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      Federal grand jury indicts Wisconsin judge over alleged Ice obstruction

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      A federal grand jury has indicted a Wisconsin judge who was arrested by the FBI last month on allegations that she helped an undocumented immigrant avoid federal authorities.Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge in Milwaukee, was charged on Tuesday with concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.Dugan was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in April, sparking public protests and rebukes from lawmakers. Her arrest has escalated a clash between Donald Trump’s administration and local authorities over the Republicans’ sweeping immigration crackdown. Democrats have accused the Trump administration of trying to make a national example of Dugan to chill judicial opposition to the crackdown.“Let’s be clear. Trump’s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration,” said US senator Bernie Sanders at the time. “It has everything to do with [Trump] moving this country towards authoritarianism.”Prosecutors charged Dugan in April with concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction. In the federal criminal justice system, prosecutors can initiate charges against a defendant directly by filing a complaint or present evidence to a grand jury and let that body decide whether to issue charges.A grand jury still reviews charges brought by complaint to determine whether enough probable cause exists to continue the case as a check on prosecutors’ power. If the grand jury determines there’s probable cause, it issues a written statement of the charges known as an indictment. That’s what happened in Dugan’s case.Dugan faces up to six years in prison if she’s convicted on both counts. Her team of defense attorneys responded to the indictment with a one-sentence statement saying that she maintains her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.Prosecutors say Dugan escorted Eduardo Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer out of her courtroom through a back jury door on 18 April after learning that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents were in the courthouse seeking his arrest.According to court documents, Flores-Ruiz illegally re-entered the US after being deported in 2013. Online state court records show he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor domestic abuse in Milwaukee county in March. He was in Dugan’s courtroom the morning of 18 April for a hearing.Court documents suggest Dugan was alerted to the agents’ presence by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that the agents appeared to be in the hallway. An affidavit says Dugan was visibly angry over the agents’ arrival and called the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. She and another judge later approached members of the arrest team in the courthouse with what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor”.After a back-and-forth with the agents over the warrant for Flores-Ruiz, Dugan demanded they speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, according to the affidavit.She then returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” and ushered Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out through a back jury door typically used only by deputies, jurors, court staff and in-custody defendants, according to the affidavit. Flores-Ruiz was free on a signature bond in the abuse case at the time, according to online state court records.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal agents ultimately captured him outside the courthouse after a foot chase.The state supreme court suspended Dugan from the bench in late April, saying the move was necessary to preserve public confidence in the judiciary. A reserve judge is filling in for her.Dugan’s case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out of a courthouse back door to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent. That case was eventually dismissed.She was scheduled to enter a plea on Thursday.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      US and Saudi Arabia sign $142bn arms deal as Trump to meet Syrian leader

