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‘Bad Business’: Corporate Gloom Rises Over Trump’s Tariffs

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‘Bad Business’: Corporate Gloom Rises Over Trump’s Tariffs


Investors are breathing a bit easier on Monday, with markets rallying in Asia and Europe on hopes for a reprieve on tech tariffs. The optimism seems to contradict President Trump’s own words.

The president has signaled that yet another round of levies are on the way, sowing more confusion among business leaders about what’s on, what’s off — and how to deal with their new reality.

Is Trump undermining his own position? If the tariffs are in fact being watered down, that could erode his bargaining power — not to mention his argument that high-tech imports fall into a special national security category — as he seeks to bring back manufacturing to U.S. shores.

The latest: Companies are bracing for new Trump tariffs as soon as this week on the chips and tech components that power phones, computers and other consumer gadgets. The president also played down a Friday announcement by his administration sparing many of the same popular electronics from punishing levies. “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook,’ ” Trump posted to Truth Social, adding, “especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst!”

Tensions are rising with Beijing. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, took a shot on Monday at Trump’s increasingly protectionist policy ahead of his tour of Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam — countries that have become essential suppliers to American businesses — to shore up regional trade ties. “The tariff war will produce no winner,” Xi said.

A protracted standoff could destabilize the global supply chain, analysts warn. Xi “can wait out the United States,” Nouriel Roubini, an economist and senior adviser at the hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital, told Bloomberg Television on Monday. “In the short term, China has a lot of leverage,” he added, including placing trade restrictions on companies like Apple and Tesla.

Markets are bouncing back. Nasdaq futures look set to open in the green on Monday, with Apple rallying in premarket trading. But last week’s big loser — the dollar — was selling off again, hitting a six-month low and adding to U.S. importers’ concerns.

The rally belies a growing list of questions: When will the tariffs escalation stop, and is there enough time for trade partners to strike deals? Would the White House agree to carve-outs for specific industries or products? In the meantime, how do companies price their products, and plan investments?

Business leaders are fretting. A poll by Chief Executive magazine conducted last week found that C.E.O. confidence is at its lowest level since spring 2020, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, DealBook is first to report. Of the 329 corporate chiefs surveyed:

  • 76 percent see the tariffs adversely affecting their business;

  • 26 percent plan to increase capex spending, down from 37 percent in the March survey;

  • 62 percent forecast a slowdown or recession in the next six months.

“Although I am in support of moving more manufacturing back to the U.S., this is not how to do it,” Peter Ensch, the C.E.O. of Sani-Matic, a manufacturer of cleaning systems in Wisconsin, said in the survey. “Initiating a trade war with our closest allies and business partners is simply bad business.”

Shares in Goldman Sachs surge on buyback plans and solid first-quarter results. The Wall Street giant said its board had approved buying back up to $40 billion worth of shares as it beat analyst estimates on profit and revenue. Strong trading revenues gave Goldman a boost, offsetting declines in its investment banking unit, which was hit by weak deal flow and a moribund I.P.O. market.

The police have arrested a suspect after the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion was set on fire. The 38-year-old man was charged with attempted murder, arson and terrorism after the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro went up in flames while he and his family slept there early Sunday morning. The fire adds to voters’ growing concerns about violence against elected officials.

A new suitor reportedly emerges to buy the port assets of Li ka-shing. The bidder is Geneva-based Terminal Investment, Bloomberg reports. It would negotiate to buy 43 ports from the Hong Kong billionaire’s company, CK Hutchison, and take a minority stake in the two others around the Panama Canal that BlackRock is negotiating to acquire. That deal has drawn intense scrutiny from Beijing and Washington.

A landmark case against Meta, Facebook’s parent, begins as a federal judge determines whether the social network broke antimonopoly laws. C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg could testify as soon as Monday.

Here’s what to know: The federal government has charged Meta with illegally applying its monopoly power when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. Regulators call it a “buy and bury” strategy.

Meta argues that Facebook already competes against popular apps like TikTok and Snapchat, and that the ever-shifting forces of the internet often breed new competitors. Artificial intelligence has already upended how people interact with technology. The company also says it has invested heavily to develop the apps, which have become bigger than most people would have imagined.

The case, which is expected to last several weeks, is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Judge James E. Boasberg, who was appointed under George W. Bush and is considered a moderate.

What is Zuckerberg doing about it? The Facebook founder, who has become much friendlier toward President Trump (contributing, for example, $1 million to his inaugural fund), has lobbied for a settlement. He’s made frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago to present his case and promoted Joel Kaplan, a Republican, as the company’s policy chief to strengthen ties to Washington. He also named former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick to its board. Zuckerberg’s political efforts thus far have not ended the case, though a settlement is always possible.

Stakes are high. Meta could be forced to spin off or sell Instagram and WhatsApp. And that could have a chilling effect on mergers altogether. The flow of M&A activity has quieted under Trump, the opposite of what investors had anticipated. A government victory could reshape the merger landscape, setting a much tougher standard for deals.

The F.T.C. faces a difficult task, legal experts say. The agency is in effect trying to prove a hypothetical — that Facebook would not be as dominant if it hadn’t acquired these apps. But it also has rare bipartisan support as lawmakers on both sides think tech giants like Meta are becoming too powerful.

It’s not just Meta. The government won a major antitrust battle against Google last year, and the Justice Department has sued Apple for anticompetitive practices, arguing that its network of devices and apps corners consumers into using only Apple services.

The oil giants will be limping into the start of proxy season this week with battered share prices and with Brent crude, the global benchmark, trading near a four-year low.

But for the first time in nearly a decade, major climate activists won’t be pushing them hard to cut emissions and transition to clean energy, partly because of President Trump’s actions to silence climate action, Vivienne Walt reports for DealBook.

Follow This, the Dutch climate shareholder group that has been hounding energy companies for years to clean up their act, stepped back from its campaign of filing proxy resolutions, predicting a lackluster response from investors.

Tough new S.E.C. guidelines for shareholder proposals have already had a muzzling effect, too. (Morningstar expects a 40 percent drop this year in resolutions aimed at environmental, social and governance matters, the company told DealBook.)

Mark van Baal, the founder of Follow This, spoke with DealBook about his organization’s decision to back off at annual general meetings this year. The group has had big wins, but has also faced a string of dud votes in recent years.

The interview has been edited for brevity.

Why have you paused shareholder resolutions this year?

Since 2016, we’ve managed to get four super majors to set emissions reduction targets. That is something they absolutely didn’t want to do. Then, with the war in Ukraine, with high oil prices, the companies started fighting back. We got 20 percent votes three years in a row. We thought, “OK, it is not effective.”

What factor did Trump play in your decision?

Donald Trump, and the S.E.C. under Trump, makes it impossible to file resolutions. They will call our kind of resolutions micromanaging.

With the Trump election, and states suing investors for considering climate risks, that has added to investor uncertainty. They are afraid of the repercussions, that they could be sued for considering climate risk.

The S.E.C.’s new guidelines force investors into passivity. Investors don’t want to be confrontational with the companies, and they have to confront companies. In Europe, the regulators are not appointed by politicians. We hope that investors will join us.

What is next for activist shareholders like you?

The institutional investors have only one key action — vote at the A.G.M.s.

We’re taking a pause to speak with them. BlackRock, Norges Bank and Legal & General, for example, talk all the time that they want to tackle the climate crisis. But when push comes to shove, they don’t use their vote.

dealbook series: how tariffs are affecting U.S. business

We asked DealBook readers how tariffs have affected their companies. Today we’re featuring a response from Danny Muskat, an owner and the S.V.P. at Deer Stags, a family-owned footwear company based in New York.

