Author: Akela Lacy

  • As Senate Republicans sprinted to pass the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” with their caucus strained over issues including staggering Medicaid cuts, clean energy, and cryptocurrency regulation, there was little debate over the billions of dollars the bill allocates for the nation’s cops and law enforcement.

    The bill, which passed 51-50 on Tuesday, includes major giveaways to policing and security efforts designed to fuel President Donald Trump’s deportation and surveillance regime. The wins range from tax reforms to make police overtime more lucrative to new grants administered by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. (Some of the funding is also being set aside for security at Trump’s homes, including at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.)

    While the legislative package has driven outcry from defenders of the social safety net and deficit hawks alike — it brings a projected $3.3 trillion bump to the national debt over the next decade — its push to ramp up police funding has met less opposition. Last month, Trump hosted leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s biggest police union, at the White House to mark their endorsement of his signature spending package.

    The FOP said it was endorsing Trump’s bill because of a provision that cuts federal taxes on overtime pay, which costs municipalities and their police departments millions of dollars in spending. Overtime usage tends to balloon as a result of increased policing and surveillance initiatives, especially in response to protests.

    During his June 5 visit to the White House, national FOP President Patrick Yoes told Trump that police have faced problems recruiting and retaining officers because when they’re forced to work overtime, they can’t keep all of the money they earn (because, like almost all legal income, they’re required to pay taxes on it). 

    “You’ve always been a steadfast supporter of the Fraternal Order of Police and law enforcement across this country,” Yoes said. “You made a promise that you were going to address overtime — a tax on overtime,” he said. “The one big new bill is certainly making good on that promise.”

    The overtime deduction, which would apply to workers who collect overtime besides police, is projected to cost the government about $90 billion in total tax revenues over the next four years.

    Similar tax cuts would apply by expanding the federal tax deductions people can claim based on their state and local taxes through a program known as SALT. The expansion makes it easier to deduct income taxes and, for homeowners, property taxes from a person’s federal filing. Praising the bill after the House of Representatives passed its version in early June, Yoes said the change appeals to his members because the current income cap “uniquely and unfairly” penalizes law enforcement officers who have to live in specific jurisdictions. 

    Because they’re based on income and property taxes, SALT deductions disproportionately benefit wealthier taxpayers. While the Senate had expressed some skepticism of the SALT expansion, its version of the bill ultimately included an even greater boost to the tax deduction than the House version.

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    In addition to easing the tax burden on police, the bill also includes billions of dollars for police to aid in surveillance and deportation efforts. It provides funding for state and local agencies to support operations by the Department of Homeland Security — which doesn’t stop at immigration enforcement. 

    The text would also allow DHS to fund state, local, and tribal security “and other costs” for major sporting events like the FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — setting aside $625 million for the former and $1 billion for the latter. Another subset of DHS grants for border security totals $10 billion. The bill also expands funding and grants — more than $3 billion each — under the Department of Justice for police to aid in Trump’s deportation machine.

    Through the State Homeland Security Grant program, the bill authorizes $500 million for state and local efforts to “detect, identify, track, or monitor threats” from unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, and $450 million for Operation Stonegarden, a program under the Federal Emergency Management Agency which supports “enhanced cooperation and coordination” with Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol, and police agencies “to improve overall border security.”

    As the Senate rushed to vote on the bill, those provisions appeared in danger: The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the State Homeland Security Grant program provisions for border security, immigration, and major event security did not comply with the chamber’s rules and may be removed or changed. But according to the last version of the bill publicized just an hour before the vote, the DHS grants remained in the text.

    “If these grants remain in the bill and it passes, you will start to see more local law enforcement participating in the kidnapping of innocent people off the street,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a group of former public defenders advising on criminal justice reform strategies. 

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    To power the deportation regime, the bill appropriates $3.3 billion to do things like hire immigration judges, prosecute immigrants, and compensate states and localities for incarcerating people for immigration authorities. Part of that $3.3 billion also boosts funding for police through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, which has long faced criticism from advocates for criminal justice reform for adding billions to the country’s budget for mass incarceration. Another $3.5 billion allocated under the DOJ is set aside for the attorney general to administer as she sees fit under the
    “Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide” fund, a reference to former President Joe Biden. 

    “This money isn’t intended to make anyone safer. It’s intended to break us.”

    It also adds $5 billion to the Bureau of Prisons over the next four years — and another $45 billion for immigrant detention. Another $1.17 billion would go to the Secret Service, including for performance, retention, and signing bonuses.

    “We are already watching horror shows with teachers, mothers, neighbors — people we know and love — getting arrested and put in terrible detention centers and deported,” Brand said. “It’s only going to get worse. This money isn’t intended to make anyone safer. It’s intended to break us.”

    The post Senate Passes Trump’s Big, Beautiful Boon for Police appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • “New York Is Not a democracy,” read a headline from The Atlantic earlier this month lamenting the city’s ranked-choice voting system ahead of the upcoming mayoral primary election. The statement rankled some observers, but it was largely true — just not because of ranked-choice voting. 

    A well-financed political machine is gearing up to topple New York Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani even if he beats former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for mayor. While Cuomo is heavily favored to win the election, a Mamdani victory appears closer than ever: The democratic socialist leads Cuomo in one of the latest polls ahead of the June 24 election.

    While the outcome would be a major accomplishment for New York City’s progressives and socialists, it would be far from the end of the road. Even if Cuomo loses on Tuesday — despite the $24.9 million the city’s billionaires, real estate tycoons, and former leaders have poured into a super PAC backing him — the disgraced former governor, like current New York City Mayor Eric Adams, plans to run in the general election on a third-party ballot line

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    That possibility sounds eerily familiar to those who watched what happened in Buffalo four years ago to socialist India Walton, who beat four-term incumbent Byron Brown in the city’s 2021 Democratic primary for mayor. Rather than concede, Brown ran a last-minute campaign backed by Republicans and real estate developers to get a ballot line and win the general election. He served as mayor until last year. 

    “If Mamdani was to win the Democratic Party primary for mayor, New York City will probably repeat something similar to what happened in heavily Democratic Buffalo in 2021,” said John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany, a statewide watchdog group. “Deep-pocketed business interests and the Democratic Party incumbency was shocked by Walton’s win and poured money and support into Brown’s winning general election campaign.” 

    The pool of money for an independent Cuomo campaign is indeed deep. Billionaire Israel fanatic Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have poured $9.1 million into Fix the City, making up more than a third of the funding for the Cuomo-backing PAC. Many of Cuomo’s deep-pocketed supporters seem to feel particular political ire for Mamdani over his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, triggering an entire news cycle about Mamdani’s thoughts on the protest cry “globalize the intifada.” Neither the Mamdani nor Cuomo campaigns immediately responded to requests for comment.

    Mamdani, who if elected would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, has been the target of Islamophobic harassment and bomb threats during the campaign. His success on Tuesday would almost certainly guarantee a bigger and stronger backlash from his political opponents in the general election. 

    “Everyone is very laser-focused on tomorrow. But I think that everyone knows that even if we win tomorrow, the fight’s not over until November,” said state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who spoke to The Intercept on the way to a canvassing shift for Mamdani on Monday evening. Brisport, another socialist state legislator, endorsed Mamdani in March. Still, Mamdani supporters have something that Walton’s campaign didn’t, Brisport said. 

    “I don’t think anybody on India Walton’s campaign expected that Byron Brown would launch a write-in campaign,” Brisport said. “Whereas we’ve known for some time that Andrew Cuomo was running in the general election, regardless of what happens.”

    According to Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York State Working Families Party, Mamdani’s campaign infrastructure far exceeds Walton’s. 

    “I think he’s redefining what’s possible in a large city,” she said. “And the apparatus is ready to engage and level up if they go into a general election.” 

    She said her party views Tuesday’s contest as the first big race since President Donald Trump won in 2024. If Mamdani loses, there’s a possibility that he could run on the Working Families Party line in the general election — though Gripper said the New York WFP has not decided whether they’ll run a candidate on their line in the general election and will make a decision after the final primary results come in.

    At that point, the groups backing Mamdani will take stock of the results, said Daniel Coates, political director at Make the Road Action, which endorsed Mamdani after New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

    “I don’t think anything is off the table in terms of strategies and actions that the Cuomo camp will play,” Coates said.

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    “On the one hand, it’s scary and it’s true that Bill Ackman and DoorDash and organizations and companies that just want to have a mayor that just does their bidding — you could see them dropping a lot of money, and Cuomo’s already put his ballot line together,” he added. “But sometimes the weight of your own money can weigh you down. I don’t think voters like the idea of buying an election.”

    Kaehny pointed to Bloomberg, Cuomo’s single largest donor. “Cuomo’s super wealthy contributors have signaled they will spend what it takes to defeat Mamdani in a general election rematch,” he said. “Like other Americans, New Yorkers can thank the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision for opening the floodgates of unlimited political spending and obliterating any concept of fairness in American democracy.”

    Billionaires are used to having a mayor and politicians who work for them, said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America. “We’re expecting them to fight us all the way. If he wins the primary, we’re not gonna rest or let up. We’re going to keep the fight on until the general. And if he wins the general, then we’re going to keep organizing and keep the struggle going well into his administration because that’s the only way that we can actually implement the agenda and change our politics.”

    Unless one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, New Yorkers won’t know who won the Democratic primary for a week: The New York City Board of Elections will need to run its ranked-choice voting algorithm, and that process is scheduled for July 1.

    If Mamdani makes it to the general election, centrists could potentially split four ways in the general between Cuomo, Adams, independent attorney Jim Walden, and Republican Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. 

    “The political establishment has totally failed the city,” Gordillo said. “Even though we expect a big onslaught of money spent against our movement, I think the fact that they have had no answers to the people of the city, that they’ve really failed to campaign on anything other than fear and the same old business, we’ll be able to defeat them.”

    Democrats have spent more time fighting progressives on the left than on fighting Republicans, according to Gripper. But that’s not new. “A victory by Zohran in the Democratic primary would be a seismic shift in politics and the election and how campaigns are run and won. Not just in New York City but across the nation,” she said. 

    “Even though it’s the mayor, it’s not really a local position. It’s a national position,” Gripper said. “We know that if Zohran wins, it will create a new narrative around what’s possible.” 

    The post How Andrew Cuomo Could Become NYC Mayor — Even if Zohran Mamdani Wins appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Harvard Divinity School broke precedent by refusing to publish a video of its commencement speech after a speaker went off-script to call attention to the perilous conditions in Gaza, The Intercept has learned.

    “There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide,” said Zehra Imam, who graduated from the Harvard Divinity School this spring and participated in the embattled Religion and Public Life program. Imam, who is Muslim, was speaking with two other students from Christian and Jewish faiths who had cleared a draft of their planned remarks with the school — and agreed that Imam should go off-script to address the ongoing genocide.

    “I center Palestine today, not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it,” Imam said. “Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for you to arrive. And you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in your living rooms until you are ready to meet its gaze.”

    Harvard did not publish a video of the speech on its website or YouTube page, as it did with commencement speeches in past years. When Imam and her co-speakers asked why, the school told them the decision was made due to “security concerns.” 

    The decision runs counter to the public perception that Harvard is crusading against President Donald Trump’s threats to cut university funding to crush speech, according to seven Harvard Divinity School students and staff who spoke to The Intercept. While the university has been publicly praised for fighting back against Trump, its efforts to censor Imam’s speech and wipe out the civic engagement she took part in have raised concerns among students and staff that the school is actually capitulating to pressure from the White House.

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    The school made a password-protected version of the speech temporarily available to people with a Harvard login, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept. But choosing not to release it publicly “feels to a lot of students suspicious and just contradictory,” said Perlei Toor, a second-year divinity school student. “That’s not what happened last year or the year before that.” 

    Behind the scenes, the school has been quietly dismantling the Religion and Public Life program from which Imam graduated. Until recently led by the Divinity School’s only Palestinian staff member, the program has drawn Trump’s ire — and criticism from some alumni, campus leaders, and students. 

    Imam ended her portion of the speech with a poem from a student in Gaza — one of several refugees to whom she offers poetry lessons via an organization she founded connecting U.S. students with students in refugee camps. She and her co-speakers received a standing ovation. 

    “I had a dream / I went back home / slept in my bed / felt warmth again,” she read. “I had a dream / My eyes forgot the blood, the loss, the patience … My nose forgot the smoke smell, the deaths, the corpse rotten … My body skipped what I had lived.”

    The suppression of Imam’s speech capped off a chaotic year for the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program. As of last month, Harvard had pushed out the program’s three leaders, canceled a class, suspended one of its initiatives, and cut most of its staff.

    The program itself is still relatively new: Harvard launched Religion and Public Life in late 2020, following worldwide protests against police brutality to focus on “educating leaders to understand the civic consequences of religion, in service of building a just world at peace.” During a time of uncertainty, the program would “shape our character and trajectory both in the years to come as well as in our tumultuous present.”

    After the October 7 attacks, the program’s troubled trajectory began to take shape. Program leaders, faculty, and staff sent a newsletter urging affiliates of the Divinity School to “challenge single story narratives” that justified retaliation against Palestinians. Harvard Divinity School Dean David F. Holland disavowed the statement, as the Harvard Crimson reported, saying it did not represent the school and described it as “unproductive.” 

    The following year, the group Students Against Antisemitism sued Harvard over claims that the school had failed to stop antisemitism on campus. The suit criticized the Religion and Public Life program for hosting a screening of the film “Israelism,” which documents changing Jewish attitudes toward Israel, and took aim at the program’s flagship course, which took students on a trip to Israel and the West Bank. Harvard agreed to a confidential settlement in the suit last month. 

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    Last May, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance released a report on campus antisemitism that took further aim at the letter program faculty sent after the October 7 attacks. It also criticized the program’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which ran the flagship course and examines how religion can promote peace in situations of violent conflict and mass displacement. The initiative, the report claims, “appears to focus entirely on the Palestinians.” 

    According to Toor, the second-year student, this framing is emblematic of misconceptions about the Religion and Public Life program. News stories and discourse about the program often miss “just how much Religion and Public Life does besides Palestine and Israel,” she told The Intercept.

    The program provides opportunities for students to connect religious studies to the public sphere through tracks in government, journalism, and humanitarian aid, among other topics, and to take on related internships. It also plans more than half of the school’s programming and events.

    Late last year, facing political pressure and security concerns, program leaders decided not to take students on the trip to Israel and the West Bank or offer the flagship course this spring. Shortly after, the departures of several program leaders were announced. In January, Assistant Dean Diane Moore, who built the program and taught the course, announced she would leave the program early. The next day, Assistant Dean Hussein Rashid announced he would leave the program at the end of the academic year because of what he described as the school’s anti-Muslim bias and a “hostile environment to Muslims and Arabs.” 

    Moore did not respond to a request for comment. Rashid declined to comment on the record. 

    According to Toor, the program has been a necessary home for people of all faiths.

    “Because of the diversity of the staff and because of the range of topics that students were able to explore,” Toor said, “especially since the inauguration of Trump, [the program] has been a real space of ministerial comfort.” 

    But in April, Harvard’s much-anticipated report on antisemitism presented a narrative closer to the one from the Jewish Alumni Alliance. Released just after the school said it would not comply with a letter with Trump’s demands, the April report was a result of the efforts of Trump’s antisemitism task force. The school had just pushed out leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and ended its partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank. 

    The new report identified the Religion and Public Life program as one of several offenders that contributed to the “frequency and intensity of treatment of Israel as an oppressor state and the Palestinians as an oppressed people in courses and public events throughout the campus.” This, according to the report, was “indicative of institutional bias and hostility.” 

    ”While the program was publicly launched with what seemed like a broad mandate to explore the intersection of religion and various aspects of public life, in practice, it focused heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presenting a perspective widely perceived as consistently anti-Israeli and aligned very narrowly with a strand of pro-Palestinian politics,” the report read. “This narrow focus on this exceptionally polarizing topic appears to have stemmed from the decision, made soon after RPL’s founding, to center its programming around a multi-year case study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

    The program focuses on a wide range of topics like the economy, democracy and voting rights, education, and humanitarian aid, said Toor. Topics related to Israel and Palestine are a fraction of the work it does on campus. 

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    The program continued to shrink, this time with cuts. Shortly after the report was published, the school began notifying staff and other program leaders — including its only Israeli professor — that their contracts would not be renewed due to budget cuts. The school also announced it was pausing the program’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. 

    One of the staff cut was Hilary Rantisi, the program’s Palestinian American associate director who co-taught the flagship course.

    “They terminated the only Palestinian employee that they had,” said Preston Iha, a first-year student in the Masters of Divinity program. “Which is, again, signaling and makes people wonder who is really welcome at a school that claims to welcome everybody.” 

    Last month, the day after the commencement, the school notified program staff about additional cuts. Four staff members’ jobs were eliminated, and a fifth staffer was given a three-month extension of their contract, which is set to end June 30. A new program director, Terrence L. Johnson, will take over at the end of June — but students and staff told The Intercept it’s not clear what the program will consist of after its staff was gutted. 

    “It seems like, yes, there could be budget cuts,” said Toor. “But for you to target one program so specifically, and for that program to also be heavily mentioned in the antisemitism report and the Islamophobia report, it seems like too much of a coincidence.”

    Imam, the commencement speaker, was one of three students who told The Intercept the Religion and Public Life program was one of the major reasons she attended Harvard in the first place. 

    “It’s very, very frustrating to see this censorship and attack on academic freedom,” Imam said. 

    Shir Lovett-Graff, a Jewish spiritual leader who graduated from the Divinity School last year, said the attacks on the program were part of a long-running pattern at Harvard.

    “Far before the Trump administration targeted Harvard and any university, far before Trump was elected into office for his second term, Harvard itself, internally, has a legacy of cracking down on pro-Palestine voices,” said Lovett-Graff, who helped found the student group Jews for Liberation, the largest Jewish student organization at Harvard Divinity School. 

    “It is not out of the ordinary or unexpected in any way for Harvard to crack down on pro-Palestine or even Israel-critical spaces on campus. That is part of Harvard’s legacy,” Lovett-Graff said. They said they were grateful the program had been “a place of connection for Jewish students, staff, alumni and faculty who are not represented by the Jewish mainstream of Harvard and beyond.” 

    Toor, the second-year student, told The Intercept she feared that with the program gutted, students would lose a comforting space on campus.

    “Students have been flocking to the office just to hang out and vent and have a safe space where they could be a person of color, where they can be Muslim, where they can be an international student in times when that is really needed and has felt really limited,” Toor said. “This is a home that’s being lost for a lot of students.” 

