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      Trump officials step up defiance over man wrongly deported to El Salvador

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      The Trump administration escalated its stubborn defiance against securing the release of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador on Monday, advancing new misrepresentations of a US supreme court order.The supreme court last week unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was supposed to have been protected from deportation to El Salvador regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.But at an Oval Office meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Trump deferred to officials who gave extraordinary readings of the supreme court order and claimed the US was powerless to return Abrego Garcia to US soil.“The ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, we could deport him a second time,” said Trump’s policy chief Stephen Miller, about an order that, in fact, upheld a lower court’s directive to return Abrego Garcia.Miller’s remarks went beyond the tortured reading offered by the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, who also characterized the supreme court order as only requiring the administration to provide transportation to Abrego Garcia if released by El Salvador.“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s up to them,” Bondi said. “The supreme court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him, we would ‘facilitate’ it, meaning provide a plane.”The remarks at the Oval Office meeting marked an escalation by Trump officials to resist complying with a supreme court order by manufacturing uncertainty in the ruling that reiterated deportations were subject to judicial review.And the fact that the US is paying El Salvador to detain deportees it sends to the notorious Cecot prison undercut the notion that the administration lacked the power to return Abrego Garcia into US custody.The case started when Abrego Garcia was detained by police in 2019 in Maryland, outside a Home Depot, with several other men, and asked about a murder. He denied knowledge of a crime and repeatedly denied that he was part of a gang.Abrego Garcia was subsequently put in immigration proceedings, where officials argued they believed he was part of the MS-13 gang in New York based on his Chicago Bulls gear and on the word of a confidential informant.The case went before a US immigration judge, who suggested that Abrego Garcia could be a member of MS-13 and agreed to a deportation order but shielded him from being sent to El Salvador because he was likely to face persecution there by a local gang.The Trump administration did not appeal against that decision, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has since said in a court filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error”. The supreme court also called his removal illegal.In earlier remarks to reporters on Monday morning, Miller expressly demonstrated he knew the administration had made a mistake because the immigration judge had issued a so-called withholding order, which meant he could not be deported to El Salvador.“When you have a withholding order, to be clear, that is not ‘pause your deportation’. In other words, in the worst-case scenario, it means you get deported to another country,” Miller said.That concession evaporated hours later when he joined Trump, Bukele and a dozen senior officials in the Oval Office and suggested that bringing back Abrego Garcia to the US would be tantamount to kidnapping a citizen of El Salvador.Miller appeared to be suggesting that the US could not force the actions of El Salvador, a sovereign nation. But he then said the supreme court said neither the president nor the secretary of state could forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador – which the order did not say. More

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      The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22

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      It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.The US government has admitted it deported Abrego García by mistake. But instead of “facilitating” his return as ordered by the supreme court, the administration has trapped Abrego García in a catch-22 by offshoring his fate to a jurisdiction beyond the reach of legality – or, it would seem, basic logic or common decency.The paradox is this: the Trump administration says it cannot facilitate the return of Abrego García because he is in a prison in El Salvador. El Salvador says it cannot return him because that would be tantamount to “smuggling” him into the US.The absurdity of the position played out on Monday during an Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Bukele where the two men appeared to enjoy mocking the powerlessness of the US courts to intervene in the fate of anyone caught in the maws of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked about whether he would help to return Abrego García.There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed. But that is not really important here.“I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said during a meeting with the US president on Monday. “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” Trump added.Trump’s lieutenants also jumped in on Monday, arguing that they could not intervene in the case because Bukele is a foreign citizen and outside of their control.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He is a citizen of El Salvador,” said Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide who regularly advises the president on immigration issues. “It’s very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.”A district court injunction to halt the deportation was in effect, he added, an order to “kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”.Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, repeated one of the Trump administration’s mantras: that US courts cannot determine Trump’s foreign policy. Increasingly, the administration is including questions of immigration in that foreign policy in order to defy the courts.Monday’s presentation was in effect a pantomime. Both sides could quickly intervene if they wanted to. But this was a means to an end. Miller said this case would not end with Abrego García living in the US.More broadly, it indicates the Trump administration’s modus operandi: to move quickly before the courts can react to its transgressions and, when they do, to deflect and defy until the damage done cannot be reversed. More

