96 arrested around England ahead of legal challenge to group’s proscription, no arrests in Edinburgh and Derry
~ Tim Simon ~
Nearly 100 more people across England have been arrested today (19 July) under the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding signs saying “I oppose genocide—I support Palestine Action”. Protest group Defend Our Juries reported that 55 people were arrested in Parliament Square in London, 17 in Bristol, 16 in Manchester, and 8 in Truro. In contrast, protests in Edinburgh and Derry were left undisturbed.
In Truro, police were slow to respond to the display at first, handing out leaflets outlining the legislation surrounding support for proscribed groups. They later began to slowly arrest those holding the signs—among them 81 year-old Deborah Hinton, a former magistrate.
Edinburgh. Photo: Defend Our Juries
In a statement made during their arrest, one activist stated: “We want Yvette Cooper to remove the proscription of Palestine Action. We want the government to take action on genocide and to stop complying with Israel in killing and slaughtering babies, women, children, and men. If this was in 1930s Germany, it would be the same as helping the Nazis with their concentration camps”.
The ban on the group was announced by Cooper after supporters of Palestine Action entered the RAF base at Brize Norton and spray-painted two military planes. The High Court is to hear a legal challenge to the ban on Monday, when Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori will seek permission for a full judicial review of the group’s proscription.
Vote Labour for Genocide.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
A few months ago, Reform figures couldn’t stop banging on about how many members were joining the party, prompting them to start a live ticker of membership numbers.
…
But the problem with having a live tracker of your membership numbers is that everyone can see when things aren’t going so well.
And in the last month or so it seems that the ticker has started going in the other direction – significantly.
At the start of June, Reform appeared to have around 237,000 members. Now, their membership ticker is roughly 10,000 down on this, at 227,592 at the time of writing.
…
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Diane Abbott speaking at the People’s Assembly Against Austerity protest in central London, June 7, 2025
DIANE ABBOTT is not so much guilty of thought crime as the crime of thinking. In her response to question put to her by Radio 4’s James Naughtie (and recorded in May before the present ructions in the Parliamentary Labour Party) she simply said: “Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know.”
She then went on to remark: “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism. I don’t know why people would say that.”
Keir Starmer’s reimposition of the verbot on Abbott’s membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party arrived without anything resembling a rational examination of the manifestly sensible things she said and without any reasoned argument against.
It is, and was intended as such, as an arbitrary act of punishment, designed to isolate her and render toxic a rational discussion of racism.
You might think that Starmer and his praetorian guard would think about the way this might be understood in black communities, particularly as this all occurs alongside a violent racist riot in a neighbouring constituency to hers.
…
Starmer sees it as another opportunity to buttress his complicity in the Gaza genocide to strengthen his police regime which has driven hundreds of thousands out of the Labour Party, shed millions of Labour voters and is creating something of a panic in a Parliamentary Labour Party whose members, if they lack the courage to confront him, still retain the capacity to count and thus know they face certain defeat.
Keir Starmer chases Nigel Farage’s racist bigot vote.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Grassroots immigrant rights activists challenge federal claims about the circumstances of the ICE raid that lead to the farmworker’s death
Jaime Alanís succumbed to injuries sustained amid an ICE raid at Glass House Farms, where he had labored for over a decade
On July 10, 2025, while being pursued by ICE agents during a violent raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, 57‑year‑old farmworker Jaime Alanís fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof and succumbed to his injuries two days later.
A devoted husband, father, and the sole breadwinner for his family, Alanís had labored at the farm for over a decade. On July 12, the worker became the first known casualty of the Trump administration’s intensified ICE raids.
His death ignited a fierce public outcry. While the Department of Homeland Security maintains he was not actively being chased and climbed the roof on his own accord, his family, as well as immigrant rights activists, contend he was fleeing from the violence of Trump’s ICE agents, who have terrorized immigrant communities across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security denies that Alanís was being pursued at all, although this does not explain why the worker ended up climbing 30 feet onto the roof of a greenhouse. DHS also claims that the raid resulted in the rescue of children from “potential exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.”
To some immigrant rights activists, Alanís’ death has become a poignant symbol of the human cost of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, and the policies that make them possible.
On July 9, the US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers, and that the Trump administration is seeking a workforce composed entirely of those from the US. Rollins plans to accomplish this via automation and mobilizing the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program.”
Trump has recently signed legislation that would create the first-ever federally mandated work requirements for those covered by Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program. According to a May report by the healthcare policy group KFF, 92% of those on Medicaid under age 65 and not receiving SSI or SSDI benefits and not covered by Medicare, were either working full or part-time, or not working due to caregiving duties, illness or disability, or attending school.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ventura County activist Elaine Yompian, part of the immigrant rights coalition VC Defensa, for more on the fight for justice for Jaime Alanís and the millions of immigrant workers with targets on their backs.
