The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has appealed to Foreign Minister Winston Peters askingto New Zealand initiate a call for an internationally enforced “no-fly” zone over Gaza.
PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said in a statement this would be a small but practicable step to “blunt Israel’s continuing genocidal attacks” on Palestinians.
“Gaza is recognised under international law, and by the New Zealand government, as part of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territory,” they said.
“As such, Israel’s intrusion into Gaza airspace is illegal, and is elevated to a war crime when its aircraft attack Palestinian civilians there to further what the International Court of Justice has described as a ‘plausible genocide”.”
Minto and Maher said the United Nations had repeatedly said there were no safe places in Gaza for Palestinian civilians, where even so-called “safe zones” were systematically attacked as Israel “terrorised the population to flee from the territory”.
“Suggestions for a no-fly zone have been made in the past but there has never been a better time for a concerted international effort to enforce such a zone over Gaza,” said Minto.
“In the week leading up to Anzac Day there is no better time for New Zealand to stand up and be counted.
“New Zealanders from past conflicts, including in that very region in 1917 and 1918, have died in vain if today’s politicians refuse to speak out to end the death and destruction in Gaza.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, has died aged 88 a day after he made his first prolonged public appearance since being discharged from hospital.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis entered St Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile shortly after midday, greeting cheering pilgrim crowds and blessing babies.
The Pope, who had recently spent five weeks in hospital being treated for double pneumonia, also offered a special blessing for the first time since Christmas.
At the address, an aide read out his “Urbi et Orbi” — Latin for “to the city and the world” — benediction, in which the Pope condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
“I express my closeness to the sufferings . . . of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” said the message.
“I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
On the same day, Francis — who has been Pope for 12 years — also held a private meeting with US Vice President JD Vance to exchange Easter greetings.
Among responses from world leaders, Vance said his “heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him”, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it was “deeply sad news, because a great man has left us,” and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Pope France would be remembered for his efforts to build “a more just, peaceful and compassionate world.”
Most vocal leader on Gaza
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the Pope’s death was “another sad day for Gaza — especially for the Christian Catholic community’ in the besieged enclave.
“He is seen as one of the most vocal leaders on Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and always asking for a ceasefire and asking for the end of this conflict,” she said.
“According to the Christian community in the Gaza Strip, he was in contact with them daily, asking them what they need and asking about what they are facing, especially as this community has been attacked several times during the course of this war.
“At this stage, the Palestinians need someone to stand by them, to defend and support them.
Traditionally, when the Pope dies or resigns, the Papal Conclave — cardinals under the age of 80 — vote for his successor.
To prevent outside influence, the conclave locks itself in the Sistine Chapel and deliberates on potential successors.
While the number of papal electors is typically capped at 120, there are currently 138 eligible voters. Its members cast their votes via secret ballots, a process overseen by nine randomly selected cardinals.
A two-thirds majority is traditionally required to elect the new pope, and voting continues until this threshold is met.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, has died aged 88 a day after he made his first prolonged public appearance since being discharged from hospital.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis entered St Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile shortly after midday, greeting cheering pilgrim crowds and blessing babies.
The Pope, who had recently spent five weeks in hospital being treated for double pneumonia, also offered a special blessing for the first time since Christmas.
At the address, an aide read out his “Urbi et Orbi” — Latin for “to the city and the world” — benediction, in which the Pope condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
“I express my closeness to the sufferings . . . of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” said the message.
“I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
On the same day, Francis — who has been Pope for 12 years — also held a private meeting with US Vice President JD Vance to exchange Easter greetings.
Among responses from world leaders, Vance said his “heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him”, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it was “deeply sad news, because a great man has left us,” and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Pope France would be remembered for his efforts to build “a more just, peaceful and compassionate world.”
Most vocal leader on Gaza
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the Pope’s death was “another sad day for Gaza — especially for the Christian Catholic community’ in the besieged enclave.
“He is seen as one of the most vocal leaders on Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and always asking for a ceasefire and asking for the end of this conflict,” she said.
“According to the Christian community in the Gaza Strip, he was in contact with them daily, asking them what they need and asking about what they are facing, especially as this community has been attacked several times during the course of this war.
“At this stage, the Palestinians need someone to stand by them, to defend and support them.