    “It’s definitely sending the wrong message for Harvard Divinity School,” said Iha, the first-year student, “which touts itself as being a moral center, to capitulate to these really immoral demands.“

    Imam said given everything she’d seen Harvard do to gut the program and censor speech on Palestine, she was concerned that the school would not approve her speech if she showed them what she planned to say about Gaza. 

    “Having seen everything in my time at Harvard Divinity School, I was worried that if I had shared those exact things in my speech and submitted that version, that I would not have been allowed to actually share what I wanted to,” Imam said. “I wanted Gaza to have the last word. I wanted to center Palestine.”

    The post A Harvard Commencement Speaker Mentioned Gaza. The School Refused to Publish Her Speech. appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • It may come as little surprise that President Donald Trump’s administration is benefitting the wealthy. Trump’s plan to fund $5 trillion in tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich relies on cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in services for working people, including Medicaid. 

    But just how billionaires and corporate oligarchs stand to benefit from Trump’s policies — namely his deportation and surveillance regime — is outlined in detail in a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy Action, the campaign arm of the nonprofit advocacy group.

    The usual characters won’t shock anyone: major Trump campaign donors like Elon Musk (whose recent rift with Trump may not last), Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, or Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. Trump wants to deregulate sectors from artificial intelligence to the environment and labor, and cut corporate taxes for Bezos and other billionaires. But other corporate executives are already quietly enriching themselves on Trump’s policies.

    “Trump’s ‘oligarchs’ are billionaires who are attempting to control political decisions in order to increase their wealth,” the report said.

    Take private prison executive and millionaire George Zoley, an immigrant from Greece who founded GEO Group, the nation’s biggest private prison and immigrant detention company. During an earnings call in November, Zoley, a registered Republican, said Trump’s policies presented an “unprecedented opportunity” for the company to double its services. The company has also massively expanded its work in surveillance technology to assist in deportations. 

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    Zoley’s comments were prescient. GEO Group has doubled its stock value since Trump’s election. The company claims to be the largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was awarded a $1 billion contract by ICE in February to open the largest ICE detention center on the East Coast. The company runs the Louisiana immigration detention center where Mahmoud Khalil is currently being held. GEO Group is also poised to reap profits after Congress passed the Laken Riley Act. The company has received $9 million in state and local subsidies over the last 17 years. GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

    GEO Group is just one of several companies profiting off of the Trump administration’s efforts to fast-track deportations and beef up surveillance capacities. Of course, companies like GEO Group, Palantir, and Amazon also saw major profits under former President Joe Biden, but Trump has opened new doors for the country’s corporate oligarchs.

    “Trump’s presidency is a vehicle for billionaires to loot the government and line their own pockets, while working people bear the cost,” Popular Democracy co-executive directors Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper said in a statement. “These cuts to Medicare, housing, SNAP benefits, and immigrant protections aren’t accidents — they’re part of a calculated scheme to turn public suffering into private profit.”

    The administration has emboldened corporate executives to exert their already-strong political power. More than 10 billionaires have positions in the Trump administration, and his Cabinet is the richest in history. At least seven other ultra-wealthy Trump donors and corporate executives are pulling political levers, the report notes.

    Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, another major Trump donor, is pushing to ease regulations on corporations and gut protections for renters. Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, who has fought efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, is set to benefit from a Trump order to delay negotiations. Harold G. Hamm, founder and chair of the fossil fuel company Continental Resources, was part of Trump’s transition team and has worked to advance the interests of the oil and gas industry in the White House. He has also worked closely with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is pushing to open public lands to drilling that would benefit Hamm’s company. 

    “In a representative democracy, elected officials are supposed to respond to the priorities and interests of the people,” the report said. “Today, the U.S. is functioning as an oligarchy: a government where a small group of powerful, wealthy people are calling the shots.”

    The post Meet the Billionaires Profiting the Most From Trump’s Draconian Policies appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Cities and towns throughout the United States are expected to see growing protests this weekend against President Donald Trump’s deportation regime and aggressive tactics to repress and intimidate protesters. After witnessing the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of tear gas, bean-bag munitions, and rubber bullets at recent protests, anyone planning to attend demonstrations this weekend likely knows they could encounter police aggression.

    But not all police forces opt for the same tactics — and protesters can keep themselves safer if they know what to expect. 

    Different cities’ police departments are, in theory, constrained by local and state laws, though that doesn’t mean police always follow them. Take California, where legislators passed a law in 2021 prohibiting police from shooting rubber bullets and pepper spray at protesters, except in response to a “reasonable,” objective threat to life or of serious injury. The LAPD still fired rubber bullets at protesters last weekend, and there’s little sign they’ll refrain in the days to come. 

    While it’s impossible to predict how exactly a police department or federal force will respond to a protest, past precedent and legal limitations can help demonstrators prepare to keep themselves safe. Beyond Los Angeles, The Intercept reviewed police practices in six major cities where protests are expected this weekend, plus best practices for attendees to defend themselves.

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    Rubber bullets are just one type of what’s called “less-than-lethal” ammunition — a misnomer, according to legal advocates who have represented protesters severely injured by police using them. Police might also shoot bean bags or water cannons, which are similarly not supposed to kill the person they hit, but can still inflict serious injury. Several cities temporarily banned tear gas, another popular choice, after protests against police brutality in 2020. It’s banned in war, but not for police responding to public demonstrations and showed up in response to recent protests against ICE and earlier protests against the genocide in Gaza. 

    Other departments rely more on tactics like kettling, when police encircle protesters and keep them from dispersing, often used in concert with curfews, which give law enforcement a pretext for making arrests for people who don’t comply, or are physically barred by police from doing so.

    “The key really no matter where you are or what you’re doing is situational awareness,” said Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel to the National Press Photographers Association. “When you start to see officers on bikes encircling you, you need to have probably thought of this before, but certainly at that point, look for a place to exit.”

    Osterreicher is also a uniform reserve sheriff’s deputy in Erie County, New York. He has trained police departments around the country in how to uphold constitutional rights, and his trainings have helped shape guidelines for how police should interact with the press. But in the event that police don’t follow those guidelines, Osterreicher said, press and protesters need to know how to protect themselves. 

    “I do understand the challenges of law enforcement, but I understand also that I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. The last time I looked, the First Amendment was still part of the Bill of rights,” he said. “So it’s really important that police understand you know what they should and shouldn’t be doing.” 

    Knowing your rights is essential, Osterreicher said. But knowledge won’t keep tear gas out of your eyes. For that, protest attendees should have the right protective gear — and know how and when to use it.

    Protective Equipment

    If you have a gas mask, you need to be sure you know how it works, how to put it on, and that it fits properly. “If it’s not fitting properly, it’s going to be worse getting gas inside the mask than not having a mask at all,” Osterreicher said. If you’re using eye goggles, be sure they meet safety standards and won’t shatter if police hit them

    Other gear, like ballistic helmets, can protect from projectiles — but eye-catching combat gear can cut both ways. Protest attendees should be aware of how they may be perceived by police. A gas mask or a combat helmet may protect you — but it could also make you a target, Osterreicher said. 

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    Journalists in particular should find ways to distinguish themselves from other protesters, he added, like not wearing all black. “You really need to figure out a way to be safe, but distinguish yourself,” Osterreicher said. 

    To get the best sense of how to prepare, we took a look at precedents for police repression tactics across the country.

    Chicago

    Chicago Police have been notorious for using aggressive tactics to police protests for decades, going back to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Ahead of the 2024 DNC, as protesters objecting to the United States’ arming Israel to commit genocide in Gaza prepared to fill the streets, Chicago’s inspector general warned that the police department’s crowd-control tactics like kettling, use of pepper spray, and general lack of knowledge of First Amendment rights could cause “escalating tensions” and violations of protesters’ constitutional rights. 

    “Such use of these tactics could also escalate police-crowd tensions. Indiscriminate use of containment tactics could trap both persons conducting crimes along with peaceful protestors, instigating resistant behavior from individuals who might have otherwise cooperated with police instructions,” the inspector general’s report noted. Police arrested more than 70 people at a demonstration outside of the Israeli Consulate during the convention, including several journalists.

    Philadelphia

    Police in Philadelphia tend to be quick to attack protesters one-on-one. Videos of Philadelphia Police pushing protesters to the ground and beating them with batons this week at anti-ICE protests went viral. Another video showed a police officer kneeling on the neck of a protester wearing a keffiyeh — a tactic prohibited in the city after 2020 protests. Police also reportedly threw bikes at protesters on Tuesday. Philadelphia police have also historically used flash-bang grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and bean-bag rounds to disperse crowds. 

    With more protests expected this weekend, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said the police would maintain public safety and order during protests. District Attorney Larry Krasner said protesters would be protected but that those who violated the law would face consequences.

    New York City

    The New York City Police department settled a lawsuit in 2023 to reform protest tactics after its response to 2020 protests against police brutality. The settlement set up a system to reform the department’s protest response by reducing the number of officers sent to respond to protests, prioritizing deescalation, and banning the practice of kettling. The settlement also provided a pathway to enforce limits on the use of pepper spray, batons, and bicycle strikes that the department had not previously followed.

    Related

    NYPD to Pay Largest Protester Settlement Ever for Abuses During George Floyd Uprising

    That means those tactics should — in theory — be less prevalent in New York. The NYPD is less likely to use tear gas against protesters than police in many other major cities, but protest attendees should still be aware of their surroundings and maintain an exit plan for any situation. NYPD officers, too, are known for their long history of brutalizing protesters and using kettling tactics to trap demonstrators. A new bill introduced in March would bar the NYPD from deploying the militarized Strategic Response Group to protests and ban or restrict tactics including kettling, tear gas, pepper spray, and acoustic weapons — but it hasn’t been passed so far. 

    Seattle

    The Seattle Police Department has been known to use pepper spray and tear gas against protesters. They have also used long-range acoustic devices to communicate orders to crowds. But since protests in 2020, the use of tear gas has been effectively banned. Police are only supposed to use pepper spray or balls if an individual poses a threat, and it must be reported to a supervisor. 

    This week, Seattle’s chief of police said he expected to be arrested because he supports protesters’ and residents’ First Amendment rights. 

    Atlanta

    Atlanta Police officers demonstrated a unique form of violence and aggression against protesters in their response to protests against Cop City, an 85-acre police training complex for which the city of Atlanta destroyed large swaths of its forest. As demonstrators objected to the destruction in 2023, police carried out a multi-agency raid and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, shooting him at least 57 times. Atlanta Police also attacked protesters with garden tools after they tried to plant trees. 

    Police in Altanta used tear gas against protesters during campus protests against the genocide in Gaza last year. The Atlanta Police Department said that while other responding agencies used rubber bullets, their officers did not, though it did confirm the use of chemical irritants. Atlanta police have said they do not train officers in kettling, though they’ve been accused of kettling protesters in past demonstrations. 

    Houston

    During 2020 protests, Houston’s police chief said the department would avoid using tear gas or rubber bullets on protesters, and the city was one of the few to not have a curfew imposed as protests began— although the National Guard was deployed to the city in 2020. Houston was the only major city in Texas where police did not use rubber bullets or tear gas against protesters in 2020 — but they did use pepper spray, and one officer on horseback trampled a protester. Officers are also supposed to get permission from the chief to use tear gas or rubber bullets. 

    Last year, Houston Mayor John Whitmire called on police to crack down on protesters against the genocide in Gaza who demonstrated outside of his house. Whitmire has rejected federal aid to manage protests this weekend and applauded organizers for working with Houston Police to prepare. But Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was the first governor to request National Guard assistance in quelling the recent anti-ICE protests, deploying the troops throughout Texas on Thursday. Police responding to protests this week in Austin and Dallas used tear gas and pepper spray against demonstrators.

    What About the Feds?

    The deployment of federal troops in U.S. cities has shocked observers and drawn fears of martial law — but in many cases, it’s local police departments that have the most prominent role in repressing protests. Still, it’s important to know if federal agents in your city will appear at protests alongside police this weekend.

    Several other major cities anticipating protests this weekend have received notice that federal agents are being deployed. ICE is also reportedly planning to deploy teams in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, and Northern Virginia ahead of expected protests.

    The post How to Stay Safe Protesting ICE — and What to Expect From Cops in Your City appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Seventy-five House Democrats voted on Monday in support of a resolution that praised President Donald Trump’s deportation regime.

    The vote came as Trump deployed more than 1,700 National Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to crush protests against increased U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and mass arrests.

    Sponsored by Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., a pro-Israel Republican, the bulk of the resolution was dedicated to condemning the attack last month in Boulder, Colorado, against pro-Israel demonstrators calling for the release of hostages in Israel.

    Tucked into the text was a line praising ICE, expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.”

    While some Democrats are busy joining Republican colleagues to praise ICE, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is seeking to pass a law that holds police accountable for violence against protesters. Her bill, introduced in late May, would apply penalties to law enforcement for using force in response to a demonstration.

    “Now, more than ever, it’s important that we’re doing everything we can to protect Americans’ right to free speech and peaceful protest,” Omar said. “That’s why I introduced legislation to make law enforcement violence against protesters a federal crime.”

    The military response to the protests is not just about immigration, said Omar, but represents another step in Trump’s efforts to crush dissent.  

    “In my district and across the country, we’re seeing the Trump Administration use militarized force to silence, intimidate, and brutalize, not just protestors for exercising their First Amendment right, but also members of the press,” Omar said in a statement to The Intercept. “This appears to be part of a broader more sinister and deeply un-American agenda to surveil and criminalize individuals for their political views.”

    While the bill praising ICE got 75 votes from Democrats and 205 Republicans, with seven co-sponsors, Omar’s bill has only garnered three co-sponsors. Another resolution Omar introduced late last month that condemns police brutality, especially in response to protests, has no cosponsors.

    Of the handful of bills related to protests introduced in Congress this session, the vast majority are aimed at increasing penalties for protesters; restricting people convicted of federal or state crimes in relation to protests from receiving federal student aid; and designating some forms of protest as domestic terrorism. Few bills, on the other hand, seek to introduce new protections. There are currently only two Democratic bills this session related to protecting protesters — both have been introduced by Omar.

    Even when bills seek to shore up protesters’ rights, some are aimed at defending Trump supporters, not protesters in general. One from a far-right member of Congress seeks to bar detention for nonviolent political protesters in the name of a man who participated in the January 6 attacks on the Capitol and, following his conviction, died by suicide in custody.

    Omar is one of several progressive members of Congress who denounced Trump’s use of state force to quash dissent and affirmed the rights of protesters. On Monday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, called Trump’s actions a distraction and described them as illegal and authoritarian.

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    LAPD Won’t Do Immigration Enforcement — But Will Shoot You With Rubber Bullets for Protesting ICE

    “Trump’s threats have nothing to do with keeping people safe — it’s about political theater. He’s scapegoating immigrants to distract from the GOP’s real agenda: ripping health care away from millions to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-rich,” Casar said in a statement. “We stand with Angelenos, and we stand with immigrant families everywhere. The President must return command of the National Guard to Governor Newsom.”

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said the arrival of the military in Los Angeles was “evidence of our country’s descent into fascism.”

    “It’s an abuse of power and a dangerous escalation that will only destabilize our communities,” Tlaib wrote. “I stand with those defending our immigrant neighbors and our fundamental rights.”

    Denouncing Whose Violence?

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called on protesters to remain nonviolent.

    “Dr. King defeated racist government officials & ended segregation through disciplined non-violent resistance,” Sanders tweeted. “Defeating Trumpism, oligarchy & authoritarianism requires that same level of discipline. Violent protests are counterproductive and play right into Trump’s playbook.”

    Comments like Sanders’s that blame protesters for violence justify Trump’s response, said California attorney Thomas Harvey, who has worked with student protesters demonstrating against Israel’s war on Gaza.

    Related

    LA Protesters Aren’t Inviting Violent Authoritarianism, They’re Mobilizing to Stop It

    Trump has “falsely characterized resistance to these ICE abductions as insurrection and rebellion to justify federalizing the National Guard in CA and authorized Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth to use the military on U.S. soil anywhere he decides,” Harvey said. “To make matters worse, the armchair quarterbacks in the Democratic Party and punditry, most of whom have never organized a protest or dealt with the kind of state violence we’re seeing today, dare to admonish protesters for engaging in what they call violence.”

    Sanders’s comments were “incorrect and completely ahistorical,” Harvey added.

    “King himself changed his views on violence, especially riots, as the Civil Rights Movement went on and the U.S. government resisted meaningful change. But any serious person knows that civil rights protesters fought the police in the streets in the 1960s, just as anti-ICE kidnapping protesters are willing to do today,” he said.

    People protesting in Los Angeles responded to an already violent situation, said Ricci Sergienko, an attorney and organizer in Los Angeles.

    “Is our current situation ‘peace’? Why would anyone be shocked at this response by the people?”

    “Our current situation is a complete provocation by the state — tearing families apart and throwing people into concentration camps is violence,” Sergienko said. “They are kidnapping people and locking them in the LA federal detention center basement without food or water. This, on top of the violence already faced against every day Angelenos. From seven unhoused people dying on the streets every day to rent and evictions to continuous police harassment. How do you expect people to act? Is our current situation ‘peace’? Why would anyone be shocked at this response by the people?”

    The protests in Los Angeles should come as no surprise given its history of mass action, Sergienko said. Riots broke out in 1992 after police brutally beat Rodney King. In 1965, the Watts Rebellion came in response to widespread racist police abuse. Protests in 2020 against police brutality and in 2024 against Israel’s genocide in Gaza are part of that same thread, he said.

    “There is a long history of this kind of action in Los Angeles,” he said. “Politicians don’t dictate how people in this city are going to respond.”

    The post As 75 Democrats Vote to Praise ICE, Ilhan Omar Wants to Hold Police Accountable for Protest Abuses appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • A poll sent to constituents in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s district has the hallmarks of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s strategy. 

    The poll, sent earlier this month, first ran through the kinds of questions typical for a campaign testing the waters. The survey started by posing positive and negative questions about Omar and Ryan Winkler, a Democrat and former Minnesota state representative, on run-of-the-mill political grounds: how would voters rate Omar’s job performance based on her voting record on affordable housing and healthcare, or Winkler’s record on minimum wage and private prison legislation?

    Screenshot
    Screenshots of survey questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar and former State Rep. Ryan Winkler The Intercept

    Then the poll tipped its hand. In a series of questions about “statements critics might make about Ilhan Omar,” the survey described Omar as “one of the most anti-Israel members of Congress,” cited her voting record against a resolution that condemned the October 7 attacks without mentioning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians, and outlined her opposition to arms sales to Israel, then asked respondents to indicate how concerned this information makes them feel.

    Then it asked respondents whether Winkler being backed by “a right-wing, pro-Israel group that is funded by Trump-supporting billionaires and has endorsed dozens of Republican members of Congress who support Trump and his MAGA agenda” raises any concerns. 