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      The United States and Saudi Arabia have signed a $142bn arms deal touted by the White House as the “largest defence sales agreement in history” in the first stop of Donald Trump’s four-day diplomatic tour to the Gulf states aimed at securing big deals and spotlighting the benefits of Trump’s transactional foreign policy.During the trip, the White House also confirmed that Trump would meet with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander whose forces helped overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2024. The informal meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting between a US president and a Syrian leader since 2000, when Bill Clinton met with the late leader Hafez al-Assad in Geneva.Speaking at an investment forum on Tuesday, Trump said that he planned to lift sanctions on Syria after holding talks with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said.Sharaa’s pitch to woo the US president offered access to Syrian oil, reconstruction contracts and to build a Trump Tower in Damascus in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Syria.Though the details of the sanctions relief were still unclear, Sharaa’s team in Damascus was celebrating. “This is amazing, it worked,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian writer and activist who is close to the Syrian president. He shared a picture of an initial mockup of Trump Tower Damascus. “This is how you win his heart and mind,” he said, noting that Sharaa would probably show Trump the design during their meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday.The visit was heavily focused on business interests and securing quick wins – often with characteristic Trumpian embellishment – for the administration. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed pledged to invest $600bn in the United States during a lunch with Trump, including $20bn in artificial intelligence data centres, purchases of gas turbines and other energy equipment worth $14.2bn, nearly $5bn in Boeing 737-8 jets, and other deals.But details of the specific commitments remained vague, the numbers put out by the White House did not total $600bn, and some of the programs began under Joe Biden’s administration.The White House called the arms deal the “largest defence sales agreement in history” and said that it included plans for more than a dozen US defense companies to sell weapons, equipment and services in the areas of air force advancement and space capabilities, air and missile defense, as well as border and maritime security.The US president was feted with a royal guard as he arrived in Riyadh on Tuesday. Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s escorted Trump’s Air Force One jet as it arrived in Riyadh and Trump sat with Salman in an ornate hall at the Royal Court at Al Yamamah Palace with members of the US and Saudi and business elite. Among them were Elon Musk, prominent figures in AI such as Sam Altman, as well the chief executives of IBM, BlackRock, Citigroup, Palantir and Nvidia, among others.When Salman pledged that Saudi Arabia would invest $600bn in the US economy, Trump smiled and joked that it should be $1tn.The trip is part of a reordering of Middle Eastern politics dominated by Trump’s “America first” platform of prioritising domestic US economic and security interests over foreign alliances and international law. Critics have said that the dealmaking empowers Trump and a coterie of businessmen around the president, and the US president’s family has business interests in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, giving this administration an unprecedented conflict of interest.The most glaring example of the new commoditisation of American foreign policy under Trump has been the proposed gift from the ruling family of Qatar of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet that the White House said could be converted into a presidential plane and then be given to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office.The gift has provoked anger from congressional Democrats, one of whom described it as an “aerial palace” and said it would constitute “the most valuable gift ever conferred on a president by a foreign government”.Trump has defended the offer, saying in a post it would “replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction” and called Democrats asking for an ethics investigation “World Class Losers!!!”The meeting between Trump and Salman was characterised by smiles and friendly backslapping, a sharp contrast to past summits when the Saudi leader was mired in controversy over the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.While his administration touted big deals, Trump also admitted that his geopolitical goals of Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic recognition of Israel would take time due in large part to the Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.“It will be a special day in the Middle East, with the whole world watching, when Saudi Arabia joins us” in the Abraham accords, the Trump administration’s framework for Arab states to recognise Israel, he said. “And I really think it’s going to be something special – but you’ll do it in your own time.”Trump is also due to visit the United Arab Emirates on Thursday before continuing on to Qatar this week.His negotiations in the region have been characterised by big-ticket investment deals, and those appeared to play a role in his reversal of US policy on Syria as well.Sharaa, who is keen to normalise relations with the US, has reportedly offered Trump a number of sweeteners including the Trump tower in Damascus, a demilitarised zone by the Golan Heights that would strengthen Israel’s claim to the territory it has occupied since 1967, diplomatic recognition of Israel, and a profit-sharing deal on resources similar to the Ukraine minerals deal.The idea to offer Trump a piece of real estate with his name on it in the heart of Damascus was thought up by a US Republican senator, who passed on the idea to Sharaa’s team.“Sanctions in Syria are very complicated, but with Trump, he can [get] most of them lifted. It is a great opportunity,” Ziadeh said.The trip is also extraordinary for Trump’s decision not to visit Israel, the US’s closest ally in the region, due to the war in Gaza and Trump’s fraught relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas released the last remaining American hostage, Edan Alexander, on the eve of Trump’s visit to the Middle East, in an effort to push Trump to pressure Netanyahu to end the war.Netanyahu doubled down on the war on Tuesday in a show of defiance, saying that any ceasefire would only be “temporary”.“In the coming days, we will enter with full force to complete the operation to defeat Hamas,” he said. “Our forces are there now.”“There will be no situation where we stop the war,” he added. More

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      Chuck Schumer says he’ll obstruct Trump’s justice department picks over Qatar jet gift

