Mahmoud Khalil

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      Judge gives Trump administration deadline to justify Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation

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      An immigration judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration has until 5pm on Wednesday to present evidence as to why Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate, should be deported. She said that if the evidence does not support deportation, she may rule on Friday on his release from immigration detention.Khalil, a green-card holder and leader in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year, was detained on 8 March. The Trump administration claims that his presence has adverse foreign policy consequences, an argument decried by his legal team as a blatant free speech violation. The government has not provided any evidence that he broke the law, a typical condition for revoking permanent residency.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can “either can provide sufficient evidence or not”, said the judge, Jamee Comans, from her courtroom in Jena, Louisiana. “If he’s not removable, I’m going to terminate this case on Friday.”A lawyer for DHS told the judge: “We have evidence we will submit.”During the hearing, Khalil sat beside an empty chair, his immigration attorneys and counsel appearing over video on a flatscreen TV. Behind him sat a handful of supporters, some of whom had been directed by security to remove keffiyehs. Khalil, in navy blue detention-issued clothes, sat calmly, sometimes fingering a set of prayer beads.The proceedings were delayed as Comans tried to pick the attorneys out of the nearly 600 people – media, supporters and observers – attempting to join the video call.“This is highly unusual,” began Comans, in reference to the number of people attempting to watch the hearing.“Your honor, I’d appreciate it if you could let my wife in,” Khalil said softly into the microphone. A moment later, the face of Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, appeared on the screen.“Your honor, there is obviously a lot of public interest in this case, and we would appreciate if there could be online access” granted to the public, began Khalil’s immigration lawyer, Mark Van Der Hout. Comans denied this request and added, seeming frustrated, that she was “very, very close” to making the rest of the legal team appear in person as well.Van Der Hout said they had requested DHS’s evidence of the allegations more than two weeks ago and had not received a response. “We cannot plead until we know the specific allegations,” he added.The DHS also alleges that Khalil failed to disclose on his visa application that he had previously worked in a Syrian office of the British embassy and for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), before becoming a member of a pro-Palestinian activist group at Columbia.Van Der Hout requested to postpone a follow-up hearing Comans had set for Friday, noting: “We may have to depose the secretary of state” due to the nature of the charges against Khalil.Comans declined, telling him: “You’re in the wrong court for that.” Indicating she wanted to move the case along, she added: “I’m like you, Mr Van Der Hout: I’d like to see the evidence.”Apart from his immigration case, Khalil is challenging his detention in a separate case before a federal judge in New Jersey. More

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      To my husband, Mahmoud Khalil: I can’t wait to tell our son of his father’s bravery | Noor Abdalla

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      Exactly a month ago, you were taken from me. This is the longest we have been apart since we got married. I miss you more and more every day and as the days draw us closer to the arrival of our child, I am haunted by the uncertainty that looms over me – the possibility that you might not be there for this monumental moment. Every kick, every cramp, every small flutter I feel inside me serves as an inescapable reminder of the family we’ve dreamed of building together. Yet, I am left to navigate this profound journey alone, while you endure the cruel and unjust confines of a detention center.I could not be more proud of you, Mahmoud. You embody everything I ever hoped for in a partner and the father of my children. What more could I ask for as a role model for our children than a man who, with unwavering conviction, stands up for the liberation of his people, fully cognizant of the consequences of speaking truth to power? Your courage is boundless, and now more than ever, I am in awe of your strength and determination. Your voice, your belief in justice, and your refusal to be silenced are the very qualities that make you the man I love and admire.We will not forget those who have orchestrated this injustice, the government officials and university administrators who have targeted you without cause, without any shred of evidence to justify their actions. They sit in their ivory towers, scrambling to fabricate lies and distort the truth, throwing accusations like stones in the hope that something will stick. What they fail to realize is that their efforts are futile. Their wrongful detention of you is a testament to the fact that you have struck a nerve. You’ve disrupted the false narratives they’ve worked so hard to maintain, and spoken a truth that they are too terrified to acknowledge. What more do we have than our fundamental right to free speech, when they constantly attempt to strip us of our dignity, telling us we are unworthy of life, of respect, of voice? Now, they seek to punish that very speech, to silence the words that challenge their corrupt and oppressive systems.They are trying to silence you. They are trying to silence anyone who dares to speak out against the atrocities happening in Palestine. But they will fail. We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children – until Palestine is free. I eagerly await the day when I can tell our son the stories of his father’s bravery, of the courage that courses through his veins, and of the pride he should feel to carry Palestinian blood … your blood. And, more than anything, I pray that he will not have to grow up fighting the same fight for our basic freedoms.We will be reunited soon. Until then, I will continue to fight for you, for us and for our family. Your resilience and your courage will guide us through the storm. You are my best friend, my comrade, the very air that sustains me when it feels as though there is none left. I know your spirit is unwavering, that they cannot break you, and that you will emerge from this stronger than ever. I have no doubt that, when you are finally released, you will raise your hands in the air, chanting: “Free Palestine.”