Traditionally, when the Pope dies or resigns, the Papal Conclave — cardinals under the age of 80 — vote for his successor.
To prevent outside influence, the conclave locks itself in the Sistine Chapel and deliberates on potential successors.
While the number of papal electors is typically capped at 120, there are currently 138 eligible voters. Its members cast their votes via secret ballots, a process overseen by nine randomly selected cardinals.
A two-thirds majority is traditionally required to elect the new pope, and voting continues until this threshold is met.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Part one of a two-part series: On the courage to remember
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.
The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel:
“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.
Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.
Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.
Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important.
What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the US defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more.
Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
It’s time to remember.
Memory shapes national identity As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products — books, movies, songs, curricula and the like — fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility, partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh?
Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.
How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia? Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes — say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Māori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the US government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.
Lest we forget. Forget what? Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country?
Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?
Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To VVAW and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.
The US spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the US military.
The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre While cultural memes like “Me Love You Long Time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women — popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket,Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.
The most infamous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The US Army is no exception — despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the US 20th Infantry Regiment.
Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old women. The US soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.
The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the US President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.
The failure of the US Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the US Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.
Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.
Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished Thousands of Viet Cong died in US custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focuses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain.
The future US presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.
The CIA’s Phoenix Programme was eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Programme, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. According to US journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:
“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.
Common practices, Valentine says, quoting US witnesses and official papers, included:
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”
No US serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.
Tiger Force — part of the US 327th Infantry — gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.
“Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination — so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.
Their crimes, secretly documented by the US military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information — interesting given how much mileage the US and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on 7 October 2023. The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths — and no one ever faced real consequences.
The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as US forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked US documents following the illegal invasion of that country.
The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”
Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Next article: The fall of Saigon 1975: Part two: Quiet mutiny: the US army falls apart.
Peaceful protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city Auckland held an Easter prayer vigil honouring Palestinian political prisoners and the sacrifice of thousands of innocent lives as relentless Israeli bombing of displaced Gazans in tents killed at least 92 people in two days.
Organisers of the rally for the 80th week since the war began in October 2023 said they aimed for a shift in emphasis for quietness and meditation this spiritual weekend.
“This is dedicated to the Palestine Prisoners’ Day and those who have died, innocent of any crime — women, children, journalists, patients, friends, healthcare workers, those buried under rubble, non-military civilians,” said Kathy Ross of Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
“All those starving and needing our help,” she added.
The organisers created a flowers and candles circle of peace with hibiscus blossoms in an area of Britomart that has become dubbed “Palestinian Corner”.
Placards declared “Free all Palestinian prisoners — all 10,000 people” and “Release the Palestinian prisoners.”
Palestinian fusion dancer and singer Rana Hamida, who last year sailed on the Freedom Flotilla boat Handala in an attempt to break the Israel siege of Gaza, spoke about how people could keep their spirits up in the face of such terrible atrocities, and sang a haunting hymn.
Calmness and strength
She also described how the air and wind could help protesters seek calmness and strength in spite of storms like Cyclone Tam that gusted across much of New Zealand yesterday on Good Friday causing havoc.
She spread her arms like wings as Palestinian flags fluttered strongly, saying: “The wind is now blowing in exactly the right direction.”
The Palestinian “circle of peace” at today’s spiritual vigil on Easter Saturday in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Another PSNA organiser, Del Abcede, spoke about the incarceration of Palestinian paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who was kidnapped by the Israeli military last December 27 — two days after Christmas – and has been held in detention without charge and under torture ever since.
“The reason why he was arrested is because he would not leave his hospital or his patients,” she said, adding that he had been held incommunicado for a long time.
“I want to dedicate a special honour and prayer for him and I hope that he will be released soon.”
Beaten in prison
Dr Safiya is suffering from a serious eye injury as a result of being beaten in Israeli prison, his lawyer has revealed to media.
According to lawyer Ghaid Qassem, Dr Abu Safiya has been classified by Israeli authorities as an “unlawful combatant” but has not yet been charged or received any court trials.
Despite a global campaign calling for him to be released from prison, Israeli authorities have continued to interrogate and torture Dr Abu Safiya.