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      The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, announced on Tuesday he would obstruct all Trump administration justice department nominations until the White House provides answers about plans to accept a luxury aircraft from Qatar for presidential use.The New York senator declared the hold amid growing controversy over the constitutional and security implications of accepting a foreign government’s offer to provide what would become the new Air Force One.“In light of the deeply troubling news of a possible Qatari-funded Air Force One, and the reports that the attorney general personally signed off on this clearly unethical deal, I am announcing a hold on all DOJ political nominees, until we get more answers,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech.Schumer called the proposed arrangement “not just naked corruption”, likening it to something so corrupt “that even [Russian president Vladimir] Putin would give a double take”.Though the procedural maneuver cannot completely block nominees, it forces Senate Republicans to use valuable floor time to overcome Democratic opposition through individual confirmation votes.Schumer said he has several demands that must be met before he lifts the blockade, including having the attorney general, Pam Bondi, testify before Congress to explain how accepting such a gift would comply with the US constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits presidents from receiving gifts from foreign states without congressional approval.“President Trump has told the American people this is ‘a free jet’. Does that mean the Qataris are delivering a ready-on-day-one plane with all the security measures already built in? If so, who installed those security measures, and how do we know they were properly installed?” Schumer asked.The blocking tactic has also been deployed by Hawaii senator Brian Schatz, who said in February he’d also place a blanket hold on Trump’s nominees to the state department until its attempt to shut USAID was reversed. Under the Biden administration, the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville held a 10-month hold on military promotions based off the Pentagon’s abortion policy.But the opposition on accepting the plane extends beyond party lines, notably from some pro-Israel Republicans long angered by Qatar’s diplomatic role on Israel’s years-long military campaign in Gaza, and its close communication with Hamas.The Texas senator Ted Cruz, typically aligned with Trump, said on CNBC that the aircraft arrangement “poses significant espionage and surveillance problems”. The West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito, part of the Republican leadership, said: “I’d be checking for bugs is what I’d be checking for.”Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who ran against then campaigned for Trump, said the idea of taking gifts from other countries “is never a good practice”.“It threatens intelligence and national security. Especially when that nation supports a terrorist organization,” she wrote on X. “Regardless of how beautiful the plane may be, it opens a door and implies the President and US can be bought.”Even the Senate majority leader, John Thune, acknowledged “there are lots of issues associated with that offer, which I think need to be further talked about”, while Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican senator, suggested: “It would be better if Air Force One were a big, beautiful jet made in the United States of America.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for the White House accused Democratic leadership of “prioritizing politics over critical DOJ appointments” and “obstructing President Trump’s ‘Make America safe again’ agenda”.Trump previously defended accepting the aircraft before departing for a trip to the Middle East, calling it “a very nice gesture” and suggesting the plane would eventually be housed in his presidential library after its service life.“Now I could be a stupid person and say: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a free plane,’” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer.”The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, indicated on Monday that legal details were “still being worked out”, but insisted that “any donation to this government is always done in full compliance with the law”.There are three nominations to the justice department awaiting confirmation, the New York Times reports, with dozens more likely to come down the pipeline. More

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      RFK Jr and his grandchildren swam in DC creek contaminated by sewage

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      The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has revealed that he went swimming with his children in a Washington DC creek that authorities have said is toxic due to contamination by an upstream, ageing sewer system.The “Make America healthy again” crusader attracted attention for the Mother’s Day dip in Dumbarton Oaks Park with his grandchildren Bobcat and Cassius, which he posted about on X. He was also accompanied by relatives Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick and Jackson.Rock Creek, which runs through the federal park, is described as unsafe for swimming or wading because it acts as a runoff for excess sewage and storm water during rain storms.Studies of streams in the nation’s capital have revealed “chronic elevated levels of Escherichia coli (E coli) contamination that exceeded DC’s surface water quality standards”, according to one published in 2021.The District of Columbia banned swimming in all waterways in 1971, citing “extraordinarily high levels of pollutants from human and animal waste containing bacteria such as salmonella and hepatitis, and viruses”.Separately, the National Park Service has said: “Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban – this means wading, too!”Part of the issue is that the District’s combined sewer system was developed before 1900, and – like New York City sewage and rain systems – is designed to combine to ease runoff, bypassing water treatment plants.In Washington, according to Open Data DC: “Release of this excess flow is necessary to prevent flooding in homes, basements, businesses, and streets. [Combined sewer overflows] are discharged to the Anacostia River, Rock Creek, Potomac River or tributary waters at CSO outfalls during most moderate rain events.”Kennedy, an avid outdoorsman, had not responded to a request for comment as of publication time, and has not posted on social media about it.In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Kennedy described himself as a “renegade”. Joined by other appointees to the federal health agency – including the TV doctor Mehmet Oz, Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya – he said: “The entire leadership of this agency are renegades who are, you know, who are juggernauts against convention and who are trying to look for truth, no matter what the cost.”On Sunday, Kennedy joined Donald Trump to unveil a new administration plan to lower high US prescription drug prices. He thanked the US president for standing “up to the oligarchs” and took aim at Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who has made drug pricing a signature issue of his political platform.“It’s one of these promises that politicians make to their constituents knowing that they’ll never have to do it,” the former 2024 Democratic turned independent presidential candidate said.Sanders later scoffed at the administration’s plan, saying it “will be thrown out by the courts”.Kennedy is known for taking risks of a biological kind. He admitted to transporting a roadkill bear cub to New York’s Central Park, and his daughter Kick described a childhood adventure when her father transported a rotting whale head on top of their car from Nantucket to their Westchester home.Had Kennedy’s foray into the polluted creek produced ill effects, the probable treatment for E coli poisoning would not necessarily have benefited much from the administration’s drug cost reduction plan. Common antibiotics used to treat E coli infections are typically priced $10 to $30 for a course of treatment. More

