Subterms
Archive: ABC News, Bloomberg News, CBS News, CNN, National Conservatism, NBC News, Scripp News
Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politcspodus More
The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”.The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Ábrego García, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US.It was not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”Bukele continued mockingly: “Kilmar Ábrego García, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ and ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.The meeting came in the hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison while he was trying to check on Ábrego García’s wellbeing and attempting to push for his release.The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3km from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, even as they let other cars go on.“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Ábrego García back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US supreme court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.Trump officials have said that Ábrego García, a Salvadorian citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Ábrego García has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Ábrego García’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference on Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.Van Hollen told reporters on Wednesday that he met with Vice-President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Ábrego García to the United States.“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr Ábrego García by driving to the Cecot prison,” Van Hollen said on Thursday.Van Hollen said Ábrego García has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and wellbeing,” Van Hollen said. He said Ábrego García should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.New Jersey senator Cory Booker is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted on Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Ábrego García is being held. He did not mention Ábrego García but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.Missouri Republican Jason Smith, chair of the House ways and means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans”.The fight over Ábrego García has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants – whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes – and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele popular at home.Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment”. Officials there deny wrongdoing. More
She had been welcomed to the White House with open arms as few other foreign visitors had been since Donald Trump’s return, and Giorgia Meloni wanted to assure her host that – at least when it came to their political worldview – they spoke a common language.Italy’s prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in neo-fascism, was keen to stress that she shared many things with the man who had just hailed her as a “friend” who “everybody loves … and respects”.Tariffs were a bit of problem. But between friends? Hey, we can work it out.Even if Italy boasted one of Europe’s biggest trade surpluses with the US, such disagreements could be bridged with recourse to the previously uncoined creed of “western nationalism”, argued Meloni, speaking in confident, lightly accented English, although she admitted she did not know if it was “the right word”.“I know that when I speak about west mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilization, and I want to make that civilization stronger,” she said, in terms that the president and his attendant cabinet members-cum-courtiers surely lapped up.“So I think even if we have some problems between the two shores of the Atlantic, it is the time that we try to sit down and find solutions.”After all, Meloni pointed out, they were on the same side when it came to one existential struggle, “the fight against the woke and ADI [sic] ideology that would like to erase our history.”The acronym was a bit confusing. Did she mean DEI? But no matter, her audience got the general gist.Meloni, 48, has been labelled “Europe’s Trump whisperer” – deemed capable of awakening the concealed angels of his nature that other Euro-leaders cannot reach. She has spent time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and was the only European leader invited to his inauguration in January.Here, in the Oval Office, the whispering was having a soothing effect. The president smiled indulgently, before going off on several “weaves” during which he attacked Joe Biden, the federal reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, Biden again, “activist judges” who were blocking his deportation agenda, then Powell once again.But it was standard Trump. The man who had publicly browbeaten Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and barely tolerated Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer on their White House visits was the very picture of a gracious host.Even JD Vance – whose boorish interventions blew up the Zelenskyy visit and nearly did the same to Starmer’s – kept his trap shut, proof indeed that all was going swimmingly.Then disaster threatened.An Italian journalist insisted on asking the prime minister a question in her native Italian. Mama mia!Meloni looked disgusted. Weren’t they all supposed to be western nationalists here, defenders of the same civilization. Why emphasize differences?She played along reluctantly, her features relaxing slightly as she embarked on an extended discourse, but her body language betraying her as she lifted both feet off the ground, one crossed leg folding behind the other. Trump watched her intently all the while.When she finished, an American journalist tried to ask another question but Trump interjected: “No, wait, I want to hear what you said.”It was over to Meloni’s female interpreter, sitting nearby, who revealed: “Prime Minister Meloni was asked … what she thinks about the fact