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      US deports 10 more alleged gang members to El Salvador, says Rubio

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      The US has deported another 10 people that it alleges are gang members to El Salvador, secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Sunday, a day before that country’s president is due to visit the White House.“Last night, another 10 criminals from the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua Foreign Terrorist Organizations arrived in El Salvador,” Rubio said in an Twitter/X post.The alliance between Donald Trump and El Salvador president Nayib Bukele “has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere”, Rubio added.The US president is due to meet Bukele at the White House on Monday.Trump said on Saturday he was looking forward to meeting Bukele and praised him for taking “enemy aliens” from the United States. He said the two countries were working closely to “eradicate terrorist organizations”.Administration officials have repeatedly made public statements alleging that detained immigrants are gang members that they have not backed up in court.The Trump administration has deported hundreds of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.Lawyers and relatives of the migrants held in El Salvador say they are not gang members and had no opportunity to contest the US government assertion that they were. The Trump administration says it vetted migrants to ensure they belonged to Tren de Aragua, which it labels a terrorist organization.The deportations have been challenged in federal court. The US supreme court said the US government must give sufficient notice to immigrant detainees to allow them to contest their deportations. It did not say how those already in El Salvador could seek judicial review of their removals.The White House has come under fire recently after a Maryland man was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government had accused of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.Trump administration lawyers were able to confirm on Saturday that Kilmar Abrego García, 29, remains confined in a notorious prison in El Salvador. However, the White House did not detail the steps it was taking to return Abrego García to the United States. More

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      Trump’s already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens | Moira Donegan

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      They’re rounding people up, and you could be next. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with due process rights in deporting immigrants, who are now being targeted for their protected speech, having their visas or green cards summarily cancelled without process and sometimes without notice, and getting kidnapped off the streets and hustled into vans so that they can be shipped to “detention centers” too far away for their loved ones, or their lawyers, to visit them.Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an opinion that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to hold. But others the government seems to be seizing almost at random. More than 200 Venezuelan nationals have been seized and deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, rendered outside of US jurisdiction in defiance of judges’ orders demanding that their deportation flights be stopped. Of those Venezuelans, most had no criminal record. Other deportees, like the Maryland father and sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrego García, seem to have been deported by mistake; the Trump administration says that Abrego García, who they admit they did not mean to deport, will not be brought back to his family in the United States. Conveniently, the fact that they have deported him to a foreign prison is supposed, in the Trump administration’s logic, to absolve them of responsibility for putting him there. “We suggest the judge contact [Salvadoran] President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador,” the White House said, obnoxiously, after a judge ordered them to bring Abrego García back.Meanwhile, the sadism of the deportations, and the cruelty of the Salvadoran prison where the men are being kept, seem to hold a kind of aesthetic appeal for the Trump camp. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, recently flew to the El Salvador prison for a photoshoot with the captives there, where she stood in front of a crowd of men packed into a cell behind bars with her hair coiffed in long beachy waves.Now, the Trump administration may be seeking to extend the lawlessness and cruelty of its deportation regime to the next logical target: American citizens. The White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed on Tuesday that the Trump administration is considering pathways to deport citizens as well. “The president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He’s also discussed it privately. You’re referring to the president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported,” she said. “The president has said, if it’s legal, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure.”This would be illegal. But so is so much of what the Trump administration is doing with its deportation policies. It is illegal to cancel visas and green cards without due process, as the Trump administration has done and continues to do as part of a widening dragnet in its anti-immigrant purges. It is illegal to target immigrants for their speech, as the Trump administration has done to pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide activists, from Rümeysa Öztürk to Mahmoud Khalil. It is illegal to deport people to a foreign prison where they have no recourse to enforce their rights and no path to pursue their freedom – it is illegal to do this, as the Trump administration has done, specifically to prevent its victims from seeking to enforce their own rights in American courts. And it is illegal to ignore the binding orders of federal judges to stop all of this conduct in order to ensure that the deportations can continue, punishing innocent people, silencing protected speech, and scaring whole populations out of work, travel, political participation or any of the other daily dignities that they are supposed to be entitled to in this country.But the law, increasingly, is whatever the Trump administration decides it is. And there is no force that seems prepared to make them obey the law when their will does not incline them to do so.That is because the supreme court has been no help, and if anything has acted, so far, as all but an accomplice to Trump’s dismantling of the rule of law in his pursuit of anti-immigrant vengeance. Lower court judges have attempted to intervene on behalf of the disappeared immigrants, issuing orders commanding the Trump administration to stop deportations under a long-dormant 1798 wartime measure known as the Alien Enemies Act, and to return Abrego García to the US immediately. But the supreme court has stepped in to pause these orders, allowing the Trump administration’s deportation agenda to continue. In the Abrego García case, the court weakened a district court order to “effectuate” the innocent man’s freedom and return to a mere command that they “facilitate” it, and only in ways that don’t interfere with the executive branch’s foreign policy prerogatives – in practice, a weakening of the demand to bring Abrego García back home to a request that the Trump administration provide more plausible deniability when they refuse to do so. And while Brett Kavanaugh weighed in with a concurrence to make a pious declaration of the need for due process in deportation proceedings, the court’s actions speak louder than its words: they are allowing the kidnapping and deportation of US residents to continue without due process.The legal precedents being established in these immigration disappearance cases have no limiting principles: if visa holders, asylum seekers and legal permanent residents can be snatched and deported with effectively no practicable recourse to due process protections, then there is no reason why citizens can’t be. It is in the interest of every American citizen to take an active stand in defense of our immigrant neighbors. Because once the Trump administration decides that they have no rights, then neither do we. More