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      Trump 2.0 takes quid pro quo fears to new heights with $400m flying grift

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      Fox & Friends, the show beamed into millions of rightwing Americans’ homes every morning, is not generally considered to be the place where Donald Trump faces the tough questions. The “& Friends” in the show’s title gives that away.But on Monday morning, the show’s co-host Brian Kilmeade put the billion-dollar question to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. News had just broken that Trump had decided to accept a gift of a $400m luxury jumbo jet from the government of Qatar, a petro-state which the president once denounced as a “funder of terrorism”.“Do you worry that, if they give us something like this, they want something in return?” Kilmeade asked.Leavitt swatted the question away, saying that the Qataris knew that Trump “only works with the interests of the American public in mind”. Despite her protestations, the heart of the matter is now out there for all to contemplate: what about the quid pro quo?The avoidance of quid pro quo – of favours granted in return for something, or to put it colloquially, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours – has been a bedrock of American governance, especially in foreign policy, for decades. It even informed Trump’s first presidency when the Trump Organization, his family business, forewent all foreign deals for the duration.Now he’s back in the Oval Office, all such guardrails separating personal from public gain appear to have been discarded. Since Trump’s second presidential victory in November, the Trump Organization, under the management of his third child Eric, has seen an explosion of activity in the Gulf region.Plans have proliferated for Trump towers and golf resorts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It would take a bold commentator to suggest that the president’s visit beginning on Tuesday to those same fabulously rich oil nations is purely coincidental.Of all the transactions in the pipeline, the most brazen is the proposed gift of a $400m “palace in the sky” from the Qatari government. It is hard to imagine a clearer violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution which bars federal officials, including the president, from accepting high-value gifts without congressional approval.The Republican senator from Kentucky Rand Paul summed it up. “It’s not like a ride on the plane,” he said. “We are talking about the entire $400m plane.”Trump’s approach in his second term towards such inconveniences as ethical codes and the rule of law has been to dismiss from the leadership of key federal agencies seasoned public servants committed to the US constitution and replace them with loyalists committed to his Make America great again (Maga) mantra. From Trump’s perspective, that may look like an easy fix. But for anyone concerned about quid pro quo it has merely compounded the problem.According to ABC News, Pam Bondi, Trump’s US attorney general and the country’s top law enforcement officer, carried out a legal analysis of the Qatar plane gift that concluded it would be “legally permissible”. That’s all very well. But what about the fact that in the run-up to the 2022 soccer World Cup, Bondi worked as a lobbyist for the Qatari government, receiving from it a handsome $115,000 every month?Quid pro quo over the gift of the Boeing 747-8 jetliner from that same Qatari government is further complicated by the intricate nexus of business deals that Eric Trump is creating at lightning speed through the Gulf region. The first foreign deal secured by the Trump Organization since Trump’s return to the Oval Office in January is in Qatar.The deal is for the construction of a luxury resort and 18-hole golf course outside the Qatari capital, Doha. It will be known as the Trump International Golf Club & Villas.The scheme will be developed by a Qatari company, Qatari Diar, which happens to be owned by the Qatari government. The real estate business was set up by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and has a government minister chairing its board.That would appear to be a breach of Trump’s second-term promise – already so much weaker than the ethical pledges he made in Trump presidency 1.0 – that the family business would pursue no deals involving foreign governments. The Trump Organization insists the partnership was arranged with a Saudi firm, Dar Global, and not the Qatari company. But that only raises a further issue: Dar Global has close ties with the Saudi royal family.Were that not enough, there’s also the crypto factor. Trump’s venture into the crypto currency business is another whole can of worms, with so many ethical conundrums attached to it that it would keep a conflict of interest investigator busy for years.Suffice to say that the Trump family is betting big on cryptocurrency at the same time that the president is using his executive powers to boost the fledging digital payment system as well as remove regulatory restraints standing in its way.Where are the Trump family’s biggest crypto deals located? In the Gulf states.A fund run by the royal family of UAE recently invested $2bn in a crypto exchange. The fund channeled the money through a new cryptocurrency known as stablecoin that tracks the US dollar.The stablecoin was issued by a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. It is owned by the Trump family.The front page of World Liberty Financial’s website invites visitors to “meet our team, the passionate minds shaping the future of finance”. Under a beaming photograph of the 47th president are the words: “Donald J Trump, chief crypto advocate”. More

