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    US judge rules Mahmoud Khalil can be deported for his views

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    Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer, is eligible to be deported from the United States, an immigration judge ruled on Friday during a contentious hearing at a remote court in central Louisiana.The decision sides with the Trump administration’s claim that a short memo written by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, which stated Khalil’s “current or expected beliefs, statements or associations” were counter to foreign policy interests, is sufficient evidence to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States. The undated memo, the main piece of evidence submitted by the government, contained no allegations of criminal conduct.During a tense hearing on Friday afternoon, Khalil’s attorneys made an array of unsuccessful arguments attempting to both delay a ruling on his eligibility for removal and to terminate proceedings entirely. They argued the broad allegations contained in Rubio’s memo gave them a right to directly cross-examine him.Khalil held prayer beads as three attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security presented arguments for his removal.Judge Jamee Comans ruled that Rubio’s determination was “presumptive and sufficient evidence” and that she had no power to rule on concerns over free speech.“There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy,” Comans said.A supporter was in tears sat on the crowded public benches as the ruling was delivered.Following the ruling, Khalil, who had remained silent throughout proceedings, requested permission to speak before the court.Addressing the judge directly, he said: “I would like to quote what you said last time, that ‘there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.’”He continued: “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process.“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me is afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”Khalil, 30, helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last year. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in New York on 8 March and transferred to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been detained for over a month. His case was the first in a string of Ice arrests instigated by the Trump administration targeting pro-Palestinian students and scholars present in the US on visas or green cards.The ruling means that Khalil’s removal proceedings will continue to move forward in Jena, while a separate case being heard in federal court in New Jersey examines the legality of his detention and questions surrounding the constitutionality of the government’s claims it can deport people for first amendment-protected speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy.Khalil’s legal team is asking the New Jersey judge to release him on bail so that he can reunite with his wife, who is due to give birth to their first child this month.His lawyers slammed the decision, which they said appeared to be prewritten. “Today, we saw our worst fears play out: Mahmoud was subject to a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing, and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent. This is not over, and our fight continues,” said Marc van der Hout, Khalil’s immigration lawyer.“If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes. We will continue working tirelessly until Mahmoud is free and rightfully returned home to his family and community.”During a short prayer vigil held outside the detention centre on Friday afternoon, a group of interfaith clergy read messages of support. A short statement from Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is due to give birth this month, was also delivered in front of reporters.“Today’s decision feels like a devastating blow to our family. No person should be deemed ‘removable’ from their home for speaking out against the killing of Palestinian families, doctors, and journalists,” the statement read.It continued: “In less than a month, Mahmoud and I will welcome our first child. Until we are reunited, I will not stop advocating for my husband’s safe return home.”The New Jersey judge has ordered the government not to remove Khalil as his case plays out in federal court. A hearing in that case is set for later on Friday. More

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      White House may seek legally binding control over Columbia through consent decree – report

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      The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts that the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary move by the Trump administration, which has threatened government funding as a way to force colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues from campus protests to transgender women in sports and diversity and inclusion initiatives.As a party to the consent decree, Columbia would have to agree to enter it – and the Journal report states that it is unclear whether such a plan has been discussed by the university board.In a statement to the Guardian, the university did not directly address the report. “The University remains in active dialogue with the Federal Government to restore its critical research funding,” a spokesperson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the Journal, the proposal comes from the administration’s antisemitism taskforce, composed in part of justice department lawyers, who have reportedly expressed skepticism that Columbia was acting in “good faith”. If Columbia resists, the justice department would need to present its case for the agreement in court, a process that could drag on for years with the university risking its federal funding in the interim.Republicans and the Trump administration have sought to make an example of Columbia University, which was at the center of a student protest movement over Israel’s war in Gaza that broke out on campuses across the country. Last month, federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and prominent Palestinian activist who participated in campus protests. He remains in detention.During a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Trump pressed his education secretary, Linda McMahon, to elaborate on the department’s efforts to withhold federal funds from universities that were “not behaving”.“You’re holding back from $400 Columbia?” he asked McMahon. She nodded and named other schools, noting that the administration had frozen nearly $1bn in funding from Cornell.“We’re getting calls from the presidents of universities who really do want to come in and sit down and come in and sit down and have discussions,” she said. “We’re investigating them but in the meantime we’re holding back the grant fund money.” More