      Dr Noor Abdalla is a dentist and a soon-to-be mother. She is the wife of Mahmoud Khalil More

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      ‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish

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      Behind the reinforced doors of courtroom number two, at a remote detention centre in central Louisiana, Lu Xianying sat alone before an immigration judge unable to communicate.Dressed in a blue jumpsuit that drooped from his slight frame, he waited as court staff called three different translation services, unable to find an interpreter proficient in his native Gan Chinese.Like almost all of the 17 detainees appearing before Judge Kandra Robbins during removal proceedings on Tuesday morning, Lu had no attorney because there is no right to legal representation in US immigration proceedings. He sat silently, evidently confused. A substitute interpreter was eventually found, and began translating the judge’s questions into Mandarin.“I am afraid to return to China,” he told the court, as he described how he had already filed an asylum application after crossing the border into Texas in March 2024. Lu said he was worried a lawyer had stolen his money and not submitted his asylum claim. Lu, who had only recently been detained, struggled to understand, as the judge asked him to list his country of return should he be deported.“Right now my order is to be removed?” He asked. “Or should I go to court?”The judge explained that he was present in court, and provided him another asylum application form. His next hearing was scheduled for April.The LaSalle immigration court, inside a sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre in rural Jena, Louisiana, has been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks after the former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was transferred here earlier this month. His case has drawn international attention as the Trump administration attempts to deport the pro-Palestinian activist under rarely used executive provisions of US immigration law. The government is fighting vigorously to keep Khalil’s case in Louisiana and he is due to appear again at the LaSalle court for removal proceedings on 8 April.View image in fullscreenBut it has also renewed focus on the network of remote immigration detention centres that stretch between Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, known as “Detention Alley” – where 14 of the country’s 20 largest detention centres are clustered. And now where other students have since been sent after being arrested thousands of miles away.Badar Khan Suri, a research student at Georgetown University, was arrested in Virginia last week and sent to a detention centre in Alexandria, Louisiana, and then on to another site, Prairieland in eastern Texas. This week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested in Massachusetts and sent to the South Louisiana Ice processing centre in the swamplands of Evangeline parish.These distant detention facilities and court systems have long been associated with rights violations, poor medical treatment and due process concerns, which advocates argue are only likely to intensify during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and promise to carry out mass deportations that has already led to a surge in the detention population. But rarely do cases within these centres attract much public attention or individual scrutiny.“Most of the folks in detention in Louisiana aren’t the ones making the news,” said Andrew Perry, an immigrant rights attorney at the ACLU of Louisiana. “But they are experiencing similar, if not the same, treatment as those who are.”To observe a snapshot of the more than 1,100 other detainees confined at the facility also holding Khalil, the Guardian travelled to Jena and witnessed a full day inside the LaSalle court, which is rarely visited by journalists. Dozens lined up for their short appearances before a judge and were sworn in en masse. Some expressed severe health concerns, others frustration over a lack of legal representation. Many had been transferred to the centre from states hundreds of miles away.Earlier in the morning Wilfredo Espinoza, a migrant from Honduras, appeared before Judge Robbins for a procedural update on his asylum case that was due for a full hearing in May. Espinoza, who coughed throughout his appearance and had a small bandage on his face, had no lawyer and informed the court he wished to abandon his asylum application “because of my health”. The circumstances of his detention and timing and location of his arrest by Ice were not made clear in court.He suffered from hypertension and fatty liver disease, he said through a Spanish translator. “I’ve had three issues with my heart here,” he said. “I don’t want to be here any more. I can’t be locked up for this long. I want to leave.”The judge asked him repeatedly if he was entering his decision of his own free will. “Yes,” he said. “I just want to leave here as quickly