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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

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      Tufts student detained by Ice may not be deported without court order, judge rules

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      A Tufts University student who was detained by US immigration authorities this week, in an arrest that caused widespread outrage, cannot be deported without a court order, a US judge ordered on Friday.Rümeysa Öztürk, 30, was detained by masked, plainclothes officers as she walked in a Boston-area suburb on Tuesday, an incident that was captured on surveillance footage that has since gone viral. Öztürk, who is being threatened with deportation to Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar and doctoral student in the US with a visa.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said Öztürk’s visa was terminated, accusing her of engaging in activities in support of Hamas, but providing no evidence to substantiate that claim. Her attorneys, which include lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, have said the arrest appeared to be retaliation for an opinion piece that she and three other students co-wrote for the student newspaper last year, advocating that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.After Öztürk’s lawyers filed an amended complaint on Friday, the US district judge Denise Casper issued a brief order stipulating that Öztürk “shall not be removed from the United States until further order of this court”. The judge also ordered the US government to respond to Öztürk’s latest claims by Tuesday evening.Öztürk has not been charged with or accused of any crime, her lawyers say.“This is a first step in getting Rümeysa released and back home to Boston so she can continue her studies. But we never should have gotten here in the first place: Rümeysa’s experience is shocking, cruel, and unconstitutional,” Mahsa Khanbabai, one of her attorneys, said in a statement on Friday evening. “Criticizing US foreign policy and human rights violations is neither illegal nor grounds for detention … The government must immediately release Rümeysa to continue her studies and rejoin her community.”The Trump administration has increasingly sought to deport students and academics who had varying degrees of involvement in pro-Palestinian campus activism last year, including permanent residents with green cards.Öztürk was on the phone with her mother and headed to an Iftar to break her Ramadan fast with friends when the officers confronted and apprehended her, the Boston Globe reported. A 32-year-old whose camera captured the arrest told the AP it “looked like a kidnapping”.Khanbabai had written emergency filings on Tuesday, which secured a court ruling that her client not be removed from Massachusetts without advance notice. Despite that order from US district judge Indira Talwani, officials with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (Ice), which is part of DHS, transferred Öztürk to Louisiana without notifying her counsel, the court or US Department of Justice lawyers, according to the ACLU.For nearly a full day after her arrest, Öztürk’s family, attorneys and friends could not locate or reach her, and when lawyers did finally speak with her, they learned Öztürk had suffered an asthma attack while being transported to Louisiana, the ACLU says.When questioned by reporters about her arrest, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, suggested the US was revoking visas from “people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States”, saying international students don’t have a right to “become a social activist that tears up our university campuses”.Öztürk’s friends told the Boston Globe, however, that she was not much of an activist and not a leader in protests last year. They said Öztürk volunteered with refugee children, participated in interfaith gatherings and studied the representation of youth in media. Her brother said she had roughly 10 months left in her doctorate degree.“Grabbing someone off the streets, stripping them of their student visa, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint is an affront to all of our constitutional rights,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “We will not stop fighting until Ms Öztürk is free to return to her loved ones and until we know the government will not abuse immigration law to punish those who speak up for what they believe.”The Trump administration has also gone after students and academics at Columbia University, Georgetown, Cornell, Brown and other campuses.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

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      The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Columbia protester suit raises questions about free speech rights: ‘Immigration enforcement as a bludgeon’

