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      Trump is using Mahmoud Khalil to test his mass deportation plan | Heba Gowayed

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      On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, was apprehended from university housing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Khalil, a Palestinian and student leader at the Columbia encampments last year, was told by the arresting officers that his green card had been “revoked”, an action that only an immigration judge can decide. It has since been revealed that he is in Ice custody in La Salle, Louisiana, a detention site notorious for abuse.On Truth Social, Donald Trump celebrated the apprehension of Khalil, whom he called “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and bragged of more arrests to come.Khalil has not been accused, by anyone, of violating the law. Instead, his apprehension is a dangerous example of deportation as a retaliation for first amendment-protected speech. Simply put, Khalil was punished for protesting against US complicity in what is widely recognized as a genocide in Gaza. The Trump administration has exploited anti-Palestinian racism as a means to test its mass deportation goals: whitening the nation by eliminating immigrants and insisting that those who are here not challenge those in authority. Khalil’s arrest and detention reveals the fragility of our first amendment protections, of who does and does not have a voice in our nation.As a professor, I am troubled by the central role that academia, which in its ideal form is a bastion of free speech and critical thought, is playing in this assault on human rights. Universities and colleges have become consumed by a politics of consent, where to appease donors and politicians, leadership has collaborated in the targeting of their own students, and faculty largely remain silent in the face of assaults on them.As Israel began its bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, students across the nation set up encampments on their campuses, reminiscent of the anti-apartheid movement of decades past. The Gaza protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, with like-minded students from all backgrounds sharing meals and community.View image in fullscreenColumbia University administrators, for their part, called the the New York City police department to brutalize and arrest their students, criminalizing them. They have since sealed off the public spaces on their campus and restricted access to them, including illegally closing the 116th through street rather than risk any protest on the campus lawn. The brutality is ongoing: just last week, nine students from Barnard were arrested in a new escalation.Much has been written about the “Palestine exception” – the idea that advocating for Palestine is excluded from free speech protections. Well before 7 October 2023, people had been fired, sanctioned, or retaliated against for their writing and speech on issues related to the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Since then, the number has ballooned to thousands of cases as repression has intensified.In the lead-up to his arrest by Ice, Khalil reached out to Columbia twice asking for help, describing a “dehumanizing doxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer” including a tweet by Davidai, a faculty member at Columbia, who called Khalil a “terror supporter” and tagged Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, to demand his deportation.Rubio deployed the racialized language of “terrorism” to announce that he would target international students for “visa denial or revocation, and deportation”. The announcement was applauded by Senator Tom Cotton and the House committee on foreign affairs, which tweeted from its official account: “Terrorist sympathizers are not welcome in the United States of America. Thank you @SecRubio and @POTUS for your leadership. Deport them all!”The campaign against Khalil, which White House officials admit is a blueprint for targeting other students, was successful. It was later reported that Rubio himself signed the warrant for his arrest, using a little-known provision in the law that allows the secretary of state to unilaterally determine whose presence is warranted in the nation. It means that the fate of Palestinians such as Khalil is being left to those who would dox a student, to those who want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.Democratic politicians came to Khalil’s defense even as they continued to condemn the protests that he was a part of, even as they saw it fitting to use the power of the federal government to sanction students for daring to speak out. In a statement criticizing the arrest, Hakeem Jeffries still felt compelled to describe Khalil exercising his right to protest as creating “an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students”.Columbia has not issued any statement of support for Khalil or for other immigrant students. Instead, the school updated its website stating that Ice could enter campus property without a judicial warrant in the case of “risk of imminent harm to people or property”. In other words, Columbia is endorsing that deportation – the torturous and forcible removal of a person from their life – is a fitting consequence for protest. It instructed its faculty to continue operating as “usual”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe implications of this are extraordinary and alarming. It means that as the country takes an authoritarian turn, as the laws become more McCarthyist, more draconian, this university and others are choosing to align themselves with that turn, to go above and beyond to apply the “law”, even if it means greenlighting the abduction of their students.To be sure, Columbia is not the only campus guilty of silencing pro-Palestinian voices. Last year I protested outside the City College of New York as my own students were loaded into police vans at the behest of chancellor of the City University of New York. In February, an advertisement for a Palestine studies position was removed from our hiring platform due to the intervention of the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who deemed it to be “antisemitic” because it included the words “genocide” and “apartheid”.I am regularly in conversation with faculty who have lost their jobs, with students who have been expelled from their institutions for protest, with people across universities, across the country, who have been doxed and sanctioned and reprimanded for their voice.The tools of oppression, wielded against those students and faculty whose opinions run contrary to those who are in power, are now undermining the very foundations of this democracy. The freedom of Khalil – who is not a political symbol, but an expectant father – the freedom of everyone who raises their voice for Palestine, and the freedom of Palestinians themselves are tethered to all of our freedoms. Khalil’s safety is tied to that of every immigrant, whether on a student or an H1-B visa, or a permanent resident, or even a naturalized citizen. His freedom is tethered to everyone who cares about their right to free expression.As his case is adjudicated in the courts, which considers its legal dimensions, it is not just Mahmoud Khalil who is on trial, but the entirety of a nation teetering on the edge of authoritarianism. More