as possible.”The judge ordered his removal from the US.Substantiated allegations of medical neglect have plagued the Jena facility for years. In 2018, the civil rights division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) examined the circumstances of four fatalities at the facility, which is operated by the Geo Group, a private corrections company. All four deaths occurred between January 2016 and March 2017 and the DHS identified a pattern of delay in medical care, citing “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs”.At the South Louisiana Ice processing centre, an all-female facility that is also operated by the Geo Group and where Ozturk is now being held, the ACLU of Louisiana recently filed a complaint to the DHS’s civil rights division alleging an array of rights violations. These included inadequate access to medical care, with the complaint stating: “Guards left detained people suffering from severe conditions like external bleeding, tremors, and sprained limbs unattended to, refusing them access to diagnostic care”.The complaint was filed in December 2024, before the Trump administration moved to gut the DHS’s civil rights division earlier this month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for the Geo Group said the company “strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding services we provide at Geo-contracted Ice processing centres” including the facility in Jena.“In all instances, our contracted services are monitored by the federal government to ensure strict compliance with applicable federal standards,” the spokesperson said, pointing to Ice’s performance-based national detention standards that the company’s contracts are governed by.The spokesperson added: “These allegations are part of a longstanding, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish Ice and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contracts.”The DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Louisiana experienced a surge in immigration detention during the first Trump administration. At the end of 2016, the state had capacity for a little more than 2,000 immigrant detainees, which more than doubled within two years. A wave of new Ice detention centres opened in remote, rural locations often at facilities previously used as private prisons. The state now holds the second largest number of detained immigrants, behind only Texas. Almost 7,000 people were held as of February 2025 at nine facilities in Louisiana, all operated by private companies.“It is this warehousing of immigrants in rural, isolated, ‘out of sight, of mind’ locations,” said Homero López, the legal director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in Louisiana and a former appellate immigration judge. “It’s difficult on attorneys, on family members, on community support systems to even get to folks. And therefore it’s a lot easier on government to present their case. They can just bulldoze people through the process.”At the LaSalle court this week, the Guardian observed detainees transferred from states as far away as Arizona, Florida and Tennessee. In an afternoon hearing, where 15 detainees made an application for bond, which would release them from custody and transfer their case to a court closer to home, only two were granted.Cases heard from detention are far less likely to result in relief. At LaSalle, 78.6% of asylum cases are rejected, compared with the national average of 57.7%, according to the Trac immigration data project. In Judge Robbins’s court, 52% of asylum applicants appear without an attorney.In the afternoon session, the court heard from Fernando Altamarino, a Mexican national, who was transferred to Jena from Panama City, Florida, more than 500 miles away. Altamarino had no criminal record, like almost 50% of immigrants currently detained by Ice. He had been arrested by agents about a month ago, after he received a traffic ticket following a minor car accident.He tried to resolve the matter at his local courthouse, and was instead detained by immigration authorities. Via his lawyer, the court heard his application for release. A letter from a leader in his local church described his role as a stalwart member of the congregation and “a man who truly embodies faith”.But a prosecutor for the DHS, who opposed all but one bond application that afternoon, argued that Altamarino, who had lived in the country for more than a decade, presented a flight risk due to his “very limited to non-existent family ties to the US”.The judge concurred, as Altamarino sat upright and listened through a translator. Despite acknowledging he was “not a danger to community”, she sided with the government and denied bond.Altamarino thanked the judge as he left the room, under watch of a guard. The heavy door closed behind him as he headed back into the void of America’s vast detention system. More

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      Trump’s imperial plan is now eroding the rights of people who thought they were safe | Nesrine Malik

