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      Doge breaks into US Institute of Peace building after White House guts board

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      The Trump administration fired most of the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and sent its new leader into the Washington DC headquarters of the independent organization on Monday, in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.The remaining three members of the group’s board – defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio and national defense university president Peter Garvin – fired president and CEO, George Moose, on Friday, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press.An executive order that Donald Trump signed last month targeted the organization, which was created by Congress more than 40 years ago, and others for reductions.Current USIP employees said staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” entered the building despite protests that the institute is not part of the executive branch. USIP called the police, whose vehicles were outside the building on Monday evening.USIP is a congressionally funded independent non-profit that works to advance US values in conflict resolution, ending wars and promoting good governance.Moose, said: “DOGE has broken into our building.” Police cars were outside the Washington building on Monday evening.The CEO vowed legal action, saying: “What has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private non-profit.”He said the institute’s headquarters, located across the street from the state department, is not a federal building. Speaking to reporters after leaving the building, Moose noted: “It was very clear that there was a desire on the part of the administration to dismantle a lot of what we call foreign assistance, and we are part of that family.”The Doge workers gained access to the building after several unsuccessful attempts Monday and after having been turned away on Friday, a senior US Institute of Peace official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.It was not immediately clear what the Doge staffers were doing or looking for in the non-profit’s building, which is across the street from the state department in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.White House spokesperson Anna Kelly pointed to USIP’s “noncompliance” with Trump’s order.After that, “11 board members were lawfully removed, and remaining board members appointed Kenneth Jackson acting president,” she said. “Rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage. The Trump administration will enforce the President’s executive authority and ensure his agencies remain accountable to the American people.”Jackson had been seen earlier on Monday trying to get into the non-profit’s building.Moose said the organization had been speaking with Doge since last month, trying to explain its independent status. Speaking of Trump, he said: “I can’t imagine how our work could align more perfectly with the goals that he has outlined: keeping us out of foreign wars, resolving conflicts before they drag us into those kinds of conflicts.”Doge has expressed interest in the US Institute of Peace (USIP) for weeks but has been rebuffed by lawyers who argued that the institute’s status protected it from the kind of reorganization that is occurring in other federal agencies.On Friday, Doge members arrived with two FBI agents, who left after the institute’s lawyer told them of USIP’s “private and independent status”, the organization said in a statement.Chief of security Colin O’Brien said police on Monday helped Doge members enter the building and that the private security team for the organization had its contract canceled.The US Institute of Peace says on its website that it is a nonpartisan, independent organization “dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad”.The non-profit says it was created by Congress in 1984 as an “independent nonprofit corporation”, and it does not meet US code definitions of “government corporation”, “government-controlled corporation” or “independent establishment”.Also named in the president’s executive order were the US African Development Foundation, a federal agency that invests in African small businesses; the Inter-American Foundation, a federal agency that invests in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Presidio Trust, which oversees a national park site next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.The African Development Foundation, which also unsuccessfully tried to keep Doge staff from entering its offices in Washington, went to court, but a federal judge ruled last week that removing most grants and most staff would be legal. The president of the Inter-American Foundation sued on Monday to block her firing in February by the Trump administration. More

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      White House’s defense for not recalling deportations ‘one heck of a stretch’, says judge