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      Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show

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      As Donald Trump’s administration ramps up its crackdown on undocumented immigrants to the US, advocates are increasingly worried immigration agents will turn to surveillance technology to round up those targeted for deportation, even in so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit the ways local law enforcement can cooperate with immigration officials.That’s because US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) in past years has gained access to troves of data from sanctuary cities that could aid its raids and enforcement actions. Among that information is data from the vast network of license plate readers active across the US, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.Local agencies across the country use license plate readers, high-speed cameras that scan and capture images and videos of every vehicle that passes, to collect information on vehicular activity, including the direction a vehicle is moving. They store those details in databases that are often shared with other local law enforcement agencies as well as federal ones. The volume of data gathered along with the wide breadth of bureaus that have access to it mean that federal agents in practice can often obtain information on individual immigrants gathered by local authorities those same agents are legally not allowed to work with.Take the example of Westchester county, New York, where police work with a license plate reader company named Rekor.Westchester, a 450-sq-mile mostly suburban area just north of New York City – has had laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities on the books since 2018. But documents including emails and access logs newly made public show Ice has had access in the past to a major database that holds license plate reader information collected across the county.Westchester county police said they managed a network of 480 such cameras as of January 2023. Westchester police provided these figures in response to a freedom of information law request and are the most up-to-date figures available on the scale of the county’s license plate surveillance network. In just the last week of January 2023, the cameras scanned 16.2m cars, according to these documents. That’s up from 14m scans across 346 cameras in March 2022, these emails show. Ice, Customs and Border Protection and the agency they fall under, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have all had access to this database as of February 2022, as do local law enforcement agencies outside New York state, these documents show. The license plate information that is stored in this database came from more than 20 cities across Westchester and spans two years.Neither Ice nor the Westchester county police department responded to questions about whether the federal agency still has access to the database.In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s administration, a flurry of immigration enforcement activity across Westchester county prompted local mayors to reassure residents they were complying with local sanctuary laws and were not cooperating with Ice on these investigations. These laws “prohibit members of the police department from engaging in law enforcement activities solely for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration law, unless required to do so by a judicial warrant or other federal law”, the Peekskill mayor, Vivian C McKenzie, told the Westfair Business Journal.The data sharing between the county police and Ice, illustrated in the documents the Guardian reviewed, appear to have sidestepped and undermined the county’s sanctuary city laws. It also means that Ice can potentially use data captured in Westchester to pursue immigration cases elsewhere, including in other sanctuary cities.“Westchester can be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It can’t be both. This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county,” Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the privacy advocacy group the Surveillance Tech Oversight Project, said. “It’s unclear if Westchester county [was] violating the letter of its law, or merely its spirit, but either way it’s clear that immigrant communities are at risk.”Westchester county police, Ice and the mayors of several cities in the county did not respond to multiple requests for comment.The documents, which Westchester county police made public in response to a freedom of information law request by a legal non-profit and shared exclusively with the Guardian, include a list of its “users”, or organizations that had access to this database as of February 2022. The non-profit asked not to be named to avoid compromising the federal grants the organization was awarded. In addition to Ice and the DHS, agencies listed as having access include the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service and the FBI.A separate list details individual users who have access to the database. Among the users were five individuals who had email addresses that ended in @ice.dhs.gov and two people with Secret Service email addresses ending in USSS.dhs.gov. There were 44 users with email addresses that end in FBI.gov, 40 with DOJ.gov addresses and just over a dozen featuring DEA.gov. Many of those included on the list indicated they were part of the investigative unit of their agency. It was not clear whether that list was current as of 2025 and if those users have ongoing access to the database.A nationwide surveillance netRekor sells license plate readers and the software used to analyze their data to law enforcement agencies, though it is among the smaller companies in an ecosystem of many working in similar ways. Together, these companies’ license plate readers blanket the majority of the US. Access to more than one major network can enable law enforcement agencies to monitor people’s movements across the country.In addition to accessing local networks like Westchester’s, Ice uses the national database of Vigilant Solutions, a Motorola subsidiary which offers license-plate reading technology that competes with Rekor for contracts with local law enforcement and business across the US. In 2019, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed 9,000 Ice agents had access to the database of Vigilant Solutions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrivacy and civil liberty experts argue these technologies create a vast surveillance dragnet wherein the movement of every vehicle in the US is being tracked and examined regardless of whether there is an active investigation. Residents of places where these cameras have been set up are beginning to push back.In October, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, sued the city for allegedly violating their fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by installing license plate readers from another Rekor competitor called Flock Safety. When announcing the contract to install 172 Flock cameras across Norfolk, the police chief, Mark Talbot, said his office wanted to create “a nice curtain of technology” that would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere”. Lee Schmidt, one of the plaintiffs, said four of the cameras had fenced in his neighborhood.“He was outraged by the loss of privacy,” said Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute of Justice who is representing the plaintiffs on this case. “He noticed that he basically couldn’t leave his neighborhood without one of the cameras picking it up.”Local law enforcement across the country sharing license plate data with each other and with federal agencies means that anyone’s movements are in effect being tracked across state lines, experts say.“We’re moving to a day where someone getting in their car in New York City could drive to Boston or Washington and have their car basically map every moment of the drive,” Fox Cahn said. “It is profoundly and painfully ironic that American highways went from the symbol of freedom and the liberty of the open road to this metaphor for creeping surveillance and police control.”Westchester police discuss more surveillanceIn addition to informal data-sharing with various federal and local agencies inside and outside of New York state, emails show Westchester police actively discussed creating formal data-sharing relationships to enable a cross-county surveillance network, including with the New York police department and fire departments, as well as an out-of-state agency in Stamford, Connecticut.“If you get a chance I would love to discuss what possibilities exist with a Data Sharing plan,” a Westchester police lieutenant wrote in an email to an NYPD officer dated 10 March 2022. “We are currently at 346 cameras in Westchester with about 14 million reads per week. A lot of those reads are along the city line (Bronx).”The range of agencies and individuals that have access to this database is potentially far more expansive than those listed. Rekor advertises a nationwide law enforcement platform that allows any agency that uses it “to access real time data from any part of the network at no cost”, according to a company press release. Announced in 2019, the platform would make real-time data on the “150 million plate reads” a month that Rekor collects across 30 states available to any agency that wanted to opt in. More

