About 900,000 fresh flowers hung from walls, columns and ceilings; there were tins of caviar for each guest, Dom Pérignon, three wedding dresses and a 30-piece orchestra. The Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York hosted a wedding in September that was put together in under three months and cost around $10 million, according to the U.S. media. It was the week of the United Nations General Assembly, with Manhattan full of heads of state and diplomats, and the party drew major figures from U.S. power circles, oligarchs, Congolese politicians, the rapper Nelly on stage, and even former boxer Mike Tyson. But above all the celebration brought together the top ranks of Trumpism: the attorney general Todd Blanche; the FBI director Kash Patel; and White House counsel Will Scharf. It was a MAGA wedding for the glossy magazines.

The hangover from that party has passed, but the couple has been dominating headlines for more than a week. No longer so much for their lavish wedding as for their connections and, above all, for the bitter fight that has erupted after this fairy-tale union. The bride, Alina Habba, 42, was once Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The groom, Turhan Mildon, who says he is 29 — although some documents list him as being 25 — is a Turkish investor who did business in Venezuela thanks to Alex Saab, former president Nicolás Maduro’s front man. The couple met in late 2025 at Washington’s Kennedy Center and began dating in early 2026. And into this brief romance stepped an old friend of the couple, Richard Grenell, former U.S. special envoy to Caracas — which now explains why no one invited him to the party.

What might read like a Turkish soap opera is, at its core, a fight over Venezuela. Weeks after the wedding, on October 9, Habba entered the Oval Office to accuse Grenell of making millions of dollars transferred by her newlywed husband disappear. She did not pick an ordinary day: it was one day after The New York Times sent her husband a series of questions about his businesses in Venezuela.

Habba’s account, according to Axios and the Times, is that in the spring of 2025 Grenell persuaded Mildon to transfer $17.6 million to TX-AT, a Texas security and defense firm for which Grenell worked as a consultant in 2024. The details of the deal behind that transfer remain unclear, but Axios reports thatGrenell sent a message promising that the investment would be rewarded with access to the U.S. president, VIP events and administration officials. Of that total, $5.6 million was meant to be used as a donation to the Kennedy Center, which Grenell was then running, but the money never arrived.

The tangle has grown in recent days. The money transfer, The New York Times reports, did not actually come directly from Mildon but from an account linked to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose president had hired the Turkish businessman as an adviser. Grenell calls the whole thing absurd, denies the messages and says he never received a cent from Mildon.

The struggle over Venezuela

The plot goes beyond Washington power squabbles and exposes two men who tried to profit from the U.S. push against Chavismo and were swept up by Maduro’s fall. On October 12, The New York Times published a piece laying out the first details of the dispute that was about to erupt. It linked the Turkish investor to Saab’s front operations and reported that in June the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez — the same official who handed Saab over to Washington — had ordered the freezing of Mildon’s contracts in the country. Rodríguez cited failure to meet investment goals, but the punishment, the Times reports, did not last long. The chavista leader reversed course as soon as she learned the name of the Turkish investor’s new bride.

The Kennedy Center’s starring role turns this story into a personal matter for Trump, who appointed himself chair of its board. U.S. media have revealed Trump had grown disenchanted with Grenell over a string of negative headlines about the institution. The president announced Grenell’s departure in March of this year, and earlier, in November 2025, Democratic senators had opened an investigation into him and the center’s leadership over cronyism and corruption, which Grenell denied. This time, Trump put the case in the hands of Will Scharf, his counsel, one of the notable guests at the wedding. Mildon’s lawyer handed over text messages and a transfer receipt. In one message from May 2025, Grenell allegedly said he wanted to make Mildon the U.S. face in Venezuela.

The formula for success

Mildon grew up in a small Turkish town near the Dardanelles Strait, where his family owned auto shops and gas stations. He summed up his formula this month to Forbes Turkey with a play on English words: previously the emphasis was on know-how, now it’s on know-who. He put that premise to use in 2021 by marrying the daughter of a construction magnate close to Turkish President Recep Erdoğan. Later, in the RDC — where in 2023 he began advising President Félix Tshisekedi — he obtained a diplomatic passport and won major public contracts. And in June 2025, just months after his divorce, Mildon became engaged to María Eugenia Ceballos, daughter of Venezuelan Admiral Remigio Ceballos, the entrepreneur’s spokesman told the Times. Ceballos was for years the operational chief of Venezuela’s armed forces, a man sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption and human rights abuses.

At the end of 2023 Mildon landed in Caracas and found his true godfather. Alex Saab had just returned from a U.S. prison after a prisoner swap with the Biden administration, and months later Maduro appointed him minister of industry, in charge of dealing with foreign investors. In March 2025, Saab awarded him the operation of the state cement plants. Months later, he handed him a shrimp business expropriated from its founder, who was jailed after being accused of financing the opposition. Mildon boasted to Forbes Turkey of producing 4.5 million tons of cement a year, three times the country’s total output according to figures seen by the Times. In June he visited a cement plant wearing chavista red and posed with his thumbs up, in a Trump-style gesture. His business group said in a statement there have been no cancellations of its contracts and that its business volume continues to grow.