“We understand that even though this wasn’t an immediate death, his injuries and the danger that he was put in is a direct result of the ICE operation and the brutality in which agents were conducting this raid,” Elaine told Peoples Dispatch. “We’re calling it the first murder that has happened in an ICE operation.”
Read the full interview here:
Peoples Dispatch: Can you describe what took place during the raid at Glass House Farms and the surrounding events?
Elaine Yompian: The same day as the raid, there was a huge protest that broke out in defense of the community. We kind of put out a call for people to immediately show up.
That’s been one of the key things that we’ve been doing, mobilizing people to take action wherever ICE is present so that their actions don’t go unnoticed or unchecked.
We didn’t know how big the raid was when it started. We put out a call for emergency mobilization to that location, and soon we saw that the National Guard was coming in. We kept making calls for people to just show up to declare that we wanted ICE out of the county, and away from our neighbors and family members.
We were there for over six hours, standing basically in front of the ICE agents, hoping that they wouldn’t pass, hoping that they wouldn’t take more people. Amid the chaos, we have heard of four US citizens that were taken, two of which were our volunteers, and one is a person that we know.
All four have been released so far. One of them was our volunteer, she’s a mother, and she was held for over 10 hours. She was beaten up, then taken to the hospital. And when she was taken to the hospital, we called for a protest there, for them to release her, and ICE agents actually tried to enter the hospital and were pushing the hospital staff to try to get in. A lot of the staff held their ground because of HIPAA compliances and everything, and the ICE had no warrants.
Eventually ICE agents did get in, apparently someone let them in, and then they took her again and she saw all kinds of really horrible things while in their custody. They tried to intimidate her, but eventually they released her with no charges.
The other US citizen that was detained, Jonathan Anthony Caravello, is a labor organizer and a volunteer of ours. He is math and philosophy professor at California State University, Channel Islands, and he was also taken and detained for several days. They released him recently.
Another US citizen who was detained is a US Army veteran, George Retes, who we met during the first raid that happened in June, and he was also detained and freed yesterday.
We stayed back at the site of the raid for a very long time, even after the agents had left, to help those who were hiding with farm workers, to get back to their cars or get back home.
After the raid, our hotline was getting back to back calls of families who were looking for their loved ones. We had a family search team, trying to find where they were taken, if they were taken, or if they were just missing – whether they had been detained or were still hiding somewhere, and we needed to go find them. We were doing all that work, as well as doing food distribution for families that have been affected.
With Jaime Alanís’ family in particular, we got in contact pretty quickly because the news reports were saying that he had died during the raid. The family was pretty upset that the media was saying that he had already passed away when he was still on life support.
When I spoke to his niece, who was his immediate family member in the US., her goal is to eventually sue the DHS for his murder.
PD:How does the violence deployed during the ICE raid in Camarillo compare to tactics used in other Trump-era ICE raids, such as militarization or arrests of noncriminals? How do these raids compare to raids under past administrations?
EY: Raids have always been a form of human torture. It’s always involved family separation, and the level of trauma and impact that it has on our communities has never really shifted, depending on whether it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president in office. It’s always been something that has caused incredible amounts of pain to the families and to the people being taken.
The use of force has also always been brutal. The conditions within detention centers have always been truly horrific. There’s no other word to describe them other than torture.
Now with Trump, it’s definitely intensified, we’re not going to deny that.
PD:DHS is justifying this raid by claiming that children were rescued from potential violations of child labor laws and human trafficking taking place at the farm. What is your response to this justification?
EY: It’s a common tactic for the US to claim that they’re doing this for the safety of the community, for the well-being of children. Let’s even say that the farm had conditions that DHS claims. However, these conditions are also caused by systems of injustice. The reason why so many people go into jobs that have these extreme amounts of physical labor for very low pay is a result of capitalist exploitation.
But the solution for that would never be a one time intervention on one farm in one county in the middle of California. That is not going to solve the larger issue.
So if the government wants to say we’re doing this because we were trying to protect children from working these conditions, the finger should be pointed right back at the government itself and the capitalist system, because that’s what’s causing these conditions and that’s what’s allowing for this to happen.
Heavily armed police repress anti-mining protests in Las Naves on June 26. Photo: CONAIE
In June, the police harshly repressed demonstrators opposing the third-largest mining project in the country. Several social movements have denounced links between the mining company and the president’s family.
Ecuador is a country that has developed a strong consciousness for environmental conservation throughout its history. Its constitution, approved in 2008, was a pioneer in the world in granting rights to nature. In 2021, more than 80% of the inhabitants of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-largest city, voted in favor of banning mining there. In 2023, in a popular consultation, the Ecuadorian people demanded that the oil in the Amazonian Yasuní National Park be left in the ground.
The inhabitants of the country’s capital, Quito, also voted against the exploration and exploitation of metallic minerals in the Andean Chocó area. Mention should also be made of the numerous struggles that Indigenous peoples have waged for decades against the destruction of nature by large mining and oil companies.