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      The imperial boomerang effect is the theory that techniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a case study in how systems built for those whose rights have been diluted or taken away eventually devour those who were assumed to be safe from such violations. There are three ways in which this process of rebounding happens. The first is through the creation of a domestic caste system that mirrors the one outside a country’s borders, as demonstrated in the recent treatment of those foreigners with permanent US residency and valid work visas who expressed dissenting views on Gaza.Under Trump, their actions meet a threshold of insubordination that justifies their arrest, detention and deportation. The human rights of those individuals, such as due process, are cancelled. In allying themselves with Palestinians and against US foreign policy, they are demoted to the level of those Palestinians in their treatment by the US government. The tenuousness of permanent residency, valid work visas, green cards, marriage to US citizens and parenthood to American children starts to become clear. These are all conditional rights that can be stripped away if, in your alliances and solidarities, you identify yourself as a subject of American power. You mark yourself out as a citizen of the periphery daring to ask for the rights of the citizens of the core.Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is an almost too-on-the-nose demonstration of that two-tier system. Laws that were designed centuries ago, and have only been used to create legal vacuums on US soil in order to detain foreigners, create a second class of human. Franklin Roosevelt relied on the act to create domestic internment camps during the second world war, in which more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were detained. Another order that he issued, and that mandated the internment of US citizens, was only overturned in 2018. If it had not been, Trump would no doubt be using the law to extend arrests and detentions to US citizens for their political opinions as well.That legal infrastructure, no matter how dormant, is always open to reactivation and capture. A similar process unfolds within the workings of an immigration complex that is already opaque and reflexively punitive. The second rebound mechanism is via this sort of infrastructure. The US immigration system is a vast enterprise of bureaucracy, employment, detention centres and private companies that channels and imprisons immigrants. It is also a system that, even before Trump, was one of legal sinkholes and almost infinite licence. Border guards have the final decision-making authority on whether you enter the US, no matter what visa you are issued from an embassy abroad; customs agents have the right to search devices; and, if you are detained and deported, that whole process can happen without you being given access to a lawyer or standing before a judge. Detention for many is a state of extended limbo.Combine a system so large with a regime that enables it while weakening the judicial and legal proceedings that act as a check on its worst impulses, and you have a recipe for overreach and impunity. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that gave even more power to border officials to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”. With increased deportations of undocumented migrants being a flagship policy of Trump’s campaign, and the empowerment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to achieve that end, a practical and political dragnet has been cast so wide that it’s catching a lot more than intended. It is no longer only those whose skin colour, paperwork or political opinions throw them into uncertainty.Over the past few weeks, German tourists were arrested when they tried to enter the US entirely legally through the southern border, and detained for weeks before being deported. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen with a work visa, was arrested and detained for two weeks but told to “mentally prepare” herself for “months”. A French scientist was denied entry to the US when his phone was searched and messages critical of Trump were found. Those who have been added to the immigration detention prison population, from Mooney to Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and recent graduate of Columbia University, testify to the state of detainees they met there. “Justice,” Khalil wrote from detention, “escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”Which brings us to the third way in which the boomerang effect takes place – through the erosion of norms and standards, a cannibalisation of the very political systems meant to govern and protect those at the centre. On 18 March, Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who issued a temporary ban on deportations as ordered by the administration. The confrontation between Trump and the judiciary has precipitated a constitutional crisis that is shaking the foundations of US politics. The system of checks and balances – the equality of the legislative, executive and judicial branches under the constitution – is threatened by Trump’s open defiance and desired subjugation of all to the executive office. This is against a backdrop of the limiting of academic freedom, the violation of the first amendment, and a disregard for the US constitution described by experts as a “blitzkrieg on the law”.In this, there is something that can be seen everywhere in regimes that either have or crave absolute power. In order to seize authority and run a whole country according to the interests of a sovereign, more and more parties must be disenfranchised and repressed. The imperial form of governance is the prototype of what is required to exert control in the presence of mass dissent. But all political systems with large components that subdue a significant portion of the population cannot continue without those components overtaking the entire machine. It is a simple, almost elegant fact; something like a law of nature. But a nation that withholds its best ideals from some will end up losing them for all.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Greenpeace says Dakota Access pipeline defamation verdict risks ‘destroying right to peaceful protest’ – live