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      The Trump administration claimed to a federal judge on Monday that it did not recall deportation flights of hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members over the weekend despite his specific instructions because that was not expressly included in the formal written order issued afterwards.The administration also said that even if James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, had included that instruction in his formal order, his authority to compel the planes to return disappeared the moment the planes entered international airspace.The extraordinary arguments suggested the White House took advantage of its own perceived uncertainty with a federal court order to do as it pleased, testing the limits of the judicial system to hold to account an administration set on circumventing adverse rulings.An incredulous Boasberg at one stage asked the administration: “Isn’t then the better course to return the planes to the United States and figure out what to do, than say: ‘We don’t care; we’ll do what we want’?”The showdown between the administration and the judge reached a crescendo over the weekend after the US president secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport, without normal due process, Venezuelans over age 14 who the government says belong to the Tren de Aragua gang.The underlying basis for Trump to invoke the statute is unclear because it historically requires the president to identify a state adversary, and Boasberg on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportations of five Venezuelans who had filed suit against the government.At an emergency hearing on Saturday evening, Boasberg extended his injunction to block the deportation of all Venezuelan migrants using Alien Enemies Act authority, and told the administration that any deportation flights already in the air needed to be recalled.By the time of the hearing, two flights had already taken off and a third flight left after Boasberg issued his ruling. All three flights landed in El Salvador, where the deportees were taken to a special maximum security prison, after Boasberg issued his written order.The Trump administration claimed at a hearing on Monday that it believed it had complied with the written order issued by Boasberg, which did not include his verbal instructions for any flights already departed to return to the US.“Oral statements are not injunctions and the written orders always supersede whatever may have been stated in the record,” Abhishek Kambli, the deputy assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil division, argued for the administration.The judge appeared unimpressed by that contention. “You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded, that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said.The administration also suggested that even if Boasberg had included the directive in his written order, by the time he had granted the temporary restraining order, the deportation flights were outside of the judge’s jurisdiction.The judge expressed similar skepticism at the second argument, noting that federal judges still have authority over US government officials who make the decisions about the planes, even if the planes themselves were outside of US airspace.“The problem is the equitable power of United States courts is not so limited,” Boasberg said. “It’s not a question that the plane was or was not in US airspace.” Boasberg added. “My equitable powers are pretty clear that they do not lapse at the airspace’s edge.”At times, the Trump administration appeared to touch on a separate but related position that the judge’s authority to block the deportations clashed with Trump’s authority to direct US military forces and foreign relations without review by the courts.Boasberg expressed doubt at the strength of that argument, as well as Kambli’s separate claim that he could not provide more details about when the deportation flights took off and how many flights left the US on Saturday, before and possibly after his order.Kambli said he was not authorized to provide those details on account of national security concerns, even in private, to the judge himself. Asked whether the information was classified, Kambli demurred. Boasberg ordered the government to provide him with more information by noon on Tuesday.The statements offered by the administration in federal district court in Washington offered a more legally refined version of public statements from White House officials about the possibility that they had defied a court order.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted on Monday that the administration acted within “the bounds of immigration law in this country” and said the Trump team did not believe a verbal order carried the same legal weight as a written order.But the White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan offered greater defiance at the court order and told Fox News in an interview that the court order came too late for Boasberg to have jurisdiction over the matter, saying: “I don’t care what the judges think.” More

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      White House removes advisory defining gun violence as a public health issue

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      The Trump administration has removed former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website. This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups, and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.But Daniel Semenza, a firearm violence researcher with Rutgers University, argues that talking about gun violence through a public health lens is meant to “bring the heat down” about a deeply politicized issue and broaden what prevention can look like.In 2023, nearly 47,000 people died by firearms, most of them suicides.“When people read gun violence is a public health problem, they read guns are a public health problem,” Semenza said. “This idea actually removes the politics from the issue and is an engine to get us on the same page. [The removal] feels like an unnecessary and mean-spirited way to politicize something that people have actively been trying to bring people together on.”The removal of Murthy’s advisory and the rest of the information on the page is one of the thousands of pieces of health information and research removed from federal websites. They include information about vaccines, health risks among youth and gender-based violence, the New York Times reported.Some of these pages have been restored following a court order, and it is unclear whether the removal of the “firearm violence in America” will see the same fate.In response to the Guardian’s question about the removal of webpages, the White House said: “Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and as he again made clear during his recent speech at the Department of Justice, President Trump is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order.”While researchers and violence prevention advocates have described gun violence – including both suicides and homicides – as a public health issue for more than a decade, it’s only recently that this language has entered mainstream discourse. Experts across the field of violence prevention argue that this updated lens is meant to reflect the widespread impacts of shootings on entire communities and offer solutions to violence beyond law enforcement and firearm restrictions and policy.This new framing has also led to more dollars from federal government offices, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, for research that could illuminate preventive methods. These efforts were supercharged with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed in June 2022, which allocated millions of dollars for research into the unseen consequences of shootings. It also allowed researchers to evaluate groups that are working on the ground in the nation’s most underserved communities where shootings happen most.If this work doesn’t continue or is severely pared down, years of progress and gun violence status as a public health is at risk of being lost, Semenza said.“The vernacular of gun violence as a public health issue that has shaped in the last five to 10 years of research and advocacy is under direct threat,” he said. “I’m really disheartened and sad to hear about it. But it’s not because I’m surprised. This is a clear example of this administration pulling the wool over people’s eyes and being disingenuous about the things that harm people who are most vulnerable.” More