Vigil organisers Kathy Ross (left) and Del Abcede speaking at the prayer vigil for Palestine today . . . courageous Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is pictured on the placard. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Another speaker at the vigil, Dr David Robie, said he had been a journalist for 50 years and he found it “shameful” that the Western media — including Aotearoa New Zealand — failed to report the genocide and ethnic cleansing truthfully, and in fact was normalising the “horrendous crimes”.
He called for silent prayer for the at least 232 Gazan journalists killed — many along with their entire families — who had been courageously reporting the truth to the rest of the world.
Banners at the vigil referred to “Jesus [was] Palestinian – born in Bethlehem” and “Let Gaza live”. One placard declared “Jesus was an anti-imperialist Palestinian Jew who preached (and practised) radical love for all – not a violent bully bigot”.
Other vigils and protests took place across New Zealand at Easter weekend, especially in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Journalist Dr David Robie speaking about how Western media has been “normalising” genocide and calling for prayer for the killed Gazan journalists. Image: Bruce King
‘Violating’ religious status quo
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem reports were emerging that Israelis were “taking pride in violating the status quo” with religious traditions at Easter.
A protester carrying her placard proclaiming Jesus as an “anti-imperialist Palestinian Jew” who preached love for all. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Xavier Abu Eid, a political scientist and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from occupied East Jerusalem, explained on Al Jazeera that Jerusalem, “has a very central place” in the history of Palestinian Christians.
“We have to … understand what the Israeli occupation is doing to all Palestinians, because there is a concept. … It’s called the status quo. It’s understood and it’s under a very old agreement, centuries or older than the state of Israel,” he said.
Under the status quo, “the status of Christian and Muslim holy sites, including Al-Aqsa Mosque, for example, and the Holy Sepulchre, would be respected,” Dr Eid explained.
Despite this, he said, “Israeli government officials are taking pride in violating the status quo of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by allowing Israeli settlers to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque”.
He said the Israeli authorities are also trying to “turn the Mount of Olives, a very important place for this [Easter] celebration, into an Israeli national park”.
“So you’re talking about a community that feels under threat, not just from a national point of view with the Israeli government, pushing for ethnic cleansing and annexation, but also from the traditions that religiously we have kept here for generations,” he noted.
The UN Palestine relief agency UNRWA reports that after 1.5 years of war in Gaza, at least 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, 1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced multiple times, and the Israel military has blocked humanitarian aid from entering the besieged enclave for seven weeks.
A “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” banner at today’s Britomart vigil for Palestine. Image: Asia Pacific Report
This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.
They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule.
Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.
Yet, this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked — did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas — and histories — of Southeast Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.
Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support The Netherlands as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia.
They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.
The Second World War had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia.
Japanese beeline to Sorong
Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.
By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.
Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, The Netherlands reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests.
That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.
As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina.
To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian strategic history — if Australia had held the line with the Dutch against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 was unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.
Instead, as Cambodia and Vietnam mark their anniversaries this month, Australia continues to be reminded of the potential threat Indonesian-controlled West Papua has posed to Australia and the Pacific since it gave way to US interests in 1962.
Russian space agency plans
Nor is this the first time Russia has deployed assets to West Papua. Last year, Russian media reported plans under way for the Russian space agency Roscosmos to help Indonesia build a space base on Biak island.
In 2017, RAAF Tindal was scrambled just before Christmas to monitor Russian Tu95 nuclear “Bear” bombers doing their first-ever sorties in the South Pacific, flying between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I wrote not long afterwards how Australia was becoming “caught in a pincer” between Indonesian and Russian interests on Indonesia’s side and Chinese moves coming through the Pacific on the other.
All because we have abandoned the West Papuans to endure their own “slow-motion genocide” under Indonesian rule. Church groups and NGOs estimate up to 500,000 Papuans have perished under 60 years of Indonesian military rule, while Jakarta refuses to allow international media and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit.
Alex Sobel, an MP in the UK Parliament, last week called on Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner to visit but it is exceedingly rare to hear any Australian MPs ask questions about our neighbour West Papua in the Australian Parliament.
Canberra continues to enhance security relations with Indonesia in a naive belief that the nation is our ally against an assertive China. This ignores Jakarta’s deepening relations with both Russia and China, and avoids any mention of ongoing atrocities in West Papua or the fact that jihadi groups are operating close to Australia’s border.