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      Mahmoud Khalil can be expelled for his beliefs alone, US government argues

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      Facing a deadline from an immigration judge to turn over evidence for its attempted deportation of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, the federal government has instead submitted a brief memo, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, citing the Trump administration’s authority to expel noncitizens whose presence in the country damages US foreign policy interests.The two-page memo, which was obtained by the Associated Press, does not allege any criminal conduct by Khalil, a legal permanent US resident and graduate student who served as spokesperson for campus activists last year during large demonstrations against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the war in Gaza.Rather, Rubio wrote Khalil could be expelled for his beliefs.He said that while Khalil’s activities were “otherwise lawful”, letting him remain in the country would undermine “US policy to combat antisemitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States”.“Condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote in the undated memo.The submission was filed on Wednesday after Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to produce its evidence against Khalil ahead of a hearing on Friday on whether it can continue detaining him during immigration proceedings.Attorneys for Khalil said the memo proved the Trump administration was “targeting Mahmoud’s free speech rights about Palestine”.The government is relying on a rarely used provision of a 1952 law giving the secretary of state broad powers to order the removal of immigrations deemed harmful to foreign policy. Khalil’s lawyers argue that law was never meant to go after constitutionally protected speech.Johnny Sinodis, one of Khalil’s immigration lawyers, said in a media briefing on Thursday that the memo doesn’t come close to meeting the evidentiary standard required under immigration law.“The Rubio memo is completely devoid of any factual recitation as to why exactly Mahmoud’s presence in the United States is adverse to a compelling US government interest,” he said.A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, did not respond to questions about whether it had additional evidence against Khalil, writing in an emailed statement: “DHS did file evidence, but immigration court dockets are not available to the public.”Khalil, 30, was arrested on 8 March in New York and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. He is a Palestinian by ethnicity who was born in Syria. Khalil recently finished his coursework for a master’s degree at Columbia’s school of international affairs. He is married to an American citizen who is due to give birth this month.Khalil has adamantly rejected allegations of antisemitism, accusing the Trump administration in a letter sent from jail last month of “targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”.“Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances,” he added, “I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThough Rubio’s memo references additional documents, including a “subject profile of Mahmoud Khalil” and letter from the Department Homeland Security, the government did not submit those documents to the immigration court, according to Khalil’s lawyers.The memo also calls for the deportation of a second lawful permanent resident, whose name was redacted in the filing.The Trump administration has pulled billions of dollars in government funding from universities and their affiliated hospital systems in recent weeks as part of what it says is a campaign against antisemitism on college campuses, but which critics say is a crackdown on free speech. To get the money back, the administration has been telling universities to punish protesters and make other changes.The US government has also been revoking the visas of international students who criticized Israel or accused it of mistreating Palestinians.At the time of Khalil’s arrest, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, accused the activist of leading activities “aligned to Hamas”, referring to the militant group that attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.But the government has not produced any evidence linking Khalil to Hamas, and made no reference to the group in its most recent filing.Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a member of Khalil’s legal team, acknowledged the case’s high profile and its stakes.“If the secretary of state claims the power to arrest, detain and deport someone, including a lawful permanent resident, simply because that person dissents from US foreign policy, there are no limits. There’s no beginning and no end to that kind of executive power,” he said. More

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      US government has revoked more than 600 student visas, data shows