He writes:

For a company like mine, a small privately held wholesale footwear company, we are completely paralyzed. It is an existential crisis.

We make our shoes in China and cannot bring in our goods with a 145 percent tariff on top of normal duties. We have some planned cost receipts of about $1 million due to ship in the next few weeks. When those were bought, the duty we budgeted for was $60,000. With the new tariffs we’ll need to pay $1,510,000 for those goods to clear customs. That’s simply not possible for us to pay.

We’ve paused our shipments, and most of our retail customers are doing the same. Other brands, too.

We can’t afford the tariff — it could bankrupt us today — and we can’t afford to not have goods, which could bankrupt us tomorrow. We’re trying to move production but that takes time and expense. And how do you do it when nobody knows the conditions for importing from any other country from one day to the next? Manufacturing in the U.S. is completely unrealistic, and would take five to 10 years of national scale investment in any case.

This Trade War of Trump’s is a game of chicken being “negotiated” with a gun to the head of all the American businesses like mine.

DEALBOOK WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

We’d like to know how the tariffs are affecting your business. Have you changed suppliers? Negotiated lower prices? Paused investments or hiring? Made plans to move manufacturing to the U. S.? Please let us know what you’re doing.

Bank earnings should offer fresh clues about the state of American households and businesses’ finances. Here’s what to watch.

TUESDAY

Bank of America and Citigroup are the next big banks to report.

Wednesday

Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, is set to give a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, with questions swirling about inflation and interest rates. Elsewhere, United Airlines releases results.

Thursday

The European Central Bank is expected to lower interest rates, the latest central bank to do so in the wake of President Trump’s trade war. On the earnings calendar: UnitedHealth Group, Netflix and Blackstone.

Deals

  • Brookfield is looking to raise more than $2 billion for a fund focused on the Middle East. (Bloomberg)

  • Norway’s sovereign wealth fund intends to back Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s bid to buy the Italian lender’s larger rival, Mediobanca. (Bloomberg)

Politics, policy and regulation

  • Maya Angelou is out, but “Mein Kampf” stays on the shelves in the U.S. Naval Academy’s library after a review by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (NYT)

  • Sarah Palin’s yearslong defamation suit against The Times gets underway in a trial that could test First Amendment protections for journalists. (NYT)

Best of the rest

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.



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Pilot Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Matt Wallace, X Influencer

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Pilot Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Matt Wallace, X Influencer


Two days after a helicopter collided with a passenger jet in Washington in January, killing 67 people, Jo Ellis woke up to a flurry of text messages.

Ms. Ellis, a 35-year-old helicopter pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard, learned from friends that her name and photos were all over social media. Users were falsely naming her as the pilot who had crashed into a passenger jet on Jan. 29 — a sign, in the eyes of the online mob, that diversity initiatives had played a role in the crash because Ms. Ellis is transgender.

She posted a “proof of life” video on Facebook — emphasizing that she was very much alive and well in an attempt to slow the spread, but claims seemed to multiply.

“My life was turned upside-down at that point,” Ms. Ellis said in an interview, adding that her employer sent armed bodyguards to protect her family and that she started carrying a loaded weapon as a precaution. “Forever on, I’m known as ‘that trans terrorist.’”

Ms. Ellis filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Matt Wallace, an influencer on X with more than two million followers. Mr. Wallace was one of the more prominent people to spread the falsehood in a series of posts that included photos of Ms. Ellis and details about her life.

Mr. Wallace deleted his posts about Ms. Ellis after her Facebook video started spreading online. He posted an “important update” on the afternoon of Jan. 31, writing that Ms. Ellis “was not piloting the helicopter that crashed in to the plane and is still alive.”

The filing claims that Mr. Wallace “concocted a destructive and irresponsible defamation campaign.” It was filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado, the state where Ms. Ellis’s lawyers said Mr. Wallace resides, and seeks monetary damages to be determined at trial.

Mr. Wallace did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It is difficult for people who are targeted by digital misinformation to find recourse after lies spread about them online. Social media companies have softened their stance on content moderation in recent years, just as misinformation peddlers have become more prominent and closer to centers of power.

At the same time, the idea that social media influencers could be held personally and financially liable through defamation law for spreading overtly false statements online has grown as one potential avenue for combating misinformation.

“This suit situates itself within a clear growing trend,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah who focuses on defamation. “This is all a relatively new and complicated use of defamation law: People victimized by viral conspiracy theories are increasingly attempting to use defamation law not just to remedy their own reputations but to correct the wider societal lie.”

The approach was bolstered in recent years by successful defamation cases against much larger groups: In 2023, Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News, which it accused of spreading lies about its voting machines after the 2020 election. Families tied to the Sandy Hook school massacre sued Alex Jones, the fabulist behind Infowars, for defamation and won more than $1 billion in damages in 2022.

There are fewer examples of such lawsuits against independent creators or social media influencers.

Ms. Ellis’s lawsuit was filed by the Equality Legal Action Fund, a group of mostly volunteer lawyers who defend L.G.B.T.Q. people against defamation and harassment.

Such lawsuits face a number of constitutional and legal hurdles. Free speech laws are broad, making it difficult to prove defamation even when a falsehood is shared. In most cases it’s up to the people who are defamed to prove that the speaker acted with deliberate malice instead of making a mistake.

Ms. Ellis said any financial compensation she might receive would be donated to the families of the victims in the crash.

“I believe in free speech, but I also believe in consequences to free speech,” Ms. Ellis said. “If you can stir up a mob because you say something that’s not true, that’s your right. But once the mob comes after someone, you’ve got to have some consequences.”

Speculation that a transgender pilot could have caused the collision on Jan. 29 emerged as a conspiracy theory almost immediately after a Black Hawk helicopter on a training exercise collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River. Just days earlier, President Trump had signed an executive order attempting to bar transgender people from the military, prompting some users to speculate that the crash was an act of terrorism by an aggrieved transgender pilot. Mr. Trump continued to connect the crash to policies related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., for days afterward.

Mr. Wallace was not the first person to target Ms. Ellis on X, according to a review of posts by The New York Times. The conversation around Ms. Ellis began on Jan. 30 and exploded through Jan. 31, becoming a trending topic on X with more than 90,000 posts by the second day, according to Trends24, a website that monitors social media.

“I’ve been a door gunner in a helicopter in Iraq during a combat zone, and I’ve been shot at in that same combat zone,” Ms. Ellis said. “But even for me, having a magnifying glass placed on my personal life in the wake of that rumor had a real impact.”



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Social Security Employees Warn of Damage From DOGE

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Social Security Employees Warn of Damage From DOGE


When Eleanor H., 66, called the Social Security Administration last month seeking details about her retirement benefits, she didn’t expect to comfort the representative who answered. The woman started sobbing.

“I asked her what was wrong, and she said she and her co-workers were informed by email to accept a taxable $20,000 payout or risk termination,” said Eleanor, who lives in New Jersey (she asked to use only her first name out of privacy concerns).

The rep still answered all of Eleanor’s questions. “Through her tears she said, ‘What am I going to do?’”

The Social Security Administration, which sends retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million people each month, has long been called the “third rail” of politics — largely untouchable given its widespread popularity and role as one of the country’s remaining safety nets.

But in recent weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s crew of cost cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken its chain saw to the agency’s operations. The agency has announced plans to cut up to 12 percent of its work force, at a time its staffing is at a 50-year low. It has also offered early retirement and other incentives, including payments up to $25,000, to the entire staff.

Many current and former Social Security officials fear the cuts could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing the program, which keeps millions of people out of poverty and large percentages of retirees rely on for the bulk of their income.

The actions have caused Social Security employees and former commissioners and executives of both parties to sound alarm bells, saying it would be difficult to repair the damage, which could threaten access to benefits.