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      The case against Mahmoud Khalil is meant to silence American dissent | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      On Friday afternoon, a federal immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, the lawful permanent resident who was arrested last month for his advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University, was removable – that is to say, deportable – under the law.Let’s be absolutely clear about how outrageous this decision is. The judge, Jamee Comans, had given the Trump administration a deadline to produce the evidence required to show that Khalil should be deported. In a functional state, such evidence would rise to a standard of extreme criminality necessitating deportation.But not in this case and certainly not with the Trump administration, which has summarily deported hundreds of Venezuelan men based not on any verifiable criminal activity but simply on the basis of their body art. In response to the judge’s order, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, produced a flimsy one-and-a-half-page memo that admits that Khalil engaged in no criminal conduct. Instead, the memo, citing an arcane law, stated that Khalil’s “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful … compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest”. In other words, the government was saying that Khalil’s views – including even his future views – were sufficient grounds for his deportation.Make no mistake. The government is seeking to deport Khalil solely for his constitutionally protected speech, a protection that applies to everyone in the United States. If the government succeeds, you could well be next. And don’t think that your citizenship will protect you. If the government can deny the basic right of freedom of speech to lawful permanent residents, what’s to stop them from going after citizens next? (The administration already has a plan to denaturalize US citizens.)Do we really want to live in a country where the government can decide which ideas are allowed to be heard and which cannot? I’m surprised that I even have to write these words. In an open society, free debate is encouraged and needed, while in a closed society, lists of proscribed ideas circulate and proliferate, and it’s frighteningly clear which way we’re headed. The Trump administration has already banned the use of words and phrases such as “equity”, “women” and “Native American” from government websites and documents, showing us how the open door of American democracy is slamming shut faster and louder than we could have imagined. And Khalil’s case is the test of what this government can achieve.Rubio alleges that Khalil engaged in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States”. But he provides no evidence whatsoever. Meanwhile, here’s what Khalil told CNN last year: “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other. Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”It would seem that Rubio believes the phrase “freedom and equality for everyone” undermines US foreign policy interests. He may finally be right about something. But he’s wrong about Khalil, who clearly is not antisemitic. If Rubio wanted to cleanse the country of the noxious hatred of Jewish people, he could start by examining members of his own party. Marjorie Taylor Greene once speculated publicly that California wildfires were started by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc”, a disgusting nod to bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories. Robert F Kennedy Jr said that the coronavirus had been manipulated to make “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” the most immune to Covid-19. Elon Musk can barely keep his arm from extending into a salute, Dr Strangelove-style.It’s not some illusory antisemitism that has brought the wrath of the Trump administration raining down on Khalil. It’s the fact that he was standing up for Palestinian rights and calling out Israel’s actions, labelled genocidal by jurists, experts and international human rights organizations alike. But the US government does not want the American people to even entertain this discussion, which includes American complicity in this human catastrophe that is also US foreign policy, and so it will use every means at its disposal to forestall the possibility, including the bluntest instrument in the political book: mass fear.The attempt to deport Khalil is meant primarily to discipline the people of the United States into silence and conformity. For that reason alone, the government’s actions must be resisted. Healthy societies are based on free thinking and dissent. Unhealthy societies mobilize fear and intimidation to regulate opinion and manufacture consent. Today, that consent is about Israel. Tomorrow, it will be about something else. Either way, it will never be your choice, and it will always be theirs.Many legal observers were anticipating today’s ruling by Comans. Immigration judges are appointed by the Department of Justice. As such, they are employees of the executive branch and not the federal judiciary. The New York Times even noted that, had Comans dissented from the government, she would also have “run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters”. The ACLU speculated that the decision to deport Khalil had been “pre-written”, as it was delivered so fast. And Comans stated that the constitutional questions raised by the case will be heard in federal court in New Jersey and not in immigration court in Louisiana.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat doesn’t mean that Judge Comans couldn’t have ruled otherwise. On the contrary, the decision is another dangerous illustration of how much power the executive branch in the United States always wields, how much more power the Trump administration is willing to assume, and how deferential the institutions that could rein in this administration have become.This structural cowardice on the part of these institutions is doing great harm to the integrity of American democracy, often expressed in some sort of embarrassed whisper. Khalil, on the other hand, speaks loudly and eloquently for his position. At the end of his hearing in Louisiana, Khalil asked to address the court. “You said last time that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “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 are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”Mahmoud Khalil is clearly a remarkable, principled man. He doesn’t deserve this unjust detention the US government is subjecting him to. The irony is that this United States doesn’t deserve a Mahmoud Khalil.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump authorizes US military to take control of land at US-Mexico border