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      Steven Donziger is perhaps the best-known member of the trial monitoring committee that has been in court throughout the Energy Transfer v Greenpeace case.Donziger is an environmental lawyer who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over contamination in the Lago Agrio region, but ended up under house arrest for years, after the oil giant countersued him seeking $60bn in damages.Here, in a video released this week before the verdict, is how Donziger explains what is at stake in this legal effort to silence dissent he compares to the government’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil:Here is some useful background on the lawsuit against Greenpeace, from an article published last month by our colleagues Nina Lakhani and Rachel Leingang.Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had accused Greenpeace of defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline (Dapl).The anti-pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017 were organised by Standing Rock and other Sioux tribes and supported by more than 300 sovereign tribal nations, inspiring an international solidarity movement after Energy Transfer’s private security unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray against nonviolent protesters.Tens of thousands of people from across the country and world participated in the Dapl protests, and Greenpeace was among scores of non-profit groups that supported the Standing Rock tribe’s opposition to the pipeline.But Energy Transfer alleges in court filings that thousands of protestors were “incited” to come to North Dakota thanks to a “misinformation campaign” by Greenpeace.The lawsuit has been widely denounced as a classic strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp) – a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists and watchdog groups.For more, read the whole article, here:A team of 12 independent prominent civil rights attorneys and advocates who monitored the Greenpeace trial amid concerns about judicial bias and violations of due process released the following statement deploring the verdict:
      It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense. Attorneys on our team monitored every minute of the proceedings and found multiple violations of due process that denied Greenpeace its right to a fair trial. The problems included a jury that was patently biased in favor of Energy Transfer, with many members working in the fossil fuel industry; a judge who lacked the requisite experience and legal knowledge to rule properly on the complex First Amendment and other evidentiary issues at the center of the case; and incendiary and prejudicial statements by lawyers for Energy Transfer that tried to criminalize Greenpeace and by extension the entire climate movement by attacking constitutionally-protected advocacy.
      Our fear that this was an illegitimate corporate-funded SLAPP harassment case was confirmed by our observations. We will be issuing a full report documenting these violations and larger flaws in the case in the coming weeks. While the trial court verdict is in, the case is far from over. Greenpeace has a right to appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our committee will continue its work monitoring this critically important case that raises troubling concerns for all advocates in the country.
      The monitors who released the statement include: Marty Garbus, a trial attorney who has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and Vaclav Havel; Natali Segovia, director of Water Protector Legal Collective; Steven Donziger, an environmental and human rights advocate (and Guardian US columnist); Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; Scott Wilson Badenoch, Jr., a fellow of the American Bar Foundation; Wade McMullen, a distinguished fellow of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.As our colleagues Rachel Leingang and Nina Lakhani report, a jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable over defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago.Greenpeace, which had denied the claims, said in a statement after the verdict that lawsuits like this were aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest”; constitutional rights experts had expressed fears that case could have a wider chilling effect on free speech.Here is the complete statement on the verdict from Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal advisor, Greenpeace USA, sent to the Guardian:
      What we saw over these three weeks was Energy Transfer’s blatant disregard for the voices of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And while they also tried to distort the truth about Greenpeace’s role in the protests, we instead reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to non-violence in every action we take. After almost eight years, we were proud to share our story with the people of Mandan and beyond. To be clear, Greenpeace’s story is not the story of Standing Rock; that is not ours to tell, despite the allegations in the lawsuit. Our story is how an organization like Greenpeace USA can support critical fights to protect communities most impacted by the climate crisis, as well as continued attacks on Indigenous sovereignty. We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech. Greenpeace will continue to do its part to fight for the protection of these fundamental rights for everyone.
      Kristin Casper, the general counsel for Greenpeace International said:
      The fight against Big Oil isn’t over today, and we know that the truth and the law are on our side. Greenpeace International will continue to campaign for a green and peaceful future. Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest. We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down, we will not be silenced.