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      Trump’s border intimidation is coming for US citizens too – ask streamer Hasan Piker | Owen Jones

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      Where are all the free speech warriors on the right now? Hasan Piker, a popular streamer with 4.5 million followers across YouTube and Twitch, who has been hailed by mainstream publications such as the New Yorker and New York Times as the left’s answer to the deluge of rightwing internet influencers, says he was detained and questioned for hours by border control agents as he re-entered the US (Piker is a US citizen). It is an instructive moment. Countries that behave like this towards political commentators and dissenting voices who are their own citizens are either nakedly authoritarian, or well on the way.Piker was reportedly interrogated at length not just about Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah, but his views on Donald Trump. The 33-year-old pundit – an unapologetic champion of the Palestinian cause – stuck to a message of opposing “endless bloodshed” and siding with civilians. That the biggest progressive streamer in the US was subjected to this experience is emblematic of a phenomenon that requires an accurate and insistent description: it is the biggest assault on free speech in the west since the height of McCarthyism seven decades ago.When foreign-born citizens – including green card holders – began to be detained by US authorities over their opposition to Israel’s genocide, it should have been clear that this was just phase one: US citizens would be next. Sure, Piker wasn’t arrested, but the authorities are pushing the boundaries bit by bit. The numbers of foreign visitors entering the US are falling as it is, undoubtedly driven by fears of a punitive border regime. But Piker’s detention sends a message to Americans with dissenting opinions – not least opponents of Israel’s genocide. The threat of being stopped at the border and subjected to lengthy interrogation simply because of what you think is straightforward political intimidation. It won’t stop there.That the vice-president, JD Vance, railed against Europe for a supposed war on free speech underlines what a sham this favoured narrative of the right always was. Weeks later, his boss announced that universities allowing “illegal” protests would be starved of federal cash – with Columbia University losing $400m despite having clamped down on pro-Palestinian protests – and dissenting students would be variously expelled, arrested, imprisoned or deported. Alas, it was under the Biden administration that the McCarthyite blacklisting-style campaign began, with defenders of Palestinian rights being variously deplatformed, fired and threatened.Indeed, Vance could have noted how European countries such as Germany have assaulted free speech by silencing pro-Palestinian activists: from imposing crippling restrictions on protests and violently assaulting demonstrators to shutting down conferences, sacking people who speak out and now seeking to deport activists, too. Alas, it’s not really free speech that Vance is interested in, but rather advancing far-right politics.If we’re going to discuss who is being stopped at the border, let’s discuss the astonishing 23,380 US citizens who serve in the IDF, according to figures quoted in the Washington Post a year ago. Many of them are undoubtedly committing unspeakable war crimes in Israel’s genocidal onslaught. Yet they are being waved through the border. And that really sums it up. If like Piker, you speak out against genocide, you are liable to be treated as a criminal as you enter your own country. If you’re a US citizen serving in a foreign army committing heinous atrocities, you’re more likely to be treated as a hero. The world is turned on its head.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump administration piles pressure on Harvard with $450m more in cuts