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      More than 600 international students and recent graduates in the US have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed by the state department, according to data aggregated from around the country.The data, collected by Inside Higher Ed, shows that as of Thursday more than 100 colleges and universities have identified more than 600 cases of students whose immigration status was changed by the Trump administration. These institutions say that their students have lost their F-1 or J-1 student visas.Some of these cases were related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, and others were for “minor crimes”. Inside Higher Ed says that the majority of college officials say they’re unsure why the foreign-born students had their visas revoked or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. Most have still not received any communications from immigration authorities.The compiled data set was based on public reports and direct correspondence, Inside Higher Ed says. The database, first published 8 April, will be consistently updated at least twice a day.Late last month, it was reported that the state department had revoked 300 or more student visas in the three weeks that its “Catch and Revoke” program was in operation.The initiative, newly launched by the state department, which says it is at least partly powered by artificial intelligence (AI), scrapes social media to find “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups” and cancel their visas, according to reporting from Axios.The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, confirmed the scale of the March crackdown and referred to the student activists as “lunatics”. He told reporters during a visit to Guyana in South America when asked about the visa terminations: “Maybe more than 300 at this point” have lost their visas. “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics.”It was increasingly clear that the abrupt visa cancellations are not limited to students who engage in pro-Palestinian activism. Students with minor non-criminal infractions, such as speeding tickets, were also targeted.The Guardian previously reported on an online data sheet created and updated by affected students that showed students from 50 universities reporting their visas were canceled around 4 April , with some tracing the cause to police citations or non-criminal offenses.Students at the University of Florida have planned a campus protest in support of Felipe Zapata Velázquez, 27, a Colombian student deported by the Trump administration following his arrest for alleged traffic violations.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis family said he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his home country after police arrested him on 28 March for offenses that included having an expired tag and suspended driver’s license, before turning him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).The Florida Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velázquez, who held an F-1 student visa. “Felipe Zapata Velázquez is just the latest victim of Trump’s disgusting campaign against immigrants,” Frost said in a statement.Two other cases which received widespread attention were those of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus last summer, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Tufts University who was arrested in apparent retaliation for an op-ed she wrote that was critical of Israel. Both are in Ice detention fighting their deportations on the grounds that their actions constituted free speech under the first amendment. More

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      I’m a Jewish Israeli in the US standing up for Palestine. By Trump’s logic, I’m a terror supporter | Eran Zelnik