      Read Rachel and Nina’s detailed report on the verdict, and its implications here:A North Dakota jury has found Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to an energy company over protests against a pipeline being constructed in the state.The verdict stems from a lawsuit filed by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which sought $300m in damages from Greenpeace for defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Greenpeace has warned paying such a large judgment could bankrupt their US operation.Here’s more on the verdict:Last week, the Trump administration asked the supreme court to quickly overturn lower court rulings that blocked its attempt to curtail birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.The Associated Press reports that the request may also offer the conservative-dominated bench the opportunity to cut down on the practice of a single judge halting a policy nationwide. But, for whatever reason, the justices do not seem interested in ruling quickly on the issue.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The Supreme Court seems to be in no hurry to address an issue that has irritated Republican and Democratic administrations alike: the ability of a single judge to block a nationwide policy.
      Federal judges responding to a flurry of lawsuits have stopped or slowed one Trump administration action after another, from efforts to restrict birthright citizenship to freezes on domestic and international spending.
      While several justices have expressed concern about the use of so-called nationwide, or universal, injunctions, the high court has sidestepped multiple requests to do something about them.
      The latest plea comes in the form of an emergency appeal the Justice Department filed with the court last week, seeking to narrow orders issued by judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington that prohibit the nationwide enforcement of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to restrict birthright citizenship.
      The justices usually order the other side in an emergency appeal to respond in a few days or a week. But in this case, they have set a deadline of April 4, without offering any explanation.
      The Trump administration’s cancellation of an affordable repayment plan for student loans has prompted a lawsuit from the American Federal of Teachers, the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports:A top teachers union has sued the US Department of Education after it stopped processing applications for affordable repayment plans of student loans last month and disabled the online application for the programs.The American Federation of Teachers, or AFT – one the country’s largest unions, representing 1.8 million workers – filed a lawsuit alleging the sweeping action violates federal law.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington DC, seeks a court order to restore access to these programs.Another court order last month shut out borrowers of student loans from participating in four income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which tie income to student loan payments, designed to keep payments affordable and avoid defaults on loans.“By effectively freezing the nation’s student loan system, the new administration seems intent on making life harder for working people, including for millions of borrowers who have taken on student debt so they can go to college,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. “The former president tried to fix the system for 45 million Americans, but the new president is breaking it again.”The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is standing by his vote to fund the government, even as the calls for him to step aside grow.“I believe so strongly I did the right thing for all the flack I’m getting,” Schumer said in an interview on Morning Joe.He said he understood Democrats’ desire to stand up to Trump, but warned that forcing a shutdown was not the way to do it. “Let’s stand up to him smart. Let’s not give him the keys to the kingdom.”One major activist group, Indivisible, has already called on Schumer to resign as leader and constituents are raising the issue at town halls. According to Axios, at least two House Democrats responded yes when asked at a town hall whether Senate Democrats need new leadership.Schumer this weekend cancelled several stops on a tour for his forthcoming book, citing security concerns after progressive groups announced plans to protest the New York Democrat’s decision to lend his vote to a Republican funding bill.Schumer has argued that he does not support the bill, but feared a government shutdown at the exact moment Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to downsize the federal workforce would have been a far worse outcome.“If we shut down the government and they started doing all these bad things, in a month, those folks would be saying, hey, save Medicaid, save our rural hospitals, save this, save that, and we’ll say we can’t, there’s a government shutdown. And then they would come to us and say, so why’d you let it happen?” Schumer argued on Morning Joe. “I prevented that from happening, and I think my caucus, no matter which way they voted, understands that.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has declined to say publicly whether he continues to support Schumer. On Tuesday the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Schumer’s strategy: “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day,” she said, according to Politico. Unlike Jeffries, Pelosi said she still has confidence in Schumer’s leadership.Officials at the US Federal Reserve cut their US economic growth forecasts and raised their projections for price growth as they kept interest rates on hold.“Uncertainty around the economic outlook has increased,” the central bank said in a statement, as Donald Trump’s bid to overhaul the global economy with sweeping tariffs sparks concern over inflation and growth.Policymakers at the Fed expect inflation to increase by an average rate of 2.7% this year, according to projections released on Wednesday, up from a previous estimate of 2.5%.They expect US gross domestic product (GDP) – a broad measure of economic health – to rise by 1.7% this year, down from an estimate of 2.1% in December. Officials also revised down their projections for GDP growth in 2026 and 2027, to 1.8%.Uncertainty is “unusually elevated”, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, cautioned, as the Trump administration attempts to engineer radical economic change. Some of the increase in the Fed’s inflation expectations was “clearly” due to tariffs, he said. More