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      Eight federal agencies will terminate a further $450m in grants to Harvard University, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, escalating its antagonization of the elite institution over what officials frame as inadequate responses to antisemitism on campus.The latest funding cuts come after the administration cancelled $2.2bn in federal funding to the university, bringing the total financial penalty to approximately $2.65bn.“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” the Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism wrote in a statement. “This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement.”The cuts represent a flexing of federal power over the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, first triggered by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza – one that is only expected to expand in the coming days – but encompasses a far broader set of grievances against the institution and others like it perceived as politically liberal.Harvard has so far refused to yield, with the university’s president, Dr Alan Garber, who is Jewish, calling the previous attacks “illegal demands” from the administration “to control whom we hire and what we teach”. The university has refused to comply with the administration’s demands, outlined in a letter last month, which included shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs; cooperating with federal immigration authorities; and banning face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters.The school, which has an endowment of more than $53bn, had launched legal action against the initial $2.2bn funding freeze, arguing the university faced no choice after the Trump administration “threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism justified the latest funding reduction by claiming Harvard had “repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and antisemitic harassment plaguing its campus”.They referenced a series of alleged incidents, including a fellowship awarded by the Harvard Law Review, which the taskforce characterized as evidence of “just how radical Harvard has become”.Nationwide campus protests appear to be continuing, even as Columbia students were arrested last week. Dozens of students at California State University campuses are staging hunger strikes in solidarity with Gaza, as they simultaneously call on their school to divest from Israel.Harvard recently published its own investigations into allegations of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, but these self-regulatory efforts appear to have done little to satisfy administration officials.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s announcement of the new funding cuts was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveney, acting general counsel at the US Department of Health and Human Services; and Thomas E Wheeler, acting general counsel at the US Department of Education.Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      Ice has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished | Mehdi Hasan

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      On Friday, the Democratic mayor of Newark was arrested and detained in his own city by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. His crime? Trying to gain access and inspection rights to a privately operated detention center that he says is in violation of multiple city lawsuits.Three Democratic members of Congress accompanied Ras Baraka to the Delaney Hall facility in Newark, as they exercised their own congressionally mandated right to enter Ice detention facilities for oversight purposes, without prior notice.While Baraka was taken away in handcuffs, two of the House Democrats – Bonnie Coleman Watson and LaMonica McIver – were shoved and manhandled by Ice agents outside the facility. The third, Rob Menendez, angrily accused Ice of feeling “no weight of the law and no restraint on what they should be doing. And that was shown in broad daylight today when they not just arrested the mayor of Newark but when they put their hands on two members of Congress standing behind me. How is this acceptable?”It’s a good question. Elected Democrats are now under both legal and physical assault from a rogue agency, which behaves less like federal law enforcement and more like Donald Trump’s private militia. And yet, elected Democrats refuse to call for its abolition. They seem to have decided that the continued existence of Ice is “acceptable”.Despite the feverish claims from Republican politicians and Fox anchors about the Democratic party being “soft” on immigration enforcement, we’re a long way from 2018, when “abolish Ice” was an actual slogan on the left and deployed by both prominent progressive activists and rising Democratic party stars, such as then newly elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, a moderate New York senator, said she wanted to “get rid of [Ice], start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works”. Kamala Harris, then a California senator, said she believed in “starting from scratch” with Ice.These days, however, elected Democrats, even of the progressive variety, have run a mile from the one-time campaign to dismantle Ice. The new Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Greg Casar, for example, told Semafor last month he had “changed” his mind on “Abolish Ice”. Ocasio-Cortez did not utter the words “abolish Ice” on her recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Bernie Sanders. And nor, for that matter, did the independent senator from Vermont, who once said he wanted to “break up” Ice.What on Earth are elected Democrats, especially progressives, waiting for? How many more abuses of power and violations of the law does Ice have to commit? How unpopular does Trump have to get on the issue of immigration – especially on the issue of Ice deportations – before the so-called opposition take a much bolder stance on the future of Ice?Consider some of the Ice horror shows from the past 30 days alone:

      On 8 May, Ice agents “held a young girl’s face to the ground” while they detained her mother in Worcester, Massachusetts. A video of the incident from Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra shows the teenage girl screaming as multiple agents and officers chase her and grab her legs.

      On 7 May, Ice agents detained Jensy Machado, a US citizen, in northern Virginia with “guns drawn”, to quote the Virginia Democratic congressman Don Beyer. Despite his attempt to show his Real ID and prove his legal status, they put him in cuffs.

      On 5 May, Ice agents detained Daniel Orellana, a 25-year-old Guatemalan, at a gas station in Framingham, Massachusetts. When they were told they had apprehended the wrong man, according to Orellana’s girlfriend, one of the agents said: “OK, but we’re going to take you anyway.”