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      To Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation:Given recent patterns, the FBI might need to take a hard look at my actions over the years. If Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri and other recent Ice detainees are considered threats to national security, then so am I.I have committed the same acts they have committed, including publishing an article that calls the war in Gaza a genocide, participating in a protest against the genocide in Gaza, speaking and protesting in favor of BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions against Israel), participating in a sit-in at UC Davis about 10 years ago, and being vocal in general about the atrocities committed by Israel against the people of Gaza and Palestinians.Let me tell you a little more about myself and all the additional reasons you might want to investigate and perhaps arrest me. I was born in Israel and became a naturalized US citizen through my American mother. Given the administration’s recent challenges to the 14th amendment, which provides birthright citizenship, you might proceed from detaining legal residents to revoking the rights of naturalized citizens. Like other fascist regimes before you, you’ve been testing how much resistance you face in your effort to turn the United States into a fascist country. You start with the most marginalized, sending incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons, Venezuelans accused of gang affiliation to El Salvador, and detaining Arab and Muslim legal residents. But if the past is any indication, your next target might well be children of undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens. Of course, as every student of fascism well knows, the ultimate goal is to apprehend all the supposed enemies of this administration, regardless of their legal status.Furthermore, I must confess to using academic concepts that have come under scrutiny as antisemitic by the Department of Justice taskforce for antisemitism. As a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, I have come a long way. It took me many years of soul-searching to realize that I was complicit in a settler-colonial occupation force and that my best recourse to make amends for that was to be outspoken about my country’s atrocities. As I tried to better understand the terrible tragedy of Zionism – a nationalist ideology that sought to free Jews from oppression only to end up as oppressors in Palestine – I confess to describing concepts such as apartheid, settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism and more. Perhaps even more disturbing from your perspective, I recently employed such concepts as genocide, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in a book I wrote about early American history.I also confess that in the past I have targeted white supremacist allies of this administration in my community of Chico, California. Clearly employing extralegal militias is part of this administration’s fascist playbook, as Trump already proved during the events of 6 January 2021. For instance, when my house was a target of antisemitic leafleting, I sought the help of a colleague and a local investigative journalist to make this very real form of antisemitism known to authorities. In the process the journalist uncovered troubling information that there is an armed white supremacist in our community who holds deep antisemitic convictions and now knows where I work. Had you really been interested in investigating antisemitism, you might have looked into the whereabouts of that individual. But since you want people like him around so that they can be activated when needed, and since all you really want is to cynically weaponize antisemitism, you might want to arrest me instead. After all, according to your standards, I – a Jew targeted by white supremacists – was all along the biggest threat to Jews in my own community.I have long heard stories about the rise of fascism in Europe from my grandparents, all of whom fled Europe and were refugees from antisemitism. The similarities between the actions of this administration and what my grandparents have lived through are unmistakable. I tell them here so that before you choose to arrest me, you will have one more opportunity to decide whether you will go down in history as aiding and abetting the rise of a fascist regime or as someone who refused to be part of another dark episode in this country’s history. Be forewarned: even if you yourself never directly suffer for your crimes, history will judge you.My dear grandfather, Otto, may his memory be a blessing, escaped Austria by the skin of his teeth when he was only 13 after the Nazi takeover of the country. Having witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938 – the night when local mobs violently rioted against Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses across much of Germany and Austria and arrested 30,000 citizens just for being Jewish – his parents made the decision to flee to Shanghai, the only port that would accept them. Clearly, our current president’s rhetoric regarding enemies of the American nation from within and without, against immigrants, trans people and people deemed un-American in their political commitments (like myself), are eerily reminiscent of the stories my grandfather told me about the scapegoating of Jews.As I consider the memory of dear grandmother Rachel, may her memory be a blessing, who grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust, including enduring a harrowing year in Auschwitz and the death march to Germany, I cannot shake the sense of another parallel. As Hitler and the Nazi party were consolidating power, they appointed sycophants like yourself and so many others to positions of power in the Nazi administration. The most important criterion for Hitler was not that the people in positions of power were competent or even knowledgeable, but that they would be spineless and loyal to him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the historian Ian Kershaw, this type of leadership, where all bow to the great leader, led to the Holocaust, as the people surrounding Hitler constantly sought to outdo each other in their loyalty to the Führer. Knowing Hitler’s hatred for Jews, they constantly tried to curry favor by suggesting the most radical and far-reaching policy ideas towards Jews. This dynamic, which Kershaw called “working toward the Führer”, ultimately led Hitler and the people surrounding him to decide on the “Final Solution”, the plan to exterminate all the Jews in the world on an industrial scale in death camps. This idea of working toward the leader is upon us today, as we see institutions and even some in the Democratic party bowing before the great leader and his will. Instead of standing up to the administration at every turn, institutions, businesses and politicians across the country prefer to anticipate the administration’s wrath and eliminate any behavior or materials that might come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, Republicans rush to outdo each other in flattering the great leader, as American society seems frozen with fear in face of the rising tides of fascism.So, Kash Patel, do you want to arrest me and help bring about fascism?

      Eran Zelnik grew up in Israel and came to the US 15 years ago to complete his PhD in history. He now lives and teaches in Chico, California More

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      White House freezes funds for Cornell and Northwestern in latest crackdown