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      Donald Trump has authorized the military to take control of land at the US-Mexico border as part of the president’s broader efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration.The authorization came late on Friday in a memorandum from Trump to interior secretary Doug Burgum, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and agricultural secretary Brooke Rollins, outlining new policies concerning military involvement at the US’s southern border.The memorandum, entitled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions”, allows the US’s armed forces to “take a more direct role” when it comes to securing the boundary in question.“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats,” the order claimed. “The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past.”The memorandum added that the Department of Defense should be given jurisdiction to federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60ft-wide strip that stretches over California, Arizona and New Mexico. Doing that would give troops stationed there the legal right to detain immigrants accused of trespassing on what in effect is an elongated base – and unauthorized immigrants would be held in custody until they could be turned over to immigration agents.Military activities that could be carried out on federal land include “border-barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment”, according to the memorandum.After 45 days, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will assess the “initial phase” of the order. But at any time, Hegseth could extend the amount of federal land included in the memorandum.The ordered military takeover excludes Native American reservations, according to the memorandum.Friday’s order is the latest step from Trump in his administration’s ongoing focus on immigration enforcement, which has involved declaring a national emergency on the southern border.On Thursday, a US federal judge ruled that the Trump administration was allowed to require people who are in the country but not citizens to register with the federal government, a requirement that advocates say hasn’t been universally implemented since it was enacted as a law in the 1940s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling comes after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the new requirement on 25 February, adding that those who failed to report could face fines or possible prison time.The DHS’s announcement was widely seen as a workaround of the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars US military troops from participating in most civilian law enforcement actions.One of the purported justifications for militarizing the US border most commonly cited by Trump and his Republican colleagues is that people crossing the border with Mexico without permission carry much of the fentanyl sold in the US. Yet official statistics show 90% of convicted fentanyl peddlers are US citizens. More