Mildon not only did business with Saab but also tried to sell his virtues to Washington. According to The New York Times, he spent months trying to build ties between Maduro’s front man and Republicans in Trump’s circle. Several people who met Mildon before the autocrat’s capture on January 3 told the paper that he praised Saab and presented him as “the main power operator in Venezuela and the key to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the United States.” The Trump administration even considered sanctioning Mildon, two people involved in those talks told the paper. His spokesman called that a “totally false and malicious rumor,” and a U.S. official also cast doubt that sanctions had been seriously contemplated.

Grenell, for his part, had positioned himself as the man of dialogue in Venezuela. In January 2025 the diplomat met with Maduro at Miraflores and returned with six freed Americans. He sold that as his great achievement, although behind the scenes there was also Harry Sargeant III, an American oil magnate who has been sidelined by Washington. For months Grenell argued that an agreement with Chavismo was possible, even opening Venezuela’s oil in exchange for Maduro remaining in power.

Mildon and Grenell were allies of the same cause and defended Chavismo’s survival, though their fates are now uncertain. The dialogue strategy ended up in a drawer in the Oval Office. Marco Rubio cornered Grenell, persuaded Trump to harden his stance, capture Maduro and select Delcy Rodríguez as successor. With January 3, both men lost influence, although Mildon’s fortunes have been radically altered by his romance with Habba. Love triumphed while also unleashing an internal war.

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The warnings began circulating on Facebook groups in Laredo, Texas, two days before Mexican authorities confirmed them. Relatives of detainees at the GEO Rio Grande detention center spoke of sickness, neglect and a man who had allegedly died after more than a month without proper medical care.

“People of Laredo, please help me share this; it’s urgent! The people at the GEO Rio Grande facility are in poor health.”

“It’s true. My son is sick in there. He’s been ill for days and they ignore him.”

“Girls, check on your relatives who are at GEO; my father just called me to say a man died. He had been sick for more than a month and they didn’t treat him. The name of the deceased is Emiliano Covarrubias Andrade. Dormitory H5A.”

“My husband says they took the body without even examining it and they want this to be kept quiet.”

Those messages were confirmed on Monday, when Mexico’s Foreign Ministry announced that it will file a complaint over the death of another Mexican national in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center operated by GEO Group. With Andrade’s death, 18 migrants have died in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Emiliano Andrade Covarrubias was 56 years old. He came from a small town in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo and had lived in Dallas for decades. His three children were born in the United States. He worked as a painter and hoped eventually to return to Mexico, where he was building a house, which is why he frequently traveled back and forth between the two countries, his daughter, Stefani Andrade, told Texas Tribune. On his return from one of those trips by bus in June, he was detained at the border.

He had been in ICE custody ever since. During video calls with his family, he appeared increasingly thin. “We believe he did not receive the medical attention he desperately needed,” his daughter wrote on a GoFundMe page set up to help cover funeral expenses. “My father was more than just a name. He was a father, a loved one, and someone whose life meant so much to our family. He deserved to be treated with dignity, compassion, and care.”

This is not the first account of poor conditions inside migrant detention centers in the United States. Since Trump renewed his immigration crackdown, families have repeatedly denounced a lack of medication, inadequate food, limited access to basic hygiene, insufficient protection from the cold, and abuse and mistreatment.

The Mexican government has also stepped up its legal response, saying it has already filed 20 criminal complaints with prosecutors in the states where the deaths occurred. In August, Mexico’s Deputy Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco acknowledged that authorities had received responses in only four cases. The Foreign Ministry has not provided an update on the status of those complaints since then.

The report Dying in Detention, which examined the 52 deaths of detainees in ICE facilities during the first months of Trump’s current term through June, found failures in medical care even in serious cases, unsanitary conditions inside detention centers and a lack of accountability among those responsible.

The investigation, produced by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, found that deaths in ICE custody had more than doubled during Trump’s second term and that the mortality rate had reached its highest level in a decade.

Emiliano’s family did not learn of his death from ICE, but from the medical examiner’s office. On Monday, they traveled to Laredo to recover his belongings. “His passing has left our family devastated, heartbroken, and struggling to come to terms with such an unexpected loss,” wrote his daughter, Stefani Andrade, 29.

At her morning press conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that her government, through Mexico’s consular network, would provide legal assistance to Mexican nationals in the United States: “We are against any form of racism, especially when it involves our fellow Mexicans in the United States.”

Andrade’s story is also the story of tens of thousands of Mexicans who built lives through hard work in the United States and now face an intensified immigration crackdown. In Laredo alone, he is the second migrant to die this year in an ICE facility. In June, Félix Alcorta Rodríguez, 63, died after being found unconscious, according to ICE; it did not give details on the cause of death. Another six Mexicans have died this year amid these roundups.

The youngest was Royer Pérez, who was just 19. The oldest, José Guadalupe Ramos and Lorenzo Salgados, were only 52. They came from Veracruz, Chiapas and Guanajuato. Most had spent decades doing the jobs that often fall to working-class immigrants in the United States, working in construction, laundries, and restaurant kitchens.