Curimining and allegations of links with the Noboa family
The latest episode in this anti-mining legacy took place three weeks ago in the canton of Las Naves, Bolivar Province. The company Curimining S.A., following an agreement with the right-wing government of Daniel Noboa, announced that it would begin its activities in June with the construction of the El Domo mine, which aims to extract gold, silver, and zinc.
According to the announcement, the company will invest USD 292 million over a 22-month period and will offer royalties of more than USD 370 million, thus becoming the third-largest mine in the country, behind Fruta del Norte and Mirador.
One of the most controversial issues of the start of mining operations is that, according to several social organizations, including the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), one of the major shareholders of Curmining S.A. is the Nobis Group, a powerful conglomerate of companies dominated mainly by the family of the current president of the country. Given this, several social leaders have stressed that the operating permits were granted to favor the economic group to which the Noboa family belongs.
The popular organization of Las Naves and its neighbors
In early 2025, upon learning that Las Naves would become the epicenter of one of the largest mining operations in the country, hundreds of residents of the sector began to organize and demand that mining activities not be carried out on their land. They argue that mining operations endanger their water sources, which are not only indispensable for sustaining their fundamental economic activity (agriculture and livestock) but also for their daily consumption.
At the end of June 2025, major protests and mobilizations took place in Las Naves, involving not only the inhabitants of the area but also farmers from neighboring areas such as Ventanas, Echandía, San Luis de Pambil, Quimsaloma, and Pangua. The protesters argued that the consequences of the mining project could damage the environment and the thousands of families living there.
The National Anti-Mining Front, a social organization active in the struggle against mining, said in a statement: “Precincts, communities, associations, water boards, cocoa producers, ranchers, nurseries, traders and citizens in general mobilized in a single force to denounce the invasion of the mining company Curimining in the upper area of the canton, putting at risk the water sources where rivers are born that supply thousands of peasant families who are engaged in agriculture, livestock and tourism. Today, the people of Las Naves, but also Ventanas, Echandia, and San Luis de Pambil, Quimsaloma, Pangua, we said in one voice of resistance, MINING WILL NOT HAPPEN.”
The repression
This is not the first time that the residents of Las Naves have protested against mining. In July 2023, the government repressed the protests against the granting of the license to the company. In 2025, the presidency decided to repeat the script and protect Curmining’s interests, and opted for repression of the protesters. For several days, there were intense confrontations between farmers and traders in the area with specialized units of the National Police. Several videos show various protesters who were injured after the actions of the gendarmes.
On June 26, CONAIE reported on X: “Day 3 of repression in Las Naves. Heavily armed policemen from the Unit for the Maintenance of Order once again entered the La Union, Las Naves, by order of the mining company Curmining S.A., whose shareholder is the Nobis Group, linked to the family of President Daniel Noboa. The Government prioritizes the use of public force to protect the interests of a foreign company, criminalizing communities that defend water, territory, and their peasant economy.”
What is behind the events in Las Naves?
To better understand the situation, Peoples Dispatch spoke with Pamela Viteri, political scientist, lawyer, and left-wing militant, who affirmed that there was more behind what happened in Las Naves than what the official story says: “Behind it are the interests of the mining companies and the State that supports them. The Curimining mining company (Salazar Resources and Silvercorp) wants to impose the Curipamba – El Domo project by force, and the government, through police force and persecution, protects those interests. All this happens because mining is a business for the elites and for the politicians who are in power, such as President Noboa himself, who has very clear links with the sector, and specifically, in this concession.”
On the future of the anti-mining struggle in Las Naves, Viteri said, “The struggle is not over, it is still going on. The people have resisted strongly: there have been two points of resistance, caravans, and massive mobilizations. Although the police have brutally repressed, injuring protestors and carrying out arrests, the communities have not given up. Judicially, the protection actions were rejected, but the communities have appealed … The people continue to defend the water and the territory. Right now, there is tense resistance in the territory. They have not allowed all the machines they would like to enter, and that is thanks to the popular struggle … for more than a month and a half.”
When Viteri was asked about the broader meaning of the anti-mining struggle in Ecuador, she said: “What we are facing is not just a mining company, it is an entire extractivist model that despises peasant life, water, and the sovereignty of the peoples. A mode of accumulation that only serves the great interests of capital and that can only be sustained through blood, repression, and jail.”
“The future consists of staying organized, adding more strength, and not letting go of the territory. If we don’t stand firm, these companies will sweep us away. But the struggle of Las Naves has already transcended: now it is seen as an example throughout the country. The future lies in continuing to articulate with other anti-mining struggles, strengthening the organization, putting legal and social pressure, and not allowing us to be divided or bought. If the company and the State continue to violate rights, we will continue to resist. This struggle will not end until the mining company withdraws from the territory and the government looks for and listens to economic alternatives. The present and the future are anti-mining,” concluded Viteri.
Diane Abbott speaking at the People’s Assembly Against Austerity protest in central London, June 7, 2025