      On 4 May, a group of Ice agents detained a man filling up gas in his truck at a gas station in Oxnard, California – and left his children behind on their own. “They arrested someone,” said an eyewitness. “They left the children inside the truck.”

      On 26 April, court papers filed by the Department of Homeland Security admitted that Ice agents did not have a warrant when they arrested the Palestinian activist and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil in March.

      On 24 April, in the middle of the night, Ice agents burst into the home of a family of US citizens in Oklahoma City, while executing a search warrant issued for someone else. The agents ordered the family outside into the rain in their underwear, the mother said, and confiscated their phones, laptops and all their cash savings as “evidence”.

      On 22 April, Ice agents detained a mother and her two-year-old daughter, a US citizen, during a routine check-in with the agency in New Orleans and then deported the mother back to Honduras with her American child. A Trump-appointed federal judge said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process”.

      Also on 22 April, Ice agents in plain clothes, without badges or warrants, detained two men during a raid on a courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. Two bystanders who dared to ask those agents to show them a warrant were ordered not to “impede” the arrest and have since been threatened with prosecution by Ice.

      On 14 April, Ice agents stopped an undocumented Guatemalan couple in their car in New Bedford, Massachusetts, while looking for another man. When Juan Francisco and Marilu Méndez’s lawyer told them over the phone to stay in the car until she got there, the Ice agents used a large hammer to smash the rear window of the car and drag them out.

      Also on 14 April, we learned that Ice agents detained a 19-year old Venezuelan asylum seeker and deported him to the Cecot prison in El Salvador – despite his lack of criminal convictions or even tattoos. During the arrest, according to his father, one Ice agent said: “No, he’s not the one,” as if they were looking for someone else, but another agent said: “Take him anyway.”
      All of these incidents are just from the past month. Go back further, and I could go on and on and on.So where are the Dems on this? Why aren’t they calling for an end to a lawless, violent, deadly, institutionally racist, sexually abusive agency, whose employees’ union endorsed Trump for president in both 2016 and 2020, and whose former acting director, Tom Homan, has become this administration’s gung-ho “border czar” and “the face of Trump’s cruelty”, to quote my Zeteo colleague John Harwood?Forget about talk of “reform”. At this point, there is no way to improve or “fix” Ice. It has to be abolished. Shut down. Scrapped. To quote Gillibrand in 2018, the entirety of immigration enforcement in the United States must be “reimagined”.Meanwhile, as some Democrats obsess over opinion polls and worry about looking “soft” on the border, the actual experts on authoritarianism are sounding the alarm. The political scientist Lee Morgenbesser has compared Ice to a “secret police” and says the agency “is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism”. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls Ice the “foot soldiers” of the “fascists”. Even the “anti-woke” libertarians over at Reason magazine say Ice is on a “militaristic mission that effectively turns nonviolent immigrants into fugitives”.Why would a future Democratic president or Democratic-controlled Congress want to keep such a Gestapo-like outfit? And, sorry, but when did it become a political taboo to call for the abolition of a government agency? Republicans have spent decades trying to shut down a plethora of federal government departments. The current Trump administration has gutted USAID, established under John F Kennedy in 1961. Trump has signed an executive order to try to force the “closure” of the Department of Education, which was first conceived of by Andrew Johnson in 1867. Republicans in Congress have introduced a bill to abolish the IRS, which goes back to 1862 and Abraham Lincoln.So why can’t timid Democrats call for the abolition of Ice, which was created only in 2003 by George W Bush, making it even younger than Leonardo DiCaprio’s current girlfriend?Both Ice and its Republican supporters in Congress see an opportunity right now. “The agency,” reports the New York Times, “is hoping to receive a large windfall from Republicans in Congress so it can spend as much as $45bn over the next two years on new detention facilities, a more than sixfold increase from what Ice typically spends to detain migrants.”If Democrats are serious about stopping fascism, then they have to do everything in their power to prevent the ongoing expansion and further empowerment of Homan and his army of masked Ice thugs.And if Democrats are ever able to win back office, there is only one right move here, politically, financially, and, above all else, morally: abolishing Bush and Trump’s Ice, once and for all.

      Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and author, and a former host on MSNBC. He is also a Guardian US columnist and the editor-in-chief of Zeteo More