“Everything they have done so far is breaking the agency’s ability to serve the public,” said Martin O’Malley, the most recent former Social Security commissioner under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He said he feared that Mr. Musk’s team had taken most of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse, whether in skyrocketing wait times for customer service, system interruptions or a timely payment of benefits.

In a statement to The New York Times, the Social Security Administration said that it was “identifying efficiencies and reducing costs, with a renewed focus on mission critical work,” including streamlining redundant layers of management, and is “committed to ensuring Americans get the help they need.”

Social Security benefits cannot be changed without legislation passed by Congress. But the delivery of those paychecks — and enabling new people to enroll or make changes — rests upon a complex set of systems that are powered using programming languages developed in the 1970s.

The people who can most deftly operate the agency’s old systems are, perhaps not surprisingly, nearing or already eligible for retirement. At least 30 percent of the technical staff in the office of the chief information officer fits in those categories, former executives estimated.

“We are looking at a degradation of the system as a whole because we have a whole line of expertise walking out the door,” said Shelley Washington, executive vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1923, a unit of the federal workers’ union. “They are firing first and aiming later.”

He said the delivery of checks for people already enrolled in the system shouldn’t be affected, for now — but it’s becoming increasingly uncertain who will be around to quickly fix issues when they arise.

Michael Astrue, a former agency commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush, said it appeared that Mr. Musk has imported the strategy he used when he bought Twitter, “where you go into some place established, level it and then figure you’re going to improvise your way out,” he said, speaking at a briefing on Thursday held by the National Academy of Social Insurance. “It’s extremely destructive.”

Jason Fichtner, who held several positions at the agency, including deputy commissioner and chief economist, put it even more bluntly at the briefing. “It’s more like a drunk operating a wrecking ball,” he said.

The White House issued a statement on Tuesday, reiterating that President Trump would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.

Few dispute that the aging technology needs a reboot. The system hasn’t undergone a major overhaul because Congress hasn’t allocated money for it. It’s also an enormous undertaking, and a lack of continuity in leadership makes it difficult to carry out, current and former technology staff and executives said. It would take an estimated five to seven years and cost more than $2 billion, according to one former technology executive, who didn’t want to be named because the analysis had not been completed.

Though experts familiar with the agency’s operations acknowledged there was room to improve efficiency, they said it was already run leanly. The agency functions on a budget of less than 1 percent of its annual benefit payments, which provide retirement, survivor and disability payments.

“This is extremely low,” Mr. O’Malley said, noting that it’s far lower than the administrative costs of private insurers.

That hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk’s team. Even without a permanent commissioner, the agency is making big decisions: It has already said it would eliminate 7,000 of its 57,000-person work force, and will close six of its 10 regional offices, which coordinate and provide support to employees.

Of its 1,200 field offices that directly serve the public, more than 40 are to be closed, according to Social Security Works, an advocacy group. The group is trying to track the changes, but said that its data was based on an unreliable list released by DOGE. (The Social Security headquarters itself was also on a closings list, then later dropped.)

Two dozen senior staff members have announced their departures, including the agency’s top three cybersecurity executives, according to a memo issued on Feb. 28 from Leland C. Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner. He took the reins when Michelle King, the previous acting commissioner, left abruptly after refusing to give DOGE representatives access to private data.

Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff with 30 years of service at Social Security, recently recounted the events around that episode, which also led to her retirement. She expressed deep concerns about the safety of the confidential data and the program overall, according to her sworn testimony on March 6 in a federal lawsuit. The data, she said, has already been misinterpreted and used to spread misinformation.

Mike Russo, the new chief information officer, “seemed completely focused on questions from DOGE officials based on the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts,” Ms. Flick said.

The “disregard for critical processes” and the “significant loss of expertise” have left her seriously concerned the programs will not continue to operate without disruption.

“That could result in benefit payments not being paid out or delays in payments,” she said.

Angela Digeronimo, a claims specialist and a union leader in New Jersey who has been with Social Security for 28 years, said she believed she was witnessing a dismantling of the agency.

“It will affect the public in a very tangible way,” she said, speaking in her capacity as a union official, noting that it already takes about eight months for applicants to the disability program to learn if they’re eligible. “I hate to say this, but more and more people will die while waiting for a medical determination on their disability claim.”

Nicole Francis, a financial planner in New York, called the agency last month on behalf of a 100-year-old client who wanted to change the bank into which her benefits were deposited. Ms. Francis knew there would be a wait, but she didn’t expect it to be more than two hours.

Instead of holding, she visited her client at home and helped her make the change with a new online account.

“Not all senior Americans have a trusted representative and should have the option of telephone customer service,” she said.

Last week, in an effort to combat fraud, the agency said it would no longer allow beneficiaries to change bank information over the phone — only online or in person.

Mr. Musk has said that he wants to cut waste, fraud and abuse at the agency, but he and President Trump have continued to repeat false claims that millions of dead people are collecting benefits.

In fact, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General, which is charged with uncovering fraud and inefficiencies, published a report in 2023 that explains why these people don’t have recorded deaths, but also do not collect checks.

“Both Musk and Trump are grossly mischaracterizing the death data,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a former agency adviser. (Mr. Trump also fired the acting inspector general.)

Last week, Mr. Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, claimed that programs like it are used to attract illegal immigrants. The agency has said it collects more than $20 billion in payroll taxes annually from unauthorized workers, most of whom never collect benefits.

“Mixing up these allegations of fraud with these partisan attacks, I think, kind of confuses the public,” said Jack Smalligan, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former deputy associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.

The administration’s aggressive cost-cutting has begun to worry retirees like Eleanor H., who reached the distressed Social Security representative.

She said she won’t be able to survive in retirement without her Social Security check, but has become so concerned about the administration’s actions that she called to see how much she would receive if she filed for benefits early, a few months before her full retirement age. Healthy retirees are often advised against claiming early because waiting longer locks in a higher benefit.

The representative assured Eleanor that she thought her retirement benefits would be safe.

“They will be busy coming for us,” she told her.

Susan C. Beachy and Jack Begg contributed research.



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Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-Winning Peruvian Novelist, Dies at 89

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Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-Winning Peruvian Novelist, Dies at 89


Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday in Lima. He was 89.

His death was announced in a social media statement from his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.

Mr. Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America’s literary “boom generation.”

His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at the age of 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Mr. Vargas Llosa turned that experience into his first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” a critical account of military life published in 1963.

The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it was financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru’s military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.

Mr. Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.

He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.

His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.

He led polls for much of the race, but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s policies.

Mr. Vargas Llosa had a passion for fiction, but he started out in journalism. As a teenager, he was a night reporter for La Crónica, a Lima daily, chronicling an underworld of dive bars, crime and prostitution. Elements of that experience fed into his 1969 novel “Conversation in the Cathedral,” a depiction of Peru’s malaise under Gen. Manuel Odría’s military dictatorship during the 1950s, a book that is often considered his masterwork.

And though he often wrote articles for newspapers in Europe and the United States, he experienced a journalistic rebirth in the 1990s as a columnist for the newspaper El País in Spain, where he had been granted citizenship.

His fortnightly column, “Piedra de toque,” or “Touchstone,” was syndicated in Spanish-language newspapers throughout Latin America and the United States. It gave him a platform for topics like the re-emergence of populism in the Andes, the art of Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin or vociferous support for the state of Israel, a frequent theme in his political writing.

The columns could be either autobiographical or inspired by news events, and were often bereft of adjectives and elegantly written in a style that allowed Mr. Vargas Llosa to reach out to readers who might not have had the patience to finish some of his longer, complexly crafted novels.