Indonesia’s militarisation of West Papua, jihadi infiltration and now the potential for Russia to use airbases or space bases on Biak should all be “red lines” for Australia, yet successive governments remain desperate not to criticise Indonesia.
Ignoring actual ‘hot war’
Australia’s national security establishment remains focused on grand global strategy and acquiring over-priced gear, while ignoring the only actual “hot war” in our region.
Our geography has not changed; the most important line of defence for Australia remains the islands of Melanesia to our north and the co-operation and friendship of its peoples.
Strong independence movements in West Papua, Bougainville and New Caledonia all materially affect Australian security but Canberra can always be relied on to defer to Indonesian, American and French interests in these places, rather than what is ultimately in Australian — and Pacific Islander — interests.
Australia needs to develop a defence policy centred on a “Melanesia First” strategy from Timor to Fiji, radiating outwards. Yet Australia keeps deferring to external interests, to our cost, as history continues to remind us.
Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist and policy analyst who has reported across Asia and the Pacific for the past 36 years. His website is benbohane.com This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.
Two months before she was supposed to go on trial for killing her child, Michelle Taylor stood before a Florida judge and listened quietly as the prosecutor recited the allegations against her. Taylor, 41, had long insisted she was not what the state made her out to be: a mother who set fire to her home to collect insurance money, killing her 11-year-old son David in the process. Now there was proof she’d been telling the truth. The key arson evidence had been dismantled, with several top scientists saying that the forensics did not hold up.
But prosecutors refused to drop the charges, instead giving Taylor’s lawyer a deadline. According to defense attorney John Rockwell, if she did not take a plea deal by her next court hearing, all future offers were off the table. After several sleepless nights, Taylor walked into the St. Johns County Courthouse on April 2 and entered a plea: no contest to manslaughter.
“She was up there for maybe three minutes,” said Megan Wallace, Taylor’s fiercest advocate, who watched in the gallery alongside Taylor’s mother. Six-and-a-half years after the fire destroyed Taylor’s home and upended her life, the conviction happened in the blink of an eye.
I examined Taylor’s case in an in-depth story published by The Intercept last month. It described how she was accused of arson after escaping a nighttime fire that broke out in her St. Augustine home on October 23, 2018. Witnesses described her panic as she screamed that her son was inside, trying repeatedly to reenter the house. Taylor swore she had no idea how the fire started or why David did not make it out. The two had been watching TV in her bedroom that night, Taylor told investigators, when she heard smoke detectors go off and encountered thick black smoke outside her door. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window, Taylor said, but David turned to look for the family dog and never emerged.
Authorities became suspicious after an accelerant-detecting canine alerted in different parts of the house, prompting investigators to collect five fire debris samples from the scene. The samples were sent to the State Fire Marshal’s Bureau of Forensic Services lab, which reported three of them positive for gasoline. Subsequent samples also revealed gasoline, according to the lab — proof positive of arson. Detectives also found red flags in Taylor’s financial history, pointing to a possible motive, including evidence that she and her husband were behind in their mortgage and that she had fraudulently solicited donations from area churches.
But the gasoline was the only direct evidence of arson — and eventually that evidence began to fall apart. Veteran fire scientist John Lentini first raised alarm in January 2024, writing in a defense report that the gasoline findings were based on a misinterpretation of chromatographic data from a state lab that “routinely identified gasoline where it does not exist.” Lentini, who had filed a complaint against the lab nearly a decade earlier, leading to a temporary suspension of its professional accreditation, said it was the sixth case he had seen in which a person was falsely accused of arson based on the lab’s faulty gasoline analysis.
It was the sixth case he had seen in which a person was falsely accused of arson based on the lab’s faulty gasoline analysis.
Lentini’s report was shared with the state’s lead fire investigator, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who immediately emailed it to two ATF chemists. During depositions in April 2024, those experts agreed that the data shown in his report did not show evidence of gasoline. As the case approached trial, two more forensic chemists reexamined the evidence. One looked at the lab data; another, veteran chemist Laurel Mason of Analytical Forensic Associates, examined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris samples in 2018. Like Lentini, those experts concluded that there was no evidence of gasoline.
