‘I’m Humbled Beyond Words’: Troy Jackson Raises $2 Million After Maine Senate Nomination

“People across Maine and the country are ready to come together and finish the job” of defeating Susan Collins, said the Democratic candidate.


Troy Jackson, Democratic nominee for Maine Senate, greets delegates after winning the vote at the Maine Democrats Senate Nominating Convention in Bangor, Maine, on July 25, 2026.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jul 27, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

With Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins backed by nearly 100 billionaires, Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson has been open about the fact that beating Collins in November will be an uphill battle—but he said Monday that $2 million that’s poured in from small donors in recent days gave him hope about the “extraordinary grassroots momentum” behind his campaign.

Jackson officially became the Democratic nominee on Saturday at the party’s convention—planned in a matter of weeks after former nominee Graham Platner dropped out due to rape allegations—with Democrats across the state apparently eager to throw their support behind a candidate who backs the same progressive policies that his predecessor did.

‘30 Years of Collins. 100 Days to End It’: Maine Dems Nominate Troy Jackson for Senate

‘Working-Class Organizing Wins’: Troy Jackson Pulls Ahead in Race to Replace Platner in Maine

Since securing the nomination, said Jackson’s campaign Monday, he has raised $2 million from more than 58,000 donors, including 30,000 new contributors.

“I’m humbled beyond words by the tens of thousands of people who have stepped up to become part of this campaign,” said Jackson in a statement. “Every contribution—whether it was $5, $20, or more—is a vote of confidence in the working-class movement we’re building together.”

Without a billionaire-backed super political action committee (PAC) like the one set up by Collins’ allies, Pine Tree Results—which is planning to spend $20 million on attack ads against Jackson this fall, according to The New York Times, the fifth-generation logger and former state Senate president is relying on donations that must be $3,500 or smaller per donor.

Collins’ campaign and her allies have reserved about $60 million in air time for ads through the fall, according to AdImpact, while the Democrats have allocated about $24 million for ads in Maine.

Jackson told The New York Times Monday that he will likely need to raise at least $40 million-$50 million to beat Collins due to her fundraising advantage, but emphasized that he believes he is in a good position to win voters over based on the issues they’ll be voting on in November.

“I’m going to definitely bust my ass in these next four months to make up the difference,” Jackson said regarding the fundraising challenge. “And in the end, I think I’m on the right side of the issues compared to Susan Collins. So I feel very good about the race.”

Jackson is a strong supporter of Medicare for All, abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ending US military support for Israel, and taxing the ultrawealthy and corporations to address massive wealth inequality in the US—all issues that are increasingly popular with voters.

“In the end, I think I’m on the right side of the issues compared to Susan Collins. So I feel very good about the race.”

He has condemned Collins, the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, in recent weeks for backing President Donald Trump’s agenda and for her vote to fund ICE earlier this year—expressing anger over the vote after a federal agent fatally shot a young father in Biddeford, Maine earlier this month.

A poll released by University of New Hampshire last week showed 49% of respondents backing Jackson, compared with 46% who supported Collins.

“Susan Collins has spent years voting with Donald Trump 96% of the time, helping him stack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and supporting an agenda that guts healthcare while handing more power to billionaires and corporations,” said Jackson Monday. “Defeating her won’t be easy, and we’ll need everyone in this fight.”

The early fundraising numbers, said Jackson, prove “that people across Maine and the country are ready to come together and finish the job.”

People arrive for a hearing as a federal agent wearing a face covering waits outside a courtroom at New York Federal Plaza Immigration Court in the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City on October 29, 2025.
(Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP)

New Trump Asylum Rule Would Send Hundreds of Thousands of Applicants Straight to Deportation Proceedings

Under the new rule, an immigrant rights activist said, many asylum seekers “will never get a chance to argue their case.”


Stephen Prager
Jul 27, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Trump administration published a new regulation on Monday that will immediately allow it to potentially send almost a third of asylum applicants straight into deportation proceedings without an interview to evaluate their claims.