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      US judge blocks deportation of Palestinian activist detained by Ice

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      A judge has blocked the deportation of the prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s protests against Israel over the war in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University until this past December who holds permanent US residency, is being detained by US immigration authorities at a facility in Louisiana after his arrest, according to information from officials.A spokesperson for the US’s homeland security department – as well as the country’s top diplomat – confirmed the arrest. In a statement to the Associated Press, a homeland security department spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said Khalil’s arrest was made to support Donald Trump’s presidential orders “prohibiting antisemitism”.The department alleged that Khalil’s activism constituted “activities aligned to Hamas”.Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also confirmed the arrest, adding on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”Jesse M Furman, an Obama-appointed judge in New York’s southern district, announced the block in an order on Monday amid protests over Khalil’s arrest.Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called on the department of homeland security on Monday evening to “produce facts and evidence of criminal activity”.“Absent evidence of a crime, such as providing material support for a terrorist organization, the actions undertaken by the Trump administration are wildly inconsistent with the United States constitution,” Jeffries’ statement read.Khalil served as lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last spring. On Monday, an online tracker administered by the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) indicated he was at the LaSalle detention center near the central Louisiana community of Jena. The facility is operated by the private contractor GEO Group.According to Zeteo, which first reported on the arrest, Khalil’s attorneys did not immediately know where he was being detained. The same tracker showing Khalil in custody in Louisiana on Monday indicated on Sunday that he was at an immigration detention center in New Jersey.But when Khalil’s wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, attempted to visit him at the New Jersey center, she was reportedly told he was not there.Khalil was detained by Ice agents despite having a green card and therefore being a permanent US resident. Khalil’s attorney said Ice agents hung up the phone during the detention when she asked if they had a warrant.“The Trump administration’s outrageous detention of Mahmoud is designed to instill terror in students speaking out for Palestinian freedom and immigrant communities,” said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on the arrest. “This is the fascist playbook. We all must fiercely reject it, and universities must start protecting its students.”Trump has vowed to target foreign students for deportations as well as “agitators” involved in protests on US college and university campuses. The second Trump administration has made a specific focus of Columbia University, recently announcing the cancellation of $400m in grants over claims the school isn’t doing enough to combat antisemitism.A Zionist activist group, Betar USA, claimed credit for releasing Khalil’s name to the Trump administration, praising his detention. The Anti-Defamation League has listed the group as a hate group – the only Jewish group on the list.“This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America,” Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive of New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.“Furthermore, Khalil and all people living in the United States are afforded due process.“A green card can only be revoked by an immigration judge, showing once again that the Trump administration is willing to ignore the law in order to instill fear and further its racist agenda. DHS must immediately release Khalil.”Abené Clayton contributed to this report More