Rockwell, a private defense attorney in Jacksonville who started representing Taylor last year, had just disclosed Mason’s analysis of the carbon strips in February when prosecutors revealed a new report of their own. The chemist who tested the fire debris samples in 2018 issued an amended lab report in the case, backtracking on her earlier findings. Of the three positive samples that first set the case into motion, only one actually contained gasoline, she wrote. In total, four fire debris samples she first said contained gasoline were changed to report no evidence of an accelerant.
Rockwell, a former prosecutor, described the amended report as “mind-blowing.” As he wrote in a subsequent court filing, the state’s report “appears to have been suspiciously back-dated” to January, to make it look like it was submitted before Mason’s expert report — a hasty attempt to rehabilitate the state’s forensic evidence in the face of his experts’ findings. “I’ve never seen that in any case in my life,” he told me.
But Rockwell also knew the danger Taylor faced if she went to trial. Although the discredited evidence severely undermined the case the state hoped to present to the jury, prosecutors did not actually have to prove how the fire started in order to win a conviction. They only had to convince jurors that Taylor had committed arson in order to collect insurance money, which they planned to do by relying on circumstantial evidence of fraud. In Florida, a guilty verdict on a first-degree felony murder charge means a mandatory life sentence. Rockwell pursued what he believed to be the least risky option for his client, negotiating the best deal possible, then convincing her to take it.
“They’re still doing the exact same thing. Without any punishment or sanctions or anything. And that’s horrifying. Because that can affect somebody for the rest of their life.”
On the morning of the hearing, Rockwell met Taylor, her mother, and Wallace at the courthouse in St. Augustine, where he went over the plea deal one more time. In exchange for the no-contest plea, the state had agreed to drop the arson charge at Taylor’s sentencing, which was scheduled for May 30. Seventh Judicial Circuit Court Judge Lee Smith would then have a range of sentencing options, from three to 13 years. With credit for the nearly three years Taylor spent in the local jail, Taylor could serve as little as a few months in prison.
Michelle Taylor, right, after a hearing at the St. Johns County Courthouse in St. Augustine, Fla., on July 9, 2024. Liliana Segura
“I think she made the right decision,” Rockwell told me, reemphasizing that Taylor maintains her innocence. Now he plans to present his experts’ opinions at the sentencing hearing, where he will address the flawed forensics, the amended report, and the disturbing history of the state fire marshal’s lab. “They’re still doing the exact same thing,” he said. “Without any punishment or sanctions or anything. And that’s horrifying. Because that can affect somebody for the rest of their life.”
In an email, Bryan Shorstein, executive director of the Seventh Judicial Circuit state attorney’s office, declined to comment about the plea deal “since it is still an active case.”
A spokesperson representing the fire marshal’s office declined to comment.
A week after the court hearing, Wallace accompanied Taylor to the local Dollar Tree to buy Easter supplies for Taylor’s nieces and for Wallace’s daughter. In a text, Wallace sent a photo: a neat row of pastel baskets placed high on a closet shelf, with candy and bunny ears peeking over the side.
The holidays have been painful for Taylor, who has been out on bond for almost a year. As the sentencing approaches, she worries about her mother and one of her sisters, both of whom have terminal cancer, according to Wallace. Even a short prison sentence could keep her away from them when they need her most. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a local news story about the plea deal put Taylor’s mugshot back in circulation, along with outraged comments calling her a murderer who is getting off easy.
But for now Taylor can’t worry about what other people think, only about her sentencing, where she will finally speak for herself. She is trying to hold onto hope that the judge, who has presided over her case for years, sees the case clearly. “In her mind,” Wallace said, “she thinks that Judge Smith knows she’s innocent.”
The Trump administration is doubling down on depicting Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a dangerous gang member. The government’s proof for this claim appears to hinge on a Chicago Bulls cap and a hoodie.
While Trump continues to flout court orders to facilitate the Maryland father’s release from a notorious El Salvador prison, it is pointing to flimsy evidence of alleged MS-13 ties — adding to a long-running pattern of dubious gang designations by law enforcement and immigration agents.