US asylum law requires the government to give asylum seekers a “reasonable opportunity” to present evidence that they face persecution in their country of origin as a result of race, religion, nationality, social group membership, or political opinion.

For more than three decades, US Citizenship & Immigration Services explicitly stated that this process includes the “right” to an interview, where those seeking asylum have the opportunity to describe the persecution they fear and provide facts that may not have been included in their written asylum application.

But an interim final rule is scheduled to take effect on Tuesday that will scrap this right, allowing USCIS to skip the interview and refer applicants directly to immigration judges based solely on other documents they have submitted, which are often prepared without the help of an attorney in a language the applicant may not speak fluently.

In the filing for the new rule, USCIS acknowledged that applicants may be more likely to provide greater detail in face-to-face interviews, but that the overwhelming backlog of cases makes this unsustainable.



The filing states that the new rule will “more quickly place certain aliens into removal proceedings” at the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency within the Department of Justice (DOJ_ that runs the federal immigration court system.

While these officials are referred to as “judges,” they are really part of the executive branch, appointed at the discretion of the attorney general and not subject to any Senate confirmation process.

Critics say that under President Donald Trump, these appointees have been selected to carry out his restrictive immigration agenda.

For these positions, which the administration has advertised as “deportation judges,” The Washington Post found that two-thirds of those appointed as of April 2026 had no immigration law experience. Immigration judges granted asylum in fewer than 5% of cases in February 2026, compared with 48% in 2024.

In September, the Trump DOJ gave immigration judges broader discretion to toss out claims by allowing them to “pretermit” those that they decide are “legally deficient,” meaning that applicants can be deported without a full hearing.

As it has carried out its “mass deportation” campaign, the administration has often violated the due process of immigrants in the US by removing them without notice or hearings, detaining longtime residents without the opportunity to secure bond, restricting access to legal counsel, and using mass court procedures to prevent claims from being meaningfully heard in court.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that the new rule will allow USCIS to “deny hundreds of thousands of applications without an interview, sending applicants directly to deportation proceedings.”

According to the filing, the Department of Homeland Security estimated that the new rule could affect as many as 444,724 pending cases and roughly 132,000 future applicants each year.

“This means many people will never get a chance to argue their case,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

Peace Means We’re Not Alone

Robert Koehler

July 27, 2026

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Breathe deep, sigh, embrace the next word: W-A-R.

It doesn’t go away. I write about it far too often, and every time I do I feel torn inside . . . even though I remain personally safe from it (at least for now). Words can so easily turn the actions and consequences of war into abstractions, while failing to question why it exists at all. War is simply who we are. This is a hard certainty to shatter. But . . .

“Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.”

So wrote Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail recently in the Nation. Their words start opening a deeper level of understanding, one that I’m groping for. They go on:

“It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.”

The logical conclusion, as far as I can tell, is to declare victory and then start looking for the next enemy . . . the next evil that threatens us. This is “peace”: that brief moment of silence while everyone reloads, as someone once put it. In other words, war is inevitable and ongoing. It solves nothing. It changes nothing, except to intensify people’s hatred, toward “someone,” and their desire for revenge. It shatters connection. It shatters healing.

War’s primary function is to perpetuate itself. It’s a collective addiction to power: power over others, not with them. The enemy is always present and always dehumanized. And war doesn’t always manifest itself through militarism. Consider the criminal justice system, a.k.a. the prison system, for instance.

So let me restart this column. The word I want to embrace is: P-E-A-C-E.

Peace equals evolution. Peace means power with others, not over them. And it manifests in numerous, and often unnoticed, ways. Peace is complex and rarely produces great headlines. Over the years I’ve written about many different peace organizations, which exist in many different contexts.

In essence, peace means embracing conflict, understanding it – through non-judgmental communication between everyone involved – and looking for ways to heal, rather than punish, any harm that has occurred.