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      Crews continue to battle wind-driven brush fire on New York’s Long Island

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      Firefighters in New York were continuing to battle at least one brush fire in a wooded stretch of Long Island on Sunday with the wealthy coastal enclave of the Hamptons vulnerable and officials warning that high wind gusts threatened to ignite further blazes.The state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, declared a state of emergency on Saturday after four separate fires broke out. The flames were spreading across large swaths of the narrow strip of barrier land that stretches for more than 100 miles east from New York City out towards the Atlantic Ocean.A huge fire in Long Island’s Pine Barrens region prompted road closures and evacuations of a military base.As of Sunday morning, three of the fires had been contained, while one was still burning in the hamlet of Westhampton, according to Michael Martino, a spokesperson for Suffolk county executive Ed Romaine.Local fire crews, as well as the air national guard, worked through the night, containing roughly 80% of the blaze, according to Martino.He said the Suffolk county police department’s arson squad had initiated an investigation into the blaze, though there was no immediate evidence to suggest arson.At least two commercial structures had been damaged. One firefighter was flown to a hospital to be treated for burns to the face on Saturday.Massive clouds of smoke billowed and flames towered over the Sunrise highway that leads to the Hamptons, the string of historic seaside communities flanked by magnificent sandy beaches with rolling waves and dotted with summer mansions of the rich and famous.According to the National Weather Service, wind gusts of up to 30mph were expected on Sunday, making it more difficult to extinguish parts that were still burning.“Our biggest problem is the wind,” Romaine said at an earlier news conference. “It is driving this fire.”Roughly 15 miles west, officials were monitoring a small brush fire along Sunrise highway early on Sunday, Brookhaven town supervisor Daniel Panico said. More

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      Andrew Cuomo enters race for New York mayor as frontrunner – but trailing baggage