    Screenshot
    Screenshots of survey questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar and former State Rep. Ryan Winkler The Intercept

    Screenshots of the survey viewed by the Intercept showed no clear indication of who paid for the poll. Political operators familiar with AIPAC tacitcs, however, see the poll as a sign that AIPAC is laying the groundwork for challenging Omar in the midterm elections next year.

    The group typically tests the waters by fielding polls before they commit to a race. By asking voters how they feel about Winkler even after getting the negative message that he is backed by a “right-wing, pro-Israel group” — a group like AIPAC — the group can learn whether backing him would do more harm than good in the district, and how much ground it would have to make up if voters viewed such a fact negatively.

    “This is absolutely what they do,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which has backed candidates who are critical of U.S. military support for Israel, including Omar. 

    “They come into these districts early and poll the candidates they’ve already been talking to, that they’re already interested in, which in this case is seemingly Ryan Winkler, so they can take it back to their donors and ask for millions of dollars,” he said. “This is absolutely their playbook.”

    A source familiar with the race who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity confirmed from multiple sources that AIPAC is planning to be active in targeting Omar this cycle and has been in talks with Winkler who was reportedly waiting on the results of an AIPAC poll to make his decision.

    Winkler, AIPAC, and United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Related

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    The survey is the first public sign that AIPAC still has its eye on ousting progressive members of Congress who criticize U.S. military funding for Israel and Israeli human rights abuses in Palestine. AIPAC spent more than $100 million on primaries last cycle, including more than $25 million to oust Squad members Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The spending came from United Democracy Project and AIPAC’s regular political action committee, AIPAC PAC. In the 2020 cycle, AIPAC, endorsed more than 100 Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

    “Our district has never been for sale. Special interest groups, including AIPAC, have spent millions trying to unseat me,” Omar said in a statement to The Intercept.

    “If what AIPAC was lobbying for was truly popular, they wouldn’t need to spend millions to smear those they disagree with.”

    “If what AIPAC was lobbying for was truly popular, they wouldn’t need to spend millions to smear those they disagree with. Voters in my district want to see leaders who are fighting to get big money out of politics, not leaders who want to see our elections turned into auctions. I have proudly earned the support of my constituents every election and plan to do so again by fighting for the people I represent, not special interests backed by Republican money.”

    After its victories last cycle, AIPAC is revamping its efforts to remove every member of Congress who is critical of Israel, Andrabi of Justice Democrats said. 

    “That’s the Congress that Citizens United has been building for a decade and a half now,” Andrabi said.

    “A spineless Congress that only does the bidding of billionaires and corporate super PACs. I think we are seeing this cycle especially just how fed up voters are with that sort of Congress,” he said. “Democrats are more unpopular in Congress than they ever have been, and it’s because people see them as more dedicated to the bottom lines of their billionaire donors than to the livelihoods and liberties of their constituents — that’s because they see how much money is being spent in these primaries.”

    “This is not just about Israel and Palestine,” Andrabi continued. “It’s really about being able to control politicians and make them do what you want. We should be opposing any lobby from being able to do that.” 

    AIPAC typically runs polling in districts before it jumps into a race. Last cycle, the group officially stayed out of the Democratic primary challenge against Rep. Summer Lee, but The Intercept reported that AIPAC had tried and failed to recruit two candidates to challenge Lee. AIPAC was reportedly in contact with Bhavini Patel, who eventually decided to run against Lee, but did not officially back her. 

    Part of AIPAC’s strategy is to attack candidates who are critical of Israel on other points — like claiming that Omar is antisemitic or criticizing her for calling to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Both of those claims appeared in the survey.

    None of the survey questions specifically asked about voters’ own support for Israel’s war on Gaza, a ceasefire, or U.S. military support for Israel, both of which a growing number of Democratic voters oppose. 

    “AIPAC’s number-one requirement for endorsing a candidate is how empty of a vessel can this empty suit really be?”

    There’s a reason those questions weren’t in the survey, Andrabi said. The survey described Omar as “one of the most anti-Israel members of Congress” and criticized her for voting against a resolution that condemned the October 7 attacks without mentioning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians. 

    “AIPAC’s number-one requirement for endorsing a candidate is how empty of a vessel can this empty suit really be?” Andrabi said. “One consistency we can see amongst recruited primary challengers from AIPAC is they are people who don’t stand for anything, don’t believe in anything, and are most willing to be bought and sold by corporate lobbies and right-wing super PACs.” 

    Other questions in the survey that nodded to AIPAC’s potential involvement painted Omar as antisemitic and asked how constituents felt about Omar’s “extreme positions.” 

    “Even after being rebuked by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders for her antisemitic language, Ilhan Omar has continued to take extreme positions and opposed legislation that aims to right growing anti-semitism in this country,” the survey said. (The question referred to Democrats who attacked Omar after she criticized spending by the pro-Israel lobby in U.S. elections.) Then, the survey asked respondents to rate how concerned they were about Omar as a candidate.

    This is not the first time AIPAC has explored a primary challenge against Omar. During her primary challenge in 2022, AIPAC funneled $350,000 to a group backing her challenger, Don Samuels. The money was not reported until after the race. Pro-Israel donors backed Samuels in another challenge against Omar last cycle, The Intercept reported. 

    The post Is AIPAC Coming After Ilhan Omar? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Six universities received letters from Congress in March asking them to turn over information on programs where Chinese students participate and work. Now, academic workers speaking through their unions are demanding that their schools reject calls to turn over information on the students and faculty.

    The demand for information on Chinese students is part of a growing attack by the Trump administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill against universities in the U.S. The congressional focus on Chinese students in particular comes against the backdrop of rising of Sinophobia and racism against Chinese Americans under the guise of criticism of the Chinese government, said a scholar who focuses on science and technology in U.S.–China relationships.

    “This issue has been weaponized by the national security establishment in the U.S. — an issue of civil liberties is being treated through the means and lens of a great power rivalry and the means and lens of national security,” said Yangyang Chen, a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. “That is being further used to victimize the members of the same community in the name of protecting them.”

    The letters demanding information about the Chinese students came from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, chaired by Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich.

    Describing the student visa program as a “Trojan horse for Beijing,” the committee called on the universities to provide information on all the schools that Chinese students at their institution previously attended; sources of tuition funding; what kind of research Chinese students are conducting; a list of programs that include Chinese participants and their sources of funding; and a list of labs and research initiatives where Chinese students work.

    The committee also requested a country-by-country breakdown of applicants, admittances, and enrollees at each university.

    The letters were sent to Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, and the University of Southern California. Universities have said that the letters did not request information on individuals but rather on aggregate statistics. Some schools have issued statements that they would act in accordance with privacy protections for students. (The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Chen, the Yale scholar, said, “This is an infringement of the Chinese students and scholars’ civil liberties.”

    “A Dangerous Precedent”

    While many universities — especially well-heeled elite institutions — have faced criticisms for failing to aid their international students, pushback against powerful forces in Washington continues to grow. In the case of the Chinese students, academic workers are hoping universities will show fortitude in staving off congressional Republicans.

    On Wednesday, a coalition of 21 academic worker unions signed an open letter to executives and trustees at their schools raising concerns about the risks facing Chinese students and demanding that schools refuse to provide any information on Chinese students, faculty, or post-doctoral scholars to the House committee.

    “Complying with these letters’ requests would not only contribute to demonizing Chinese nationals, but also set a dangerous precedent for victimizing any group arbitrarily labeled as a threat,” they wrote. “At a time when the Trump administration is targeting international faculty, students, and academic workers, standing fast to strong principles of fairness, due process and academic freedom is more important than ever.”

    “Blaming China has become a bipartisan strategy.”

    “These letters are part of a broader escalation of anti-Chinese sentiment that has intensified with rising U.S.-China tensions,” said Valentina Dallona, political director for the nonprofit Justice Is Global, which helped organize the letter. “As U.S. policymakers grapple with what may be the end of the neoliberal order and the shifting balance of global power, blaming China has become a bipartisan strategy. This scapegoating not only fuels discrimination but also jeopardizes international research partnerships that are crucial for addressing global challenges.”

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    Schools have so far complied with the requests, according to statements from universities in response to inquiries from The Intercept and accounts from graduate students.

    The University of Southern California downplayed the implications of the request, said Daniel Delgado, a historian at the school and member of a graduate student union organized under the auspices of the United Auto Workers. The school implied that the information requested in the letter is typical or publicly available, Delgado said.

    “That doesn’t address the core problem, which is the targeting of Chinese students and use of this war-mongering to create fear and to target Chinese international workers,” he said. “That’s what I think they’re trying to basically ignore by downplaying the significance of this information request.”

    The University of Maryland has not told students if the school will voluntarily provide information to government entities looking to target individuals, said Rose Ying, a graduate student at Maryland and an organizer with the university’s graduate student union.

    Maryland administrators have said they won’t work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless they have a judicial warrant — which is signed by a judge based on probable cause indicating a crime, whereas administrative warrants are issued by ICE itself without a judge’s review.

    “But we are trying to get them to talk about information requests more broadly,” she said. “If this committee comes back and says, ‘Hey, we actually want a list of individuals’ — would they give over that information?”

    A spokesperson for the University of Maryland said they turned over information in accordance with federal and state law by the deadline of April 25. In a statement to The Intercept, university spokesperson Katie Lawson said, “It is our understanding that the request did not seek personally identifiable information.”

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    A spokesperson for Carnegie Mellon said the school had responded to the committee’s inquiry but did not answer questions about what kind of data it turned over.

    In a March statement, Stanford said the committee had requested aggregate information not specific to individuals. “Stanford will continue working to support our students and also to fulfill our legal obligations in protecting individual student privacy,” the university said, noting that it would “assure the security and integrity of the research environment.”

    In response to questions, Stanford University spokesperson Luisa Rapport pointed to the March statement and said the school had responded to the committee’s letter and would continue to “work cooperatively” with them.

    A spokesperson for USC said the school was complying with the congressional request. “We are cooperating with the select committee’s inquiries,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept, “and are following all applicable privacy laws and other legal protections, as we do for all matters.”

    The post Trump Is Coming for Chinese Students. Who Will Protect Them? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have begun waiting outside immigration courts in federal buildings across the country to arrest people immediately after judges dismiss their immigration cases. The ICE tactic appears to be a shift aimed at increasing the pace of deportations.

    At New York’s Varick Immigration Court, ICE agents on Wednesday began checking the documents of everyone who left, according to a source present who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. The court is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. 

    “They are indeed checking individuals off lists and attempting to detain them once they leave court,” they said. 

    According to the source, ICE detained at least two people after they left the courtroom. 

    In a statement to The Intercept, ICE said it issued guidance in January permitting its officers to conduct operations near courthouses “discreetly” and that doing so was in the interest of public safety.

    “Arrests of illegal aliens in courthouses is safer for law enforcement and the general public because these criminals have gone through security and been verified as unarmed,” ICE spokesperson Marie Ferguson said in a statement to The Intercept. “ICE will make thoughtful decisions in each case and do whatever is most likely to keep the American people safe.”

    “They’re basically circumventing due process.”

    Camille Mackler — founder and executive director of Immigrant Arc, a group of legal advocates working on immigration issues — said she’d heard that ICE was conducting targeted operations in several jurisdictions across New York and other states, including Maryland, Arizona, California, Texas, and Illinois. 

    Reports began circulating on social media on Tuesday that ICE had begun efforts to get cases dismissed that had been pending for less than two years so that the agency could immediately apprehend immigrants and force them into an expedited removal process — effectively side-stepping the typical immigration court process.

    “They’re moving to end those cases so they can move forward with a more aggressive form of deportation without the requirement to see a judge or request asylum,” Mackler said. “They’re basically circumventing due process.”

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    On Tuesday, immigration advocates said they saw ICE agents at immigration courts in Los Angeles detaining people after their cases were dismissed. 

    “There were two ICE officers inside the courtrooms who would notify the officers sitting in the hallway when a case was dismissed,” Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of legal advocacy group Immigrant Defenders Law Center, wrote on BlueSky.

    A day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security issued a guidance allowing ICE officers to conduct arrests at “protected” areas, including courthouses. This reversed a Biden-era directive that limited arrests at sensitive locations. According to the guidance, officers must first receive approval from ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to conduct arrests at courthouses. The guidance also instructs ICE to arrest people “discreetly” at non-public areas of the courts and to use the “non-public entrances and exits.”

     

    The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The FBI arrested a judge in Wisconsin last month for “obstructing” an immigration arrest operation. According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan allegedly told an immigrant to use the “jury door” to exit the courtroom after agents working with ICE arrived to arrest him.

    The post ICE Agents Are Camped Outside Immigration Courts to Make Arrests  appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • In a statement last month on its first 100 days under President Donald Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency celebrated 100 achievements.

    EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.

    The EPA, the bosses were claiming, was succeeding in its mission of protecting human health and the environment.

    In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept.

    Environmental advocates and experts have criticized the administration for an “all-out assault” on the environment. Now, EPA staffers are speaking out in the wake of staff cuts and the gutting of a spate of programs to remove lead from drinking water, support rural wastewater treatment, and address racial disparities in environmental pollution.

    “Americans are going to be less healthy. And frankly the EPA is going to be less efficient.”

    “The mission of the EPA has been shifted,” said Amelia Hertzberg, an environmental protection specialist at the EPA.

    “Americans are going to be less healthy. And frankly the EPA is going to be less efficient,” Hertzberg said. “If you’re less efficient, you’re wasting money. It’s working at cross-purposes with their stated goals.”

    An EPA spokesperson disputed staffers’ characterization of its efforts to cut staff and weaken programs.

    “At EPA, we are doing our part to Power the Great American Comeback, and we are proud of our work to advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment every day since January 20,” EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept.

    “Not Our Mission”

    Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry.

    Staffers are concerned that instead of making communities healthier, under Trump the agency is now focused on serving industry, said Ellie Hagen, an environmental scientist at the EPA’s Environmental Justice, Community Health, and Environmental Review division.

    It’s not clear how the EPA is supposed to serve those goals, said Hagen said, whose job is being terminated in July and was speaking on behalf of her local union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 704.

    “They’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs.”

    “A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”

    The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.

    “Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.”

    Deep Cuts

    The EPA has said it is aiming to cut the agency’s budget by 65 percent and bring staffing levels to Reagan-era levels. As part of Trump’s efforts to gut the federal workforce under the auspices of government efficiency, the Office of Personnel Management sent the first round of deferred resignation offers to federal employees in January. More than 540 EPA staffers took those deferred resignations, which were open until early February.

    Nine more employees were subject to a reduction in force as of May 7, according to a statement to The Intercept from the EPA press office; 280 employees in diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental justice programs were notified last month that they were part of staffing cuts.

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    As of last week, more than 1,500 staffers applied for deferred resignation and a “voluntary early retirement” program.

    The day the resignation offers were sent out, EPA staff also received notice of agency reforms including return to office and “enhanced standards of conduct,” including “loyalty.” The EPA reopened its deferred resignation program last month.

    Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.

    As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.

    “It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

    “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

    The EPA announced in March that it was ending its Environmental Justice Program and the agency’s “DEI Arms.” A few weeks later, the day before Earth Day, Hagen received notice that her tenured position was being terminated and that she would be removed no later than July 31.

    “They did it on the eve of Earth Day to send a message,” she said. “They’re showing that they don’t feel the environmental justice program staff are loyal to this administration. They think what we stand for is different than what this administration stands for. So they’re making an example out of us.”

    The agency said the term “environmental justice” had been used to advance left-wing politics.

    “As Administrator Zeldin has repeatedly stressed, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups instead of actually spending those dollars on directly remediating the specific environmental issues that need to be addressed,” the EPA press office said.

    The staffing cuts and resignation offers have had their intended effect, Hagen said: to scare career federal employees and push them out of the agency.

    “They’re creating such an intense culture of fear that I think they’re pushing a lot of people in that direction,” she said.

    Fewer people took deferred resignations in the first round because there was confusion around what direction the EPA was headed in. But Hagen expects many more to take the next round after leaders made clear they were completely shifting the agency’s agenda.

    “Based on the mood in the office and hearing from my colleagues, I never thought would leave the EPA,” she said, “I think a lot of people are going to take it just because of how scared and traumatized we all have been over the past 100 days.”

    Related

    Trump’s EPA Kills Grant to Climate Nonprofit Over Its Support for Palestine

    Another EPA staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood said they feared for their future after being placed on administrative leave in February for their work in the Environmental Justice Program.

    “I’m a military spouse who worked to better protect all including those most vulnerable and least protected from harmful exposures to chemicals and pollution,” they said.

    “Our family is having to relocate from our home and community we love. We’ve both served our country and now are afraid for both our livelihoods,” they said. “This is our story and what we’ve been living through. So many of our friends are in similar situations here and across the country.”

    “Non-Political”?

    Much of the administration’s attack on the EPA is tied up in the politicization of principles that historically had bipartisan support — like environmental justice, which staffers pointed out was until recently not viewed as a political project.

    “Environmental justice is supposed to be non-political,” Hertzberg said. “It’s just about identifying the people most in danger of pollution so you can help them first.”

    President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, first created the Environmental Justice Program in 1992.

    “This is a program that has been standing for decades, has done life-saving work across both sides of the aisle, efficiently and effectively,” Hagen said.

    The agency is now cutting other programs that have bipartisan support, she added.

    “How can you say this program has bipartisan support or support from the administration when you’re intimidating people into taking this buyout?” she said. “I think a lot of EPA staff will be taking the second round of buyouts, and we have no idea how that’s going to gut these statutory — what they say is bipartisan — support programs.”

    In their attacks on “DEI” and “wokeness” — for example, efforts to ensure civil liberties and equal protection under the law for communities that have historically faced institutional discrimination — Trump and his allies have distorted the concept of environmental justice into a political weapon, Hertzberg said.

    Related

    Thousands of U.S. Public Housing Residents Live in the Country’s Most Polluted Places

    “Environmental justice communities are young children. They’re pregnant women, the elderly, those with medical conditions, those without access to proper services, which is often rural communities and those living closer to polluters,” Hertzberg said. “This is really supposed to be a non-political part of the EPA, and it’s castigated as though we all have this axe to grind and are suspect in some way.”

    Staffers said the government is now leaving communities they’ve built relationships with over the years vulnerable to life-threatening pollution and health hazards.

    “The people who are still in the office are feeling worried about their jobs and feeling frustrated and heartbroken about the communities that we’ve served who are not being served anymore,” Hertzberg said.

    EPA staff are now put in the position of betraying communities they’ve tried to build trust in, she said.