Here’s part of a column I wrote about 10 years ago, after I had attended a conference on “soul repair” in Des Moines, Iowa:

“The community was out of control – the children, oh my God, the children, were sniffing gasoline and pretty much abandoning any pretense of a future – and the social and criminal-justice systems were just adding to the problem. Nothing was working.

“‘Our children slammed us against a brick wall,’ Burma Bushie said.

“This is the story of a culture in shambles. It was the early ’80s. Bushie’s community is called the Hollow Water First Nation Reserve, a village of about 900 people in eastern Manitoba, more or less at the end of the highway. There was one road in and one road out.

“They may have felt utterly isolated in their troubles, but what a few of them started to do – in synchronicity with people in other indigenous communities – has spread hope and awareness across the planet. They began reaching beyond the known (i.e., Western) world, deep into their souls and into the roots of a lost way of life, to save their children and the future. . . .

“‘Our children were acting out – not learning. That was our beginning,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t hide anymore. The Indian reservation-school system, the child welfare system – all these systems that came to help us more or less became our enemies.’

“The committed team of change-bringers began talking to one another about their own lives, as well as the troubles around them. They began addressing the issue of alcoholism, an obvious surface manifestation of far deeper matters. ‘Each time we cleared up one level, we found another,’ Bushie said. “When we got to sexual abuse – we knew that’s what we had to deal with. . . .’”

And it became a community process. When someone has been harmed, people sit in a circle as equals – victim, perpetrator, any others who are affected – and everyone has a chance to talk. When they’re not talking, they listen. There is only one goal: healing

Rupert Ross, who was at the conference with Burma Bushie, wrote about all this in his remarkable book, Returning to the Teachings. He had been a Canadian crown (i.e., prosecuting) attorney, and Hollow Water was part of his coverage area. His job was to prosecute offenders, send them to prison. He began to realize all this was doing was creating more damage to the community, and that Western “justice” had nothing to do with healing. It broke connections. It created bad guys and proceeded to dehumanize them.

He wrote, in his book: “The word ‘healing’ seems such a soft word, but, as I will show later, Hollow Water’s healing process is anything but soft. In fact, jail is a much easier alternative, because it does not require the victimizer to face the real truths about abuse.”

And this is peace: not a simplistic lull while enemies reload – that is to say, nothing at all – but the ongoing creation of a world that belongs to all of us. It’s also known as evolution.

Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

The Heartbreaking Case of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Now at Death’s Door

Eve Ottenberg

 July 28, 2026

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“They brought me here to kill me,” Gazan Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya told his last known visitor to the Israeli underground Rakefet prison, where he is kept in solitary confinement, tortured, starved and assaulted by guards with hammers. He is not the only one. At least 14 other Gazan doctors currently languish in Israeli prisons, sans charges, under the Unlawful Combatants Law, while estimates for the number of detained medical workers exceed 75. And there have been deaths of these Palestinian medical workers in Israeli custody. Recently, a prominent Israeli tweeted a comparison between “Hamas Safiya” and “Nazi Mengele.” This alarming lie only reinforces the view that Israeli public opinion supports the destruction of Gazan doctors in prison.

And destroyed they have been. According to Drop Site News, July 10, “A newly published testimony alleges Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, the former head of obstetrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital, died after being severely beaten during interrogation following his arrest by Israeli forces in November 2023. At least three doctors have died in Israeli custody during the genocide, Palestinian officials say.” UN human rights experts have used the term “medicide” to describe what Israel has done in Gaza. So Dr. Safiya is not exaggerating: They may very well have brought him there to kill him. After all, killers are in charge in Israeli prisons, and they are killing doctors. Furthermore, Dr. Safiya is not alone; other doctors could meet Al-Rantisi’s fate if someone with power in a place like Washington, D.C. doesn’t lift a finger to help.