They were detained while having breakfast, on their way to work, or for driving without a license. The migrant who survived the longest in ICE custody did not last more than three months. Héber, 34, survived only a week. Several were ill for much of their time in detention, some in facilities allegedly designed “to break” those held inside them.

All left behind the wives they met in the United States, the children born in the United States and the lives they rebuilt in the United States.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones says there have been only two occasions when she looked around a first-class cabin and saw that every passenger was Black. She says that when that happens, something else is going on as well.

“White passengers come on, turn the corner, see that the entire first class is Black and there is a pause. Because it is very normal to fly coach… if the people in first class are white. But all of a sudden coach gets real shabby to you if everybody in first class is Black. And that’s a metaphor for America,” she says.

“You don’t ask: why does there have to be a first class and a coach? Why can’t you make the whole plane first class? That’s not a problem to you. You only question first class if the wrong people are in it. And this is America writ large,” she adds before a crowd of hundreds at the Texas Theatre, as part of the Hay Festival in Dallas. Everyone listens attentively. Then comes another thunderous round of applause. Then the requests for photos, the festival’s longest line for a book signing, and countless people thanking her for her work.

Hannah-Jones, 50, is a journalist at The New York Times Magazine and the creator of the 1619 Project, a landmark reporting initiative on the legacy of slavery in the United States. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, turned the project into a documentary series that earned an Emmy Award, and expanded it into two books, both of which became bestsellers.

That came with consequences. In Florida, the 1619 Project was explicitly barred from being taught in public schools, while in Texas schools, educators were prohibited from requiring students to study it. Efforts to keep it out of classrooms spread across Republican-led states. During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump cited the project as an example of the “toxic propaganda” he said was dividing the country and announced the creation of the 1776 Commission to promote what he called “patriotic education.”

“The most openly white nationalist administration knows that to control power you have to teach a history that justifies your power. Control of history is never superficial,” Hannah-Jones says.

In a later interview with EL PAÍS, the journalist points to how Trump uses the idea of memory and history: “He gets his legitimacy by evoking a past where white men were the natural leaders of this country. He recalls that past to justify the open racism of his administration, saying ‘this is who we are as Americans.’ If the people who built this country were white men, it becomes a divine destiny that they should rule. He’s saying, ‘no matter what the country looks like, you will be on top.’”

The author is clear about who is receiving that message: white Americans unsettled by the country’s demographic changes, many of whom are themselves living on the brink of poverty.

She points to the example of a woman in Texas waiting in line at a food bank who was asked whether she regretted voting for Trump three times. She said she did not, but wished he had begun deportations sooner. “She thinks her suffering is okay, as long as the wrong people can’t be in the country and the right people are also suffering,” says Hannah-Jones, adding that race is being deliberately weaponized in such cases: “We spend too much time focusing on people we think should be out lessers, instead of recognizing who is exploiting all of us.”

Hannah-Jones believes it is precisely this “resentment” that Trump has successfully tapped into. “Trump understands America more than the Democrats,” she says. “He understands how effectively you can use racism as a Trojan horse. You don’t have to have great economic policy or great international policy. You can constantly lie to people, but if you provoke their sense of racial resentment, none of that will matter.”

“I don’t think Democrats have been willing to acknowledge how much race still animates and drives American politics,” she continues. “They tend to have an innate belief about the goodness of America and that everything will work out. Trump has a very realistic understanding of this country that he exploits.”

The journalist, whose career has focused on investigating race and inequality, founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, as well as the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which is dedicated to training and supporting Black investigative journalists.

One of her most recent essays, on segregation in the U.S. education system, has once again thrust her into the center of a national debate. Hannah-Jones and her husband, both upper-middle-class professionals living in New York, chose to enroll their daughter in an under-resourced public school in Brooklyn where most students are Black. “I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us,” she writes. “We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”

In the essay, she recounts her daughter’s sense of “betrayal” when she learned of the decision. Hannah-Jones has defended it, noting that her daughter was ultimately admitted to the predominantly white high school she wanted to attend. “I’ve often been told that I ‘sacrificed’ my daughter,” she says. “But we are so willing to sacrifice a whole lot of our children. And we’re okay with that. I wanted to use the story of this one child to stand in for the story of millions of children whose parents can’t just pull them out of a school when it goes bad.”

In doing so, Hannah-Jones once again shines a spotlight on educational segregation, a subject she has spent two decades investigating. She also sees the attacks on books and higher education as what she calls “the earliest attacks on democracy in the United States in this most recent moment.”

“If you study any fascist regimes, they always go after institutions of higher education because they teach you critical thinking. They teach you to question,” she explains. “And regimes don’t want people who question their power. And then they have to turn us against each other — that is the most important part.”

The upcoming midterm elections are looming large over cultural events across the country, particularly in Texas, where Democrats believe a long-awaited breakthrough may be within reach.

When asked what the headlines will be on November 4, the day after the midterms, Hannah-Jones replies: “I never try to predict the future because I think that’s the easiest way for journalists to look like an idiot. I just fear that, if we look at what the administration is saying and doing, we will not have a result on November 4 that is accepted. So I think the headline is going to be that the Trump administration is only going to accept one outcome in the election.”

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