that President Trump holds Zelenskyy responsible for the war in Ukraine.”It was a discordant, yet key, moment – and the prime minister knew it. As the interpreter tried to continue, Meloni – perhaps sensing this was unsafe territory, not least because she has, for the most part, stuck with the western support for Ukraine that Trump is on the brink of abandoning – took over interpreting her own answer.She limited her explanation to vowing to raise Italy’s contributions to Nato, currently at below 1.5% – well below the 2% minimum agreed, and far short of the 5% Trump has lately demanded.Then it was the president’s turn. “I don’t hold Zelenskyy responsible,” he said, a retreat from his previous false accusations that Ukraine started the war. “But I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started. I’m not happy with anybody involved.”If anybody was to blame, he went on, it was Biden – the default scapegoat for every wrong – because, after all, everyone knew the war would never have started if Trump had still been president.No blame was attached to “President Putin”, the man who actually was responsible for starting the war. “Now I’m trying to get him to stop,” said Trump.For the unfortunate Zelenskyy, widely praised across the west for standing steadfast in defense of his country when it was under attack, there was little charity.“I’m not blaming him. But what I’m saying is that I don’t think he’s done the greatest job, OK? I’m not a big fan, I’m really not.”It was a telling moment of just how far the west’s center of gravity had shifted in the few short weeks since Trump’s return to power. And an uncomfortable one, even for Meloni.Then the conversation moved on to to the common ground of combatting migration – and it was back to the whispering again. More
Cory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.Booker’s trip to the Central American country would come after the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled there this week to meet with his constituent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian national deported last month in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an “administrative error”. Despite a supreme court ruling saying his administration must “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return, Trump has refused to take steps to do so, and El Salvador’s government on Wednesday denied Van Hollen a meeting with the deportee.Ábrego García’s case has become a rallying cry for Democrats, who argue it is a sign of Donald Trump’s reckless approach to immigration enforcement and willingness to defy court orders. An immigration judge in 2019 had given Ábrego García protection from deportation, finding that he may face retaliation if he returns to El Salvador.Booker wrote on X earlier this week: “The Supreme Court was clear: the Trump administration must act to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García to the United States. There is no room for debate – yet Trump is refusing, in defiance of a lawful court order.“Every member of Congress should be standing up for the Constitution and demanding that the administration act to return Mr. Ábrego García to the U.S. and to his family.”Trump administration officials have countered by accusing Democrats of caring more about undocumented immigrants than US citizens. On Monday, the Republican congressman Riley Moore toured El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), where US authorities say Ábrego García is being held, and gave a thumbs up in front of a cell packed with inmates.Several other Democratic lawmakers have signaled they would like to visit El Salvador and Cecot, including Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic caucus, and Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari and Maxwell Alejandro Frost, all members of the investigative House oversight committee. Delia Ramirez of the House homeland security committee has also asked for a visit to Cecot.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBooker, who ran for president in 2020 and is viewed as a potential candidate again three years from now, has been particularly outspoken against Trump. Earlier this month, he delivered a speech from the Senate floor warning of the “grave and urgent” danger presented by his presidency that ran for 25 hours and five minutes – the longest such speech ever. More
Pronouncing himself “disgusted” by Donald Trump’s favorable attitude to Russia and Vladimir Putin, the former UK defence minister Grant Shapps said the US president calling a Russian missile strike that killed dozens in Ukraine last weekend a “mistake” was an example of “weasel language we used to hear … from the IRA” terrorist group.“All anybody needs Putin to do is get the hell out of a democratic neighboring country,” Shapps told the One Decision podcast, regarding attempts to end the war in Ukraine that has raged since Russia invaded in February 2022.“And I just have to [put] this on record: it disgusts me, I feel disgusted [by] the idea that the leader of the free world cannot tell the difference between the dictator who locks up and murders his opponents and invades innocent democratic countries and the country itself that has been invaded.“This lack of moral clarity is completely demoralizing for the rest of the democratic world.”Shapps, 56, filled numerous roles in Conservative cabinets before becoming minister of defence in August 2023, becoming a key player in maintaining international support for Ukraine. He lost his seat in parliament last July, as Labour won power in a landslide. This month, Shapps was given a knighthood.One Decision is a foreign policy focused podcast, with co-hosts including Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of the British MI6 intelligence service, and Leon Panetta, a former US defense secretary and CIA director.On the campaign trail last year, Trump repeatedly said he would secure peace in Ukraine in one day. Instead, he has angered allies by rebuking the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in the Oval Office; sought to extract concessions from Kyiv over access to rare minerals; and deployed a negotiator, Steve Witkoff, whose effusive praise for Putin has attracted widespread scorn. On Monday, Trump repeated his incorrect claim that Zelenskyy started the war.Though talks have been held in Saudi Arabia, the war has continued. This month has seen devastating Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities. First, nine children were among 19 people killed in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s home town. In Sumy last Sunday, missiles killed at least 35 and injured more than 100.Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said of the Sumy strike: “I think it was terrible. And I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing.”Shapps said: “It’s a sort of weasel language. We used to hear it from the IRA [the Irish Republican terrorist group, after attacks killed civilians]. I mean, it’s just appalling to hear this sort of thing. It’s appalling not to be able to condemn it properly.”Alluding to years of reporting on why Trump has such a favorable view of Putin, with theories ranging from admiration for autocrats to Russia holding compromising material, Shapps said: “I think I do know what hold Putin may have [over Trump] but I mean, it is not right.”Asked by co-host Kate McCann what he meant by “hold”, Shapps first noted that Trump’s first impeachment, in 2020, was for withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to get Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.Shapps also said that by appeasing Putin, Trump was offering encouragement to other autocrats with territorial ambitions.“Even if you are the Trump White House, surely you must understand that if you let one dictator get away with it, what do you think will happen when another dictator walks into a neighboring state or one maybe just over the water and takes it over? Do you think that people will believe the west when we say you can’t do that?” More
California is preparing to ask a court to block Donald Trump’s “illegal” tariffs, accusing the president of overstepping his authority and causing “immediate and irreparable harm” to the world’s fifth-largest economy.The lawsuit, to be filed in federal court on Wednesday by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and attorney general, Rob Bonta, is the most significant challenge yet to Trump’s flurry of on-again-off-again tariffs.In the complaint, California officials argue that the US constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to impose tariffs and that the president’s invocation of emergency powers to unilaterally escalate a global trade war, which has rattled stock markets and raised fears of recession, is unlawful.“No state is poised to lose more than the state of California,” Newsom said, formally unveiling the lawsuit during a press conference at an almond farm in the Central valley on Wednesday. “It’s a serious and sober moment, and I’d be … lying to you if I said it can be quickly undone.”Invoking a statute known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), Trump has issued a series of declarations imposing, reversing, delaying, restarting and modifying tariffs on US trading partners.The complaint argues that the law does not give the US president the authority to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress. It asks the court to declare Trump’s tariff orders “unlawful and void” and to order the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to stop enforcing them.“The president is yet again acting as if he’s above the law. He isn’t,” Bonta said at the press conference on Wednesday, noting that it was the state’s 14th lawsuit against the Trump administration in less than 14 weeks. “Bottom line: Trump doesn’t have the singular power to radically upend the country’s economic landscape. That’s not how our democracy works.”Trump has said tariffs are necessary to ensure “fair trade”, protect American workers and turn the US into an “industrial powerhouse”.In a statement responding to the lawsuit, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the administration was “committed” to the president’s trade strategy. “Instead of focusing on California’s rampant crime, homelessness and unaffordability, Gavin Newsom is spending his time trying to block President Trump’s historic efforts to finally address the national emergency of our country’s persistent goods trade deficits,” he said.Newsom said his office had informed the White House in advance that it was bringing this lawsuit, but that the governor has not spoken to the president directly about it.Earlier this month, on what he called “liberation day”, the president imposed a sweeping 10% tariff on nearly all imported goods and higher tariffs for a host of countries, most of which he later paused for 90 days.A 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, the US’s largest trading partners, remains in effect, while Trump’s actions have provoked a trade war with China, its third-largest trading partner, subject to US tariffs of 145%.California, the US’s largest importer and second-largest exporter with an economy larger than most countries, relies heavily on trade with Mexico, Canada and China, the state’s top trading partners. The complaint says the economic consequences of Trump’s tariffs on the state will be “significant”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCalifornia is the first US state to bring a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s tariff policies. Earlier this week, a legal advocacy group filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of US businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the levies, asking the US court of international trade to block Trump’s tariffs.Newsom said said the economic consequences of the tariffs would be reflected in a revised budget proposal he will submit next month. “Across the spectrum, the impacts are off the charts.”