    “Now you just have to let them down,” she said. “It’s the heartbreak of watching these people who you promised you were going to help be let down again, to have your hands tied behind your back, and at the same time being accused of being poor stewards of taxpayer funds.”

    The post “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Police conspired to violently attacks anti-genocide protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles last year, according to a suit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court. 

    At the height of the school’s encampment against Israel’s war on Gaza last spring, one of hundreds across the country, a mob of pro-Israel protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters for more than four hours. On the night of April 30, 2024, police stood by and watched as counter-protesters aimed and shot fireworks, sprayed chemical agents, harassed, and sexually assaulted pro-Palestine protesters, students and faculty alleged last month in a separate, ongoing lawsuit

    Related

    NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests or Be Barred from Sitting Final Exams

    The day after the melee, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, UCLA administrators, and seven different law enforcement agencies laid plans to dismantle the school’s encampment for good. 

    UCLA invited multiple outside police forces to campus to clear the encampments on May 1. More than 700 police officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol, the University of California Police Department, and private security were on campus the night of the raid. 

    Protesters are now suing the state of California, which oversees California Highway Patrol, and the city of Los Angeles, which oversees the LAPD, for violence against the demonstrations. The police fired more than 50 rounds of rubber bullets at protesters, striking several people in the head; some of the injuries sent demonstrators to the hospital.

    The projectiles shattered bones in one student’s hand and required her to undergo surgery and extensive rehab. Another person, who police shot in the head, was diagnosed with internal bleeding. (The governor’s office referred questions to California Highway Patrol. CHP, LAPD, and UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.)

    “If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California.”

    A lawyer for the protesters said it was important to hold Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, often mentioned as possible future party leaders, to account because, though the governing authorities are Democrats, their actions against the protesters helped give rise to Donald Trump’s extreme crackdown.

    “These attacks also happened in Democratic-run cities and blue states,” said attorney Ricci Sergienko, who filed the suit on Thursday. “That is a clear, direct path to what’s happening now with Trump, because the Democratic Party and their leaders made enemies out of these young people.” 

    “If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California,” Sergienko said. “We want to talk about what fascism is, and authoritarian repression and suppression — that is modeled here in California.”

    Rules on Rubber Bullets

    The new lawsuit says police violated that law and protesters’ rights under the state constitution when they attacked people at the encampment last May. 

    Related

    Police Attacks on Protesters With “Less Than Lethal” Weapons Result in Life-Threatening Injuries

    After protests against police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, police took heavy criticism for repeatedly shooting protesters with rubber or foam bullets, even losing a major lawsuit over the issue. Agencies like the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department faced injunctions restricting the use of weapons like rubber bullets — also known as 40-millimeter kinetic impact projectiles. 

    In California, lawmakers responded by passing a law that prohibited officers from using the projectiles against protests unless the situation presented an objective, reasonable defense against a threat to life or serious injury. 

    In the wake of the 2020 protests, UCLA also changed its guidelines to prioritize deescalation tactics and minimize use of outside police forces on campus. 

    California Highway Patrol, on the other hand, responds less frequently to protests and was not accused of using similar weapons in 2020. CHP officers nonetheless stormed UCLA encampments last spring and fired more than 50 rounds of the kinetic impact projectiles, said Becca Brown, another attorney working on the lawsuit. 

    “LAPD did it as well, but they did not use them quite as heavily as CHP,” Brown said. 

    The new California law restricts the indiscriminate use of rubber bullets into a crowd because they can be — and have been — deadly, Brown explained. 

    “They cannot be used indiscriminately,” she said. “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.” 

    Following criticism, police offered justifications for the use of force in some cases, according to an LAPD after-action report on the agency’s response to the UCLA encampments. Examples included someone throwing a traffic cone at police or removing an officer’s helmet. 

    “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.”

    The report offered several recommendations for the LAPD, including proper reporting of use-of-force incidents and the need for clear commands from police leaders. The report called on the police to improve communication between agencies because LAPD officers “did not appear to have a clear understanding of their mission.” 

    Plaintiffs in the suit include a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, an undergraduate student, another college student, and an architectural designer. Police shot all three of them with rubber bullets and hit several of them in the head. 

    The police attack on the protests has had effects beyond the physical, the complaint says, and has caused plaintiffs to reconsider exercising their First Amendment rights to demonstrate against Israel’s war on Gaza. The protesters are also concerned that if they participate in future protests, they’ll be subject to further attacks from the state and police. 

    “The encampment clearance by means of violence, excessive force, and kinetic energy projectiles traumatized Plaintiffs, chilled their protest activity, and justifiably made them less willing to engage in any further Palestine-related protest activity,” the complaint says. “This was the natural consequence of the dramatic and violent clearing organized and carried out by CHP and LAPD, which would have certainly chilled any ordinary person from engaging in Palestine solidarity advocacy in the future.” 

    One plaintiff, UCLA Ph.D. candidate Abdullah Puckett, “has become more hesitant and afraid of continuing his participation in protests,” the complaint said. “He now feels that he must reconsider whether he can participate in protests and if so, to what extent he can participate. He now fears that he will experience violent retaliation at the hands of law enforcement if he participates in protests.”

    UCLA Gaza Crackdown

    Police arrested more than 200 people as a result of the UCLA encampment. The LAPD, which had a $3.2 billion budget last year, sought more than half a million dollars in reimbursement from the governor’s office for the response, in part for more than 2,400 overtime hours, the Daily Bruin reported.

    “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe?”

    Arrested students wound up with criminal records. Those records are now being used by the Trump administration to target students for abduction and deportation.

    “For international students that may have been arrested at any of these encampments, they then had that on their record, which led to the Trump administration running background checks on international students,” said Sergienko, the lawyer. “And if they had gotten arrested at an encampment, that got flagged and could be subject to deportation under Trump’s fascist policies.” 

    California’s Democratic lawmakers are now pushing for a bill that amounts to an “educational gag order” targeting ethnic studies classes over concerns about antisemitism. 

    “That’s another attack on speech coming from the blue state, the liberal paradise of California,” Sergienko said. 

    “A real question is, how are students supposed to feel safe on campus knowing that the administration would call in a thousand school shooters to come attack them while on campus?” Sergienko said. “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe? 

    On Wednesday night, UCLA students showed “The Encampments,” a documentary released earlier this year. The school called in the LAPD to break up the screening. Police arrested three students.

    The post UCLA Gaza Protesters Sue Cops for Shooting Them in the Head With Rubber Bullets appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Police conspired to violently attack anti-genocide protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles last year, according to a suit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court. 

    At the height of the school’s encampment against Israel’s war on Gaza last spring, one of hundreds across the country, a mob of pro-Israel protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters for more than four hours. On the night of April 30, 2024, police stood by and watched as counter-protesters aimed and shot fireworks, sprayed chemical agents, harassed, and sexually assaulted pro-Palestine protesters, students and faculty alleged last month in a separate, ongoing lawsuit

    Related

    NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests or Be Barred From Sitting Final Exams

    The day after the melee, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, UCLA administrators, and seven different law enforcement agencies laid plans to dismantle the school’s encampment for good. 

    UCLA invited multiple outside police forces to campus to clear the encampments on May 1. More than 700 police officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol, the University of California Police Department, and private security were on campus the night of the raid. 

    Protesters are now suing the state of California, which oversees California Highway Patrol, and the city of Los Angeles, which oversees the LAPD, for violence against the demonstrations. The police fired more than 50 rounds of rubber bullets at protesters, striking several people in the head; some of the injuries sent demonstrators to the hospital.

    The projectiles shattered bones in one student’s hand and required her to undergo surgery and extensive rehab. Another person, who police shot in the head, was diagnosed with internal bleeding. (The governor’s office referred questions to California Highway Patrol. CHP and LAPD said they would not comment on pending legislation. UCLA did not respond to a request for comment.)

    “If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California.”

    A lawyer for the protesters said it was important to hold Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, often mentioned as possible future party leaders, to account because, though the governing authorities are Democrats, their actions against the protesters helped give rise to Donald Trump’s extreme crackdown.

    “These attacks also happened in Democratic-run cities and blue states,” said attorney Ricci Sergienko, who filed the suit on Thursday. “That is a clear, direct path to what’s happening now with Trump, because the Democratic Party and their leaders made enemies out of these young people.” 

    “If you want to talk about fascism, they deployed a police state on campuses all across California,” Sergienko said. “We want to talk about what fascism is, and authoritarian repression and suppression — that is modeled here in California.”

    Rules on Rubber Bullets

    The new lawsuit says police violated that law and protesters’ rights under the state constitution when they attacked people at the encampment last May. 

    Related

    Police Attacks on Protesters With “Less Than Lethal” Weapons Result in Life-Threatening Injuries

    After protests against police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, police took heavy criticism for repeatedly shooting protesters with rubber or foam bullets, even losing a major lawsuit over the issue. Agencies like the LAPD and LA Sheriff’s Department faced injunctions restricting the use of weapons like rubber bullets — also known as 40-millimeter kinetic impact projectiles. 

    In California, lawmakers responded by passing a law that prohibited officers from using the projectiles against protests unless the situation presented an objective, reasonable defense against a threat to life or serious injury. 

    In the wake of the 2020 protests, UCLA also changed its guidelines to prioritize deescalation tactics and minimize use of outside police forces on campus. 

    California Highway Patrol, on the other hand, responds less frequently to protests and was not accused of using similar weapons in 2020. CHP officers nonetheless stormed UCLA encampments last spring and fired more than 50 rounds of the kinetic impact projectiles, said Becca Brown, another attorney working on the lawsuit. 

    “LAPD did it as well, but they did not use them quite as heavily as CHP,” Brown said. 

    The new California law restricts the indiscriminate use of rubber bullets into a crowd because they can be — and have been — deadly, Brown explained. 

    “They cannot be used indiscriminately,” she said. “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.” 

    Following criticism, police offered justifications for the use of force in some cases, according to an LAPD after-action report on the agency’s response to the UCLA encampments. Examples included someone throwing a traffic cone at police or removing an officer’s helmet. 

    “They cannot be used simply because someone is non-compliant.”

    The report offered several recommendations for the LAPD, including proper reporting of use-of-force incidents and the need for clear commands from police leaders. The report called on the police to improve communication between agencies because LAPD officers “did not appear to have a clear understanding of their mission.” 

    Plaintiffs in the suit include a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, an undergraduate student, another college student, and an architectural designer. Police shot all three of them with rubber bullets and hit several of them in the head. 

    The police attack on the protests has had effects beyond the physical, the complaint says, and has caused plaintiffs to reconsider exercising their First Amendment rights to demonstrate against Israel’s war on Gaza. The protesters are also concerned that if they participate in future protests, they’ll be subject to further attacks from the state and police. 

    “The encampment clearance by means of violence, excessive force, and kinetic energy projectiles traumatized Plaintiffs, chilled their protest activity, and justifiably made them less willing to engage in any further Palestine-related protest activity,” the complaint says. “This was the natural consequence of the dramatic and violent clearing organized and carried out by CHP and LAPD, which would have certainly chilled any ordinary person from engaging in Palestine solidarity advocacy in the future.” 

    One plaintiff, UCLA Ph.D. candidate Abdullah Puckett, “has become more hesitant and afraid of continuing his participation in protests,” the complaint said. “He now feels that he must reconsider whether he can participate in protests and if so, to what extent he can participate. He now fears that he will experience violent retaliation at the hands of law enforcement if he participates in protests.”

    UCLA Gaza Crackdown

    Police arrested more than 200 people as a result of the UCLA encampment. The LAPD, which had a $3.2 billion budget last year, sought more than half a million dollars in reimbursement from the governor’s office for the response, in part for more than 2,400 overtime hours, the Daily Bruin reported.

    “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe?”

    Arrested students wound up with criminal records. Those records are now being used by the Trump administration to target students for abduction and deportation.

    “For international students that may have been arrested at any of these encampments, they then had that on their record, which led to the Trump administration running background checks on international students,” said Sergienko, the lawyer. “And if they had gotten arrested at an encampment, that got flagged and could be subject to deportation under Trump’s fascist policies.” 

    California’s Democratic lawmakers are now pushing for a bill that amounts to an “educational gag order” targeting ethnic studies classes over concerns about antisemitism. 

    “That’s another attack on speech coming from the blue state, the liberal paradise of California,” Sergienko said. 

    “A real question is, how are students supposed to feel safe on campus knowing that the administration would call in a thousand school shooters to come attack them while on campus?” Sergienko said. “How are they supposed to go back to campus and feel safe? 

    On Wednesday night, UCLA students showed “The Encampments,” a documentary released earlier this year. The school called in the LAPD to break up the screening. Police arrested three students.

    Update: May 5, 2025, 10:53 a.m. ET
    This story has been updated to include responses to requests for comment received after publication from the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

    The post Police Shot Them in the Head With Rubber Bullets. Now UCLA Gaza Protesters Are Suing. appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The progressive group that helped elect the Squad is looking to rebuild after two members were taken out by $30 million in spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

    On Monday, Justice Democrats endorsed Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney in the 2026 Democratic primary against Detroit’s Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich. — the group’s first primary challenge since AIPAC’s onslaught. 

    Thanedar, first elected to Congress in 2022, is a multimillionaire with support from two of the biggest sources of outside spending on U.S. elections: pro-Israel lobby groups and the cryptocurrency industry. 

    Three political action committees linked to the AIPAC spent $2.3 million against Thanedar’s challenger in the Democratic primary last year. AIPAC previously opposed Thanedar in 2022, but their relationship grew closer after he went on one of the group’s congressional junkets to Israel

    As part of his campaign launch, McKinney has said he is running on bringing working-class representation to Congress, criticizing Thanedar for using taxpayer money to fund his campaign expenses and neglecting his constituents.

    “I’m not running for Congress because I’m a millionaire or a billionaire. I’m running because I’m not,” the 32-year-old McKinney said in a press release announcing his campaign launch. “I’m running because our community deserves to have someone fighting back against the Trump-Musk administration who knows our struggles.”

    In a campaign video accompanying the launch, McKinney said constituents in the 13th Congressional District deserved a Democratic Party that leads the fight against billionaire elites and corporate PACs. McKinney attacked Thanedar for buying his seat in Congress and “having more in common with Donald Trump and Elon Musk than people like us.” (Thanedar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    The primary campaign is the first primary challenge against a party incumbent launched by Justice Democrats since 2021, and its first efforts since losing Reps. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Cori Bush, D-Mo., after AIPAC and other outside groups spent close to $50 million against the Squad members in last year’s election.

    In a statement, Justice Democrats noted that support for Democrats in Congress is lagging while voters are looking for candidates who will fight harder than the people they see in office. 

    “Last election cycle, Justice Democrats focused their resources on protecting our incumbents against the threat of AIPAC and other right-wing lobbies promising — and delivering — on spending $100 million in our elections,” spokesperson Usamah Andrabi said in the Monday press release. 

    “As a result of their outsized spending, we lost two of the most working class members of Congress in the most expensive Democratic primaries ever, but out-organized and beat them in every other Squad seat,” he said. “Those losses have only fueled our mission to expand our bloc in Congress and elect more working class champions to Washington.”

    The post Down Two Squad Members, Progressives Come for an AIPAC Democrat appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • When a bomb threat coincided with a pro-Palestine student protest at Barnard College last month, the New York City Police Department arrested nine demonstrators. By the next day, local and national media had picked up the story. Some outlets suggested that the protesters were responsible for the threat. “Several Barnard College protesters in custody after bomb threat made during sit-in,” read one headline

    That headline, as well as statements from Barnard College and the NYPD, overlooked a key fact: The Palestine solidarity protesters were actually the targets of the bomb threat.

    This revelation has alarmed faculty and students, who are now being interrogated by school officials about the threat during inquiries over alleged student code of conduct violations. Faculty and attorneys working with the protesters are also concerned that information from those interrogations could be shared with the government, as Barnard faces pressure to hand over information about students to Congress — where Republicans have repeatedly painted student protesters as terrorists — as part of its investigation into antisemitism on college campuses.

    When asked by The Intercept whether the school had made public that the bomb threat targeted pro-Palestine students, a Barnard spokesperson pointed to a tweet from the NYPD.

    “The NYPD is responding to a bomb threat at the Milstein Center at Barnard College and is evacuating the building. Anyone who refuses to leave the location is subject to arrest. Please stay away from the area,” the post on X states.

    “The fact that these students were targets does not seem to have been made clear.”

    Barnard, which is Columbia University’s affiliated women’s college, did not respond to detailed questions about the timeline of when it called police onto campus, why students were being asked about the threat, what information it planned to share with Congress, or why it had not made public that protesters were the target of the threat.

    “The fact that these students were targets does not seem to have been made clear,” said Homa Zarghamee, an economics professor at Barnard.

    Zarghamee noted she has not seen the kind of support for students who were the target of a threat of violence that she would have expected from the administration “in this era of safety concerns.” 

    “What we have never heard from the administration — this time, or truthfully any time in the past — is anything about the fact that this was a threat made to our students, who we need to remember, again and again, are being disciplined for peaceful protest against the Israeli war on Gaza,” said Thea Abu El-Haj, a professor of education at Barnard.

    “The language from the administration seems to consistently be about the protesters as threatening.”

    Though the school itself never explicitly blamed the bomb threat on students, Abu El-Haj said everyone she has spoken with outside of Barnard had assumed that the protesters were responsible. 

    “The language from the administration seems to consistently be about the protesters as threatening. And it seems very much addressed to a broader public audience,” she said. “I can say for myself, but also for the students I teach, they are really upset that no one is expressing concern for them and for the threats that have been brought against them.” 

    According to a screenshot of the bomb threat obtained by The Intercept, the sender emailed school administrators at 4:01 p.m. on March 5 saying they had placed a bomb “in the Barnard College library.” The sender, who used the email address, pardonderek@mail2tor.com, wrote that they intended to attack the “anti-white faggot terrorists/communists that are protesting.” 

    In an email sent that evening to the coalition of protesters Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury said students, faculty, and staff had been ordered to clear the building so the NYPD and its bomb squad could assess the threat. She added that the school had asked police not to arrest protesters. An NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that it dispatched its Emergency Services and K-9 units. The spokesperson did not respond to a question clarifying whether the NYPD Bomb Squad, a separate unit, had also been dispatched. 

    Later that night, the college addressed the bomb threat in an email to the broader school community. Rosenbury said the bomb threat was no longer a danger and went on to describe the “disturbing and unacceptable events” that took place in Milstein prior to the threat. She said staff tried to get protesters to leave the building throughout the afternoon and that the “unauthorized protest” had disrupted classes and studies. She blamed protesters for putting the entire school community at risk by not following evacuation orders after the threat was received.