Drop Site reports that Al-Rantisi’s family learned of his death through the media, after eight months of agonizing waiting. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, of the 320 healthcare workers detained since October 2023, “83 still [are] imprisoned, including Dr. Abu Safiya.” And on July 10, that news outlet reported that U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded Safiya’s release, saying that he “has been held without charge for 18 months and now faces an imminent threat to his life from torture.” If AOC is saying this, it’s politically acceptable; so hopefully there will be more U.S. congressional calls for justice regarding this atrocity. Meanwhile, also on July 10, an Israeli quadcopter attacked Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza and “injured two maintenance workers.” The genocide hasn’t ended. And the Israeli beat goes on…

Evidently Israel singled out Dr. Safiya because he was a hero. It zeroed in on him because he wouldn’t leave his northern Gaza hospital, because he was actually saving lives that Israel doesn’t want saved, because his mere presence inspired hope. And hope, apparently, is what Israel intends to crush. The inscription over Dante’s Inferno truly belongs over Israeli prisons: “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” Except the Israelis aren’t torturing sinners. They’re torturing saints. They can scream that Dr. Safiya is a Hamas colonel as much as they like – the charge that Dr. Safiya was an active Hamas terrorist, anything other than a dedicated doctor, is hooey. And the world knows it.

In a recent Fault Lines documentary, “The Disappearance of Dr. Abu Safiya,” a Palestinian says that the medical profession is sacred and must survive this assault. The irony, of course, is that once upon a time, for Jews, the medical profession WAS sacred, but Israel has trampled that in the mud and in gore, and this sacrilege, this disgusting attack on a vocation to which the victimized naturally gravitate, to which Jews, for millennia, gravitated, may pass unnoticed in Israel, as the urge to extinguish the humane spark that leads Palestinians to choose medicine overcomes and further degrades and shames the Israeli state. What is being done to the doctors in Israeli prisons is known – no matter the efforts to hide it. That it is being done on the orders of dehumanized thugs like Itamar Ben Gvir only fills the world with more revulsion. The worst among us torment the best, with no help anywhere. Still, it is known and will never be forgotten.

If Israeli prison guards murder this doctor, besides being a crime, a sin and a tragedy, that will be another stain on Israel. Not, of course, as gargantuan as the stain of the Gaza genocide, but just as indelible. You’d think someone in the Knesset would wake up to this. You’d think some shred of decency and shame would combine with the more pragmatic promptings of self-preservation to get some Israeli politician, someone other than an Israeli doctor or professor – to repeat, a politician, a person with power – to understand that these state murders must stop and to act on that perception. But maybe this is what it means to be a pariah nation. Utterly un-selfconscious wickedness. Doing evil with gusto and for the praise in the little local echo chamber, while the world looks on, aghast.

It’s encouraging that AOC spoke up about Dr. Safiya, partly because she’s a run-of-the-mill politico, and when such a person feels emboldened enough to speak, it means others may too; hopefully those who finance the monstrous Israeli murder machine, namely U.S. congressmembers. If they could come to feel the truth of their situation, namely that they are, each and every one, personally responsible for the blood being shed by the Israeli regime they arm and pay for, then we might finally be on a path out of this darkness. Congressman Ro Khanna, recently detained and threatened by Israeli settlers and the IDF, might be a good candidate to bear this message: Dr. Safiya is not alone. What’s being done to him is being done to other imprisoned Palestinian doctors.

According to Drop Site News July 12, “Since the ceasefire took effect last October, Israeli forces have killed 1112 Palestinians, including 254 children, 118 women and 34 elderly people and wounded 3548, including 995 children, 619 women and 150 elderly people…Israeli forces have carried out 1600 airstrikes and shelling attacks, 1424 live-fire attacks, 150 military incursions and 404 explosive demolitions across Gaza…Israeli forces have also detained 141 Palestinians since the ceasefire began. Israel continues to occupy approximately 34 square kilometers beyond the agreed withdrawal lines, while blocking repairs to electricity, water and sewage systems and preventing the entry of heavy machinery needed for reconstruction. The report [shared by the Palestinian side] also cites the torture and inhuman treatment of detainees…Israeli forces have averaged 13.1 ceasefire violations every day, since the agreement took effect.” This doesn’t sound like a ceasefire to me – does it to you? Or does it sound like an effort to destroy a people?