“We do have a number of venerable newspaper columnists in the United States, but who among them has the stature of Vargas Llosa in Hispanic civilization?” the literary critic Ilan Stavans wrote in a 2003 analysis of the columns. “He’s a polymath who wears his wisdom lightly, with eyes and ears everywhere and a voice as loud as thunder.”

Perhaps more than anything, the columns allowed Mr. Vargas Llosa to advance his ideas of how personal liberties rely on the creation and strengthening of societies based on free trade.

He often drew derision for these principles in Latin America, ranking among the most prominent critics of leftist governments in Venezuela and Cuba.

But free-market thought held an almost visceral attraction for him. When Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s conservative prime minister, left office in 1990, she received flowers from Mr. Vargas Llosa. He also sent a note, reading, “Madam: there are not enough words in the dictionary to thank you for what you have done for the cause of liberty.”

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, in southern Peru, and spent much of his early childhood in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba with his mother, Dora Llosa, and his grandparents. They made up a middle-class family of modest means but patrician ancestry, and he was told his father was dead.

His parents had actually separated months before he was born, and his father, Ernesto Vargas, who worked for the airline Panagra, took an assignment abroad and requested a divorce from his wife.

They reunited in Peru when their son was 10. But chafing at the discipline meted out by his father, the boy was soon sent to the military academy in Lima. After that experience, at the age of 19, Mr. Vargas Llosa eloped with Julia Urquidi Illanes, his uncle’s sister-in-law, who was 29.

The turbulent marriage shocked his family and inspired him to write “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.” Published in 1977 and one of his best-known novels translated into English, the book describes the comedic travails of Marito Varguitas, a young law student and aspiring writer who falls in love with his aunt against a backdrop of radio soap operas.

Ms. Urquidi responded to the book with a critical memoir of her time with Mr. Vargas Llosa, “What Varguitas Did Not Say,” detailing their threadbare and tension-filled years together in Europe. They divorced in 1964, and Mr. Vargas Llosa married Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children.

They separated in 2015 after 50 years of marriage when he confirmed his romantic involvement with Isabel Preysler, the former wife of the singer Julio Iglesias. He and Ms. Preysler, who was born in the Philippines and became a high-profile socialite in Spain, separated in 2022.

He is survived by his sons Álvaro, a writer, and Gonzalo, a representative for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and a daughter, Morgana, a photographer.

Though deciphering Peru dominated much of his work, Mr. Vargas Llosa lived outside the country for long stretches. In the 1960s, in Paris, he worked as a translator and wrote news bulletins for Agence France-Presse to make ends meet, and later settled into a writing life in Barcelona before returning to Peru in the 1970s.

While Mr. Vargas Llosa gained greater fame as a novelist, his 1990 presidential campaign emerged as something of a surprise after he wrote an opinion essay denouncing President Alan García’s plan to nationalize banks.

As Peruvians grappled with hyperinflation, as well as a bombing campaign carried out by the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group, Mr. Vargas Llosa temporarily stopped writing fiction and formed his own right-wing party, called Freedom Movement.

His cerebral candidacy, inspired by European and North American political and economic philosophers, and his very appearance, with his light-colored skin, trim physique and penchant for preppy sweaters, contrasted with an electorate largely made up of impoverished Quechua-speaking people and Spanish-speaking mestizos.

Mr. Fujimori, invoking his non-European ancestry, depicted himself as an ally of the lower classes long dominated by elite whites. Similarly, his opponents questioned whether Peru should be governed by Mr. Vargas Llosa after the writer acknowledged that he was agnostic.

Disillusioned by his failed foray into politics, Mr. Vargas Llosa left Peru again in the early 1990s, dividing his time between a writing base in London, where he had an apartment in Knightsbridge, and a home in Madrid.

To the dismay of many in Peru, King Juan Carlos of Spain signed a royal decree in 1993 granting Spanish citizenship to Mr. Vargas Llosa, who nevertheless kept a Peruvian passport and continued traveling to Lima.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Mr. Vargas Llosa won other distinctions, including Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1994 and the Jerusalem Prize in 1995, and produced more than 50 novels, essays, plays and works of literary criticism throughout his long career.

Some of his best work examined the vagaries of history in Latin America, such as “The War of the End of the World” (1981), a mammoth fictionalized account of a late 19th-century messianic movement in Canudos, a town in the arid expanses of northeastern Brazil.

Mr. Vargas Llosa researched the book in the archives of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, and finished writing it at the Wilson Center in Washington in 1980, not far from the battlefields of the Civil War, a conflict that may have helped him evoke the brutal violence with which Brazil’s aristocratic leaders crushed Canudos.

“I was enveloped by flying falcons and within viewing distance of the balcony where Abraham Lincoln spoke to his Union soldiers at the brink of the Battle of Manassas,” Mr. Vargas Llosa wrote in the book’s prologue.

Yet while he could write elegantly about anywhere, it was Peru that held for him a special fascination, mixed, he once wrote, with “suspicion, passion and rages,” even a hatred “steeped in tenderness.”

“You know that Herman Melville called Lima the strangest, saddest city,” Mr. Vargas Llosa, referring to a passage from “Moby Dick,” told an interviewer from The New York Times in 1989, when he seemed unable to detach himself from literature and introspection even in the heat of his campaign for president.

“Why?” Mr. Vargas Llosa said. “The fog and drizzle.”

Then he added, laughing, “I am not so sure that the fog and the drizzle are Lima’s big problems.”

Yan Zhuang and Elda Cantú contributed reporting.



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Trump to Meet President of El Salvador, Where Deportees Face Prison

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Trump to Meet President of El Salvador, Where Deportees Face Prison


President Trump will meet with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador at the White House on Monday as the administration ramps up its use of a notorious Salvadoran prison for holding migrants deported by the United States.

In Mr. Bukele, who has referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator,” Mr. Trump has found a willing partner in a plan for deportations with little or no due process. The removal of the migrants to the prison, known as CECOT, has become a flashpoint in the administration’s attempt to skirt normal immigration practice and the role of the courts in reviewing Mr. Trump’s executive power.

Just a day before the meeting between the two leaders, the Trump administration once again tried to resist a federal judge’s order to bring back a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to the prison. In a legal filing on Sunday, the Justice Department argued that the courts lacked the ability to dictate steps the White House should take to return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, because only the president had the power to handle U.S. foreign policy.

The Trump administration has fought against returning Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, despite admitting in court that his removal was an “administrative error.” In 2019, an immigration judge had barred the United States from deporting the man by finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador. That did not stop the United States from deporting him and scores of other migrants to El Salvador last month.

The Trump administration has justified its use of a wartime authority to deport the migrants to El Salvador by alleging that they are members of violent gangs like MS-13, which originated in the United States and operates in South America, and the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua.

While some of the deportees had criminal convictions, court papers have shown that the evidence the government has relied on to label some of them as gang members was often little more than whether they had tattoos or had worn clothing associated with a criminal organization.

The Trump administration doubled down on its incarceration agreement with Mr. Bukele on Sunday when it announced that it had sent 10 more people alleged to be members of the two gangs to El Salvador over the weekend.

In announcing those deportations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the alliance between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had “become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.”

Mr. Bukele has also found an opening on the global stage in opening the doors of his prison system to Mr. Trump.

While the Biden administration accused Mr. Bukele and the Salvadoran government of secretly negotiating a pact with certain gang leaders, the Trump administration has fully embraced his tough-on-crime persona.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele have paired their aggressive enforcement tactics with a highly sensationalized public relations campaign on social media. Both leaders have faced accusations of undermining democratic institutions.

After a surge of gang violence in El Salvador, Mr. Bukele imposed a state of emergency that has yet to be lifted, in addition to directing police and the military forces to carry out mass arrests. Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans who were arrested disappeared into the prison system without trial and without their families knowing whether they were alive.