    “Our staff, at risk to their own personal safety, remained in the Milstein lobby, urging the masked disruptors to take the threat seriously,” Rosebury wrote. “Even when the College activated the fire alarm, the masked protesters put our entire campus at risk by refusing to leave.” 

    At the time of the incident, school administrators and the New York Police Department gave no indication that the threat had been made against pro-Palestine protesters. That information was not shared by school administrators or police with the broader school community or the public. 

    “We heard news of a bomb threat and the lobby was evacuated very quickly thereafter but I do not recall being told the bomb threat was made toward those in the sit-in,” said Barnard theatre professor Shayoni Mitra.

    Various reports have introduced differing timelines of police response — and different reasons the NYPD was called to the scene.

    The day after the protest, an NYPD spokesperson told the Columbia Spectator that police had responded to the protest around 1:50 p.m. to an “unscheduled demonstration,” and said it had no information about a bomb threat.

    Three days later, another NYPD spokesperson told the Spectator something else: that police had indeed responded to the protest because of the bomb threat. The spokesperson also said that students who were arrested on charges including governmental obstruction and trespass were taken into custody during the police evacuation in response to the threat. Barnard told the Spectator that it called police in response to the threat, not because the demonstration was unauthorized. 

    Mitra said she taught a class on the first floor of the building that houses the library on the day of the sit-in and heard three shelter-in-place orders announced over the public address system between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. A photo shared with The Intercept shows a handful of police officers standing on the street outside Milstein at 3:25 p.m. — 36 minutes before the bomb threat email reviewed by The Intercept arrived in the school president’s inbox.

    A later message from Rosenbury mentioned threats “via multiple email messages on March 5, 2025” — further muddying the timeline as to when police were first called to campus and why.

    “Barnard lied when it said it called the police because of the bomb threat — timestamps show the threat came after the call.”

    “Barnard lied when it said it called the police because of the bomb threat — timestamps show the threat came after the call,” said attorney Remy Green, partner at the law firm Cohen&Green and counsel for several students at Barnard. “Rather than address and protect its students from a violent, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic person who threatened to murder them, Barnard saw an opportunity to deceive the public into thinking the students were connected to the threat. By doing this, Barnard has made this campus less safe and less free.” 

    According to three people who were in the library when police arrived, dozens of NYPD officers from the Strategic Response Group — a specialized team often deployed to protests — entered the library shortly after 4 p.m. An NYPD spokesperson later told the Columbia Spectator that police responded at 4:22 p.m.

    The NYPD did not respond to The Intercept’s questions asking the department to clarify what time police first responded on campus that day. 

    Sources who spoke to The Intercept said that the NYPD kettled some protesters on the lawn outside the building. Photos reviewed by The Intercept show students who were arrested in zip-ties lined up against the outer wall of the building. Police then escorted the people they arrested through the building that was the target of an active bomb threat

    “They took the students that they had arrested and put them up first up against the building that was ostensibly about to explode,” said Abu El-Haj after reviewing footage and photos taken by students.

    Some members of the faculty learned that the threat was directed at student protesters the next day at a meeting of the Barnard and Columbia chapters of the American Association of University Professors. According to sources with knowledge of the meeting, faculty members read aloud the text of the bomb threat to colleagues, shared with a few professors internally by an administrator.

    In a joint statement released following the meeting, Barnard and Columbia faculty condemned the arrests of students and blamed them on Rosenbury, as the school had summoned police to campus. They called for an independent investigation into the incident and the school’s response to another sit-in at Barnard’s Milbank Hall on February 26. 

    Students themselves are now being interrogated about the threat. Columbia’s head of public safety — ex-NYPD officer Gary Maroni — is questioning student protesters about that threat in mandatory fact-finding meetings, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept and accounts from faculty and attorneys working with pro-Palestine students on campus. Faculty worry that these interrogations — which students were originally told they had to attend without any witnesses or legal representation — could be turned over to Congress. 

    “I have deep concerns about students walking into those meetings without lawyers because of the way that Barnard is in the midst of a discovery process with Congress, as I understand it,” said Abu El-Haj. “I am worried about either congressional subpoenas, or if there’s any attempt on the part of the criminal justice system to bring any kind of criminal cases against students, that those records might be subpoenable.”

    Barnard is one of several schools that put in place new disciplinary processes and campus speech policies as part of efforts to curb speech on campus since the height of Gaza protest encampments. 

    In an email to faculty last month, Rosenbury outlined some of those changes, including new rules governing the “time, place, and manner” of events and demonstrations. She said the school would make “every effort” to deescalate disruptions internally. But if they persisted and prevented members of the school community from learning, studying, or working, administrators would “continue to rely on the NYPD when specialized skills are required, as was the case when the College received bomb threats.” 

    Rosenbury wrote in the email that the school had paused disciplinary actions related to activities that occurred after February 26 while enacting new disciplinary policies in response to the war on Gaza. (All student conduct processes for incidents prior to February 26, the date of another campus demonstration, had been completed by late March.) Rosenbury said, however, that fact-finding related to disciplinary investigations would continue. Part of the process, she wrote, could be an “inquiry meeting” that would not include witnesses or legal representation. Faculty managed to push back on this stipulation and attended some of the meetings. If charges were recommended after inquiry, Rosenbury wrote, she would consult with administrators about whether the school was close enough to adopting its new policies to hear new cases. 

    At least 27 students have been called into such inquiry meetings for protests last month. One student was called into a conduct meeting for two actions: a Jews Say No to ICE protest last month, and another action earlier this month. They are being charged with disruptive behavior, failure to comply, failure to maintain public order, and obstruction of access. 

    It’s not clear what if any information from the inquiry meetings the school plans to share with congressional officials. Either way, protesters must reckon with potentially life-altering charges from the school, said Abu El-Haj. 

    “Outside of the context of whether this gets subpoenaed anywhere or goes to Congress, students are facing quite serious consequences,” she said. “Expulsion and or suspension can carry significant financial consequences for students.” 

    Related

    Trump Administration Texted College Professors’ Personal Phones to Ask If They’re Jewish

    Barnard College was dropped last month from the lawsuit over the government’s efforts to access disciplinary records for student protesters, including those of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order last month blocking Columbia and Barnard from turning over information to Congress; Barnard is not currently subject to the order after being dropped from the suit. Earlier this month, the judge ruled that Columbia must give Khalil and other students 30 days notice before turning over additional information to Congress.

    At least 50 faculty members sent a letter to Barnard administrators on Thursday asking for an update on the new deadline and what information the school plans to share with Congress. Faculty who spoke to The Intercept said they have not yet received answers from the school. In a meeting on April 11, Rosenbury told faculty that the school had received an extension on its deadline to turn over information to Congress but did not specify the new deadline.

    The Trump administration has used the president’s executive order on antisemitism to attack, abduct, and deport student protesters that Trump and his Republican colleagues have repeatedly, with no evidence, conflated with terrorists.

    The post A Bomb Threat Targeted Student Protesters. So Why Did They Get Blamed for It? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Several professors at Barnard College received text messages on Monday notifying them that a federal agency was reviewing the college’s employment practices, according to copies of the messages reviewed by The Intercept.

    The messages, sent to several professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.

    The survey from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, asked questions including whether respondents were Jewish or Israeli; whether they had been subjected to antisemitism; and whether they were subject to “unwelcome discussions,” graffiti or signs depicting antisemitic messages or images, “unwelcome comments, jokes or discussions,” or “pressure to abandon, change or adopt a practice or religious belief.”

    The survey also asked whether respondents had reported any such events to the college.

    In an email to faculty on Monday evening, the general counsel at Barnard, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, said the school had received multiple reports about the EEOC texts. 

    “Barnard was not given advance notice of this outreach,” Barnard vice president and general counsel Serena Longley wrote in an email obtained by The Intercept. “If you choose to respond, please know that both federal law and Barnard policy strictly prohibit any form of retaliation.”

    Neither the EEOC nor Barnard immediately responded to requests for comment.

    The post Trump Administration Texted College Professors’ Personal Phones to Ask If They’re Jewish appeared first on The Intercept.

  • An Israeli associate of Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student detained Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said his targeting is a clear sign that no kind of activism in support of Palestine — even efforts to build peace with Israelis — is the right kind of activism for the Israeli and American right.

    Mahdawi’s green card was revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the deportation of people deemed to be a threat to U.S. foreign policy. In Mahdawi’s case, according to the New York Times, Rubio said without any evidence that the student’s activism stoked antisemitism that undermined the peace process to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

    Mahdawi was vocally opposed to both terrorism and antisemitism, said his associate, an Israeli former Columbia student named Mikey Baratz.

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence,” Baratz said. “This is a person who had a split from the protest movement because he felt like they were not self-policing. This is a person who has had many, many disagreements with the pro-Palestine movement for feeling that they are refusing to moderate.”

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence.”

    Mahdawi was a leader of Columbia’s student protest movement against the war on Gaza. 

    With often baseless allegations that pro-Palestine campus movements were suffused with support for terror and antisemitism, Mahdawi seemed to be the epitome of what the movement’s biggest critics said they wanted to see. He became an outspoken supporter of peaceful opposition to the war and, speaking in December 2023 on “60 Minutes,” the most watched news broadcast in the country, denounced antisemitism.

    “Since the war has broken out, many of us Israelis have tried to say, ‘Well, where are the Palestinians who will take a stand? Where are the Palestinians who want peace? Where are the Palestinians who want coexistence?” Baratz said. “It’s like: ’Here it is! Here, this is what we’ve been asking for!’”

    “Every Reason to Hate Me”

    Mahdawi had stepped back from the movement in the spring of 2024 to focus on building bridges with Israeli and Jewish students on campus. Shortly after stepping back from the movement, he began reaching out to colleagues in the protest movement to ask if they knew any Israelis on campus interested in discussing ways to build community and peace with Palestinians. 

    In October 2024, Mahdawi was connected with Baratz, then a student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The two met for coffee. 

    “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    “You’re nervous, you’re really nervous,” Baratz said of their initial meeting. “I’d had conversations with people in the pro-Palestine movement and they were often constructive but always difficult.” 

    Once they started chatting, however, the mood quickly lifted: “Within 15 minutes, we were joking.” 

    Baratz worked for the last six months with Mahdawi, who was arrested Monday after he arrived for what he thought was his citizenship interview at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. Instead of leaving on the path to citizenship as he’d hoped, Mahdawi was detained by ICE and ordered to be deported to the West Bank. 

    Born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mahdawi has over the years lost at least eight members of his family and had others tortured, imprisoned, and attacked by Israeli forces. 

    “He has every reason to hate me,” Baratz said. “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    Baratz said his conversations with Mahdawi were not always easy, but they were essential.

    “Mohsen and I do not agree on everything, and some of his views have been challenging for me to hear, but the converse of that is that many of my views have been equally challenging for Mohsen to hear,” Baratz said. “As soon as we label all views that we do not like as outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, then we lose the ability to find a middle ground.”

    Against Antisemitism

    The Trump administration has targeted and deported pro-Palestine students in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the lead-up to his arrest, Mahdawi became the target of factions on Columbia’s campus and among several Zionist groups that have named students publicly or said they’ve sent lists of students to federal agencies for deportation. 

    “These groups are, one, doing so much more harm than good, and, two — I mean, talk about selective, right?,” Baratz said. “How can I take anyone seriously talking about Mohsen being antisemitic? They don’t know Mohsen. They don’t talk to him.”

    In his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview, Mahdawi was asked about someone making an antisemitic remark at a pro-Palestine protest on Columbia’s campus. Mahdawi said he confronted the offender and used a bullhorn to publicly denounce the remark. 

    “To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi told “60 Minutes.” “And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

    A lawsuit filed against the government shortly after his detention referenced Mahdawi’s detention under the same obscure provision of the immigration law used as the basis for ICE’s abduction last month of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The government has used the provision to claim that Khalil and Mahdawi’s speech on Palestine have adverse policy consequences for the U.S. The Trump administration has routinely accused pro-Palestine protesters of supporting terror and conflated their actions with support for Hamas.

    Responses to pro-Palestine campus protests have ranged from the absurd to hypocritical to explicitly violent — from claims that a student assaulted administrators by using a bullhorn indoors, to contractors painting over protesters, to counter-protesters attacking students with what students said was a chemical spray

    The notion that targeting people like Mahdawi is working to fight terror not only lays bare the baselessness of claims about the protesters, but exposes a double standard being applied, Baratz said. 

    “Israel’s Minister of National Security has been convicted in Israel for supporting a terrorist organization,” he said. “The charges that are being leveled against Mohsen, the Israeli Minister of National Security has been convicted of in Israel. So when do Jews who support him start being evicted from the States?” 

    Baratz said Mahdawi reminded him that the only way forward was to keep humanity’s shared values in mind. 

    “If there’s anything we as Jews should know, it’s that this is familiar to us. We see ourselves in the other, we see ourselves in the stranger,” Baratz said. “Our history is rife with expulsion and prejudice. And I hope that maybe this can be an opportunity to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

    The post Rubio Says Detained Palestinian Stoked Antisemitism. Mahdawi’s Israeli Colleague Says the Opposite. appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • An Israeli associate of Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student detained Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said his targeting is a clear sign that no kind of activism in support of Palestine — even efforts to build peace with Israelis — is the right kind of activism for the Israeli and American right.

    Mahdawi’s green card was revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the deportation of people deemed to be a threat to U.S. foreign policy. In Mahdawi’s case, according to the New York Times, Rubio said, without any evidence, that the student’s activism stoked antisemitism that undermined the peace process to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

    Mahdawi was vocally opposed to both terrorism and antisemitism, said his Israeli associate, a former Columbia student named Mikey Baratz.

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence,” Baratz said. “This is a person who had a split from the protest movement because he felt like they were not self-policing. This is a person who has had many, many disagreements with the pro-Palestine movement for feeling that they are refusing to moderate.”

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence.”

    Mahdawi was a leader of Columbia’s student protest movement against the war on Gaza. 

    Battling often baseless allegations that pro-Palestine campus movements were suffused with support for terror and antisemitism, Mahdawi seemed to be the epitome of what the movement’s biggest critics said they wanted to see. He became an outspoken supporter of peaceful opposition to the war and, speaking in December 2023 on “60 Minutes,” the most watched news broadcast in the country, denounced antisemitism.

    “Since the war has broken out, many of us Israelis have tried to say, ‘Well, where are the Palestinians who will take a stand? Where are the Palestinians who want peace? Where are the Palestinians who want coexistence?” Baratz said. “It’s like: ’Here it is! Here, this is what we’ve been asking for!’”

    “Every Reason to Hate Me”

    Mahdawi had stepped back from the movement in the spring of 2024 to focus on building bridges with Israeli and Jewish students on campus. Shortly after stepping back from the movement, he began reaching out to colleagues in the protest movement to ask if they knew any Israelis on campus interested in discussing ways to build community and peace with Palestinians. 

    In October 2024, Mahdawi was connected with Baratz, then a student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The two met for coffee. 

    “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    “You’re nervous, you’re really nervous,” Baratz said of their initial meeting. “I’d had conversations with people in the pro-Palestine movement and they were often constructive but always difficult.” 

    Once they started chatting, however, the mood quickly lifted: “Within 15 minutes, we were joking.”

    Baratz worked for the last six months with Mahdawi, who was arrested Monday after he arrived for what he thought was his citizenship interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. Instead of leaving on the path to citizenship as he’d hoped, Mahdawi was detained by ICE and ordered to be deported to the West Bank. 

    Born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mahdawi has over the years lost at least eight members of his family and had others tortured, imprisoned, and attacked by Israeli forces.

    “He has every reason to hate me,” Baratz said. “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    Baratz said his conversations with Mahdawi were not always easy, but they were essential.

    “Mohsen and I do not agree on everything, and some of his views have been challenging for me to hear, but the converse of that is that many of my views have been equally challenging for Mohsen to hear,” Baratz said. “As soon as we label all views that we do not like as outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, then we lose the ability to find a middle ground.”

    Against Antisemitism

    The Trump administration has targeted and deported pro-Palestine students in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the lead-up to his arrest, Mahdawi became the target of factions on Columbia’s campus and several Zionist groups that have named students publicly or said they’ve sent lists of students to federal agencies for deportation

    “These groups are, one, doing so much more harm than good, and, two — I mean, talk about selective, right?,” Baratz said. “How can I take anyone seriously talking about Mohsen being antisemitic? They don’t know Mohsen. They don’t talk to him.”

    In his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview, Mahdawi was asked about someone making an antisemitic remark at a pro-Palestine protest on Columbia’s campus. Mahdawi said he confronted the offender and used a bullhorn to publicly denounce the remark.

    “To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi told “60 Minutes.” “And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

    A lawsuit filed against the government shortly after his detention referenced that Mahdawi’s detention relies on the same obscure provision of immigration law that was used as the basis for ICE’s abduction last month of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The government has used the provision to claim that Khalil and Mahdawi’s speech on Palestine have adverse policy consequences for the U.S. The Trump administration has routinely accused pro-Palestine protesters of supporting terror and conflated their actions with support for Hamas.

    Responses to pro-Palestine campus protests have ranged from the absurd to hypocritical to explicitly violent — from claims that a student assaulted administrators by using a bullhorn indoors, to contractors painting over protesters, to counter-protesters attacking students with what students said was a chemical spray

    The notion that targeting people like Mahdawi is working to fight terror not only lays bare the baselessness of claims about the protesters, but also exposes a double standard being applied, Baratz said. 

    “Israel’s Minister of National Security has been convicted in Israel for supporting a terrorist organization,” he said. “The charges that are being leveled against Mohsen, the Israeli Minister of National Security has been convicted of in Israel. So when do Jews who support him start being evicted from the States?”

    Baratz said Mahdawi reminded him that the only way forward was to keep humanity’s shared values in mind. 

    “If there’s anything we as Jews should know, it’s that this is familiar to us. We see ourselves in the other, we see ourselves in the stranger,” Baratz said. “Our history is rife with expulsion and prejudice. And I hope that maybe this can be an opportunity to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

    The post Mohsen Mahdawi’s Israeli Colleague Undermines Marco Rubio’s Antisemitism Case appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • An Israeli associate of Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student detained Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said his targeting is a clear sign that no kind of activism in support of Palestine — even efforts to build peace with Israelis — is the right kind of activism for the Israeli and American right.

    Mahdawi’s green card was revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the deportation of people deemed to be a threat to U.S. foreign policy. In Mahdawi’s case, according to the New York Times, Rubio said, without any evidence, that the student’s activism stoked antisemitism that undermined the peace process to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

    Mahdawi was vocally opposed to both terrorism and antisemitism, said his Israeli associate, a former Columbia student named Mikey Baratz.