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      These Tennessee lawmakers love the unborn. After birth? Not so much

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      Think of the children? NahYou’ve probably seen this quote from an Alabama pastor called Dave Barnhart. It goes viral all the time. But I’m resurfacing the quote because it is another day that ends with “y” in America, which means it is relevant once again.“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart said back in 2018, remarking wryly on the movement’s priorities. “They never make demands of you … They don’t need money, education or childcare … They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”Over in Tennessee, there are a lot of lawmakers who are very proud of how much they advocate for unborn children. In 2022, as soon as Roe was overturned, the state passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – one without explicit exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person. The ban also made performing or attempting to perform an abortion a class C felony – akin to aggravated assault – which means aiding in an abortion can land you prison time and a hefty fine. That ban has been continuously challenged in court but the bottom line is that getting an abortion in Tennessee is almost impossible.Those Tennessee lawmakers who love unborn children? Surprise, surprise, they’re not so keen on the born ones. Particularly if those kids are immigrants. On Thursday, the GOP-dominated state senate approved a bill that lets public schools check the citizenship or legal immigration status of every student. Undocumented children can be denied enrollment at these public schools or forced to pay tuition. In other words: Tennessee wants to make it legal to deny undocumented kids an education. By requiring school systems to check legal immigrant status, they’re also turning what should be safe spaces into immigration enforcement centers.All of which, to be clear, is blatantly unconstitutional. In 1982, the supreme court decision in Plyler v Doe found states cannot deny students a free public education over their immigration status. The Tennessee bill is not law yet, and if the Tennessee governor does sign it, it will almost certainly face legal challenges. But even if it eventually gets struck down, there is a chance it will stay on the books as a “zombie law” – ready to rise again when circumstances allow.Perhaps you are wondering why all these fierce advocates for the rights of unborn children are so keen on denying kids an education? According to lawmakers who voted for the measure, it’s not because they’re hateful racists who want to punish kids, it’s because they are being fiscally responsible. Their argument is that the state simply doesn’t have enough money for education for undocumented kids, particularly since some will require English language learner classes.There’s a small possibility – just throwing it out there – that one of the reasons Tennessee is finding it hard to find money for education is because its regressive tax policies are heavily weighted towards extracting money from the poor rather than making the rich pay their fair share. Tennessee is one of the nine states in the US that doesn’t have an income tax. It also doesn’t have inheritance tax and has very low business tax. Residents (including undocumented immigrants) pay sales tax, property tax and a grocery tax. Undocumented immigrants are putting money into the system and getting very little out of it. Pretending that this attack on undocumented children is about money is disingenuous. Deep down, I’m sure even the people voting for the bill know that investing in children pays dividends to society.Still, while it is disheartening that a bill like this got as far as it did, it’s also important to note that it faced a lot of opposition. Nearly half of the senate’s members spoke on the bill – many of