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      Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism

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      On 14 February, the US Department of Education’s office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the department’s new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education department’s “Dear Colleagues” letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.In the letter, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, writes:
      Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them – particularly during the last four years – under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.
      However, the United States pretty clearly is built upon systematic and structural racism. US history shows that slavery was a central factor in US wealth. The US was built on Indigenous genocide and colonialism, as seizing Indigenous land was one of the reasons for seeking independence from England and is, in any case, foundational to the country’s formation. Structural racism also persists; for example, cities are segregated because of structural injustice in housing and mortgage law. The ways in which the US was built on racism, against Black Americans and Indigenous Americans, is central both to the study of its history and its present structure. If Americans do not have an understanding of this topic, they will not be well informed.The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:
      a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCR’s analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case.
      The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining “school-on-student harassment” as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.The “more extreme practices at a university” that “could create a hostile environment under Title VI” include “pressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issues”. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of “pressure”. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States “is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’”. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of “school-on-student harassment”. Billions in federal funding is at stake.View image in fullscreenThe guidelines are not just vague, they are intentionally vague, in a way that would make it difficult for even a diligent administrator to interpret. They therefore allow maximum latitude for abuse. As the influential pro-Trump intellectual Jonathan Keeperman explained in the New York Times, referring to the Trump administration’s war on language:
      The things they’re attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts. By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to, you can, without knowing much else about what you’re doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot.
      The state of Florida has been a model of this strategy, leading to books being removed from school libraries because they normalize LGBTQ+ relationships, for example, and an unprecedented level of widespread fear among Florida’s professors and teachers. But it has spread to other states. The state of Tennessee has an online “divisive concepts reporting tracker” form for students who wish to report professors whose teaching can be seen as “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people”.The Dear Colleague letter and its attendant guidelines are easily read as banning teaching the idea that many Americans have racist attitudes. But understanding that many Americans have racist attitudes is central to understanding US politics.For example, the Republican Southern Strategy involved exploiting racist attitudes against government programs they ideologically opposed, by using the term “welfare” as a dog whistle for these attitudes. We have strong evidence from social science to explain the mechanisms here. There is a large group of white Americans who agree with racist stereotypes. Among these Americans, calling a program “welfare” decreases its support dramatically.The letter also appeals to another racist dogwhistle, “DEI”, which is employed in a similar way to justify banning classroom discussion of a range of concepts (including, it appears, discussion of the use of dog whistles in American politics).By executive order, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. Following Project 2025’s recommendation, he appears also to be seeking to eliminate funding for Title 1, which provides crucial federal support for students in under-resourced schools in urban and rural areas, special education for disabled students and a range of other educational programs. The abolition of the education department would mean no federal oversight of drastically widening educational inequalities facing millions of students (and threatens to undermine tracking of data on racial disparities in educational resources, which could be used to substantiate the official state ideology that there are no structural disparities).Linda McMahon, the new education secretary, issued a statement entitled “Our Department’s Final Mission” on 3 March. In it, she wrote about the motivation for this final mission:
      After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
      From now on, the education department’s main function appears to be targeting “critical race theory”, DEI and “gender ideology”. The final mission of the education department also includes the imposition of “patriotic education”, as if the United States were trying to imitate North Korea.Since McMahon’s announcement, the education department has launched a broad investigation into “antisemitism” at the nation’s colleges and universities. The first target was Columbia University, whose student body is over 20% Jewish; as well as pressuring Columbia to fire a distinguished law professor for pro-Palestinian statements and arresting one of the university’s students for constitutionally protected speech, on 7 March, the education department cut $400m dollars in funding for Columbia for allowing “harassment of Jewish students”. On 10 March, the civil rights office of the education department announced it was sending letters warning of potential enforcement actions to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment, who will presumably face similar jaw-dropping cuts, under the guise of protecting Jewish students and faculty.Universities are among the most Jewish institutions in American life, in fact and in their resonance. As the historian Tim Snyder dryly noted:
      History teaches clear lessons about breakdowns in the rule of law and about campaigns against cities and universities. These are very often associated with antisemitism. It is very hard, for me at least, to think of historical examples of campaigns against universities and freedom of expression that were intended to benefit Jews.
      As the US watches videos of the regime’s police handcuffing and arresting student protesters in front of their families, as well as the destruction of the world’s greatest system of higher education, all supposedly in the service of “protecting” Jewish Americans, it is past time to note: this can’t be good for Jewish people.As I have long warned, the media have been useful dupes for fascism. After years and years of vilifying academia, first by raising hysteria about “wokeness” and too little free speech (about eg race), and then by raising hysteria about too much free speech (about Israel), the mainstream media has smoothly paved the path for educational authoritarianism. No one should be surprised by its arrival.

      Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Conor McGregor anti-immigration rant in White House condemned by Irish PM

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      Ireland’s prime minister has denounced anti-immigration comments made by Conor McGregor as the MMA fighter visited the White House before a Saint Patrick’s Day meeting with Donald Trump.McGregor said “Ireland is on the cusp of losing its Irishness” and that an “illegal immigration racket” was “running ravage on the country”.Last week, Donald Trump singled out “Conor” – who last year was found liable for sexual assault after a civil trial – as one of his favourite Irish people.Dressed in a green business suit to mark Ireland’s national day, McGregor was at the White House at Trump’s invitation and participated in an impromptu Q&A session with reporters. “There are rural towns in Ireland that have been overrun in one swoop,” he said, speaking in the White House briefing room alongside the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.The 36-year-old former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion said he was “here to raise the issue and highlight it” and that he would be listening to Trump on immigration – one of the president’s main areas of focus as he seeks to ramp up deportations of people in the US without proper documentation.The apparently off-the-cuff comments were immediately condemned by Micheál Martin, the taoiseach. “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland,” the Irish prime minister said on X. “St Patrick’s Day around the world is a day rooted in community, humanity, friendship and fellowship.”McGregor was among those at an official pre-inauguration party in Washington in January. He has been one of the biggest stars of the UFC, which was founded by the Trump ally Dana White.In November McGregor was ordered by an Irish civil court to pay nearly €250,000 (£210,000) in damages to a woman who said he “brutally raped and battered” her in a hotel in Dublin in 2018. McGregor claimed they had consensual sex and is appealing against the verdict with a hearing in Dublin’s high court due later this week.The fighter has said he is considering running for president in Ireland later this year, a prospect some thought would be ruled out after the civil trial verdict.He has been supported by figures including the self-styled misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and anti-immigration campaigners in Ireland whose reach has been turbocharged by Elon Musk retweets.Immigration is a hot topic in Ireland with many arrivals entering Northern Ireland on ferries or planes and crossing the invisible border on the island to enter the Republic of Ireland.The justice minister, Jim O’Callaghan, has promised to clamp down on those who are not entitled to international protection. Last month he said more than 80% of applications for asylum in January were rejected in the first instance. More

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      Chuck Schumer postpones book tour stops amid shutdown vote backlash