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence,” Baratz said. “This is a person who had a split from the protest movement because he felt like they were not self-policing. This is a person who has had many, many disagreements with the pro-Palestine movement for feeling that they are refusing to moderate.”

    “The irony of him, of all people, being someone they target is so funny to me — this person who has denounced violence.”

    Mahdawi was a leader of Columbia’s student protest movement against the war on Gaza. 

    Battling often baseless allegations that pro-Palestine campus movements were suffused with support for terror and antisemitism, Mahdawi seemed to be the epitome of what the movement’s biggest critics said they wanted to see. He became an outspoken supporter of peaceful opposition to the war and, speaking in December 2023 on “60 Minutes,” the most watched news broadcast in the country, denounced antisemitism.

    “Since the war has broken out, many of us Israelis have tried to say, ‘Well, where are the Palestinians who will take a stand? Where are the Palestinians who want peace? Where are the Palestinians who want coexistence?” Baratz said. “It’s like: ’Here it is! Here, this is what we’ve been asking for!’”

    “Every Reason to Hate Me”

    Mahdawi had stepped back from the movement in the spring of 2024 to focus on building bridges with Israeli and Jewish students on campus. Shortly after stepping back from the movement, he began reaching out to colleagues in the protest movement to ask if they knew any Israelis on campus interested in discussing ways to build community and peace with Palestinians. 

    In October 2024, Mahdawi was connected with Baratz, then a student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The two met for coffee. 

    “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    “You’re nervous, you’re really nervous,” Baratz said of their initial meeting. “I’d had conversations with people in the pro-Palestine movement and they were often constructive but always difficult.” 

    Once they started chatting, however, the mood quickly lifted: “Within 15 minutes, we were joking.”

    Baratz worked for the last six months with Mahdawi, who was arrested Monday after he arrived for what he thought was his citizenship interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. Instead of leaving on the path to citizenship as he’d hoped, Mahdawi was detained by ICE and ordered to be deported to the West Bank. 

    Born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mahdawi has over the years lost at least eight members of his family and had others tortured, imprisoned, and attacked by Israeli forces.

    “He has every reason to hate me,” Baratz said. “He has every reason to be angry and want violence. And he doesn’t.”

    Baratz said his conversations with Mahdawi were not always easy, but they were essential.

    “Mohsen and I do not agree on everything, and some of his views have been challenging for me to hear, but the converse of that is that many of my views have been equally challenging for Mohsen to hear,” Baratz said. “As soon as we label all views that we do not like as outside the bounds of what’s acceptable, then we lose the ability to find a middle ground.”

    Against Antisemitism

    The Trump administration has targeted and deported pro-Palestine students in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the lead-up to his arrest, Mahdawi became the target of factions on Columbia’s campus and several Zionist groups that have named students publicly or said they’ve sent lists of students to federal agencies for deportation

    “These groups are, one, doing so much more harm than good, and, two — I mean, talk about selective, right?,” Baratz said. “How can I take anyone seriously talking about Mohsen being antisemitic? They don’t know Mohsen. They don’t talk to him.”

    In his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview, Mahdawi was asked about someone making an antisemitic remark at a pro-Palestine protest on Columbia’s campus. Mahdawi said he confronted the offender and used a bullhorn to publicly denounce the remark.

    “To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi told “60 Minutes.” “And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

    A lawsuit filed against the government shortly after his detention referenced that Mahdawi’s detention relies on the same obscure provision of immigration law that was used as the basis for ICE’s abduction last month of recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The government has used the provision to claim that Khalil and Mahdawi’s speech on Palestine have adverse policy consequences for the U.S. The Trump administration has routinely accused pro-Palestine protesters of supporting terror and conflated their actions with support for Hamas.

    Responses to pro-Palestine campus protests have ranged from the absurd to hypocritical to explicitly violent — from claims that a student assaulted administrators by using a bullhorn indoors, to contractors painting over protesters, to counter-protesters attacking students with what students said was a chemical spray

    The notion that targeting people like Mahdawi is working to fight terror not only lays bare the baselessness of claims about the protesters, but also exposes a double standard being applied, Baratz said. 

    “Israel’s Minister of National Security has been convicted in Israel for supporting a terrorist organization,” he said. “The charges that are being leveled against Mohsen, the Israeli Minister of National Security has been convicted of in Israel. So when do Jews who support him start being evicted from the States?”

    Baratz said Mahdawi reminded him that the only way forward was to keep humanity’s shared values in mind. 

    “If there’s anything we as Jews should know, it’s that this is familiar to us. We see ourselves in the other, we see ourselves in the stranger,” Baratz said. “Our history is rife with expulsion and prejudice. And I hope that maybe this can be an opportunity to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

    The post “How Can I Take Anyone Seriously Talking About Mohsen Being Antisemitic?” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is bleeding small-dollar donors, according to filings filed today with the Federal Election Commission.

    “Good luck winning in a swing state with numbers like this.”

    Fetterman’s campaign brought in $380,000 last quarter, a relatively small haul — and less than 40 percent of what he raised in the previous quarter. Contributions under $200 are also down, from more than $640,000 to $130,000 last quarter. 

    The steep fall-off in contributions came as Fetterman has increasingly taken positions aligned with President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress. 

    “This is what happens when you kiss the ring at Mar-a-Lago and vote for Trump’s most controversial nominees like Pam Bondi,” a former Fetterman campaign staffer told The Intercept. “Small-dollar donors dry up and you end up with an embarrassing haul for a sitting senator. Good luck winning in a swing state with numbers like this.”

    The numbers don’t appear to be sustainable: The campaign spent more in the last quarter than it brought in, according to the latest filings. (Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    The plummeting totals track with other distressing campaign fundraising issues for Fetterman. Small-dollar donors have been asking Fetterman’s campaign for refunds over his embrace of conservative stances on issues from immigration and Israel, The Intercept reported earlier this month. 

    The campaign’s most recent haul represents a significant drop-off from previous quarters. Fetterman’s campaign raised an average of $890,000 a quarter across the last five quarters. His biggest total — more than $1 million in contributions — came in the last quarter of 2024, which included a month of election fundraising, although Fetterman himself was not up for reelection.

    In the past five quarters, he also brought in an average of $480,000 contributions under $200.

    Fetterman’s office has also suffered staffing chaos: Six staffers have left his office since 2023. Fetterman’s office had three communications directors in the span of just over two years. 

    Fetterman has also taken a far-right turn in foreign policy. With a near-constant focus on Israel, he has become cozy with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — even receiving a gold pager from the prime minister to commemorate a surprise Israeli attack in Lebanon that experts said might constitute a war crime

    The Intercept reported that several of the staffers who left Fetterman’s office over the past 16 months objected to his turn toward the singular focus on Israel.

    The post Fetterman Campaign Bleeds Money appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The University of Pittsburgh violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments when it suspended the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine last month, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Tuesday against the school.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The complaint alleges that the University of Pittsburgh violated the Constitution’s prohibitions on restricting free speech when it placed the SJP chapter on an indefinite suspension last month, after the group organized a letter condemning what it said was the university’s harassment of SJP. 

    “The First Amendment requires that public universities respect students’ right to engage in vigorous debate about important issues of the day. Pitt’s suspension of the club’s status and other interference with peaceful advocacy is unconstitutional retaliation,” ACLU of Pennsylvania legal director Witold Walczak said in a press release. “Pitt cannot constitutionally put its thumb on one side of the debate by harassing and chilling the pro-Palestinian students’ side of that important discussion.”

    The lawsuit is one of a wave of similar actions taken by student protesters and their allies in response to university crackdowns on speech on Palestine. 

    The University of Pittsburgh did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The post Pitt’s Suspension of Pro-Palestine Student Group Violates First Amendment, Says ACLU Lawsuit appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The University of Pittsburgh violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments when it suspended the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine last month, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Tuesday against the school

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The complaint alleges that Pitt violated the Constitution’s prohibitions on restricting free speech when it placed the SJP chapter on an indefinite suspension last month after the group organized a letter condemning what it said was the university’s harassment of SJP. 

    “Recent actions taken by Pitt administrators to unconstitutionally muzzle pro-Palestinian speech have been pervasive and relentless.”

    “Recent actions taken by Pitt administrators to unconstitutionally muzzle pro-Palestinian speech have been pervasive and relentless, and they have left us with no choice but to seek legal action,” Pitt’s SJP chapter said in a statement to The Intercept. “We hope that by lifting our suspension and ending ongoing disciplinary proceedings, this lawsuit will ensure that students’ constitutional rights to free speech and association are fully respected on campus.”

    The suspension is an attack by the university on First Amendment rights, the SJP spokesperson said. 

    “The University of Pittsburgh’s decision to suspend our group for engaging in constitutionally-protected speech is a clear attack on student activism,” they continued. In suing the school, they said, student activists hope to set a precedent: “that universities cannot silence students because of their political views—especially those that challenge the role that our institutions play in advancing genocide abroad.” 

    “The First Amendment requires that public universities respect students’ right to engage in vigorous debate about important issues of the day. Pitt’s suspension of the club’s status and other interference with peaceful advocacy is unconstitutional retaliation,” ACLU of Pennsylvania legal director Witold Walczak said in a press release. “Pitt cannot constitutionally put its thumb on one side of the debate by harassing and chilling the pro-Palestinian students’ side of that important discussion.”

    Pitt did not respond to a request for comment.

    “Discourse and Dialogue”

    The 2023-24 academic year was designated by Pitt as its first dedicated to the theme of “Discourse and Dialogue.” The school said it was more important than ever to foster an environment for the free exchange of ideas on campus and to celebrate diverse points of view. 

    “Our support for discourse and dialogue on our campus and our commitments to free speech are now even more in focus as we aim to engage across students, staff, and faculty on each of Pitt campuses,” the school wrote in a post announcing the theme.

    Those claims are at odds with the school’s attacks on SJP, the group told The Intercept. The SJP spokesperson said university administrators had demonstrated a “striking double standard” in taking steps to punish the group for its speech while allowing pro-Israel groups on campus to harass and target pro-Palestine students. 

    “While other student groups enjoy full institutional support — even when their conduct escalates into real threats to the safety of our members — we have been met with surveillance, censorship, and punishment,” the SJP spokesperson told The Intercept. “In a clear violation of the First Amendment’s requirement of content neutrality, Pitt has unabashedly taken a side — exhausting all avenues available to them to suppress pro-Palestinian voices whilst simultaneously encouraging zionist, pro-Israeli speech.”

    The spokesperson said that SJP members had been subjected to harassment by pro-Israel groups on campus, including one of which has worked with the far-right Zionist group Betar. 

    Betar has said it sent hundreds of names of students it wants deported to the White House and other federal agencies. The group has targeted Palestinian students, including Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, in the lead-ups to their abductions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and celebrated after the fact. 

    Last year, Betar posted a petition to ban SJP from Pitt’s campus to Instagram. The Pitt group Students Supporting Israel collaborated with Betar on the post and shared it to its own page, according to the lawsuit. The petition claims that SJP aligned itself with terrorist groups and promoted violence. Students Supporting Israel maintains a link to the petition on the LinkTree on its Instagram page. 

    The lawsuit also claims that last year, a member of the executive board for another pro-Israel student group, the Student Coalition for Israel at Pitt, placed a note on a former SJP leader’s car that read: “Sinwar is dead you MF! Israel Will Always Be. Fuck you! Jew hating BITCH” — referring to Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of Hamas in Gaza who was assassinated by Israel. According to the complaint, the university investigated the incident but declined to take disciplinary action against the individual or the group. (Spokespeople for the Student Coalition for Israel at Pitt and the school’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    Betar continued to be active at Pitt. Ahead of a visit to Pitt’s campus last year, Betar’s executive director posted to Instagram that he planned to send out beepers to SJP members. The post was referring to the Israeli surprise attack on Lebanon using explosives in civilian pagers. Experts said the bombings may amount to a war crime because of their indiscriminate nature. 

    The head of Betar – a post he later told Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the post was a “joke.” SJP reported the post as a bomb threat, and Meta banned Betar from its platforms.

    “The chilling effect has rippled outward.”

    Attacks on pro-Palestine students have not only hampered SJP’s efforts to organize on campus, but also had a wider effect on chilling speech on Palestine in general, the SJP spokesperson said. Those attacks have also left the school’s Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students feeling afraid as they watch the slaughter of their families and communities abroad. 

    “The chilling effect has rippled outward — other organisations have canceled pro-Palestine events and are fearful to plan new ones, knowing the level of repression we’ve been forced to endure,” the spokesperson said. 

    The lawsuit is one of a wave of similar actions taken by student protesters and their allies in response to university crackdowns on speech on Palestine. 

    “Pitt claims to ‘welcome myriad political viewpoints’ and ‘offer spaces for debate’ across classrooms, libraries, and campus spaces,” the SJP spokesperson said. “Evidently, that welcome ends where Palestine begins.”

    Update: April 16, 2025
    This story has been updated to include more information from the lawsuit and statements from the University of Pittsburgh’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

    The post Pitt’s Suspension of Pro-Palestine Student Group Violates First Amendment, Says ACLU Lawsuit appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen. 

    Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.

    “Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.” 

    Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.

    Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.

    In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

    Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a member of Congress and Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Betar.

    Related

    The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters

    With Donald Trump’s inauguration, groups like Betar and Canary Mission have been at the center of a push to place scrutiny on foreign students active in campus pro-Palestine movements. At Columbia, one behind-the-scenes push came from a WhatsApp group that included alumni and faculty who organized to get the students deported. Davidai was a member of the group, though there’s no indication he participated in talk of deportation, whether about Mahdawi or other students.

    Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.

    After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself. 

    Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.

    Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.

    “It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.” 

    His fears arise from the toll Israel’s attacks and occupation have taken on Mahdawi’s family. Growing up in the West Bank, his community has suffered losses for years. He said he lost his childhood best friend, his uncle, two cousins, several of whom were killed in the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against occupation that lasted from 2000 to 2005. 

    “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”

    More recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence in the occupied Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks, Mahdawi said. His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed, and his father’s store was blown up as part of the violence in the West Bank city of Jenin.

    Now, he is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation as hundreds across the country have had their visas revoked under the Trump administration’s sweeps and abductions of immigrants. Mahdawi is one of the few cases of legal permanent residents arrested, meaning he did not have a student visa revoked but is facing an effort by the government to cancel his green card. Other permanent residents have faced deportation over allegations that they violated immigration law or had their residency revoked over pro-Palestinian views.

    “This is the outcome,” Mahdawi said. “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.” 

    Attacks and Government Scrutiny

    In December 2023, Mahdawi appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment focused on antisemitism on college campuses. 

    Mahdawi criticized how Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik had responded to the October 7 attacks, saying that she was ignoring the plight of Palestinians. And, a past leader of Columbia’s Palestinian student union, Mahdawi said pro-Israel factions on campus wanted to silence those protesting genocide. 

    In the wake of the interview, he became the subject of increasing surveillance and attacks from Zionist groups. He said he also started receiving death threats. Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, two Zionist groups that have become hubs for doxing and bullying of Palestine solidarity activists, created profiles for him. The profiles claimed that Mahdawi — whose activist work centered on finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts between Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians — was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.

    By late 2024, Mahdawi was visited at his apartment by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force official. Mahdawi said he is still unsure of the purpose of the FBI visit. Mahdawi said Columbia refused to provide him with video footage of his apartment complex capturing the visit. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    Then, in early 2025, Trump formalized his plans to deport pro-Palestine student protesters with an executive order.

    Shortly after, Betar, which said it sent a list of students it wanted deported to the White House, posted about Mahdawi. So did the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU, which is run by a member of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group that worked to deport students. The group posted multiple times about Mahdawi and other organizers, tagging law enforcement agencies.

    Shortly afterward, Mahdawi went into hiding. In response to a final email last month pleading with the school to move him to a safe location, a high-ranking official in the Columbia administration wrote, “The University’s outside counsel will be in touch with your counsel.” Mahdawi’s lawyer said Columbia responded and said they could not give him safe campus housing where he would be better insulated from ICE.

    Last month, Betar posted about Mahdawi again. The group said Mahdawi was part of a group of students Betar was confident would “shortly be deported.” 

    Earlier this month, Mahdawi received an email from USCIS notifying him that he was scheduled to conduct an interview to obtain his U.S. citizenship. He said he was expecting the interview to take place in December or January, in line with the expected timeline to move from his green card status through the naturalization process. When he received the email, however, he was worried it might be a trap. 

    In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible. 

    Mahdawi said he spoke personally with Welch, who said his office would be on standby pending what happened with Mahdawi’s case. Offices for Sanders and Balint said they would remain on standby pending news of Mahdawi’s status after the interview. (Welch, Sanders, and Balint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

    Mahdawi said the government’s efforts to chill speech went beyond issues related to Israel or Palestine. 

    “That’s why they’re crushing universities now, it’s not only about Palestine,” Mahdawi said. 

    As for his hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen one day and continuing his master’s degree studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi’s future is unclear. 

    “People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi said. “I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”

    Update: April 14, 2025, 1:42 p.m. ET
    This story has been updated to include a filing made by Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team challenging his detention by the government.

    The post Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Close to 100 people have requested their money back from the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. 

    Refund requests can be routine part of campaigns, either because donors decide for some reason that they want a refund or they accidentally donated over the legal limit for contributions.

    In Fetterman’s case, though, several donors have indicated that they asked the campaign for their money back or planned to do so because of his hard-right turn toward Israel and Republican-aligned policies. The bulk of the refund requests to Fetterman’s campaign since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza have been from small-dollar donors. 

    Darwin Leuba, the vice-chair of the O’Hara Township Democratic Committee and the elected auditor of the township since 2017 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, requested a refund of his $5 contribution last month.

    “Fetterman’s either fighting for our rights, or he’s not. And if he’s not, then we need to push back.”

    “It seems silly, right? It’s just five bucks, but it serves as a proof of concept for those who gave much more,” Leuba told The Intercept, noting that he only spoke for himself. “Our rights are being stripped away, and we need representatives who care enough to fight for us.”

    “Fetterman’s either fighting for our rights, or he’s not. And if he’s not, then we need to push back,” Leuba said, “even if it’s five bucks at a time.”

    The Fetterman campaign has issued more than 1,700 refund requests since 2021 from more than 1,000 donors, totaling more than $780,800, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. That includes more than 200 refunds last cycle. At least seven political action committees also received refunds. (Fetterman’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Most of the refunds the campaign issued last cycle after October 7 went to small-dollar donors: More than 80 percent of the total number of refunds the campaign issued in 2024 went to donors who gave less than $100 — up 8 percent from 2023.