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      In early March, the Trump administration sent warning letters to 60 US universities it said were facing “potential enforcement actions” for what it described as “failure to protect Jewish students on campus” in the wake of widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last year.The president of Cornell University, which was on the list, responded with a defiant op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that universities, and their students, could weather debates and protests over the war in Gaza.“Universities, despite rapidly escalating political, legal and financial risks, cannot afford to cede the space of public discourse and the free exchange of ideas,” the Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff wrote on 31 March.On Tuesday, the Trump administration froze over $1bn in funding for Cornell University, a US official said. The administration also froze $790m for Northwestern University, which hosts a prominent journalism school.The funding pause includes mostly grants and contracts with the federal departments of health, education, agriculture and defense, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.The newly announced funding freezes at Cornell and Northwestern come as Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania face similar investigations. The New York Times estimated that at least $3.3bn in elite university federal funding has already been frozen by the Trump administration in the past month, with billions more under review.In a statement Tuesday night, Cornell officials said that they were aware of “media reports” suggesting the federal government was freezing $1bn in federal grants.“While we have not received information that would confirm this figure, earlier today Cornell received more than 75 stop work orders from the Department of Defense related to research that is profoundly significant to American national defense, cybersecurity, and health.”Cornell officials said the affected grants “include research into new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, and space and satellite communications, as well as cancer research.”Northwestern also said it was aware of media reports about the funding freeze but had not received any official notification from the government and that it has cooperated in the investigation.“Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and life-saving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker, and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. This type of research is now in jeopardy,” a Northwestern spokesperson said.In Cornell’s Tuesday night statement, Kotlikoff and other university leaders defended the school as having “worked diligently to create an environment where all individuals and viewpoints are protected and respected,” and said they were “actively seeking information from federal officials to learn more about the basis for these decisions.”“We cannot let our caution overtake our purpose,” Kotlikoff had written in the New York Times piece. “Our colleges and universities are cradles of democracy and bulwarks against autocracy.”Trump has attempted to crack down on pro-Palestinian campus protests against US ally Israel’s devastating military assault on Gaza, which has caused a humanitarian crisis in the territory following a deadly October 2023 attack by Hamas.The US president has called the protesters antisemitic, has labeled them as sympathetic to Hamas and foreign policy threats.Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the Trump administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas. Human rights advocates have raised free speech and academic freedom concerns over the crackdown by the Trump administration.In March, the Trump administration suspended $175m in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender sports policies.In March, the Trump administration canceled $400m in funding for Columbia University, the epicenter of last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests.Columbia sparked condemnation from academics and free speech groups after agreeing to significant changes Trump’s administration demanded, including putting its Middle Eastern studies department under new administrative supervision, banning face masks on campus, giving campus security officers power to remove or arrest people and expanding “intellectual diversity” by staffing up its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, described the situation as “an authoritarian takeover”. More

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      The Guardian view on the US immigration crackdown: what began with foreign nationals won’t end there | Editorial

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      While running for president, Donald Trump promised voters “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Now he wants to deliver. Thousands of undocumented migrants have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since he returned to the White House. On Monday, the US supreme court lifted a judge’s ban on deporting alleged gang members to Venezuela under an 18th-century law, though it said deportees had a right to judicial review. Even the Trump-backing podcaster Joe Rogan has described as “horrific” the removal of an asylum seeker – identified as a criminal because he had tattoos – under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.What’s truly new is that the administration is also targeting those who arrived and remained in the US with official approval, such as the Palestinian activist and student Mahmoud Khalil. Normally, green card holders would be stripped of their status if convicted of a crime; he has not even been accused of one. But Mr Trump had pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests that his administration has deemed antisemitic, and Mr Khalil was a leading figure in the movement at Columbia University. The president crowed that his arrest last month was “the first of many”. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts, was detained by masked agents in the street, reportedly for an opinion piece she co-wrote with other students. Unrelated to the protests, dozens if not hundreds more students have had visas revoked, often for minor or non-criminal offences.This crackdown is exploiting legislation in ways that were never intended. The Alien Enemies Act was previously invoked only in wartime – but Mr Trump casts mass migration as an “invasion”. Mr Khalil and others are targeted under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows deportations when the secretary of state determines that a foreign national’s presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. And while this campaign is indiscriminate in many regards, Mr Trump’s offer of asylum to white Afrikaners facing “unjust racial discrimination” in South Africa speaks volumes about who is and is not wanted in his America.The current fear among migrants, with all its social costs, is not a byproduct of this drive, but the desired result. The Trump administration is trying to push undocumented individuals into “self-deporting”, which is cheaper and easier than using agents to hunt people down. It reportedly plans to levy fines of up to $998 a day if those under deportation orders do not leave – applying the penalties retroactively for up to five years. Fairness, never mind mercy, is not relevant. The administration admits an “administrative error” led to the expulsion to El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – who is married to a US citizen and was working legally in the US – but fights against righting that wrong.This crackdown should frighten US nationals too, both for what it says about their nation’s character and for what it may mean for their own rights. The Trump administration wants to remove birthright citizenship and is ramping up denaturalisation efforts. “I love it,” said Mr Trump, when asked about El Salvador’s offer to jail US citizens in its infamous mega-prisons – though at least he conceded that he might have to check the law first. The chilling effect of Mr Khalil’s arrest on dissent is already being felt by US nationals too: the first amendment’s protection of free speech is not exclusive to citizens.“The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow,” Thomas Jefferson wrote when the alien and sedition laws were passed. That warning now looks more prescient than ever.