“Human rights, democratic norms and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, senior counsel for accountability at the advocacy group Human Rights First. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook — rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”

Still, Mr. Bukele’s popularity has soared, and he was re-elected in a landslide last year. The Trump administration just last week changed a travel advisory for El Salvador, grouping it with some of the least dangerous countries for Americans to visit.

Mr. Bukele described the decision on social media as akin to receiving a “gold star.”



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From LeBron James to Alex Ovechkin, untouchable sports records and why they might never be broken

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From LeBron James to Alex Ovechkin, untouchable sports records and why they might never be broken


With each passing decade, elite athletes seem to become faster, stronger and, dare we say it, better. Performance improves and, consequently, records tumble.

But some records seem otherworldly. No matter what future technological or scientific advancements may be made, they feel out of reach and unbreakable. Although that is what many thought of Wayne Gretzky’s NHL’s goals record, and then came along Alexander Ovechkin.

For 31 years, Gretzky reigned as the all-time goalscorer in the NHL with 894 goals. That was before 39-year-old Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals overtook that landmark on April 7. Gretzky still holds a few records widely regarded as untouchable — his ridiculous 1,963 career assists, for instance.

All of this has led us to consider some other records in sport that are thought of as unlikely to be broken. Could they, too, one day be beaten, or are there some records that will forever remain in the history books?

Soccer

Furthest goal: 96.01 meters (104.9 yards)

Whether intentional or not, in January 2021, Newport County goalkeeper Tom King — with the benefit of a bounce and wind assistance — scored from a goal kick.

It set the world record after topping former Stoke City goalkeeper Asmir Begovic’s 91.9-meter goal (100.5 yards) in November 2013. It would take a lot of chutzpah (and help from the elements) to beat King’s long-distance strike.

Shortest time between two goals: Nine seconds

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. It takes no time at all to rattle off those numbers. Incredible, then, that it took just nine seconds for Wycombe Wanderers to score twice against Peterborough United in September 2000.

The first came from a free kick, and the second, following the half-time interval, was a superb solo effort by Jermaine McSporran, who scored from kick-off. Peterborough United didn’t touch the ball from one goal to the other, which were nine seconds apart in game time – setting a new world record.

Highest scoreline: 149-0

Reigning champions of the Madagascan first-tier Stade Olympique de l’Emyrne (SOE) came to their game against bitter rivals AS Adema salty in November 2002.

In their previous game, SOE felt a penalty decision had gone against them, denying them the opportunity to retain their title as the necessary win was not secured. To compound matters, AS Adema were crowned champions.

In retaliation, SOE threw the next game against Adema as a planned protest against the refereeing they felt had denied them the title. After winning the ball, they proceeded to score 149 own goals at a rate of one every 36 seconds, the sort of drama reality television would be proud of.

Olympics

Gold medals: 23

Michael Phelps might injure his neck if he wore all 23 of his Olympic gold medals. Six athletes have nine gold medals, including active American swimmers Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel, but they still don’t come close to Phelps, who won eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics alone.

It helps that swimmers can compete across different disciplines and at varying distances, but no swimmer in history has come close to having the breadth of Phelps in the pool, both in terms of the events in which he excelled and the period of time he was at his peak — dominating at four Games in multiple disciplines.

As brilliant a swimmer Ledecky is, she excels only in long-distance freestyle. Similarly, Dressel is a sprint specialist. Frenchman Leon Marchand, 22, who won four golds in Paris last year, has time on his side and the talent. But even with 50m sprint swimming events added to the Olympics schedule in Los Angeles, for any athlete to get close to Phelps’ record would be a phenomenal achievement.

Women’s 100 metre record: 10.49 seconds

Florence Griffith Joyner, known as ‘Flo-Jo, ’ had experienced glory in the 200m, winning Olympic silver in 1984 and silver again at the 1987 World Championships. But it was in 1988 that she became a global star, breaking the 100m world record and smashing her personal best at the U.S. Olympic trials.


Griffith-Joyner celebrates winning 100m Olympic gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics (Russell Cheyne/Allsport/Getty Images)

There was controversy over the wind speed, which on the track read 0.0 but on nearby triple jump equipment was recorded at 4.3 meters per second, but the record stood and no one has come close to the Californian’s time, her world records in the 100m and 200m (21.34) still standing to this day.

Elaine Thompson-Herah is the athlete to have come closest to the 100m world record, the Jamaican clocking 10.54 in 2021.

Tennis


Steffi Graff, right, with her gold medal at the 1988 Olympics, which she won beating Argentina’s Gabriela Sabatini in the final (Chris Wilkins/AFP via Getty Images)

The Calendar Golden Grand Slam

In 1988, Steffi Graf, then aged 19, had the best year possible in tennis. The German achieved the Calendar Golden Grand Slam, winning all four major tournaments — the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open — and Olympic gold in the same year.

She is the only singles player to have achieved this feat, and her record is made even tougher to beat given that the Olympics are held every four years.

NBA & NFL

Most points in a game: 100 points

One of the most iconic photos in NBA history is a black-and-white shot of Wilt Chamberlain posing with a piece of paper with 100 scribbled on it after his historic night in March 1962.

There is no TV footage of Chamberlain’s 100-point game for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks as many games NBA games weren’t televised then. In recent years, some have questioned whether it happened at all, which The Athletic examined in this 2024 article.

Chamberlain set the record without a three-point line, something the NBA later introduced in the 1979-1980 season. He shot 36-for-63 from the field and 28-for-32 from the foul line. That year, he also averaged 50.4 points per game, helping to hugely increase the popularity of the NBA.

All-time scorer: 42,170+ points

LeBron James is in his 22nd NBA season. The 40-year-old has spent more than half of his life in the league — and his longevity means he has even played alongside his son, Bronny James.

Over those 22 seasons, he has been one of the league’s best players — a 21-time All-Star and scoring leader in 2008.


LeBron James is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer (Harry How/Getty Images)

His incredible durability and ability led him to become the NBA’s all-time scorer on February 7, 2023, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who held the record for 39 years. Including playoffs, James is the first NBA player to score over 50,000 points.

His longevity is comparable to that of wide receiver Jerry Rice. Rice, who played 20 seasons in the NFL, winning three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers, holds the records for receptions (1,549), receiving yards (22,895), and touchdown receptions (197).

Formula 1

Most races without a podium finish: 231+

Having raced in 231 grands prix to date, Nico Hülkenberg is one of the most experienced drivers in Formula One history. Yet, he has never had a top-three finish.

Since making his F1 debut in 2010, the 37-year-old has picked up points in the middle of the pack for Williams, Force India, Renault, Racing Point, Aston Martin, Haas and his current team, Sauber.

Over his long career, the ‘Hulk’s’ ability to collect points has made him a valuable driver for mid-table teams, but the closest he has come to a podium is three fourth-place finishes.

Youngest driver to score points: 17 years, 180 days

Someone who knows a thing or two about podium finishes is Max Verstappen. At the time of publication, the four-time world champion has won 64 F1 grands prix races and is the youngest driver, youngest points scorer and youngest race winner in F1 history.


Max Verstappen made his F1 debut at 17 (Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

The Dutchman earned his first points at the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix, finishing in seventh for Toro Rosso on his debut aged 17 years, 180 days.

It will be a tough record to beat. In 2016, motorsport’s governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), introduced a minimum age of 18 in F1, though the rules have since been adjusted, allowing 17-year-olds to apply for an FIA Super Licence, which the FIA will issue at its discretion.