    In all of 2024, the campaign issued more than 120 refunds totaling $17,400, compared to 96 refunds in 2023 totaling $17,600.

    Still, the refunds represent a small portion of Fetterman’s campaign haul. Sixty-two donors received refunds after the October 7 attacks, totaling $20,300 across 139 contributions, less than 1 percent of the campaign’s total individual contributions that cycle. That figure does not include donors like Leuba who requested their refunds last month, or anytime since December; requests after December will be reflected in an upcoming filing.

    The period since October 7 reflects about two-thirds of the total time Fetterman has been in office, making it natural for more requests for refunds to pile up since the Hamas attacks.

    “Totally Defrauded by Fetterman”

    Fetterman’s supporters have been vocal about their disappointment with his rightward turn since taking office.

    Small-dollar donors have increasingly voiced their dismay with Fetterman since October 7, 2023, and his subsequent support for GOP efforts like the Laken Riley Act and the confirmation of Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

    At the same time, Republican donors ramped up their contributions to the Democratic senator after October 7, The Intercept previously reported.

    “It’s been clear for a while that he’s been moving further to the right, which is why I quietly requested a refund months ago,” Leuba said. “I posted it publicly because he didn’t fight back on the government funding bill and was attacking other Democrats for voting against it. That came off as selfish and counterproductive.” 

    Some Reddit users posted comments on a thread about Leuba’s refund request and said they planned to do the same. “I just emailed in my refund request. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but $40 is $40,” one user wrote last month. 

    “I just sent in my request,” another user replied. “Not expecting any response but it’s a good way to make it clear Pennsylvania is not behind this NewCon turn. I’m not sure if he was always a fraud, it was the stroke or he’s just trying to keep [his wife] Gisele out of an ICE raid. Regardless he’s not who he said he was.”

    Rabbi David Mivasair, a member of the rabbinic council of Jewish Voice for Peace and a Pennsylvania voter, wrote in a Twitter post last month that he wanted to request a refund from Fetterman’s campaign because of the senator’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “I must request a refund from John Fetterman, who I gave regular donations to, not knowing what a deeply perverse, genocidal monster he is. I’ll do it to clear my karma a bit and will double and donate every penny to desperate families in #Gaza,” Mivasair wrote. He added a link to donate to families in Gaza.

    “I feel totally defrauded by Fetterman,” Mivasair told The Intercept, noting that he had not yet requested the refund. “I actively supported him in the Democratic primary for Senate with both advocacy and donations. If I had only known what he would end up doing in the Senate, I never would have done that.”

    “I feel that way specifically because of his genocidal support for Israel. He has no regard for justice or human life when it comes to Palestinians,” he added. “I think John Fetterman is entirely irrational in his unstinting, total support for Israel as it commits genocide in full view of the world.” 

    Other senators also have large numbers of refund requests. The campaign for Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., had more than 5,000 refund requests since 2021 from more than 2,000 people and eight PACs, totaling more than $2 million.

    Other senators see far fewer such requests: The campaign for Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., has issued 275 refunds to more than 140 people since 2021, totaling $151,000. Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., issued just under 30 refunds last cycle, including several for excessive contributions.

    One of the biggest outliers in campaign refund requests is President Donald Trump, whose campaign issued more than $120 million in refunds to donors in 2020 — more than 10 percent of what the campaign raised that cycle.

    Cozy With the Right

    Last month, Fetterman was scheduled to appear alongside Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., who he previously attacked. During McCormick’s 2022 and 2024 campaigns, Fetterman had railed against the Republican. Now, the two would be appearing together at an event on youth mentorship — their first joint appearance. The event was canceled after protesters demonstrated against it.


    Related

    Fetterman Staff Quit Amid Frustration Over “Just Working on Israel All the Time”


    Staffers have left Fetterman’s office en masse since 2023. Last spring, three of his top communications staffers resigned in the course of a month. His office has had three different communications directors in the span of just over two years. The office has not hired a new communications director since the departure of Charlie Hills in February, according to LegiStorm. Fetterman’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

    In total, six staffers have left the office since 2023, The Intercept previously reported, including several people who left over Fetterman’s singular focus on Israel.

    Fetterman campaigned on being a champion of the working class, fighting to protect immigrants, and reforming the criminal justice system. Since the October 7 attacks and his increasingly cozy relationship with both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the bulk of his office’s activity has drifted away from the promises of his 2022 campaign, according to people familiar with the office’s work. 

    FEC records reflect campaign refunds through December 2024. The next round of campaign finance filings are due later this month.

    The post Small-Dollar Donors Are Asking John Fetterman for Their Money Back appeared first on The Intercept.

  • Yale University’s investments in weapons manufacturers violate Connecticut state law, organizers at the school allege in a complaint filed Wednesday with Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

    The complaint asks the attorney general to investigate Yale’s refusal to heed campus protesters’ calls for divestment from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.

    “Financially prudent investments may be ineligible for investment if they are deeply incompatible with the University’s mission and purposes,” the complaint says, citing state law and the university’s own investment policies.

    “Financially prudent investments may be ineligible for investment if they are deeply incompatible with the University’s mission.”

    Universities around the country are facing lawsuits and federal complaints over their handling of protests against the war. This is the first complaint seeking a state investigation into a university over its refusal to divest from the military industry in relation to the war, according to the organizers. 

    The organizers allege that Yale trustees breached their fiduciary duties by maintaining investments that expose the university endowment to profit from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers aiding war crimes by Israel.

    While Yale Corporation, which manages the university endowment, does not disclose the vast majority of its $40.7 billion endowment, organizers say at least $4 billion of that is tied to manufacturers and suppliers of military weapons. The scant public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission — 99.7 percent of Yale’s endowment is not publicly disclosed — show that the university has more than $110,000 invested in military weapons manufacturers and contractors with the Israeli military, Yale Daily News reported last year. 

    The investments include money in funds that hold shares of weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin

    The complaint alleges that these investments violate both the fiduciary duties of institutional investors outlined in state law and the university’s own investment policies, which call for divestment from companies that “violate, or frustrate the enforcement of” domestic and international law. (Neither the Connecticut attorney general’s office nor Yale immediately responded to requests for comment.)

    Almost every state has a law requiring that institutions managing money for tax-exempt nonprofits have to consider the purpose of those charitable organizations in making its investment decision, meaning that the spirit of those choices must be in line with the Internal Revenue Service’s general understanding of charity as providing relief for those in need, or supporting public, educational, or religious work. 

    The law does not explicitly prohibit investments in any specific industry like defense or weapons manufacturing, said attorney Ellis Carter. 

    “The only exceptions would be if a donor-imposed restriction expressly limits certain investments with respect to a particular gift or the university has adopted an internal policy incorporating ethical, environmental, or social considerations into its investment strategy,” Carter said. 

    Yale’s investment guidelines are outlined in “The Ethical Investor,” a 1972 book written by a former Yale Law School professor which the university endowment advisory committee uses to guide its work. Yale University has previously interpreted its own investment guidelines to require divestment from companies assisting in genocide; violating domestic, international, and humanitarian law; or denying students and teachers a safe educational environment, organizers argued. In 2021, Yale Corporation divested from two major private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group. 

    “Military weapons companies develop, manufacture, and sell products used in the commission of war crimes and violations of international law, including the destruction of Palestinian schools, universities, faculty, students, sites of cultural preservation, and whole communities,” the complaint says. “Since these companies are diametrically opposed to the University’s mission, due consideration of Yale’s charitable purposes by a prudent and reasonable fiduciary would bar these companies from investment.”

    Drive for Divestment

    Students launched protest encampments at Yale last year to call on the school to divest from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel. Last April, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, which supports ethical management of the university endowment and reports to university trustees, refused to recommend divestment. 

    Yale Police arrested close to 50 protesters as demonstrations escalated in response to news that the university would not divest.

    That same month, the advisory committee updated its policies to specify that a prohibition on investment in assault weapons retailers adopted in 2018 applied to assault weapon manufacturers that sell and mass advertise to the general public, but not to military weapons manufacturers. 

    University organizers again presented their proposals for divestment to Yale’s advisory committee on in November. Last month, in response to the presentation, the committee declined again to divest from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers in an email to a university organizer. (Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    “If the complaint alleges that the university has violated its own investment policies or fiduciary duties, or violated a donor restriction, then the state may evaluate whether trustees or investment managers have acted inconsistently with UPMIFA’s prudence and loyalty standards,” said Ellis, the attorney. “However, absent a clear statutory restriction, investments in military contractors or similar industries are generally a matter of policy discretion rather than a legal violation.”

    Related

    Some Universities Chose Violence. Others Responded to Protests by Considering Student Demands.

    Taran Samarth, a graduate student organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Collective, which put together Wednesday’s complaint, said the university’s endowment policies showed the Palestine exception in action. 

    “Instead of following state law, community voices, and their own investment policies, the trustees have let a Palestine exception to endowment management prevail at Yale,” Samarth said. “Abandoning their own divestment precedent and arresting students en masse isn’t just bad policy by the trustees. It’s bad-faith leadership.”

    “The Yale Corporation has breached its fiduciary duties of loyalty and due consideration of the charitable purposes of the institutional fund by providing capital to the military weapons industry,” the complaint says. “Continued investment in military weapons companies violates the Yale Corporation’s duty to consider an asset’s special relationship or special value, if any, to the charitable purposes of the institution.” 

    In recent years, there has been some success in getting universities to divest from fossil fuels through a similar strategyOrganizers at Cornell and Harvard filed complaints alleging that their schools’ investments in fossil fuels violated fiduciary duties. In 2019, Cornell issued a moratorium on fossil fuel investments, and in 2021, Harvard said it would end its investments in fossil fuels. That same year, Yale announced it would be “applying its ethical investment policy to the fossil fuel industry.”

    The post Yale Investments in Companies Selling Arms to Israel Violate State Law, Says an Official Complaint appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • During a bizarre live ad for Elon Musk’s car company on the White House lawn Tuesday, President Donald Trump said people protesting at Tesla dealerships around the country would be treated as domestic terrorists

    A reporter asked Trump what he would do about the Tesla protests, noting that some commentators had suggested that protesters “should be labeled domestic terrorists.” 

    Trump leapt at the opening. “I will do that. I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them. We catch anybody doing it because they’re harming a great American company,” he said. “We’re going to catch them. And let me tell you, you do it to Tesla and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you and you’re going to — you’re going to go through hell.” 

    The remarks came in the form of an unprecedented display of salesmanship with the White House as a backdrop, part press conference, part advertisement to improve stock performance for the president’s billionaire righthand man amid controversy and tumbling markets.

    On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., urged the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Tesla protests. Forbes reported that in doing so, Taylor-Greene — who owns Tesla stock — may have violated House ethics rules.

    Trump cannot summarily declare a class of people exercising their First Amendment rights as domestic terrorists. He can try to encourage domestic terror charges, which can be terror crimes or sentencing enhancements on other felonies, but the efforts would be unlikely to stand up in court.

    “It’s absurd,” said organizer Alice Hu, executive director at the youth-led climate justice group Planet Over Profit. “It’s obvious, both legally and from a common sense perspective, that First Amendment-protected peaceful protest is not domestic terrorism.”

    The response from Trump and Musk, Hu said, is a sign that the protests are working. Tesla’s stock prices tanked. And Musk, who is spearheading Trump’s controversial effort to gut the federal government, is using his social media platform Twitter to target individual organizers and grassroots groups, Hu said. 

    “They’re trying to label this peaceful movement an illegal, violent, whatever, domestic terrorist movement,” she said “The reality is that it’s DOGE’s illegal rampage destroying the government, taking over the government. That’s the real problem here.” 

    The president is immune from federal ethics regulations prohibiting the use of public office for private gain. However, it’s clear that after campaigning on being a champion of the working class, Trump is using the White House to advertise the company of his largest single donor and de facto appointee amid tanking Tesla stocks. 

    “There aren’t laws that apply to Trump here, and with Musk, it’s still not 100 percent clear how he fits in with the government,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But beyond that, there’s a huge optics problem, where it looks like the president of the United States is trying to stop the stock slide of his election’s biggest individual funder.”

    Police have showed up in force to barricade Tesla dealerships around the country since, amid Musk’s de facto takeover of the government, the grassroots #TeslaTakedown movement began demonstrating against the electric car maker last month. An image from Chicago showed more than 20 officers standing in a line blocking the entrance to a Tesla storefront last week. 

    Some 350 people attended protests at the Tesla showroom in Manhattan on Saturday. New York Police Department officers arrested six people; one was charged with resisting arrest, and the other five were released. 

    Hu said the police showed up with several massive vans from the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a counterterror unit that deals with civil unrest. In 2021, The Intercept reported that NYPD officer trainings — and manuals for the SRG in particular — included few directives about protecting demonstrators’ First Amendment rights. 

    “In response to this outpouring of turnout, the police had at least five or six Strategic Response Group vans. Those are the vans that are ready to transport prisoners from some kind of location to the precinct. Each of those vans fits at least 10 people or so in there,” Hu said. “They were totally preparing for some kind of event where they might have needed to arrest dozens of people.”

    An NYPD spokesperson confirmed that five people arrested on Saturday were released but did not respond to questions about how many officers were dispatched to the scene. 

    At least nine people have been arrested at protests at Tesla dealerships and showrooms in New York. It’s not clear how many more arrests have been made around the country. 

    Undeterred by the draconian response of the Trump administration, an organizer in California said she and her colleagues decided to start their own Tesla protests after seeing others pop up around the country. Lara Starr is part of a small group called Solidarity Sundays that writes postcards as a form of protest. “But after the election, postcards didn’t seem like enough,” Starr told The Intercept.

    Organizers with the group anticipated that fewer than 10 people would show up to their first action, but after Indivisible, the protest group that sprung up during Trump’s first term, publicized the plan, 200 people showed up. 

    “So many people thanked us for giving them something to do,” Starr said. The group plans to keep protesting at Tesla every Sunday.

    “Tesla cannot be disentangled from Musk, and Musk cannot be disentangled from Trump and the chaos he is causing, the lives he is ruining, and the dismantling of our democracy and decent society,” she said. “Taking down Tesla’s sales, stock price, and potentially the entire brand is the people speaking up, stepping up, and not letting our voices and values be silenced and ignored.”

    The strategy behind the Tesla protests is to take a moment when so many people feel helpless and turn it into an opportunity to exert the power of the masses, Hu said. 

    “Ordinary people around the country knew that they needed to take matters in their own hands and start organizing,” Hu said. “We are seeing relative inaction from the Democrats and from people with that kind of platform and power.”

    Trump and Musk have no grounds to speak about what’s lawful or unlawful, Hu said. 

    “It’s more than clear to anybody paying attention that this is a wannabe dictator, a wannabe authoritarian administration,” she said, raising the arrest and attempt to deport Palestinian protester and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. “They’re undermining the rule of law to try to disappear a permanent resident.”

    The post If Protesting Tesla Is Domestic Terrorism, Then What Demonstration Against Musk Isn’t appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • As protests arise and First Amendment questions mount surrounding the immigration detention of Mahmoud Khalil, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. penned and circulated a letter demanding the immediate release of the recent Columbia University graduate. 

    It found little support among Tlaib’s colleagues in Washington, with a mere 14 Democrats signing their names on the letter condemning Khalil’s detention as an “illegal abduction.” 

    Instead, statements from prominent Democrats suggest much of the party is taking the Trump administration’s targeting of Khalil in good faith.

    Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., who counts Khalil as one of his constituents, did not sign the letter. When contacted by The Intercept about the case, Espaillat said he expects the Trump administration – which has explicitly flouted and sought to circumscribe federal legal protections for civil liberties – to adhere to the rule of law.

    “Regarding the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a constituent who lives in my district, my office has been following this case closely and as a former green card holder, I expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed to him and his family,” Espaillat said in a statement Tuesday morning. “The rule of law must be respected.” 

    In a statement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., condemned Khalil’s activism and “antisemitic actions at Columbia,” without providing examples of those actions. He said that the administration should release Khalil if it could determine he had not broken any laws. 

    “This illegal justification has been stated clearly by figures throughout the administration, including the president himself.”

    The Trump administration itself has admitted the case against Khalil does not hinge on allegations that he broke the law and told a conservative news outlet that it will these proceedings as a blueprint to target other students.

    Tlaib’s letter specifically calls out the Trump administration’s campaign for pushing to expel Khalil despite the fact he “has not been charged or convicted of any crime.”

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    “As the Trump administration proudly admits, he was targeted solely for his activism and organizing as a student leader and negotiator for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University campus, protesting the Israeli government’s brutal assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza and his university’s complicity in this oppression,” the letter said. “This illegal justification has been stated clearly by figures throughout the administration, including the president himself.”

    In a bid to find additional backers, the letter was distributed among all 100 House members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Monday evening with a 10 a.m. deadline, according to a source familiar with the letter. Less than 15 percent of CPC members signed onto the letter, which was published Tuesday morning.

    Signatories of the letter include: Andre Carson, D-Ind., Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, Al Green, D-Texas, Summer Lee, D-Penn., Jim McGovern, D-Mass., Gwen Moore, D-Wisc., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., Lateefah Simon, D-Calif., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y. and Nikema Williams, D-Ga. 

    At least one Democrat reportedly consulted about Khalil prior to his arrest. According to Jewish Insider, which was first to report on Tlaib’s letter prior to its release, an aide for Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., discussed Khalil’s situation with a former operative for the Zionist group Betar. The group has taken credit for sending a list of students it wanted deported to the White House. Betar named Khalil, misspelling his first name, in a tweet in January.

    In response to a tweet on Monday from the Senate Judiciary Democrats calling to free Khalil, Fetterman replied: “Free all the hostages who have been tortured, starved, raped, beaten and STILL in tunnels in Gaza by Hamas since October 7th, 2023.” Fetterman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    The post Dems for Some Reason Expect Trump to Follow the Law on Detention of Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Intercept.

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  • During his joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump laid out his vision for the next four years and carefully revised the legacy of his first seven weeks in office. 

    Amid a slew of actions to chill speech and root out political opponents from federal agencies, Trump claimed that his administration had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” Earlier on Tuesday, Trump threatened to cut funding from schools that allow “illegal” protests.

    “Our country will be woke no longer,” Trump said to applause after he celebrated orders making English the official language of the U.S. and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. He cheered the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action and his administration’s efforts to “remove the poison of critical race theory from our public schools” and make it the official policy of the U.S. “that there are only two genders.” 

    In practice, Trump has accomplished those tasks by ending federal environmental protections for minority communities, making it easier for employers to discriminate based on race, stripping money from schools that teach about racial inequality and threatening to upend programs that provide mental health support for homeless children

    “You can’t claim to stand for free speech while threatening schools’ funding to silence anti-war students.”