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      Harvard faculty organize amid anxiety university will capitulate to Trump

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      The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard University due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!” said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.But the actual body of the message indicated no such thing. In the email, Garber briefly touted academic freedom while pledging to “engage” with the administration to “combat antisemitism”, which he said he had experienced directly, and listed a series of measures the university had already taken. “We still have much work to do,” he wrote. He offered no detail about what Harvard would do to protect its independence from the Trump administration.It was “a statement of abdication”, said Kirsten Weld, a history professor and the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group advocating for faculty. “It basically says: ‘Yes, we have been bad and we deserve to be punished.’”The email, along with a string of actions recently taken by Harvard against academic programmes, faculty and student groups who have been accused of being pro-Palestinian, have fueled anxieties throughout US campuses that the Ivy League school will be following in the footsteps of Columbia University, which recently bowed to a string of demands from the Trump administration in an effort to retain federal funding.On Thursday, the Trump administration wrote in a letter to Harvard that federal funding would be conditional on the university banning diversity and inclusion initiatives, restricting protests on campus, cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security, reviewing its academic programs “to address bias”, and installing leaders to implement the president’s demands.Dozens more universities are under investigation for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests, with Brown University on Thursday becoming the latest to face the risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They are all paying close attention to how Harvard and others weigh the financial costs of standing up to Donald Trump against the moral and academic costs that come with appeasing him.‘We have to be willing to stand up’Some signs of more muscular pushback are starting to emerge.On Tuesday, in response to the administration’s announcement that it would suspend $210m in funding to Princeton University, its president, Christopher Eisgruber, indicated that he had no intention of making concessions to the administration. At Harvard, the student newspaper reported that Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, drew applause from his colleagues on Tuesday when he accused the Trump administration of weaponising concerns about campus antisemitism to justify its ongoing attacks against higher education. (Eisgruber and Khurana did not respond to requests for comment; several Harvard faculty only agreed to speak off the record, citing a repressive climate.)View image in fullscreenKhurana’s comments followed days of upheaval at Harvard, after 600 members of the faculty signed a letter calling on the university to publicly condemn the US president’s attacks and “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands”. The Harvard Academic Workers union, which represents non-tenure-track researchers and lecturers, wrote in a statement on Wednesday: “The Trump’s administration attack on Harvard has nothing to do with antisemitism” and called on the university to “resist this intimidation with us”.So far, Eisgruber and Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, have signaled they may take a different path and resist.“University presidents and leaders have to understand that the commitment to allow academics – including our faculty, including our students – to pursue the truth as best they see it is fundamental to what our universities do,” Eisgruber said in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “We have to be willing to stand up for that.”Brown has not announced how it plans to respond to threats it will lose more than $500m in funding, but last month, Paxson outlined how the university would respond to federal attacks on its academic freedom. “I know that many in our community have been gravely concerned about persistent media reports of some of our peers experiencing encroachments on their freedom of expression and the autonomy necessary to advance their mission, she wrote. “If Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions, we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms.”Faculty across the country have also begun to organize. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has filed three lawsuits: over the funding cuts at Columbia, the targeting of international students by immigration authorities, and Trump’s efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programmes on campuses. Meanwhile, faculty at Rutgers University have proposed a “mutual defence compact” within the “Big Ten” consortium, which includes some of the largest state universities in the country, to support one another in the face of political attacks.“The attacks that are coming from the federal government might be directed toward Columbia University last week, and Harvard University this week, and who knows which other university next week, but if we allow them to proceed, then we will be picked off one by one,” said Weld. “The only way forward for any individual institution in the higher-education sector right now is to join forces.”‘We have our voices’Harvard had tried to get ahead of the administration’s attack. The university was one of the first to come under scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. Allegations that it had failed to address antisemitism on campus contributed, in part, to last year’s resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president.This year, Harvard adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students. In the days leading up to Trump’s threats, it forced out two leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This week, the university also suspended a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the divinity school that the Jewish Alumni Association had accused of focussing “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.View image in fullscreenBut if the repression of programmes targeting spaces sympathetic to Palestinians was meant to appease the Trump administration and avert threats of funding cuts, it didn’t work.A fraction of Harvard’s $53bn endowment – the world’s largest for a university – is liquid or free of restrictions, but several faculty said that this is the time for the university to tap into it to defend its core values. While the administration’s cuts threaten hundreds of jobs on campus, Harvard is uniquely placed to withstand the impact, they say.“We’re constantly told that the endowment is not a piggy bank, it’s not a slush fund, and that we need to protect it because it ensures the success of our initiatives over the long term and for future generations,” Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard, said. “But if we lose the independence of universities from political interference, then we’re sacrificing something for future generations that is truly priceless.”Others noted that Harvard is also in a position to forcefully defend itself in court, much like it did when affirmative action came under attack, although the US supreme court ultimately ruled against the university in that case.So far, the university administration hasn’t shown signs it will put up a fight. Several faculty members believe that Trump’s efforts have the tacit support of some university leaders and trustees.“There is a strategic alliance among segments of the professoriate and university administrations, particularly boards of trustees, who agree that pro-Palestine activism on US college campuses needs to be shut down,” said Weld. “Whether those voices understand what the collateral damage of their participation in that alliance is going to be, I don’t know.”Harvard faculty in recent months have ramped up organizing efforts, including by launching the AAUP chapter on the heels of the Gaza encampment last spring and the university’s response.“One of the perversely brighter things to come out of last year is that I saw the faculty organizing and working together to an extent that outstripped anything I had seen in my academic career,” said Jasanoff. “We have our voices, and we can use our voices together.” More