(Top photo: Adam Pretty/Getty Images)



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Mike Rogers Will Run Again for Senate in Michigan

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Mike Rogers Will Run Again for Senate in Michigan


Former Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, announced on Monday that he would run for his state’s open U.S. Senate seat, his second bid for the chamber after losing to Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, by fewer than 20,000 votes last fall.

The seat opened after Michigan’s senior senator, Gary Peters, a Democrat, said that he would not seek re-election to a third term. The race, in a battleground state that President Trump won in 2024 and Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in 2020, will help decide control of the Senate. It is expected to be among the most closely watched in next year’s midterm elections.

A statement from Mr. Rogers’s campaign on Monday, warning that Democrats planned to “pour millions of dollars” into the race, said that he would “be an ally” for Mr. Trump and that he would be the “backup” the president needed in the Senate.

Mr. Rogers, 61, is a former F.B.I. special agent and Army officer who served in Congress for 14 years, including four as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He left Congress in 2015 to become a talk-radio host and eventually moved to Florida. His return to Michigan in 2023 failed to appease Democrats, who labeled him a disloyal opportunist in his race against Ms. Slotkin. That tightly fought contest, in which Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Rogers, was one of the last Senate races to be called in 2024.

Mr. Rogers is so far the only Republican to enter the 2026 race, though Representative Bill Huizenga, who has served in Congress since 2011, is expected to run. Other possible contenders include Tudor Dixon, who lost the Michigan governor’s race to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022, and Kevin Rinke, who lost to Ms. Dixon in that race’s Republican primary.

The lone Democrat to have entered the race, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, announced her candidacy this month. Ms. McMorrow gained national prominence in 2022 when she defended her liberal values in a video while also calling herself a “straight, white, Christian, married suburban mom.” Two other Democrats — Representative Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a former health director in Wayne County, Mich. — are eyeing the race.

Several Democrats have notably decided to skip the contest. Both Ms. Whitmer, who is barred from running for re-election because of term limits, and Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary in the Biden administration who moved to Michigan in 2022, have said they will not run, decisions that could make way for 2028 presidential bids. Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet said last week that she planned to run for re-election.



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How Geo Group’s Surveillance Tech Is Aiding Trump’s Immigration Agenda

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How Geo Group’s Surveillance Tech Is Aiding Trump’s Immigration Agenda


After a Honduran immigrant arrived in the United States in 2022, officials ordered him to use a government-issued app as part of an immigration surveillance program.

At least once a week, the immigrant, a former police officer in Honduras who was living in Louisiana, would take a selfie through the facial-recognition powered app to confirm his identity and location. By trading some of his privacy, he avoided being put in a detention center and obtained a work permit.

In February, he received a message: report to an immigration office so the tracking technology could be updated. When he arrived, federal agents were waiting. They handcuffed him and put him on a vehicle bound for a detention center, where he has been ever since, according to an account from his wife and Jacinta González, the head of programs for the advocacy group MediaJustice who is working with the detained immigrant. He and his wife declined to be named for fear of harming his legal proceedings.

The maker of the app he had used was Geo Group, the largest private prison operator in the United States. Over the past decade, the company has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools — including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps — to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government.

Those products are now aiding President Trump’s deportation efforts by providing the whereabouts of unauthorized immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to legal aid groups and immigration organizations. No figures have been released about the number of arrests made from the digital monitoring program, but legal aid groups estimated it was at least in the hundreds. More than 30,000 immigrants were arrested in Mr. Trump’s first 50 days in office, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“These are the people who are precisely being monitored,” said Laura Rodriguez, a lawyer with American Friends Service Committee, a legal aid organization in New Jersey with several clients in the monitoring program who were detained. “It’s just easy pickings.”

The use of Geo Group’s technology has made the company one of the Trump administration’s big business winners so far. Even as Mr. Trump slashes costs across the federal government, his agencies have handed Geo Group new federal contracts to house unauthorized immigrants. And D.H.S. is weighing the renewal of a longtime contract with the company — worth about $350 million last year — to track the roughly 180,000 people now in the surveillance program.

Republican lawmakers and administration advisers have also called for more surveillance of immigrants, including expanded location tracking and stricter enforcement of curfews.

Mr. Trump’s immigration policies have sent Geo Group’s stock price soaring and kept its share price afloat even as the stock market gyrates. While digital monitoring generates only about 14 percent of its $2.4 billion in annual revenue, the company, which is based in Boca Raton, Fla., has said its immigrant surveillance could more than double. Profit margins on the monitoring business hover at around 50 percent.

“The Geo Group was built for this unique moment in our country’s history and the opportunities that it will bring,” George Zoley, the company’s founder, said on an investor call days after Mr. Trump was elected.

The tracking program that Geo Group oversees, called Alternatives to Detention, was set up to keep tabs on unauthorized immigrants who face potential deportation. Rather than being placed in detention centers or released into the country without supervision, immigrants receive location tracking devices. They must quickly respond to alerts sent to the gadgets in order to confirm their whereabouts, or risk punishment.

The program highlights technology’s growing role in guarding borders, with demand for muscular digital tools opening lucrative avenues for private industry while expanding government authority. The boom has benefited companies like Palantir, Anduril and Cellebrite, which have won government contracts.

Supporters praised the effectiveness and cost savings of Geo Group’s tools, but critics warned that the technology usage might lead to deeper surveillance of immigrant communities.

“The government bills it as an alternative to detention,” but “we see it as an expansion to detention,” said Noor Zafar, a senior lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

At the same time, Geo Group’s products have been glitchy and expensive, according to more than a dozen current and former employees and government officials, as well as a review of the company’s federal contract and other records.

Each time an immigrant sends a selfie to check in through the company’s SmartLink app, which can happen millions of times a year, the federal government pays roughly $1, according to portions of Geo Group’s government contract obtained by The New York Times. The company charges $3 a day for any immigrant wearing its VeriWatch smartwatch. If the watch is lost, Geo Group bills the government $380, more than the cost of an Apple Watch SE.

ICE said in a statement that the monitoring program “effectively increases court appearance rates and compliance with release conditions.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Attempts to modify the program and open the contract to rival bids have been stymied by Geo Group’s lobbying and connections on Capitol Hill and within ICE, according to senior D.H.S. officials and congressional staff members. Some senior ICE employees have gone on to work at the company.

Geo Group referred questions about how its monitoring technology is being used by the Trump administration to ICE. In a statement, Geo Group said it had “never advocated for or against, nor have we ever played a role in setting immigration enforcement policies.” The company added that its services are “closely monitored in accordance with strict government contract standards.”

Mr. Zoley, whose family moved to the United States from Greece when he was a child, started Geo Group in 1984 as a division of a security guard business. When the prison population exploded in the 1980s, the company expanded into running private prisons. It now has about 100 facilities.

In 1986, Geo Group won an ICE contract to build an immigrant processing facility in Aurora, Colo., to hold up to 150 people. By the 2000s, immigration had become a major business, which fluctuated based on who was in the White House and which party controlled Congress.

To diversify, Geo Group turned to digital surveillance. In 2011, the firm paid $415 million for Behavioral Interventions, a Colorado company founded in the 1970s to track cattle and which had expanded to monitoring parolees. Behavioral Interventions had an exclusive contract with ICE to digitally monitor thousands of recently arrived immigrants.

Mr. Zoley called the acquisition “transformative.” He was proved right when the government plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into remote surveillance of immigrants over the next decade, especially during the Biden administration.

The idea was that remote surveillance of immigrants facing removal proceedings would reduce the burdens on already-packed detention centers, relieve ICE officers of grunt work and save money. Digitally monitoring an immigrant costs about $4.20 a day, versus about $150 a day in a detention center, according to ICE.

“The program is meant to make sure we know who these people are and that they are on an adequate level of supervision,” said Deborah Fleischaker, the ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration.