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      I am a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana. I am being targeted for my activism | Mahmoud Khalil

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      My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices under way against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.On March 8, I was taken by DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours – I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents [Minouche] Shafik, [Katrina] Armstrong, and Dean [Keren] Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students – some stripped of their BA degrees just weeks before graduation – and the expulsion of SWC [Student Workers of Columbia] President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam war, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

      This statement was originally published here More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I could be next’: international students at Columbia University feel ‘targeted’ after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest

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      It was 4am and a Columbia University master’s student two months away from graduation lay awake in bed. His heart thumped so hard, his chest began to hurt. His hands got colder and colder; he was unable to speak. This had become an agonizing nightly routine for the 24-year-old from India since 8 March, when immigration officials handcuffed the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and took him into detention in Louisiana.“What scares me the most is that I would be fast asleep at home and I would hear a bang on my door and I’d be taken away in the middle of the night by Ice and nobody will ever know what happened to me,” said the student, who attended multiple protests to support Palestine around New York City. “It feels as if people are getting targeted for just speaking up for their political views last year.”Khalil was an organizer at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, part of a diverse community that ate, danced, prayed and protested together, demanding the university divest from corporations linked to Israel as violence in Gaza escalated.The federal immigration officers who arrested Khalil gained entry into the Columbia-owned building where he lived and told him his green card, which grants him permanent residence in the US, had been revoked. The Department of Homeland Security accused him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” and is attempting to deport him, but has not alleged he committed any crimes. His lawyers are challenging his detention and potential deportation, and said agents did not provide an arrest warrant. Khalil’s arrest came after Donald Trump vowed to deport student visa holders who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, a move legal experts have called a flagrant violation of free speech.Now, Columbia students who are not US citizens, some who have vocally supported Palestinian rights, told the Guardian they feel they must be careful who they speak to and censor what they say. They fear being questioned by Ice agents, having their visas revoked or being arrested and detained. Some feel like they are being watched while walking around Morningside Heights and on campus, while others are reluctant to visit family or friends overseas in case they are not permitted back in the country.View image in fullscreen“When I leave my apartment, when I go out, I’m just so much more aware and cautious of who’s around me,” said Seher Ahmed, a psychology master’s student from Pakistan. “I went for a run this morning, and I’ve never felt this way before, but I felt like everyone was, like, looking at me.”Another student who arrived at Columbia in August last year to study journalism had been inspired by student reporters’ coverage of campus protests. She photographed a vigil where journalism school students recited names of the more than 100 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed in Gaza. For a reporting class, the 21-year-old wrote about an anti-Trump rally on election night that called for an end to the Israel-Gaza war. She posted her work and discussed related issues on Instagram and X.But just days away from applying for a year-long work visa that would follow her expected graduation this May, she stopped posting her opinions and made her accounts private. She is reconsidering attending a friend’s wedding overseas in case she is not allowed back in the country. “I feel like I’m being paranoid, but I’m really scared,” she said.Ahmed, who attended women’s rights marches in Pakistan from the age of 15 with her mother, began an art piece after Khalil’s arrest: a meditation on the Urdu translation of the word freedom, with blue ink pen swept across white canvas. “I come from a Muslim country, so did he. I believe in the same things he does, freedom and basic human rights and just standing up for a place that needs our voice right now,” said Ahmed. Her paralyzing fear is rooted in the idea that the US government will misconstrue those values as “pro-Hamas” and revoke her student visa.“We’re not terrorists, or, like, supporting terrorists. We’re trying to prevent a genocide from happening,” said Ahmed.Imam, a graduate student, went to the encampment – once with his professor – to join protests, listen to speakers including journalist Motaz Azaiza and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attend Friday prayers. The 30-year-old has been attending classes over Zoom or skipping them altogether: he feels he “could be next” on Ice’s list, without having any knowledge of what he has done wrong. Two months away from graduation, he is conflicted about attending more protests, which have continued on and off campus in support of Khalil and Palestine. “I want to do something, I feel so hopeless,” he said. “But also everything I do is going to cost me a bigger risk.”On 11 March, three days after Ice arrested Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia PhD student from India who participated in campus protests, “self-deported” after her student visa had been revoked, DHS said. On 13 March, DHS presented warrants and searched two students’ dorm rooms on campus. In Newark, immigration agents arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, after saying her student visa had expired.That federal agents can target a student or recent graduate without charge is a chilling reminder of the oppressive environments that some international students left behind. For a 22-year-old master’s student from Russia who lives in university housing, Khalil’s arrest brought back memories of police knocking on doors to draft male citizens at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. She said the spirit of the university had changed; now it feels like “the police state is coming after you”.“Your home should be your safe space. But ever since the arrest, anytime I hear footsteps at night in the Columbia housing – the walls are super thin so you hear everything – I’m always like, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’” she said.This week, Yale Law School professors warned international students about an impending Trump travel ban, saying they should avoid leaving the US or return immediately to the US if abroad. Brown issued a similar warning to its international students.“People look at the global north thinking they have things so much better. There are better laws to protect your rights,” said Thien Miru, a post-graduate student from Indonesia. Now there is overwhelming concern that if a green card holder can be detained, a student visa holder has little protection.The Trump administration is intent on bringing Columbia to heel: last week it sent a letter to the university demanding measures such as a mask ban, winding down the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department and empowering campus law enforcement in exchange for any of the $400m federal funding it had clawed back after “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”, according to the administration.View image in fullscreenIn several emails to students and faculty, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, emphasized the need to “stand together”. “Our university is defined by the principles of academic freedom, open inquiry, and respect for all,” she wrote. One email linked to a public safety webpage outlining protocols for potential Ice campus visits. But some students interpreted this to mean they were responsible for dealing with immigration officials alone. Columbia did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.While studying for her two-year degree in social work, Miru, 35, learned about advocating for those who need help. She said the university needs to “go the extra mile” by mediating with those in power to protect its students’ rights.“I’ve heard a lot of people at Columbia say that this is our community, so what are you going to do if your community is experiencing something like this?” said Miru. “I am expecting something more than just sending us super-long emails. Prove to us that we are part of your community.”On 14 March, Khalil’s lawyers released a video of him being taken away from his wife, Noor Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, by plainclothes immigration officers. “As a woman I feel it’s so hard for her to think about raising your child without support from your partner,” said Miru, a mother of two girls. “If they deport her husband, family separation is not a good idea, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this little family. I’m speechless.”Miru made the difficult decision to leave her daughters with her parents in Indonesia to get her degree, after her father gave her books about the US and talked for years about the high quality of education while she was growing up. “I also got accepted to some universities in Australia, but since Columbia also accepted me, I thought let’s aim for the highest, let’s aim for the stars,” said Miru. Her hope was to bring her daughters to the US so they could also study there. Now, she’s questioning whether she should give up on her aspirations and move back home.