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      In a matter of days, Yunseo Chung was sent into hiding.On 5 March, Chung – a 21-year-old student at Columbia University – attended a sit-in to protest the expulsion of several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism at the famed New York university. Four days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents showed up at her parents’ home.When they couldn’t find her there, Ice sought help from federal prosecutors and searched her dormitory – using a warrant that cited a criminal law against “harboring noncitizens”. They revoked her green card and accused her of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests.On Monday, Chung sued Donald Trump and other high-ranking administrations to stop their targeting of her and other students. And on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport Chung, saying “nothing in the record” indicated that Chung posed a danger to the community.“After the constant dread in the back of my mind over the past few weeks, this decision feels like a million pounds off of my chest. I feel like I could fly,” she shared in a statement to the Guardian after the ruling.Her location remains undisclosed, and Chung herself has remained shielded – for her own protection – from the public. But she has nonetheless made a powerful statement, by raising a simple question: if the administration can arbitrarily and unilaterally threaten immigrants over political views they disagree with, if it can disregard the free speech rights of lawful permanent residents – what limits, if any, remain on its power?“Officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung’s speech,” her lawyers write in the suit.Unlike some of the other students the administration has targeted for pro-Palestinian activism, including recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who led protests on campus, and Cornell PhD student Momodou Taal, who delivered speeches at his university’s pro-Palestinian encampment, Chung’s involvement in the movement was low-profile. She didn’t play an organizing or leading role in any of the protest efforts; she didn’t speak to the media about her activism.“She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns,” her lawyers write.Chung moved to the US from South Korea when she was seven, and has lived in the country ever since. She was a valedictorian in high school; at Columbia, she had contributed to a literary magazine and an undergraduate law journal. She has maintained a 3.99 GPA and interned with a number of legal non-profits including the Innocence Project.Last spring, Chung was one of hundreds of students and other activists who set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the university campus, and hundreds of others visited the space to attend speeches, community events and protests. As the university began meting out disciplinary actions against protesters, hundreds of students and faculty also joined in a walkout in solidarity with student activists, demanding amnesty to student protesters.View image in fullscreenIn May last year, Chung and other students faced disciplinary proceedings for posting flyers on school campus – but the university ultimately found that Chung had not violated policies, according to the lawsuit.After that, Chung continued her studies, and it wasn’t until earlier this month that she came onto immigration officials’ radar.Earlier this year, Barnard College, a sister school to Columbia, announced the expulsions of several protesters – amid a renewed, nationwide crackdown on student protesters that came following pressures from the Trump administration to tamp down pro-Palestinian activism on campus.Chung attended a sit-in demonstration calling on Barnard to reverse the expulsions. Chung became trapped between a crowd of students and New York police department officers investigating a bomb threat, according to the suit. She, and others, were charged by the NYPD for “obstruction of governmental administration”.Days later, immigration officials obtained a warrant to track down and arrest Chung. In a statement on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security characterized the sit-in she attended as a “pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College”.In a press conference after a hearing on Chung’s case Tuesday, Ramzi Kassem, one of her lawyers, said that Chung “remained a resident of the Southern District of New York” and had been “keeping up with her coursework” even amid Ice’s efforts to track her down and arrest her.In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chung’s lawyers wrote that the prospect of arrest and detention has “chilled her speech” – and note that the administration’s pursuit of non-citizen students had overall dampened free expression.“Ms. Chung is now concerned about speaking up about the ongoing ordeal of Palestinians in Gaza as well as what is happening on her own campus: the targeting of her fellow students,” the suit alleges.Scores of other students could also be silenced with similar threats, the suit argues. Faculty at Columbia and universities across the US have reported that international students and green card holders have been worried about attending classes, and are reconsidering plans to visit family, study abroad or travel for research.The administration has also placed immense pressure on universities to cooperate with its crackdown on protesters. Last week, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and hire an internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus after the administration revoked $400m in funding for the university, which many faculty have taken as a dangerous capitulation that will endanger academic freedom.And the threat of deportation against her is a powerful one, the suit continues. If she is sent to South Korea, she would be arriving in a country she hardly knows – separated from her parents and community, and a sister who is about the start college as well.“Yunseo no longer has to fear that Ice will spirit her away to a distant prison simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human rights,” said Kassem in a statement to the Guardian. “The court’s temporary restraining order is both sensible and fair, to preserve the status quo as we litigate the serious constitutional issues at stake not just for Yunseo, but for our society as a whole.” More

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      USC enacts hiring freeze and makes cuts over Trump threats to funding

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      The University of Southern California announced an immediate hiring freeze for all staff positions, “with very few critical exceptions” in a letter to faculty and staff on Tuesday.The letter, from USC’s president, Carol Folt, and provost, Andrew Guzman, said the hiring freeze was one of nine steps to cut the school’s operating budget amid deep uncertainty about federal funding – given sweeping cuts to scientific research, the reorganization of student loans, and an education department investigation accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish students during protests over Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.“Like other major research institutions, USC relies on significant amounts of federal funding to carry out our mission,” the university administrators wrote. “In fiscal year 2024, for example, we received approximately $1.35 billion in federal funding, including roughly $650 million in student financial aid and $569 million for federally funded research. The health system also receives Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal payments – a significant portion of its revenues – and the futures of those funds are similarly uncertain.”The other measures include: permanent budget reductions for administrative units and schools, a review of procurement contracts, a review of capital projects “to determine which may be deferred or paused”, a curtailment of faculty hiring, new restriction on discretionary spending and expenses for travel and conferences, an effort to streamline operations, a halt on merit-based pay increases, and an end to extended winter recess introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.Two weeks ago, USC was one of 60 schools notified by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights of “potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus”.The newly announced budget cuts follow a university statement in November of last year that informed staff that “rising costs require … budgetary adjustments”. In 2024, that statement said: “USC’s audited financial statement shows a deficit of $158 million.”“Over the past six years, our deficit has ranged from $586 million during legal cost repayments and COVID, to a modest positive level of $36 million in 2023,” USC administrators wrote in November.“Similar deficits are being reported at many peer institutions due to rising costs that outpace revenues across all of higher education,” they added. More