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      Abraham Rios, a 76-year-old army veteran and retiree, regularly meets friends at a coffee shop around the corner from his home in Brooklyn, and that is about all he does, he says.The Puerto Rico native who served in the Vietnam war is satisfied with the money he gets from social security and enjoys life, but he would like to see more police in his Clinton Hill neighborhood, where he has lived since 1964.Rios thinks Andrew Cuomo, who on 1 March entered the New York City mayoral race in an attempt to resurrect a seemingly dead political career, can make that happen.“He is a very good leader,” Rios said of Cuomo, who resigned as New York governor in 2021 after facing sexual harassment allegations, which he denied. “He made his mistakes, like all of us have,” but “the governor built bridges. He helped the poor. He helped everybody.”Cuomo’s long history in New York politics and name recognition has helped him storm to a lead in a candidate field featuring an incumbent – Eric Adams – whom many see as corrupt, and a large number of lesser-known candidates who are struggling to get much traction.The scandal that brought Cuomo down and his controversial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic probably won’t have a significant impact on his chances of winning, New York political analysts say, but some voters don’t like what they viewed as his heavy-handed approach as governor and don’t think he is progressive enough.“The judging of the mayor is going to be determined not on incidents in their past but who we feel has got the best chance of leading the city when things that are not predictable happen,” like the pandemic and the September 11 terrorist attacks, said Mitchell Moss, New York University professor of urban policy and planning. “He is the only candidate” with experience “at the federal level, the state level and who understands how to make the tough decisions”.The Democratic mayoral primary, which will probably determine who wins the general election in the blue city, is scheduled for 24 June. The city will again use a ranked-choice system in which voters pick their preferred candidates from one to five, though they do not need to select more than one. If someone captures more than half the votes, they win; if not, the candidate with the fewest first-round votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes go to their second choice. That process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes.Cuomo, who for months was rumored to be considering running, had a wide lead in February polls, with about a third of voters in two surveys saying he was their favorite candidate among nine Democrats, while the runner-up in each only received 10%.Other candidates include Adams, who faced a federal indictment until the US justice department dropped the charges against him, it appears, in exchange for his help implementing Donald Trump’s immigration policy; the current and former city comptrollers, Brad Lander and Scott Stringer; the New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani; and the state senator Jessica Ramos, among others.In announcing his candidacy, Cuomo said the city was in crisis.“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway,” Cuomo said in a video. “These conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or, more precisely, the lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders.”View image in fullscreenAs governor, Cuomo allegedly bullied those who disagreed with him. While that made it hard for him to find allies when he faced calls to resign, it also contributed to the perception that he is a strong leader, said Doug Muzzio, a retired political science professor who worked at Baruch College.Meanwhile, “the incumbent is seen to be a weak person who is in the pocket of a president who the voters despise”, Muzzio said.Cuomo can also point to his infrastructure accomplishments, Moss said, which include rebuilding a bridge that connects Brooklyn and Queens, an overhaul of La Guardia airport and construction of the Moynihan Train Hall.Kim Grover, a graphic designer who lives in the East Village, said she was concerned about the allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women and that his administration underreported how many people died in nursing homes during the pandemic.Still, Grover thinks Cuomo stood up to Trump during the pandemic – and in doing so, to many, became a hero. She now worries about maintaining New Yorkers’ civil rights and sanctuary city policy, which keeps local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officers, something Trump and Republicans have attacked.“In terms of his excellent delivery and communication skills, my first thought would be that [Cuomo] would be a good person to stand his ground against President Trump,” said Grover, 67, who has not decided whom she will support.Gabe Russell, a petitioner for a Democrat in the comptroller race – whom he declined to name – did not like Cuomo even before the Covid and sexual harassment scandals, and Cuomo is not on his list of five candidates. His top two choices are Mamdani and Lander.Cuomo “was very cozy with the real estate lobby … and that is always a bad sign”, said Russell, 33, who wants the government to use mathematics to prevent gerrymandering. “New York is one of the bluest states. We should have been doing far more lefty stuff than we ever do.”Russell also thinks Cuomo could lose support, citing the 2021 mayoral election, when Andrew Yang was the frontrunner and then fell to fourth place.Elena Siyanko, a longtime leader of arts organizations who moved to New York in 1996, said the city was once a “generative place in terms of culture, where artists could afford to live” but had become a place “for hi-tech and financial services”.An East Village resident, Siyanko blames Cuomo for the safety issues he now decries because of how he cut funding for social services. For example, to address a budget shortfall, he discontinued $65m in annual payments for a rental assistance program, while also refusing to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents.“He is in this neoliberal camp of removing any safety net and economic support from public life,” said Siyanko, 53, who immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine, and is undecided in the mayoral race. “We just need to try to get to a corruption-free candidate in this chapter of our life in New York City.” More

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      Trump administration cancels $400m in funds to Columbia University

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      The Donald Trump administration announced on Friday that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The announcement comes after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and initiated its own investigations into students critical of Israel and its war on Gaza after Hamas’s own attack on Israel. That move by the university has alarmed advocates of free speech.It also comes at a time of widespread backlash to American universities by the Trump administration and conservatives more broadly who see the higher education sector in the US as dominated by liberals and ripe for a rightwing attack on its influence.Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed secretary of education, had warned on Monday that Columbia would lose federal funding if it did not take additional action to combat antisemitism on its campus.A statement issued on Friday by the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the US General Services Administration, states: “These cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.”“For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” McMahon said in the statement.The statement also refers to ongoing “illegal protests” on college and university campuses, a phrase Trump has used to refer to some student protests, though what makes these illegal remains unclear.Columbia was central to campus protests that broke out across the US over Gaza last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment there in April and inspired a wave of similar protests in many other colleges.The first amendment to the US constitution protects the rights of people to “peacefully assemble” and to petition the government for a “redress of grievances”.The extent that pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses can be considered antisemitic is still debated across political and academic spheres. Republican lawmakers viewed the protests as antisemitic, despite the fact many protesters denied the accusations or were Jewish themselves.Trump has threatened college students with imprisonment and deportation on Tuesday on his Truth Social platform, writing: “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”A Columbia University spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Columbia Spectator, that it was “reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and [pledged] to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding”.“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” the spokesperson wrote.It is not immediately clear what contracts or grants would be cut under the directive. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments, the GSA statement said.Katherine Franke, a retired legal scholar and former professor at Columbia Law School told the Guardian how she was “pushed out” of her role in January because of her pro-Palestinian activism. She had been with Columbia for 25 years.Franke says that the university was told “unless we as faculty and students take a pro-Israeli position, it [the university] will be sanctioned. And at the same time, the university is now committing itself to something it’s calling institutional neutrality.”She says that though not all the grants were cut, the Trump administration did “cut a significant part of them, and the important research that’s being done with those grants will stop”.Franke is highly critical of the way Columbia is responding to the threats from Trump, believing the institution could have done more to protect students, faculty and the pivotal role the university plays in a democracy.“If you grovel before a bully, it just emboldens the bully, and the bully has now become an authoritarian government with the capacity to act on a level that was unthinkable for us a couple of years ago,” she said.Columbia is one of five colleges currently under the new federal investigation, and it is one of 10 being visited by a taskforce in response to allegations of antisemitism. Others under investigation include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; and Portland State University. More