Tunnel vision when it comes to demolishing Gaza so impairs Israeli judgment that Likud rulers must consider their nation’s pariah status temporary, that once the Gazans are gone, they will be forgotten, that the way to deal with Palestinian heroes is to kill them. After all, no one has stopped Israel from doing what it wants so far. But someone could. That someone is the United States. Specifically, the someone who sits in the Oval Office. Yet even if Donald “Board of Empire” Trump won’t thwart its atrocities, Israel has succumbed to a delusion, the delusion that it can get away with murder in perpetuity. It can’t. A day will dawn when, to put it colloquially, the show is over. Let’s hope Dr. Safiya survives until then.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website

We Must Act With the Same Moral Courage as Dr. Hussam Abu Saffiya: Free Dr. Abu Safiya Now!

National Single Payer

 July 27, 2026

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Dr. Hussam Abu Saffiya, outside Gaza’s battered Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2024. Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.

Summary: National Single Payer, a national, grassroots organization joined by the principles that health care is a human right, must be free from profit, and will be achieved through national legislation, endorses the appeal issued by Doctors Against Genocide for immediate international action on behalf of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician detained by Israeli Occupation Forces in December 2024 because he refused to abandon his patients under his care. We call on every government, medical association, hospital, university, humanitarian organization, and elected official to demand his immediate release.

National Single Payer  has endorsed an appeal issued by Doctors Against Genocide for immediate international action on behalf of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician and former Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza, detained by Israeli authorities on December 27, 2024 because he refused to abandon the patients under his care as his hospital was under assault.

Dr. Abu Safiya has been detained in Israeli prisons for more than 18 months without formal criminal charges where he has been beaten and tortured and held in solitary confinement.  As a result, his health has deteriorated and his life is in imminent danger.

The detention of Dr. Abu Safiya is part of an international effort to demonstrate that health care workers are not safe or protected.  There have been over 400 health care workers illegally abducted by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza since October 2023. In addition to Dr. Abu Safiya, 16 other doctors from Gaza remain detained illegally and 80 health care workers are still held without charge.  The death toll among Palestinian health care workers is now over 1700.

As a national, grassroots, social justice organization that organizes locally in the struggle for national single payer health care in the U.S., united by the common principles that health care is a human right, must be free from profit, and must be achieved through national legislation, the Steering Committee of National Single Payer endorses the following appeal and strongly encourages national medical associations, hospitals, universities, and health care professional worldwide to do so also.

National Single Payer joins Doctors Against Genocide in calling for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s:

+ Immediate proof of life.

+ Immediate independent medical evaluation and all necessary medical treatment.

+ Immediate and unrestricted access by his lawyer and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

+ Protection from torture and all cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

+ Immediate release.

In addition, National Single Payer calls for:

+ The immediate release of all healthcare workers detained without due process consistent with international humanitarian law.

+ Independent investigation and accountability for alleged torture, deaths in custody, and other serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remained beside his patients when it placed his life at risk. Today, his own life and our own moral integrity depend on whether the international community acts with the same courage.

There is still a narrow window to act. Recent judicial proceedings requiring the Israeli government to report on Dr. Abu Safiya’s condition create an opportunity for urgent international engagement. Every government, medical association, hospital, university, humanitarian organization, and elected official with the ability to act should do so now.

For more information: 

https://doctorsagainstgenocide.org/statements/release-dr-abu-safiya

National Single Payer Steering Committee: J. Albert, C. Cohen, E. Grystar, A. Malinow, J. Noh-Smith, K. Tillow.