the White House launched a high-profile effort targeting the nation’s largest financial institutions, accusing them of closing accounts based on political bias. Within days, Trump signed an executive order restricting banks from denying accounts on those grounds.
Trump has long framed “debanking” as a systemic effort targeting conservatives. But evidence for this claim is limited.
A Reuters news agency review of more than 8,000 complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found only 35 related to political or religious reasons, let alone targeting Christians or conservatives specifically.
The push by banks centres on the use of “reputational risk” as a standard that allows them to weigh the social or political fallout of doing business with a client.
Critics say this practice makes banks arbiters of morality – freezing, withholding, or closing accounts based not on financial considerations but on social and geopolitical concerns. This approach has pulled financial institutions into the middle of cultural and geopolitical debates.
While often cast as a partisan issue, data show that Trump’s core base, evangelical Christians, are not the ones typically targeted by debanking efforts.
A report from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), a research organisation that looks at the experience of the US Muslim community, found that 27 percent of Muslim Americans and 14 percent of Jewish Americans have faced trouble banking, compared with negligible rates among Christian denominations, especially with Trump’s core base, evangelicals, at 8 percent.
Overall, 93 percent of Muslim Americans reported experiencing trouble with banking access. In one situation involving Citibank, the New York Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) accused the financial institution of not opening the account of a Muslim woman because of her husband, whom she wanted to nominate as a beneficiary and who is a Palestinian Muslim. CAIR did not release the name of the woman at the centre of the complaint.
“It [debanking] is a huge barrier for actually Muslims fulfilling philanthropic goals,” Erum Ikramullah, a senior research project manager at the ISPU, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a huge barrier for the actual Muslim-based, Muslim-led organisations who are managing relief both domestically and overseas.”
Between October 2023 and May 2024, at least 30 US nonprofits providing humanitarian aid to Gaza have had accounts closed.
“Muslim Americans and Armenian Americans have faced de-banking on account of their last names,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts who founded the CFPB in 2013, said in a Senate Banking Committee hearing last year.
But Trump continues to allege that groups like Christians and conservatives are the ones discriminated against.
Among them include the National Committee for Religious Freedom, led by former Republican Senator and Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. Brownback alleges that Chase closed his account on religious grounds, a claim the bank denies.
Regardless, the push to take on the problem of debanking is a rare spot of bipartisanship in Washington, with Trump and Warren both agreeing that banks should change their ways.
A US banking regulator said last month that the nine largest US banks put restrictions on industries that it deems risky, but this has been a long-term issue for several industries.
Operation Choke Point, under the administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama, targeted exploitative industries like payday lenders and arms dealers. The initiative pushed banks to consider entire categories of businesses – and the individuals who worked in them – as reputationally risky, even when that view lagged cultural sentiment.
In response, Frank Keating, the then-CEO of the American Banking Association, slammed the move in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, saying that the “Justice Department [is] telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges”.
Ultimately, that scrutiny affected people working in several industries over the last decade, most particularly in adult entertainment, cannabis, and cryptocurrency.
Within months of the new guidance from the Obama administration, hundreds of adult performers lost access to banking services from Chase Bank. The ability to keep a bank account persisted for adult performers. In 2022, adult performer Alana Evans penned an op-ed for The Daily Beast describing how Wells Fargo closed her account.
The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, found that 63 percent of adult workers have lost access to a bank account because of their work in the legal industry, and nearly 50 percent have been rejected for a loan because of the nature of the profession.
“I think that when I talk to a lot of people about this issue, or when I’ve talked to even legislators about this, they really can’t believe it, because it’s never been anything that they’ve encountered personally. The idea that a bank could shut off your account because they disagreed with the type of work you do is sort of inconceivable to most people,” Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, told Al Jazeera.
The cannabis business has faced similar problems. Over the last decade, both laws and public sentiment around marijuana use have drastically changed. Now, more people use marijuana daily than drink alcohol, and recreational use is legal in 24 states as well as Washington, DC.
Yet, legitimate businesses that cater to this growing market share and those who work for them have been subject to debanking.
Kyle Sherman, the CEO and founder of Flowhub, a cannabis payment processing company, testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee last year that his employees are routinely discriminated against in consumer banking. He alleged that one of his employees was denied a mortgage because of what he does for a living, as well as others who have had their personal accounts closed.
While state laws have shifted on marijuana’s stance, federal laws have not kept up, making it harder for banks to navigate the reputational risk.
Trump recently eased pressure on the marijuana industry by reclassifying the substance as Schedule III, which means it is less harmful, but it does not change the legality of sale and interstate commerce on the federal level.
“In some of the states that have recently gone legal with recreational and medical cannabis, the individual entrepreneurs [there] were previously considered outlaws. It is hard for a banker to get over the perception that yesterday, you were an illegal activity, and today, you’re a legal activity,” said Terry Mendez, the CEO of Safe Harbor Financial, a financial services company for the cannabis industry.
There has been a bigger about-face with regard to the cryptocurrency industry. At first, crypto was seen as a safe haven for illicit transactions because the underlying technology allowed for anonymous transfers, making it difficult for banks to determine which transactions were legitimate and legal and which ones were not.