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      Trump reportedly threatening to freeze $510m in grants from Brown University

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      The Trump administration is taking aim at Brown University with threats to freeze $510m in grants, widening its promise to withhold federal funding from schools it accuses of allowing antisemitism on campus, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters and the New York Times.University officials said they had not yet been formally notified, but the school was among dozens warned last month that enforcement actions could be coming as the administration seeks to crack down on academic institutions .As at many universities across the US, students at the Rhode Island Ivy League school protested Israel’s attacks against Palestinians last autumn, raising a cluster of tents on the grassy quad at the heart of campus. But, unlike at many of its sister schools, Brown administrators chose to negotiate rather than clear the demonstrations forcefully.Trump has called the protesters antisemitic, labeling them sympathetic to Hamas militants and foreign policy threats, and has threatened to slash federal funds universities depend on to fuel important research.In an email to campus leaders on Thursday shared by a Brown University spokesperson, the school’s provost, Frank Doyle, said the university was aware of “troubling rumors emerging about federal action on Brown research grants” but added it had “no information to substantiate any of these rumors”.“We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now,” he added.But Brown’s leaders have been bracing for backlash from the president for weeks. In a letter shared publicly on the university’s site, the president, Christina H Paxson, promised that Brown would not buckle under pressure.“The nation has witnessed what many in higher education fear may be only the first examples of unprecedented government demands placed on a private university as a condition for restoring federal funding,” she said.Paxson outlined three core values and the school’s response to protect them: following the law, defending academic freedom and freedom of expression, and a commitment to providing resources to international community members.“If Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions,” she said, “we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms, and true to our values, we would do so with integrity and respect.”Last month, the Trump administration canceled $400m in federal funding for Columbia University, which had been the epicenter of pro-Palestinian campus protests. Princeton University said on Tuesday the US government froze several dozen research grants to the school, and $9bn in federal contracts and grants awarded to Harvard University is under review.Along with the funding freeze, there are concerns about other actions being taken by the administration to undermine academic freedoms or civil rights on campus.The administration has targeted schools over diversity, equity and inclusion programs and suspended $175m in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over transgender sports policies.Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks and are working to deport them.Rights advocates have also raised concerns about Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias during the Israel-Gaza war. The Trump administration has not announced steps in response.“These are uncertain times,” Paxson said in the letter. “We remain committed to taking the steps necessary to preserve our ability to fulfill our mission as a university dedicated to advancing knowledge and understanding in service to communities, the nation and the world.”Reuters contributed reporting More