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      Why are other universities silent in condemning Trump’s attacks on Columbia? | Zephyr Teachout

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      University presidents need to be working together to speak up against Donald Trump. Across the country, higher education is facing a crisis that threatens the entire vision of independence: a direct federal government effort to destroy academic freedom by controlling ideas and acceptable areas of inquiry. University leaders should be standing in solidarity with those who have been attacked to defend academic freedom and free speech. So far, all but five have been silent.The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.By my count, five university presidents have publicly condemned Trump. The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has been the first and loudest, clearly expressing the unacceptable nature of Trump’s attack. The presidents of Mount Holyoke, Delta College in Michigan, Trinity Community College in Washington DC, and Princeton have also made clear that what Trump is doing is unacceptable.The thousands of others who are keeping totally quiet know what is happening, and how serious it is; in a recent survey, 94% said Trump directly threatened academic freedom.The silence from university presidents is particularly jarring when compared with the swift and seemingly coordinated statements universities have issued on dozens of other issues – from US supreme court decisions to international conflicts to campus protests. Now that it comes to defending their core institutional values against a direct authoritarian attack, their collective voice is crickets.The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?This is the grotesque genius of his attack on Columbia, which operated like putting a dead body on a car for all to see – so long as each university president sees their job in isolation, and their possible defiance in isolation, all arrows point towards silence. He wins without even having to fight.But what if he did have to fight? It is not at all clear that Trump will pull funding. He hasn’t attacked Wesleyan, Princeton, Delta, Liberty. This isn’t an oversight: he wants the ground of the debate to be at Columbia, to be conflated with Gaza-Israel, to be complicated by questions about protests and student discipline and the nature of Ivy League education.If he takes on the Big 10 schools, or a small liberal arts community college, or a Catholic university like the one at which I teach, or any school where there is no pre-existing major conflict, he will be more cleanly revealed as an anti-speech bully. The university presidents can have litigation counsel at the ready to file for a temporary restraining order if Trump pulls funding because of disliked speech, and they will win these lawsuits. Constitutional law is on the side of protecting academic freedom and political speech.I don’t want to sugarcoat it: Trump could cause real chaos, significantly hurt programs while the legal fight is going on, and scare off other alumni donors to a school – who are themselves scared. If they spoke up alone, it’s possible it wouldn’t matter. I understand why university presidents are so trepidatious – he could truly wreck havoc on the people that they have pledged to care for.But it is precisely because of this dilemma that each leader is morally required to speak up – and to be prioritizing identifying others who will speak up as well over all else. It is an existential moment: standing by in silence as other universities get humiliated leads to all being humiliated.While it is far from assured that a single voice will lead to others, courage is courageous, and not only because of its natural infectiousness. The more universities speak up, the more obvious it will become that Trump cannot take on all of them, the weaker he will be, the more he will be revealed as an anti-dissent authoritarian. Trump does care how popular he is, and it matters for his leverage in Congress, too. He ran in part on freeing speech; the more it is clear he is imprisoning it, the worse he’ll do.This red scare will not end with an appeal to decency that is seen around the country on national television. Trump is worse than McCarthy; he is more powerful, more vengeful, and more determined to destroy institutions and bend them into subservience. But it can end with collective bravery. If they can find a way to share methodology for financial aid, they can find a way to share a rebuke to Trump.To be sure, the reputational power of universities is low, and university presidents have little faith that they have any meaningful political power. Their weak reputations came about in part because of illiberalism in the last 10 years, brought on in part by a rhetoric of student safety trumping free discourse, and in part because of the ungodly cost of tuition. The recent price-fixing lawsuits haven’t helped.That leads me to wonder whether there might be other reasons university presidents are so quiet; more mundane, human, contextual ones. They tend to be trained in thinking strategically when virtue ethics is what is called for; game theory has a way of demanding data points that no one has. Or perhaps, after making too many statements on too many topics in the 2018-2022 period, presidents may be exhausted and annoyed when they are told that speaking out is a moral imperative. They have been turning towards institutional neutrality in most policy issues, tired of being told that every crisis demands a university president voice – one last call demanding courage can feel like overload, overwrought and irrelevant.The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

      Zephyr Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and professor of law specializing in democracy and antitrust at Fordham University More