“Regardless of all the scientific and engineering advances, farming is still hard work, and the weather makes every year a gamble,” said Christine Gemperle, who hosted the governor and attorney at her almond farm. “The last thing we need is more uncertainty and not knowing whether we can ride this one out.”California is the nation’s top agricultural exporter, shipping nuts, tomatoes, wine and rice around the world. California’s agricultural exports totalled nearly $24bn in 2022.After Trump’s announcement of across-the-board levies, Newsom said his administration would pursue new trade deals with international partners to exempt California from retaliatory tariffs. It also launched a campaign to encourage Canadian tourism to California, which has fallen dramatically in response to the Trump administration’s policies. Newsom called the effort a “sign of the times”.“We talk about own goals. We talk about stupidity,” he said of Trump’s pursuit of a global trade war. “This needs to be updated in the next Wikipedia or the next encyclopedia as a poster child for that.” More
A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that there was probable cause to hold Trump officials in criminal contempt for violating his temporary injunction that barred the use of the Alien Enemies Act wartime power to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.In a scathing 46-page opinion, James Boasberg, the chief US district judge for Washington, wrote that senior Trump officials could either return the people who were supposed to have been protected by his injunction, or face contempt proceedings.The judge also warned that if the administration tried to stonewall his contempt proceedings or instructed the justice department to decline to file contempt charges against the most responsible officials, he would appoint an independent prosecutor himself.“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” Boasberg wrote. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses have been satisfactory.”The threat of contempt proceedings marked a major escalation in the showdown over Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members, without normal due process, in his expansive interpretation of his executive power.It came one day after another federal judge, in a separate case involving the wrongful deportation of a man to El Salvador, said she would force the administration to detail what steps it had taken to comply with a US supreme court order compelling his return.In that case, US district judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to answer questions in depositions and in writing about whether it had actually sought to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was protected from being sent to El Salvador.Taken together, the decisions represented a developing effort by the federal judiciary to hold the White House accountable for its apparent willingness to flout adverse court orders and test the limits of the legal system.At issue in the case overseen by Boasberg is the Trump administration’s apparent violation of his temporary restraining order last month blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act – and crucially to recall planes that had already departed.The administration never recalled the planes and argued, after the fact, that they did not follow Boasberg’s order to recall the planes because he gave that instruction verbally and it was not included in his later written order.In subsequent hearings, lawyers for the Trump administration also suggested that even if Boasberg had included the directive in his written order, by the time he had granted the temporary restraining order, the deportation flights were outside US airspace and therefore beyond the judge’s jurisdiction.Boasberg excoriated that excuse and others in his opinion, writing that under the so-called collateral-bar rule, if a party is charged with acting in contempt for disobeying a court order, it cannot raise the possible legal invalidity of the order as a defense.“If Defendants believed – correctly or not – that the Order encroached upon the President’s Article II powers, they had two options: they could seek judicial review of the injunction but not disobey it, or they could disobey it but forfeit any right to raise their legal argument as a defense,” Boasberg wrote.Boasberg also rejected the administration’s claim that his authority over the planes disappeared the moment they left US airspace, finding that federal courts regularly restrain executive branch conduct abroad, even when it touches on national security matters.“That courts can enjoin US officials’ overseas conduct simply reflects the fact that an injunction … binds the enjoined parties wherever they might be; the ‘situs of the [violation], whether within or without the United States, is of no importance,’” Boasberg wrote.Boasberg added he was unpersuaded by the Trump administration’s efforts to stonewall his attempts to date to establish whether it knew it had deliberately flouted his injunction, including by invoking the state secrets doctrine to withhold basic information about when and what times the planes departed.“The Court is skeptical that such information rises to the level of a state secret. As noted, the Government has widely publicized details of the flights through social media and official announcements thereby revealing snippets of the information the Court seeks,” Boasberg wrote. More
When FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents descended recently on two homes owned by Xiaofeng Wang, a Chinese national and cybersecurity professor at Indiana University, many in the idyllic college town of Bloomington were shocked.In December, Wang had been questioned by his employers about allegedly receiving undisclosed funding from China on a project that also received US federal research grants. On the same day of the home raids, Wang was fired from his longstanding post at Indiana University over email – a move that goes against the university’s own policy.But Wang hasn’t been charged with any offence, and his lawyer says no criminal charges are pending.The incident has driven fear into the hearts of Bloomington’s Asian community of faculty and students who fear a political motivation.“I study at the computer science department, and I’ve overheard Chinese professors talking about how worried they are that something similar could happen them, too,” says a Chinese PhD student who came to Bloomington from Suzhou, Jiangsu province, last September and who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the issue.During the first Trump administration, the Department of Justice created the China Initiative in an effort to find and prosecute spies for Beijing working in US research and development sectors. At the time, it was criticized by rights groups for fueling racial profiling and violence against Asian Americans, and a review by the Biden administration saw the effort ended in 2022.Now as before, Trump has made targeting universities whose leadership and faculty he believes run against his own agenda a key element of his second term.For the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, what happened to Wang “brings chills to our spines”.“What is particularly troubling in this case is that Indiana University fired him and his wife without due process, presuming guilt instead of innocence,” Chen says.Chen, who has US and Chinese nationality, found himself charged by the Department of Justice for allegedly failing to disclose links to Chinese organizations on a grant application for a federally funded project, with just weeks remaining in Trump’s first term, in January 2021.The charges were dismissed a year later.“The investigations on Professor Wang and his firing creates huge fear among researchers of Chinese descent, especially students and postdoctorates from China. It is clear that such events, together with legislation and hostile rhetoric, are driving out talents. I learned that many Chinese students and postdoctorates here are considering leaving the US.”More students from China come to the US to study and research at third-level institutions than from any other country.The fear of Chinese spies operating in the US isn’t completely unfounded.A report released recently by US intelligence agencies found that China remains the top cyber threat to America, and many politicians on the right believe smaller colleges in low-key parts of the country such as the midwest could be used as gateways into the US by the Chinese Communist party.In October, five Chinese students at a college in Michigan were charged with spying on a military training camp where Taiwanese soldiers participate. This month, information on several Chinese students at Purdue University, also in Indiana, was sought by members of Congress, claiming national security interests, though no charges have been brought.But the vast majority of the estimated 300,000 Chinese academics and students in the US today are in the country to legitimately contribute to research and to learn, say experts who fear that Trump’s targeting of colleges deemed to be antisemitic may now be shifting to the midwest.Last month, the Department of Education named Indiana University Bloomington among 60 colleges under investigation for alleged antisemitic discrimination, a move that could result in funding cuts.It’s not only Chinese academics and students who could be affected.Universities in Illinois, Indiana and other heartland states are home to some of the largest Chinese student populations in the country.Nearly half of Urbana-Champaign’s combined population of 130,000 people in neighboring Illinois is made up of college students and staff. Nearly six thousand are students from China.In Bloomington, which has a population of under 80,000 people, close to 50,000 are students, with nearly 10% coming from overseas.Midwestern colleges and the communities around them are keen to attract international students and rely heavily on the money they bring with them; about 2,000 Chinese students enroll at Indiana University every year. International undergrad students are charged an average of $42,000 in tuition and fees, alongside $14,000 in housing and food, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the college and town.Over the years, these and other small university towns have come to rely on international students to prop up their economies.A couple of blocks west of the University of Indiana Bloomington campus, a grouping of Chinese, Korean and Asian eateries cater to the college’s large Asian community. The sidewalk in front of the Longfei Chinese restaurant is dotted with food signs written in Mandarin. The restaurant’s manager, however, says he believes that the political problems between Washington and Beijing have seen the number of Chinese students coming to the US – and through his doors – fall in recent years.The Chinese PhD student, who one recent morning is here grabbing lunch, says his student visa status allows him to stay in the US for up to five years, but he and his Chinese colleagues are worried that the Trump administration may cut that short.“I’m concerned with President Trump’s hostility against China and this kind of hostility may affect Chinese students and professors, and the funding that we get,” he says.“I’m concerned about the impact on my life.”Faculty at the department where Wang worked for more than two decades have called for Indiana University to revoke his dismissal. His profile page on the University’s website has been removed and college authorities have not commented on his firing.“Neither Prof Wang nor Ms Ma [his wife, who worked as a library analyst at the same university] have been arrested … further, there are no pending criminal charges as far as we are aware,” says Jason Covert, a lawyer at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, a firm representing Wang and Ma.“They look forward to clearing their names and resuming their successful careers at the conclusion of this investigation.”Covert would not say whether Wang planned to remain in the US. More