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      The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has postponed several stops on a tour to promote his new book, citing security concerns, as the New York Democrat faces intensifying backlash over his vote to support a Republican-drafted spending bill and avert a government shutdown.Schumer was scheduled to participate in events in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia this week to discuss his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning, which is set to be released on Tuesday. The tour dates were expected to be rescheduled but the cancellation drew criticism from both political wings.Progressives erupted in fury over his decision last week to relent and help Republicans pass a stopgap funding bill many Democrats warned would hand Donald Trump and Elon Musk even greater discretion to slash government programs and services. Schumer had said Senate Democrats faced a “Hobson’s choice”: either vote for a “terrible” bill or shut down the government, which he argued would have been a far worse outcome for the party and the country.But Democrats are desperate for the party to stand up to Trump, as the administration embarks on a series of radical and potentially unlawful moves to slash the government, deport thousands of immigrants and launch a global trade war.“People are furious about Democrats not having a plan to fight Trump – and supposed ‘leaders’ folding [over] and over again,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement, accusing Schumer of attempting to “hide” from constituents. “We hope other Democratic senators continue meeting with their constituents and demand that their leadership fight with backbone.”Democrats have been organizing protests against Republican members of Congress, voicing their fury over the administration’s federal overhaul led by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” as well as their fears over Republican proposals that would probably result in cuts to safety-net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.But this week, several Democratic groups are targeting Schumer and other Senate Democrats who voted for the spending bill. Some have staged protests outside of the minority leader’s Brooklyn home while others are calling on him to step down.In an interview with the New York Times, Schumer brushed aside questions about whether the self-described institutionalist was the right leader for this moment. The New York Democrat said he knew how to win seats and compared himself to an “orchestra leader” skilled at highlighting the diverse talent in his caucus. He said he encouraged the senator Chris Murphy, one of the sharpest Democratic critics of the second Trump administration, to ramp up his media appearances, and the independent senator Bernie Sanders to lead a cross-country “fighting oligarchy” tour.When asked about the prospect of a primary challenge, perhaps by the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as some have reportedly encouraged her to do, Schumer demurred, saying 2028 was “a long time away”.But Schumer’s decision to relent rather than fight has shaken his party’s activist base.After the vote last week, Indivisible, one of the major groups organizing against Trump, said it was time for new leadership in the Senate.“This is a painful decision, the gravity of which we take very seriously. Senator Schumer has contributed to and led many important accomplishments that Indivisible is grateful for,” Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, wrote in a statement. “But with our democracy on the line, he let us, the country, and the Democratic party down.”The group is encouraging members to call their Democratic senators and ask them to pressure Schumer to “step aside”.The funding fight also exposed a deep rift with House Democrats, all but one of whom opposed the bill in a floor vote. On Friday, the congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, declined to answer a question about whether it was time for new leadership in the Senate. More

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      Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism chief, shares post by prominent neo-Nazi

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      The leader of a prominent Jewish group has condemned Leo Terrell, the head of Donald Trump’s official antisemitism taskforce, for sharing a post by a white supremacist.The post Terrell shared was written by Patrick Casey last Wednesday. It accompanied footage of the US president saying in the Oval Office that Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate minority leader, “used to be Jewish” and “is not Jewish anymore, he’s a Palestinian”.In the post Casey said Trump “has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card”.Casey is a former head of Identity Evropa, a defunct racist group. In that role, in 2018, he told NBC News his mission was to “take over” the Republican party “as much as possible”.“Trump’s antisemitism chief shared an antisemitic, white supremacist post from a neo-Nazi involved in Charlottesville,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in reference to the march by neo-Nazis and other extremists in support of Trump in Virginia in 2017, during which a counter-protester was killed.“This administration doesn’t care about countering antisemitism,” Spitalnick said. “They care about exploiting it to attack democracy.”Spitalnick previously led Integrity First for America, the group that steered a successful lawsuit against organizers of the Charlottesville march.“We successfully sued [Casey’s] now-defunct hate group,” Spitalnick said on Monday.Terrell, 70, is a civil rights attorney from California. A former Democrat but a Fox News contributor, he came out in support of Trump in 2020.View image in fullscreenIn January, Terrell was nominated to serve in the civil rights division of the US justice department. In February, the Trump administration announced that Terrell would lead “a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism”, focused on college protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.Terrell said: “Antisemitism in any environment is repugnant to this nation’s ideals. The department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found. The Task Force to Combat Antisemitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending antisemitism in our schools.”Now, attention to Terrell’s social media habits comes amid controversy regarding the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student and protest organizer. Khalil is being held for deportation under an obscure provision of immigration law but has not been charged with wrongdoing.Raw Story, a progressive site, first noted that after sharing Casey’s tweet, Terrell shared another by Keith and Kevin Hodge, podcasters the advocacy group Stop Antisemitism said have “taken a puzzling antisemitic turn”, including “admitting to listening to Hitler’s speeches … wishing America had a leader like him”.Terrell has not commented. The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a comment request. More