By 2022, more than 300,000 immigrants were enrolled in the program. Geo Group’s sales soared, but revenue fell in 2023.

The company lobbied to expand the surveillance, said Jason Morín, a political science professor at California State University, Northridge who studies Geo Group. Ahead of the 2024 election, a Geo Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million in campaign contributions to Republican candidates, with the bulk going to groups supporting Mr. Trump and those running for Congress, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Wall Street analysts included Geo Group, which has about 18,000 employees, in ideas for stocks that would perform well if Mr. Trump were elected. With no real competition, some estimated the company’s digital monitoring business would generate nearly $700 million in revenue cumulatively through 2026. Its biggest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard.

For many unauthorized immigrants who are not detained at the border, the perilous journey to the United States ends inside Geo Group’s surveillance system.

After turning themselves in to immigration officers, they are given an ankle bracelet, a smartwatch or a smartphone with the company’s monitoring app. Rather than be overseen by ICE officers, they are watched by Geo Group case specialists.

Under the program, immigrants live more freely in the United States during a legal process that can play out over years. The trade-off is constant monitoring. Geo Group’s app has permission to continuously track a user’s location, according to a Times analysis of its code.

One Geo Group case worker in the Northeast, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, described using a Google Maps-like software to check immigrants’ locations. If immigrants were not home or lied about their whereabouts during a check-in, they received a strike. If an immigrant received three strikes, the case specialist would inform an ICE agent, who could increase monitoring, detain the person or expedite the person’s deportation.

Geo Group employees at field offices from Massachusetts to Alabama said they had often struggled to monitor up to 300 immigrants simultaneously. The case worker in the Northeast recalled being asked to make 12 home visits to immigrants in a single day. Each was limited to five minutes, despite requirements to do a full report on the immigrant’s living conditions, she said. Geo Group charged D.H.S. up to $88 a visit.

Those under surveillance are limited in where they can travel, lawyers and immigration rights groups said. If immigrants leave a set area of where they can be, the software alerts case officers. Because many check-ins must happen from home on a prescribed day — say on a Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — people are often stuck waiting, affecting their ability to work or perform certain day-to-day tasks.

“Whatever radius is imposed, that becomes the size of their life,” said Laura Rivera, a senior lawyer for Just Futures Law, which focuses on tech usage for immigration enforcement.

Geo Group stores data collected from the surveillance program on its private servers, making it more cumbersome for the government to access and analyze, current and former ICE officials said. Former company employees described technical problems, such as relying on outdated servers that frequently crashed, weak batteries in the company’s smartwatches and a bug in which the app occasionally failed to tell an immigrant to check in, which could result in a penalty.

In 2022, as Geo Group’s digital monitoring business ballooned, some Biden administration officials in the Department of Homeland Security questioned the cost and effectiveness of the tracking program.

The D.H.S. officials met to draft a plan to change it, including standards for assessing each immigrant’s risk of committing a crime or fleeing and what surveillance that merited, said six people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations. The officials wanted to break up the contract into three parts to solicit new bids, the people said. Around the same time, D.H.S. tech workers were asked to develop cheaper alternatives to Geo Group.

​The moves threatened Geo Group’s involvement in the monitoring program, with major financial implications for its bottom line. The company began lobbying to disrupt the plans, according to agency officials and Capitol Hill staff members.

Conservatives and some career ICE officials joined in. Thomas D. Homan, who was then working for a conservative immigration group and is now Mr. Trump’s border czar, wrote a Breitbart editorial attacking the plans and the midlevel Biden administration official responsible for them. A conservative group created a website dedicated to attacking the official.

Daniel Bible, ICE’s head of enforcement and removal operations at the time, also stalled the changes by ordering lengthy reviews and delaying approvals, two people said. Last year, he joined Geo Group as an executive. He did not respond to a message for comment.

The efforts eventually died and plans to develop cheaper alternatives to Geo Group’s tech never went beyond testing.

Geo Group said allegations that it had blocked changes to the surveillance program “are part of a politicized effort by open borders groups to interfere with the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts and to abolish immigration enforcement writ large.”

Since Mr. Trump took office, fewer immigrants have crossed the border as the president has signed legislation like the Laken Riley Act, which mandates increasing detentions of immigrants with criminal histories in facilities like those owned by Geo Group.

The new law could also require “significant ramp-up in the electronic monitoring,” Mr. Zoley said on an earnings call in February, adding that his company was ready to scale up its surveillance “by several hundreds of thousands and upward to several millions of participants as required.”

Geo Group’s technology has repeatedly helped ICE officers carry out deportations, legal aid groups said. In January, ICE agents in Georgia tracked an immigrant to a job site and detained him, while another was grabbed outside a church, the groups said. More recently, an immigrant in New Jersey received a call from a Geo Group employee asking him to step outside his home because the tracker was not getting a signal. Agents were waiting for him.

Legal aid groups said they feared that the surveillance would soon be used for larger raids. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, agents in Mississippi used data harvested from Geo Group’s tools to help secure a warrant for a raid on a chicken processing plant. The ensuing sweep, which included workplaces across the state, led to the detention of 680 immigrants.



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Meta’s Antitrust Trial to Put Mark Zuckerberg, Serial Witness, to the Test Again

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Meta’s Antitrust Trial to Put Mark Zuckerberg, Serial Witness, to the Test Again


Seven years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, testified for the first time in Congress. After a two-week boot camp by his lawyers to prep him, he answered questions in three back-to-back-to-back hearings over two days in a baptism by fire.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, has had even more practice since then. He has appeared before Congress eight times and testified in court at least twice, more than any of his peers at the biggest tech companies. He has defended his company, previously known as Facebook, on issues such as privacy, child safety and the spread of disinformation.

As early as Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg will again take the hot seat, this time as the marquee witness in the Federal Trade Commission’s landmark lawsuit accusing Meta of breaking antitrust law. Regulators sued the company in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, saying it used a “buy-or-bury strategy” to maintain a monopoly in social media.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s turn as a serial witness has become a potent symbol of Washington’s growing frustration with the power held by Silicon Valley, fueling attempts to rein in the tech industry. Under President Trump, tech chief executives have cozied up to the administration in hopes that regulators will take a softer hand, but so far his appointees have signaled continued scrutiny.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have railed at Mr. Zuckerberg, accusing him of lying and having personal responsibility for various societal harms. Previous tough questioning could help him during his expected seven hours of testimony defending Meta in the antitrust trial, legal experts said.

“He seems to be much more aware of the audiences he’s speaking to compared to his earlier years,” said Adam Sterling, associate dean at Stanford Law School. “Whether it’s a deposition or a lawsuit or in front of the Senate, he can actually craft the message to the recipients of it.”

Meta and the F.T.C. declined to comment.

It’s a far cry from Mr. Zuckerberg’s start in a Harvard dorm room 21 years ago. After building “The Facebook,” he dropped out of school and moved to Silicon Valley to build the social network. His successes and failures were publicly scrutinized.

In 2021, he renamed the company Meta, an effort to shed some of the company’s baggage. He has recently courted Mr. Trump, including visiting the White House this month to try to persuade the president and his aides to settle the F.T.C.’s suit.

The government scrutiny and legal challenges haven’t inflicted lasting wounds on the company. Meta’s stock price has more than doubled since Mr. Zuckerberg’s first appearance in Congress.

Mr. Zuckerberg is likely to face a more grueling time on the stand at the antitrust trial, legal experts said. Congressional hearings feature grandstanding by lawmakers, and they are limited to a few minutes each. F.T.C. lawyers plan to grill Mr. Zuckerberg for hours. They also have a trove of his emails and other communications and plan to ask him to defend the documents that they say prove his company’s ill intentions.