    Since taking office, Trump has signed executive orders to threaten to deport students who take part in pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests and announced a list of schools that will receive visits from the Department of Justice over their handling of campus protests. He has also eliminated civil rights work and diversity and equity initiatives across federal agencies, and made plans to defund schools that teach “discriminatory equity ideology,” which includes teaching basic facts about racism in U.S. history like the idea that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.” 

    “You can’t claim to stand for free speech while threatening schools’ funding to silence anti-war students,” said Tariq Habash, a former staffer in president Joe Biden’s Department of Education who resigned over Biden’s handling of the war on Gaza. Habash is now cofounder and director of the advocacy group A New Policy. “These efforts are not just antidemocratic, they’re illegal and a direct attack on academia, students, and faculty.”

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    Self-described liberals at universities around the country opened the door for Trump’s attacks on civil rights by making exceptions for freedom of speech on Palestine, said Democratic National Committee delegate Nadia Ahmad. “University leaders across the country are more than happy to carry out Trump’s anti-Palestinian deportation orders while publicly lamenting his attacks on DEI initiatives,” said Ahmad. 

    “They condemn him in rhetoric, yet eagerly enforce his agenda by silencing and expelling students. Their complicity reveals how shallow institutional commitments to human rights really are. The administration and university leaders, particularly the legal elite, have weaponized civility to declare certain human rights conversations off-limits,” said Ahman, who in August was struck in the head by Biden supporters wielding signs that read “We Love Joe” after she held up a banner at the Democratic National Convention calling on the president to stop arming Israel. “Freedom of speech at universities now only extends as far as supporting the political status quo allows.”

    Trump touted his administration’s “swift and unrelenting action” in its first days, during which he moved to dismantle federal agencies and installed his political allies in positions of immense power. 

    Democrats, facing criticism from supporters for not doing more to block Trump’s agenda, wore pink to draw attention to Trump’s attacks on women’s rights. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., ordered the Sergeant at Arms to remove Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, from the chamber after he interrupted Trump’s remarks about his electoral win. 

    Shortly before Trump’s address on Tuesday night, news broke of the next phase of Trump’s gutting of the federal work force. The Internal Revenue Service is expected to lay off as much as half of its 90,000-employee staff. The news came after reports that Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump acolyte and advisor who attended the address on Tuesday, is pushing to access personal tax information held by the agency.

    Less than two hours after the news of the pending IRS layoffs, Trump told his audience: “America is back.”

    The post Trump Brags He “Brought Back Free Speech” Hours After Calling to Ban “Illegal” Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

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  • Now that Republicans have won control of government in Washington, they’re shifting their sights to a progressive enclave in Pennsylvania.

    Major donors to President Donald Trump are pouring money into the race to unseat Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, lining up behind his Democratic primary opponent, Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor.

    Three months ahead of the primary, the GOP donors have already funneled more than $130,000 into the race, constituting more than 20 percent of O’Connor’s January haul. At least five Trump and Republican donors have maxed out to O’Connor’s campaign, helping him to outraise Gainey last month with $464,000 to Gainey’s $23,600, according to January campaign finance reports.

    While Gainey has taken outspoken progressive stances on issues from housing to immigration, the right-leaning donors see O’Connor as more of a blank slate, said Tanisha Long, a Gainey supporter and an Allegheny County political director for Straight Ahead, a criminal justice project of the Abolitionist Law Center.

    “He won’t outright embrace those people, but he will very happily accept checks.”

    “A lot of the Republicans,” said Long, referring to the donors, “are running with the fact that Corey doesn’t really take hard stances on things.”

    She said O’Connor is being politically delicate but appears willing to take the cash: “He won’t outright embrace those people, but he will very happily accept checks.”

    In small communities like Pittsburgh, the relatively small donor pool and a weak Republican Party means it’s common for Republican donors to get involved in Democratic races. The influx of GOP money in a primary, however, is unusual for Pittsburgh, Long said.

    Democratic Pittsburgh City Councilmember Barb Warwick, who represents O’Connor’s old city council district and is backing Gainey, found the GOP money in the mayor’s race particularly disconcerting. Trump’s current approach — fostering a developer and tech plutocracy — has already been a feature of right-wing Pittsburgh politics, she said.

    “It makes sense that they are putting money toward getting rid of him,” Warwick said of the donors and Gainey. “It doesn’t surprise me that the same folks who are trying to overstep what’s good for regular people on the ground at the national level are also trying to push aside a mayor who is really focused on what’s good for the people living here in Pittsburgh today.”

    A spokesperson for O’Connor’s campaign said the challenger took progressive stances. 

    “Corey has delivered for workers by challenging wealthy corporate interests, stood alongside community members against developers, and took a stand against the powerful gun lobby,” said the spokesperson, Ben Forstate. “The fights that he has undertaken for Pittsburgh residents show that he cannot and will not be bought by anyone.”

    The next campaign finance reports in the mayor’s race are expected later this month. O’Connor has outraised Gainey in both small and large-dollar contributions. His campaign reported more than contributions over $250 from more than 250 people, totaling more than $450,000. Gainey’s campaign reported contributions over $250 from 15 people totaling $14,725.

    O’Connor’s campaign touted its small-dollar support.

    “The fact that we’ve raised more than our opponent in small contributions from more individual small-dollar donors,” said Forstate, “shows Pittsburghers from all walks of life — whether they’re laborers, teachers, service workers, paramedics, or retirees — are behind Corey.”

    Trump, GOP Donations

    In addition to donors, other figures from Trump-world and the Republican Party have become involved with O’Connor’s campaign.

    Trump consultant and pollster Kent Gates, whose firm took a six-figure payment from Trump’s 2024 campaign, appeared at an event with O’Connor earlier this month. The event, a roundtable meeting with local business leaders, was organized with help from Republican operative Jeff Kendall, a close ally and surrogate of billionaire and controversial GOP megadonor Jeffrey Yass. (Gates and Kendall did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Forstate, the O’Connor spokesperson, said the campaign would not accept money from Yass, was not aware that Gates and Kendall had helped organize the event, and that O’Connor gave his standard stump speech.

    “He did not request donations, and this was not an event planned, organized, or produced by the O’Connor campaign,” Forstate said. “We’ve taken zero dollars from Gates or Kendall. We were not aware that the event was organized by those individuals.”

    Some Trump donors, however, have given. Clifford Forrest, who owns a Pennsylvania mining firm and donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016, gave O’Connor $3,300 in January. (Forrest did not respond to a request for comment.)

    The O’Connor campaign pointed to donations from Republicans to Gainey, the bulk of which came during his 2021 general election effort. “Our campaign took our lead on fundraising from the mayor,” Forstate said in a statement to The Intercept, citing a Forrest contribution to Gainey in 2021. “Over the last four years Mayor Gainey took over $82,000 from Trump and GOP donors.”

    In 2021, Gainey raised $55,600 — five percent of the money he took in that cycle — from Trump donors, and registered Republicans. (Several of the registered Republicans are regular Democratic donors with no history of giving to the GOP.) In 2021, Gainey also took $5,000 from the O’Connor donor Forrest and his wife. (In response to questions about the contribution, Gainey’s campaign said it was an oversight and that a refund would be issued.)

    The money O’Connor has raised from Trump and GOP donors in January alone — more than 20 percent of his total haul that month — dwarfs GOP donor support for Gainey over the last four years.

    GOP megadonor Herb Shear, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups supporting Trump, maxed out his contribution to O’Connor’s campaign last month. Other GOP donors who maxed out to O’Connor’s campaign include Kent McElhattan, John Staley IV, and Thomas Grealish. Forstate said O’Connor’s campaign returned a contribution from one GOP donor. (None of the Republican O’Connor donors responded to a request for comment.)

    Progressive Wave

    Republican donors see a threat rising in Pittsburgh, where progressives have found success amid broader Democratic failures.

    Gainey has been an instrumental part of the movement to build a progressive bench in Western Pennsylvania, even as Democrats continue to erode support. He’s also been vocal in opposing Trump’s efforts to track down and remove undocumented immigrants. In January, Gainey said his office would not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that Pittsburgh, a city made of immigrants, would “always be welcoming of everybody.”

    Gainey has worked closely with Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., and his 2021 election boosted her 2022 congressional campaign. Gainey and Lee’s wins also helped pave the way for progressive Sara Innamorato’s 2023 election as Allegheny County executive, one of the most powerful offices in the western part of the state.

    O’Connor himself has been part of that progressive surge. He is the son of former Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O’Connor and was a city councilmember from 2012 to 2022, when he was first appointed as Allegheny County controller by then-Gov. Tom Wolf.

    O’Connor elected to a full term as controller in 2023. He has used his position to address criminal justice issues and shine a light on how the county jail destabilizes families. O’Connor also refused an invitation from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to challenge Lee in Congress, The Intercept reported.

    In the mayoral race, however, O’Connor attracted money from real estate interests. Developers including Walnut Capital executives Gregg Perelman and Todd Reidbord maxed out to O’Connor’s campaign in December, as did one of their employees. One of the company’s properties is hosting an event for O’Connor next month with tickets ranging from $100 to $1,000. The Walnut Capital donors and O’Connor’s campaign did not respond to questions about the contributions or the event.

    Gainey has been a vocal advocate for affordable housing and pushed zoning reforms that drew the ire of real estate interests.

    O’Connor supported affordable housing measures during his time on city council and says he wants to expand affordable housing in Pittsburgh. He has also said he doesn’t believe inclusionary zoning should be required in every neighborhood and said he’s open to waiving certain fees to boost development.

    “It’s easy to say that you’re for the people,” said Warwick, the councilmember. “It’s a much different thing to actually step forward and put your foot down.”

    The post Trump Donors Try to Buy Pittsburgh Mayor’s Race appeared first on The Intercept.

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  • The exodus of staff from the office of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., continued Thursday with two new departures.

    The exits of the longtime staffers reflects a deep disillusionment in Fetterman’s office with his disavowal of progressive politics and turn toward the right in both his openness to working with President Donald Trump and his embrace of strident pro-Israel positions.

    The office’s “major staff turnover,” as one team Fetterman veteran put it, comes amid a tough hiring environment for Democratic staffers in Washington.

    “This is a guy who came in talking about being a champion for labor and he’s gone pretty quiet on it.”

    “I don’t find this as a surprise,” said the former Fetterman campaign staffer, who requested anonymity to protect their livelihood. “I think the staff is probably frustrated that working in the Fetterman office means you’re just working on Israel all the time.”

    “This is a guy who came in talking about being a champion for labor and he’s gone pretty quiet on it,” they said. “This is a guy who, since Trump won, is for lack of better word basically a useful idiot for Republicans. He’s supporting stuff and it gives them cover to say, ‘Look it’s bipartisan, we got Fetterman.’”

    The most recent departures are two of six from Fetterman’s office since his hard pro-Israel turn after the October 7 attacks in 2023. Three of Fetterman’s top communications staffers left his office last spring after he claimed he was not a progressive amid criticism from his left-leaning colleagues over his aggressive pro-Israel stances. 

    After that round of resignations, Fetterman hired a new communications director, Carrie Adams. Adams then left the office last month. Fetterman posted an opening for a new communications director on Wednesday. 

    The newest staffers on the way out are Charlie Hills, Fetterman’s communications director, whose last day is Friday, and legislative director Tré Easton, whose departure date is unclear. Hills and Easton’s resignations were first reported by NBC News. “Together we created a legislative body of work that I think is a blueprint for how Democrats should be governing when they have power,” Easton told NBC in a statement. (Neither Hills nor Fetterman’s office immediately responded to a request for comment.)

    The bleeding of staff, the former campaign staffer said, is a sign that people in Fetterman’s office are fed up with his abandonment of campaign promises to make the economy easier on working class people and be an advocate for the poor, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and criminal justice reform in the Senate. 

    Fetterman campaigned as a progressive and positioned himself as the only logical option for Pennsylvania voters to fight Trump’s influence in the 2022 Senate race. But shortly after taking office, Fetterman abandoned the progressive mantle. 

    Fetterman’s recent postures are a far cry from his 2022 campaign, which focused on cutting taxes for working people, celebrating immigrants — including his wife — and what they do for the country, and supporting LGBTQIA rights. “We diminish ourselves and are never more un-American when we eliminate citizenship for those who just simply want to contribute and be a part of our great country,” Fetterman said in a 2022 campaign ad.

    Since the October 7 attack, Fetterman’s office has ignored most of the issues he campaigned on, instead turning almost all his focus toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to people familiar with his office. At the same time, Fetterman has added a number of Republican donors to his roster, The Intercept reported. 

    Since Trump took office last month, Fetterman has become a sometime Republican ally. He was one of 12 Democrats in the Senate to support the GOP’s draconian new immigration law. At times, Fetterman has been Trump’s sole ally across the aisle. He was the only Democrat to vote to confirm Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general who helped spread the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

    The post Fetterman Staff Quit Amid Frustration Over “Just Working on Israel All the Time” appeared first on The Intercept.

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  • Attorney General Pam Bondi issued last week several memos to all Department of Justice employees including one with the subject: “Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions.” It detailed exactly how her agency will put into practice an executive order to restart federal executions that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.

    The memo denounced the pause on federal executions under former President Joe Biden and claimed DOJ officials had neglected their jobs by upholding a moratorium on federal executions in place since 2021, which halted a killing spree launched by Trump in his first term. “The Department’s political leadership disregarded these important responsibilities and supplanted the will of the people with their own personal beliefs,” the memo read. 

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    While there is no evidence that the death penalty achieves its purported goal to deter crime, the Trump administration wants the federal government to direct substantial resources and dollars to carrying out more executions, more quickly. Through its executive actions and policy memos, the administration is also stating something that criminal justice and human rights advocates have long said: that conditions in many federal detention facilities are inhumane, and Trump wants to keep them that way.

    In the January 20 executive order, Trump directed his attorney general to evaluate the conditions of confinement for the 37 people commuted from federal death row at the end of Biden’s term and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” 

    The message is a direction to the federal government to use conditions of confinement as additional punishment — which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, according to Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at Yale University and a former federal public defender. 

    On top of that, it suggests that inhumane conditions in federal detention are the administration’s goal. 

    “The one thing that was clear from the order was that it sounded like the administration was going to try to influence placement of people, and try to do so under conditions that they called ‘monstrous’ in their order,” Gohara told The Intercept. Gohara spent over a decade representing clients sentenced to death in post-conviction litigation. 

    “Certainly, if I were leading the [Bureau of Prisons] or if I were working in the BOP, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there are any monstrous conditions in my facilities,” she said.

    “That suggests that they’re actually encouraging the Bureau of Prisons to maintain monstrous conditions, or that they think they’re already monstrous conditions in the BOP somewhere, and that somebody could be put there. Which again, seems like a very odd thing for the executive to be saying about one of his agencies.”

    The administration’s use of language describing federal detention as “monstrous” is on par with how Trump has spoken on criminal justice from the start, said death row attorney Dale Baich. He previously led the unit of the Arizona Federal Defender’s Office that represents people sentenced to death in post-conviction proceedings. 

    “I was really taken aback by the number of adjectives in the order,” Baich said. “But, you know, that’s how he campaigned, that’s how Project 2025 was drafted. We really shouldn’t be surprised.” 

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    Incarcerated people and advocates for reform have long argued that conditions of incarceration across the board — from federal prisons to local jails — are inhumane and that the government has not done enough to address them. Even prior to the latest order, there are plenty of examples of detention facilities that have not taken corrective measures even under court order

    Welcoming and embracing inhumane conditions in prisons as federal policy will make challenging those conditions even more difficult, Baich said. “It’s hard enough to challenge conditions of confinement when departments of corrections or the Bureau of Prisons is saying that it’s not unconstitutional,” he said. 

    “So I just think it’s going to be a real heavy lift going forward to challenge those conditions,” Baich said. 

    But challenges, he said, must continue. “What is important is to continue to pursue unconstitutional conditions of confinement and hold the government accountable.”

    Bondi’s memo last week also directs Bureau of Prisons employees to work with states that allow executions to ensure they have “sufficient supplies and resources to impose the death penalty” — including lethal injection drugs — and helping to transfer federal detainees “to the appropriate authorities to carry out those sentences.” 

    The order also directs the U.S. attorney general to look for opportunities to bring state capital charges against those with commuted federal death sentences and make relevant recommendations to state and local authorities, effectively finding another way to execute them. At its worst, that could look like the Department of Justice finding a way to federalize crimes in states without the death penalty — in other words, making a new constituency of suspects eligible for federal execution, Baich said. 

    States that don’t have the death penalty or only rarely use it are already bracing for how, if at all, Trump’s order might affect them. On Wednesday, Trump said judicial efforts to push back on his orders amounted to a “weaponization” of the courts.

    Since Trump won the presidential election, at least one Democratic governor has already taken steps to downplay the state’s history of botched executions. In late November, Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs fired an independent commissioner before they were set to publish a report on their investigation into the state’s history of botched lethal injections. A draft of the report, which was never published, concluded that death by firing squad, barred in Arizona, was the only form of execution more quick and less painful than lethal injection. Arizona’s next execution, the first in two years, is scheduled for March 19.

    Capital trials are expensive and resource-intensive, and it’s an open question whether the Trump administration would provide grants or additional support to rural counties that historically don’t have the capacity to carry out capital trials or executions. In a worst-case scenario, the administration could find a way to offer money to rural counties that often can’t afford to prosecute death penalty cases. 

    Trump’s Justice Department has already authorized the movement of one person to ensure their execution. On Wednesday, Bondi approved Oklahoma’s request to transfer George Hanson to the state from Louisiana for execution. Hanson was previously scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma in 2022, but Biden’s DOJ denied Oklahoma’s request to transfer him from Louisiana, where he is serving a life sentence for an unrelated conviction.

    Baich called the move an “example of this newly found cooperation between DOJ and the states.”

    “Mr. Hanson was never going to get out of prison,” Baich said. “Deliberate decisions by government officials have deprived Mr. Hanson of the guarantees of due process. This trampling of constitutional protections and the rush to execute are consistent with what we saw at the end of the first Trump administration where thirteen people were executed.”

    “The death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources.”

    The Trump administration’s focus on accelerating federal executions takes away resources from the goals it claims to prioritize, Gohara said during a briefing on the order last month. Those stated goals include things like helping victims and curbing crime — at a time of historically low national rates. 

    “We now understand that the death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources that actually could be used to help keep people free from crime and violence,” Gohara said. “If you’re spending money on expensive capital trials, you’re not spending money on doing things like using rape kits to clear old cases or to try to solve cold crimes.”

    The post Trump Is Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: Federal Prisons Are Purposely Inhumane appeared first on The Intercept.

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