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      ‘I escaped one gulag only to end up in another’: Russian asylum seekers face Ice detention in the US

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      For most of the four years of Joe Biden was in office, citizens of Russia and other post-Soviet states seeking asylum in the US were generally released into the country while they awaited hearings on their claim in immigration court.But since last summer, many have been detained upon entering the US, and some of them have been held for more than a year, lawyers, activists and detainees say. Some children have been separated from their parents.“My Russian clients tell me, ‘Now our prison is 80% Russian, the remaining 20% are from rotating nationalities who stay for a while,’” said immigration attorney Julia Nikolaev, who has been advocating for detainees’ rights alongside representatives of the Russian opposition. “Only Russians and a few other post-Soviet nationals remain in detention until their final hearings.”Alexei Demin, a 62-year-old former naval officer from Moscow, was detained in July of last year.In the last 20 years, Demin rarely missed an anti-Vladimir Putin protest in the Russian capital. He had become concerned almost immediately after Putin, a former KGB agent, rose to power, he said. For years, he criticized Putin’s regime on Facebook, and he was detained twice at protests. Still, he never imagined that he would end up fleeing his homeland for fear that Putin’s regime would imprison him. Or that he would end up imprisoned in the US.When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a colleague asked Demin why he wasn’t enlisting to fight. He replied: “If I go, it will be on Ukraine’s side.” Soon, as the crackdown on dissent in Russia intensified amid the war, Demin and his wife, like many others who had long openly opposed Putin, fled to the US to seek political asylum. For years, Russians have been among the top five nationalities granted asylum.The couple arrived in the US in the summer of 2024, after securing an appointment through CBP One, the app launched by the Biden administration (and since then shut down by Donald Trump) allowing asylum applicants to schedule to meet with immigration officials. At their appointment, Demin and his wife were detained, separated and sent to detention centers in different states. They haven’t seen each other since.His predicament, Demin said, was “a trap and a blatant injustice”.“This is how the US treats people who protest against Russia’s policies,” he said in a call from a detention center in Virginia in January.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) does not release public data on the number of people from post-Soviet countries it holds in detention. But Nikolaev said that law enforcement officials have privately acknowledged to her that asylum seekers from those countries are being held longer.Other activists say they have seen similar patterns. The non-profit Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR) has played an active role in assisting detainees in immigration detention centers, finding lawyers and working with the government officials.Dmitry Valuev, president of RADR, said it was an issue that affected not only Russians, but also citizens of several other post-Soviet countries.There have been reports that some immigrants arriving from post-Soviet states are facing increased scrutiny over fears they are connected to Islamist terrorist organizations. It’s unclear what prompted US authorities to keep the Russian asylum seekers in detention. One theory is that immigration officials are targeting Russians and other post-Soviet nationals as spies.Eric Rubin, former US ambassador to Bulgaria who also served as a deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Moscow, said that the complicated history of US-Russia diplomacy can hurt Russian asylum applicants.“When you meet Russians in the United States, obviously you need to wonder whether some of them are actually working for Russian intelligence. Some of them are, most of them are not,” said Rubin.Nikolaev isn’t so sure. “Russian spies can enter the country with European passports, visas and all the right documents,” she said.Nikolaev in January took her concerns to US government officials, alongside Ilya Yashin, a leading Russian opposition figure. They met with officials at the national security council, who requested a list of separated families, Nikolaev said.The Department of Homeland Security, Ice and the national security council did not respond to repeated questions about detention policies or the specific cases outlined in this article.In a statement, the White House said that the duration of cases varies based on legal proceedings and any protections sought. The