“A trial is a different beast since opposing counsel will be well prepared, ask better questions and stay focused on their case,” said Nu Wexler, a former policy official for Meta and a principal for Four Corners Public Affairs.

In 2017, Mr. Zuckerberg testified in Dallas in a trial over intellectual property theft claims by a video game company, ZeniMax Media. He also testified in San Jose, Calif., in 2023 during an F.T.C. trial to block Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality company Within.

This time, the F.T.C. is asking Judge James E. Boasberg to find Meta guilty of antitrust violations, so there is “a lot more at stake,” said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director for Meta and the chief executive of Anchor Change, a consulting firm.

For the first half of Meta’s history, Mr. Zuckerberg shied away from unscripted public appearances. In 2010, he fumbled an interview at a technology conference by struggling to respond to questions about privacy as beads of sweat ran down his face.

Most of his public witness experience has come before Congress.

Mr. Zuckerberg faced an enormous backlash from Washington lawmakers after the 2016 presidential election. Reports surfaced that Facebook had given Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, access to people’s social networking data without their consent.

That led to Mr. Zuckerberg’s appearance at packed hearings in Congress in April 2018. His lawyers coached him to stay calm when interrupted and to postpone answers to hard questions, according to Meta employees familiar with the briefings.

“My team will get back to you,” he said multiple times at the hearings.

The next year, Mr. Zuckerberg faced questions from the House Financial Services Committee on the security and safety of the company’s plans for a cryptocurrency called Libra.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Zuckerberg about misinformation in political advertisements and interrupted him. He winced occasionally and at times struggled to find answers.

Representative Maxine Waters of California, the Democratic chair of the committee at the time, accused Mr. Zuckerberg of putting the company’s fortunes ahead its users.

“You’re willing to step on anyone — your competitors, women and people of color, even our democracy,” Ms. Waters said.

“I get that I’m not the ideal messenger for this right now,” Mr. Zuckerberg replied. “We certainly have work to do to build trust.”

Mr. Zuckerberg did better in his next two appearances, legal experts and former employees said, showing more polish and control of his answers. He and the chiefs of Apple, Amazon and Google were summoned in 2020 during the pandemic for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the power of Big Tech. In 2021, joined by the chief executives of Twitter and Google, Mr. Zuckerberg spoke to a House committee about disinformation.

Last year, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, demanded during a child safety hearing that Mr. Zuckerberg apologize to parents who had lost their children to bullying and other harms that Facebook and Instagram were accused of fueling.

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Mr. Zuckerberg said to parents who attended. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered.”

Mr. Hawley said it was important to hold Meta and Mr. Zuckerberg accountable.

“This was my entire goal, to force a moment of truth,” Mr. Hawley said in an interview. “But the truth is also that he keeps sailing right on ahead and will do so until there are real consequences from Congress and in the trial next week.”



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Medicaid Is a Middle-Class Benefit. Here’s What to Know.

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Medicaid Is a Middle-Class Benefit. Here’s What to Know.


“I never thought that Medicaid would become an issue in my family, but it has.”

That was the first line of a note I received this week from a retired investment industry veteran whose autistic son receives coverage from the program. A similar email arrived from one of the most affluent towns in California.

Yes, Medicaid primarily serves Americans with the lowest incomes, and you may not count yourself among them.

But now that the program is potentially on the chopping block, as Republicans in Congress seek to make up to $2 trillion in spending cuts, it’s a good time to consider others who qualify.

It could be an aging parent who needs nursing home care, whose significant nest egg has been drained after 20 years of retirement. Or it could be a 26-year-old adult child who can’t be covered on your health insurance anymore but is not yet making much money. Or perhaps it’s a severely disabled child.

Millions of people who are financially comfortable now may be just one bad break away from needing Medicaid for themselves or a member of their immediate family. Without coverage, the cost of care for an aging parent or a sick or disabled child — of any age — can be ruinous.

Medicaid is a shield against anxiety for the luckiest among us. If there is any chance your family could face enormous bills from situations like the ones that follow, the Medicaid policy debate affects you, too.

Medicaid pays for nursing home and other long-term care for people who have mostly run out of money. (Medicare does not pay for such care in most circumstances.)

Often, middle-aged people are astounded when they start helping an aging parent or another relative and find that the median annual cost of a semiprivate room in a nursing home is $111,325, according to an annual survey by Genworth, a company in the long-term-care planning business.

They’re relieved when nursing home employees tell them that their parents will qualify for Medicaid once those parents draw down their own funds (or already do qualify) — and it won’t cost the adult children anything.

“This is everybody’s coverage,” said David C. Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.

One law that most people don’t appreciate until they hit their 20s (or their child does) is a requirement that health insurers allow most parents to keep that child on their plan until the child turns 26, providing it offers coverage for dependents.

After turning 26, they’re on their own. And no matter how well-off you are, it doesn’t guarantee that your 26-year-old will have gainful employment, let alone the kind that has employer-provided health insurance.

Enter Medicaid, which often covers individual adults who earn no more than $21,597 annually. The website for KFF, a nonprofit health research group, has a number of clear explainers on various categories of eligibility. (Which state you live in can matter a lot for all categories of Medicaid beneficiaries, and states administer the programs.)

People in their 50s don’t usually boast about their 20-something children being on Medicaid. I know of two recipients in my circle in this category, because I inquire about such things. Ask around; they’re probably in your circle, too.

For most children with an incurable but not fatal condition — and many adults with a disability that prevents them from working or earning much — there is usually at least one family member managing some aspect of their care. But those family members may not be paying for it.

If your minor child has, say, spina bifida or cerebral palsy, your health insurance may not cover every therapy or the health aides who will allow you to avoid becoming a full-time caregiver. Medicaid often steps in to pay for many such expenses, no matter how much the parents earn.

Some adult children with autism may not be able to work, drive to work or live alone without a lot of help. But they may still want independence. The assistance and aides necessary for them to live away from family, though, may not be on the family’s dime. Medicaid pays many expenses for those who are eligible, no matter their parents’ assets.

So if you’re pregnant or considering becoming a parent, Medicaid is a likely backstop if your child ends up needing an enormous amount of care. The same thing is true if your 20-year-old college student has a disabling accident, your 25-year-old has a severe stroke and only partly recovers or your 30-year-old has a life-altering mental health diagnosis.

It may also be true if you want to adopt. When Kelly M. Smith and his partner adopted two brothers from the Connecticut foster-care system and moved them to North Carolina, the boys qualified for Medicaid and stayed on it until they were young adults.

Later on, Mr. Smith’s grandmother turned 100 and could no longer live alone. Medicaid paid for her nursing home care until she died.

“Medicaid supports everyone, including us upper-incomers,” he said.

Mr. Smith sent me the loveliest picture of his family, and he wasn’t the only one who shared snapshots. But the messages with some of those photos were harrowing. When parents hear about the possibility of even moderate Medicaid cuts, they are scared out of their minds. They’re also teeming with rage at what they see as the cruelty of it all.

President Trump has promised not to cut the program. Rhetoric around Medicaid “fraud, waste and abuse” floats in the ether, but there is no formal legislative blueprint yet.

All we have for now are the statistics and the stories. The statistics are these: Medicaid pays for roughly 50 percent of long-term services and support (like nursing homes and in-home care), according to KFF, and the program covers more than 70 million people.

The stories are yours to tell — and to coax out of others who might otherwise be disinclined to discuss a delicate part of their financial lives.

“Talk about it. Celebrate it,” said Brittany van der Salm, who spent years working for consulting firms that helped states improve their Medicaid programs. “It’s something to be proud of. You’ve made a great decision for yourself in seeking and getting care.”



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