      Some names have been withheld for sources’ safety.
      Jazzmin Jiwa is an international journalist and documentary maker currently based in New York City. Reporting contributed by Duaa Shah, a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefs

      by

      In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent” warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said.“At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.”He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket.In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”.“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel.“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.“I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.”Khalil’s arrest ignited protests and caused alarm among free expression advocates, who view the deportation attempt as a violation of his free speech rights. Khalil has not been accused of a crime. His lawyers argue that the Trump administration is unlawfully retaliating against him for his activism and constitutionally protected speech. In an amended petition filed last week, they contended that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.His attorneys are currently fighting in a New York court to have him transferred back to New York and to secure his release. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation while the legal challenge is pending.Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and since assuming office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, frequently framing such demonstrations as expressions of support for Hamas.Khalil, who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between the pro-Palestine protesters and university administrators.The Trump administration has accused the former student of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” and was attempting to deport him using a rarely invoked legal provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to remove someone from the US if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.Federal prosecutors are asking the New York court to order his challenge to his detention moved to Louisiana, where it would likely face more conservative judges.Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and member of Khalil’s legal team, said that what happens to Khalil will reverberate beyond his case. “The Trump administration has clearly signaled that this is their test case, their opening shot, the first of many more to come,” she said.“And for that test case, they chose an intrepid and deeply principled organizer who is beloved and trusted in his community,” Shamas said.After Khalil’s arrest, Trump said that it was just “the first of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport other foreign students he accused of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.Khalil said in his statement that he has always believed that his duty “is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear”.“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention” he said. “For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”He added: “That is precisely why I am being targeted.”Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”The university has increasingly taken disciplinary actions against students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on the school under the guise of fighting antisemitism, which it claims run rampant at the university. The administration is using the same argument to threaten dozens of others American universities with potentially crippling funding cuts.Students, Khalil said, have an important role to play in fighting back. “Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,” he said.“In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”He concluded: “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”

      Read Khalil’s full statement here. More