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      Republicans haul sanctuary city mayors over the coals at immigration hearing

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      A congressional hearing designed to criticize sanctuary city policies unexpectedly shifted on Wednesday, as a planned attack by Republican lawmakers instead dissolved into a platform that amplified Democratic mayors’ arguments about immigration and urban safety.Before a packed room on Capitol Hill, the House oversight committee, led by its Republican chair, James Comer of Kentucky, sought to portray sanctuary cities – a city that touts municipal laws that protect undocumented migrants – as havens for criminal activity and foreign gangs.“The point that we’ve got to iron out today is that we have to have cooperation with federal law to turn over those illegal criminals to Ice and we’ve heard reports and many of you have said publicly that you are going to obstruct that,” Comer said. “That is against the law. And we’re going to hear more about that today.”But instead of cornering the mayors, Republican lawmakers seemed to inadvertently provide them a national megaphone to sell their approaches to local governance and immigration.“If you wanted to make us safe, pass gun reforms,” Boston mayor Michelle Wu said. “Stop cutting Medicaid. Stop cutting cancer research. Stop cutting funds for veterans. That is what will make our cities safe.”Along with Wu, Mayors Eric Adams of New York, Brandon Johnson of Chicago, and Mike Johnston of Denver were put at the center of the national debate about local governance, immigration enforcement and the balance between federal mandates and municipal discretion.In opening statements, each mayor offered a defense of their sanctuary policies. Adams emphasized that such classifications do not shield criminals, but instead ensure immigrant communities can trust local authorities. Johnson argued that welcoming city ordinances do not impede criminal investigations, while Johnston framed the issue through a moral lens of humanitarian responsibility.Wu, who brought her one-month old infant, said it was the Trump administration’s over-the-top tactics that jeopardized safety for Americans – and that the border czar, Tom Homan, should be the one that should face Congress.“This federal administration is making hard-working, tax-paying, God-fearing residents afraid to live their lives,” Wu said. “A city that’s scared is not a city that’s safe, a land ruled by fear is not the land of the free.”The hearing took a turn when Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina demanded mayors answer inflammatory yes-or-no questions, including whether they “hated President Trump more than they loved their country”.A shouting match then erupted between Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Comer, with Pressley attempting to enter critical headlines about the Trump administration into the official record. Comer had been generally receptive to her prior requests up until that moment.The hearing occurred amid heightened national tensions around immigration, with Trump and Republican rhetoric focusing on linking immigrant populations to crime – a narrative sharply contested by the Democratic mayors and civil liberties advocates.Comer suggested that sanctuary policies “create sanctuary for criminals” and directly endanger public safety. He called for potentially withholding federal funding from cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities and pressed each Mayor on whether they will turn over undocumented migrants to Ice.The hearing comes as Adams faces a potential congressional investigation into the justice department’s efforts to dismiss corruption charges against him.The Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin and Jasmine Crockett – who is a member of the House oversight committee – have accused the department of attempting an improper quid pro quo, alleging that federal prosecutors have looked to drop corruption charges in exchange for Adams’s cooperation with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.At one point, Robert Garcia, the Democratic congressman of California, publicly called for Adams’s resignation, declaring he was “confident that Adams committed the crimes with which he is charged”, though Adams – who has been ducking local media on the question – firmly denied any wrongdoing. More