them, including some Republicans, in passionate disagreement. There were tears and a lot of Bible verses quoted about compassion for children. As the US becomes increasingly dystopian, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of just how much opposition there is to the extremist policies and legislation a hate-filled minority are pushing through. Donald Trump likes to say that winning the popular vote gave him and his cronies a mandate to do whatever they like; that all the policies getting passed have the support of the people. This simply isn’t true. Only around 32% of eligible voters actually voted for Trump.While we must not minimize the amount of misogyny and racism there is in the US (and there is a lot!), we should also take heart from the fact that a sizable number of Americans do not want to live in an authoritarian dystopia where women have no rights and undocumented kids get no education. Sixty-three percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to Pew research from 2024. Most Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met. Increasingly, the actions of the American government don’t reflect the views of the American people.Which, of course, is why the Trump administration is so obsessed with undermining education as a whole. From trying to stop undocumented immigrants from going to school, to tightly controlling how Ivy League universities operate, to attempting to eliminate the US Department of Education, Republicans are waging a war on critical thinking.The US just made it harder for married women to voteOn Thursday the US House approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to prove they are citizens when they vote. If you changed your birth name – as around 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the US have – you will have to show a lot more paperwork to vote.Mickey Rourke tells JoJo Siwa he will tie her up and make her straightI had to look up who Rourke is because he hasn’t been relevant for a while. Now, however, he is making headlines for being misogynistic and homophobic on Celebrity Big Brother UK. Rourke, 72, recently told JoJo Siwa (a gay singer and social media personality) that he’d turn her straight. “If I stay [in the Big Brother house] longer than four days, you won’t be gay any more,” Rourke said to Siwa in a clip from Wednesday. “I’ll tie you up,” he added. Rourke got a warning from producers for his language but his comments were not censored. This is in stark contrast to a Big Brother “controversy” last year, when ITV, the broadcaster, edited an episode of the show to remove shots of a T-shirt worn by one of the contestants featuring a watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhite House says it will ignore reporters with gender pronouns in email signatureThe amount of time these people spend obsessing over pronouns boggles the mind. Get a hobby! Get therapy! Try thinking about literally anything else!Student found guilty of rape goes unpunished because of promising future in gynecologyA criminal court in Leuven, Belgium, recently found a 24-year-old medical student, who was training as a gynaecologist, guilty of rape but suspended his sentence because of his lack of prior offences and his “promising future”. This has sparked a lot of anger in Belgium and many commentators have drawn parallels to the Brock Turner case in the US.Does sitting behind a screen turn you into a woman?Fox News’s Jesse Watters, who sits behind a screen all day, seems to think so. This profundity comes after he declared public soup consumption unmanly and said that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands”.The week in pawtriarchyRemember those tariffs Trump imposed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins? Those penguins now have their own social media account, @PenguinsAgainstTrump. “What are you going to do, deport us?” one post reads. “We’ve been dealing with ICE for centuries.” More