White House also said there had been “zero instances of children from any of the countries you mentioned being separated from their families by US immigration authorities in this entire fiscal year”.View image in fullscreenBut Galina Kaplunova, 26, an illustrator and anti-Putin activist, was detained and separated from her child and mother at the US border last August.In the summer of 2024, Kaplunova’s husband, a Kremlin supporter, had threatened to take her child away and report her to the police for her political activism, Kaplunova said. A native of St Petersburg, she had been detained multiple times at protests and had volunteered in opposition leaders’ campaign offices. Two days after her husband made the threat, Kaplunova, her four-year-old son and her mother fled to the US.At the US border with Mexico, Ice agents separated Kaplunova from her son, she said. He was placed in foster care, while she and her mother were sent to different detention centers in separate states.After being separated, her son was placed with a Mexican American family, she said. He didn’t speak English, so communicated with them through Google Translate.“I fled Russia so they wouldn’t take my child or jail me. But the US did,” she said.About two months after being detained and separated, Kaplunova was released and reunited with her son, she said. It was a miracle, she said.Now Kaplunova and her son now live in California. Her mother is still detained. Her son is afraid of being abandoned. Whenever she tries to discuss his time in foster care, he simply says he doesn’t remember it.“It’s as if he erased that part of his life so he wouldn’t have to remember it,” she said.He learned some English in foster care, but refuses to speak it with his mother.“Maybe he associates English with something bad, something negative,” she said.Valuev, the president of RADR, said that long periods of detention can hurt applicants’ asylum cases. Hiring a lawyer from within a detention center is nearly impossible due to the lack of internet access, he said. “Detainees are given a list of contacts, but most of these numbers don’t answer the phone,” he said.Additionally, many detainees have no access to materials for their asylum cases because their documents were stored on computers and phones that were confiscated.Vladislav Krasnov, a protest organizer and activist from Moscow, said he spent 444 days in a Louisiana detention center. Krasnov fled Russia in 2022 after Putin announced a draft. He crossed the border with the CBP One appointment and was swiftly detained. Now free, he is still waiting for a court hearing to review his asylum case.Reflecting on his experience, he said he was shocked by the welcome he got in the United States. “I escaped one gulag only to end up in another,” Krasnov said.He was also angry at Russian opposition leaders for not paying attention to his plight until recently.“Last summer, I watched Yulia Navalnaya hugging Biden in the Oval Office. Then she talked on the phone with [Kamala] Harris, and Harris declared that America supports people fighting for Russia’s freedom. To put it mildly, I had a complete breakdown at that moment, sitting in detention,” Krasnov said.About 300 detainees from Russia and other post-Soviet countries filed a lawsuit last November, calling their detention discriminatory, and demanding freedom for people they argue were held without a justification. A federal judge ruled in February that the court lacked the jurisdiction to review the detention policy and dismissed the case.View image in fullscreenAmong those mentioned in the lawsuit was Polina Guseva, a political activist and volunteer on the team of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Guseva arrived in the US in July 2024, applied for asylum and was sent to a detention center. She said Ice officers at the Louisiana detention facility where she’s being held “openly say that Russians are not being released”.Still, she does not regret coming to the US, she said, adding safety concerns in Russia left her with no other choice.“Two thoughts help me a lot. First, better to be here than to be raped with a dumbbell in a Russian prison,” Guseva said. “And second, my friend Daniil Kholodny is still in prison in Russia. He was the technical director of the Navalny Live YouTube channel. He was tried alongside Alexei Navalny in his last trial and sentenced to eight years. He has been imprisoned for more than two years now. If he can hold on, why shouldn’t I?”Alexei Demin, the former naval officer and longtime protester, was supposed to have his first asylum court hearing reviewing his asylum case in early February, but the hearing was rescheduled to mid-April because of the judge’s sickness. By that time, he will have been in detention for more than 300 days. More