As the industry began to move into the mainstream, the challenges were amplified. Exchanges and startups faced debanking or sudden account closures, and even major platforms like Coinbase struggled to maintain reliable banking partners.
“Historically, banks were kind of more naturally averse to crypto companies, going back to like 2018, to 2020, 2021. Crypto companies would often, when registering for accounts with banks, say that they were software development companies to try and avoid the mention of crypto because of fear of not being able to open a bank account, which, of course, then means it’s harder to make a payroll. It’s hard to take in funds from investors; you can’t pay vendors,” Sid Powell, the CEO of the asset management firm Maple Finance, told Al Jazeera.
That was not helped by the collapse of FTX, the notorious cryptocurrency exchange, pushing banks to pull back from working with the crypto industry.
Sentiment is shifting now. Under Trump, who has embraced crypto, financial regulators last year withdrew guidance that suggested that banks should be careful when working with the crypto industry. Powell says the executive order could help crypto avoid debanking in the future.
“It [the executive order] kind of signals to the FDIC and the OCC that they should act in a more balanced way when it comes to crypto companies and crypto startups, instead of taking a more hostile approach, or the approach of kind of lumping everyone in with the worst of the industry, which tended to happen post-FTX,” Powell added.
Powell was referring to the The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an independent agency created by Congress to maintain stability in the nation’s financial system, and The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent bureau of the US Department of the Treasury, which charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.
Trump has also accused banks of not doing business with him, the primary driver of his interest in the debanking issue.
Banks can generally refuse to create accounts for potential customers who could be deemed as high risk.
“The president’s companies have filed [for] bankruptcy repeatedly. There have been years of reporting about financial institutions’ concerns with suspicious financial activity, and the president was found civilly liable for inflating the value of his assets that served as collateral for loans from financial institutions,” Graham Steele, an academic fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, told Al Jazeera.
Reuters reported last year that banks gauged Trump as a financial risk due to his plethora of legal challenges after his first term, including the suit brought by E Jean Caroll, which found Trump liable for sexual abuse. He has declared bankruptcy six times.
He also defaulted on loans totalling hundreds of millions of dollars several times, including a loan to Deutsche Bank. In 2024, a New York court ruled that the president fraudulently inflated his financial worth by more than $2bn.
“Notwithstanding the fact that the president is an inherently political figure, a financial institution could reasonably rely on any of these concerns, grounded in financial and legal risks, not ‘political’ beliefs, as a basis for declining to do business with a customer,” Steele said.
That did not stop the president from pointing fingers at banking giants, including Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that includes a place called Bank of America,” Trump told the executive during a Q&A session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year.
The Trump family also sued Capital One last March. The lawsuit alleged that it debanked The Trump Organisation after Trump incited an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after spreading misinformation alleging that he won the 2020 presidential election even though he had lost by a significant margin.
Trump’s rhetoric on debanking is among his latest attempts to punish entities for political bias, while actively pushing actions that punish those who have viewpoints that oppose his own.
Trump has argued that debanking disproportionately targets conservatives and conservative-leaning businesses like firearms manufacturers. His pressure has moved the needle at Citibank. In June, it lifted its ban on banking services to gun sellers and manufacturers, a policy it put in place in 2018 after the shooting in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.
In March, his administration announced it would shut down a set of climate grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – known as the “green bank” – a $20bn programme created through the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act signed by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, in 2022 to channel financing for climate projects into underinvested regions.
Environment and Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin justified the decision by citing “misconduct, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud”, allegations he offered without evidence, and forced Citibank, which was holding the fund’s money for nonprofit distribution, to return the funds to the EPA.
The decision faced legal hurdles. But earlier this month, a US court of appeals allowed the Trump administration to continue axing the programme. The 2-1 ruling was decided by two judges appointed by Trump.
Last year, the White House also pressured companies seeking federal contracts to abandon diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, which it has long portrayed, without evidence, as undermining merit-based hiring.
Citigroup, historically one of the most vocal supporters of DEI in the financial services sector, scrapped its programme. Citibank holds multiple federal contracts with agencies including the Department of Defense and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo followed suit in February, scaling back their initiatives as well, as did many other companies.
As part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns, the White House has also pressured banks to cut financial services to immigrants. The administration is doing so by trying to cancel the social security numbers of migrants who have legal status in the US, which would essentially cut them off from access to basic financial services, including bank accounts and credit cards, The New York Times reported.
At the time, Leland Dudek, then the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner and a Trump administration appointee, said the move to cut access would end their “financial lives”.
“There’s a real telling disconnect. They are saying, on the one hand, we wanna put a thumb on the scale and ensure that conservative groups are included in the financial system, while actively working to push out liberal coded groups by either freezing them out of the bank accounts when they get government grants, or trying to investigate and potentially bring criminal charges against the payment platform that serves liberal groups,” Steele said.
Steele questioned if taking on political bias would actually help communities that do not align with the Trump administration’s stated values and conservative viewpoints.
Thousands gathered in Tokyo to bid farewell to Japan’s last two pandas, Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei, as they began their return to China amid strained ties between the two countries. Their departure leaves Japan panda-less for the first time in over half a century.