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      I disagree with Mahmoud Khalil’s politics. But the deportation decision is abhorrent | Jo-Ann Mort

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      When the federal immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled in favor of allowing the government to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student in the US on a legal visa, her decision was based on “foreign policy concerns” presented by US secretary of state Marco Rubio. It was so shocking that I had to reread the news report several times before I could believe it.Rubio’s claim is based on Khalil’s leadership role in the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. I didn’t agree with Khalil’s politics when he led the protests and I don’t agree today with his politics, nor even his actions during the protests. But I’m unwavering in supporting his right to his views, and his right to shout them in what, until Trump took the reins, was our free American nation.As an immigration judge, Judge Comans couldn’t make a constitutional determination. Immigration judges are not actually part of the judicial branch of government; they are part of the executive branch and, as such, don’t rule on constitutional questions but only on issues of immigration law. Therefore, it’s likely – and hopeful – that on further appeal, Khalil’s constitutional right to free speech could be upheld, though less likely than it would have been before the weakening of our constitutional fiber under President Trump.Since Rubio recently argued that non-citizens, even if here legally, can be deported if they undermine US foreign policy aims, the administration has taken further intimidating action. Today, visa-holders and US visitors are finding their social media being examined and their phones taken at the border for searches.From the day he entered office, Rubio has shown himself to be a weak link in preserving the national interest, justifying a range of abuses under the guise of US foreign policy. He has completely crouched under the heavy arm of President Trump, foregoing many of his previously long-held beliefs in everything from support for Ukraine to the use of soft aid via USAID, and generally in promoting American values. A child of parents who came to the United States as emigres from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, he once embraced democracy with as much bravado as he is now displaying in helping to sink it.To claim that one of the reasons for a deportation like this is to stop antisemitism, as the state department says, is really a ruse to garner support for the widening attack on campus free speech and universities. It is certainly not making Jewish students safer. On the contrary, dividing and conquering to strip higher education and free speech of their very essences endangers every group that has relied on the first amendment’s guarantee.It also strikes me as laughable that the secretary is claiming that Khalil’s presence in America is harming US foreign policy aims. After all, as I wrote here just last week, what in the world is US foreign policy, especially regarding the Middle East? There is no diplomacy and there are no stated foreign policy goals, unless you consider Trump’s dream of building hotel-casinos on Gaza’s beaches to be formal American policy.As the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu himself discovered when he traveled to the White House this week, Trump had nothing to offer him. Netanyahu came begging for tariff relief and a green light for continuing his war against Hamas, as well as an even brighter green light to bomb Iran. He was shocked when Trump announced during their joint press availability that he would send his adviser Steve Witkoff to discuss a peace agreement between the US and Iran. Netanyahu went home empty-handed on tariff relief, and stunned at Trump’s sudden dive into talks with Iran.But of course, neither the Gaza beach hotels nor, especially, the deportations of visa-holders are about foreign policy. Everything is about domestic policy; the actual purpose is to pit various groups of Americans one against the other. The memo circulated by Rubio argues that “while Khalil’s activities were otherwise lawful” his presence in the US would harm efforts by those who are implementing “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”.Rubio went on to claim that “condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective”.What does this even mean? On the same day that Khalil’s freedom was being constricted, Witkoff, the White House adviser, had a four-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin, one of the leading purveyors of antisemitism in the world today. What is this administration’s plan for fighting antisemitism on a global scale? There is none, of course.Domestically, the president’s plan appears to be not only to divide and conquer, but also to weaken and even cripple institutions of higher education, the arts, and other critical underpinnings of democracy that keep American Jews – and all minorities – safe. Worse still, it is to simultaneously try to make us, American Jews, complicit in his evil dealings.The ripple effect of this ruling and the detention of other students, like Rümeysa Öztürk from Tufts University, is propelling many of us in the American Jewish community to act against the Trump administration. A new amicus brief filed by a coalition of 27 Jewish organizations, supported with pro-bono work by the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine (a firm that deserves a gold star for upholding our constitution, rather than making side deals with the president to crush it), says this: “Without presuming to speak for all of Jewish America – a diverse community that holds a multitude of viewpoints – amici are compelled to file this brief because the arrest, detention, and potential deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk for her protected speech violate the most basic constitutional rights.”Freedom of expression, particularly on matters of public concern, the brief makes clear, is a cornerstone of American democracy and extends to academic settings and campus discourse. I’m proud to say that my synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim, in Brooklyn, is a signatory of the brief, along with an organization, New Jewish Narratives, where I serve on the board.Tonight begins the Jewish festival of Passover, a festival of liberation and freedom. It marks a journey that the ancient Jews who were slaves in Egypt took from servitude to freedom. It is a time when Jews around the world proclaim, “Let my people go,” as we see our own fight for freedom in the eyes of those who remain unfree. For me, the freeing of the Israeli hostages is central to the Passover message, as is the freedom of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis to live in a state where they are free from fear and have a vibrant democracy.It’s a vibrant democracy that I wish, too, for the United States. And, at my Passover table, I will pledge to fight to maintain and strengthen the bonds of all peoples here in the US toward collective action that defends and maintains our democracy. If Khalil’s right to remain in the US is not upheld, our nation will be weaker for it, and all our rights will be further endangered.

      Jo-Ann Mort, who writes and reports frequently about Israel/Palestine is also author of the forthcoming book of poetry, A Precise Chaos. Follow her @jo-ann.bsky.social More