Last month, immigration enforcement officials rounded up hundreds of migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, accusing them of being members of gangs the administration deemed terrorist organizations. Abrego Garcia, 29, a Salvadoran national, was among the men sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, prison. The government admitted in court filings that he was sent there due to an “administrative error,” in violation of a court order blocking his deportation due to threats to his safety in El Salvador.
While many of the other detained men appear to be labeled as gang members mainly because of their tattoos, law enforcement officials seem to have singled Abrego Garcia out for his attire, additional documents released Wednesday by Attorney General Pam Bondi show.
“Wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with MS-13.”
The documents released detail a Prince George’s County Police Department encounter with Abrego Garcia in 2019. “Officers observed he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents,” they wrote. “Officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.”
The gang field interview sheet from the Prince George’s County Police Department notes that “wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with MS-13.”
Officers also stated they reached out to a confidential informant who claimed that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. In court, it was revealed that the source claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang in New York — a place where he never lived. Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, and his family maintains that he was never a member of any gang.
Ana Muñiz, a professor of criminology, law, and society at UC Irvine, said it’s not at all surprising that police and immigration officials put so much emphasis on his hat as a way to prove his gang ties.
“A gang designation is something that police really use to maintain contact, mainly with men of color in low-income urban neighborhoods, when they can’t find enough to actually charge them with a crime,” said Muñiz, the author of “Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond.” You have people with gang designations, people on gang databases who are designated on things like clothing [from] very popular sports brands.”
Muñiz explained that law enforcement agencies generally use a 9 or 10-point system to determine gang affiliation based on factors as mundane and subjective as wearing sports apparel or “frequenting a gang area.” To be placed on a gang database, suspects often only need to meet two of the categories, she said.
In an ethnography Muñiz conducted on gang designation in Los Angeles, she found that the Los Angeles Police Department “considered Dodgers gear to be indicative of gang membership, in certain contexts,” Muñiz said. “If you’ve ever been to LA, everyone is wearing Dodgers gear.”
Gang designations can become sweep up wide swaths of the population; at one point, roughly half of all Black men in Los Angeles between the ages of 21 to 24 years old were listed on a gang database, according to a report published in the Asian Pacific American Law Journal.
For people like Abrego Garcia, being listed as having a gang affiliation — no matter how thin the justification — can have serious immigration consequences. Yet in some cases, people might not even be aware that they’re on a gang database. “It’s really common for police when they can’t charge someone with a crime or find something to get them on to slap this very easy designation on them,” Muñiz said, “and then eventually, it will make its way up to ICE, and ICE will use that in court to argue for things like expedited deportation or compulsory detention.”
Abrego Garcia is far from the first case of Chicago Bulls attire being weaponized in the immigration process. An investigation by The Intercept during the first Trump administration revealed that students at a Long Island high school were reported to ICE for among other things wearing Chicago Bulls jersey and posting the Salvadoran flag on Facebook.
Many of the men shipped to the CECOT prison with Abrego Garcia appear to be detained under similarly flimsy gang affiliation claims. Federal law enforcement officials reportedly rated them on a 10-point scale, with a score of 8 or more designating them a member of Tren de Aragua, and thus immediately deportable since President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to alleged members of the gang. Certain tattoos were 4 points. Another 4 points could be added for “notations, drawing, or dress known to indicate were allegiance to TDA.”
On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., met with Abrego Garcia after traveling to El Salvador to check on his constituent’s welfare and “discuss” his release.
“My main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” Van Hollen wrote on X. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return,”
Muñiz said she predicted that the Trump administration would use gang affiliation as a tool to fuel the president’s mass deportation strategy and system of racialized state terror. “You don’t need probable cause. You don’t need to prove this in court,” she said. “It’s a label you can apply very easily, without criminal charges, without really any proof. And then, once that person is labeled, you can justify doing a lot of things with them, like detaining them, like deporting them.”
The Department of Homeland Security said this week in a Michigan court that the agency does not have the authority to terminate students’ immigration statuses by terminating their records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System. Known as SEVIS, the database allows both universities and authorities to track information about international students on visas in U.S.
Homeland Security’s changes to SEVIS, the Trump administration said, have no bearing on a student’s lawful nonimmigrant status.
“Terminating a record in SEVIS does not terminate an individual’s nonimmigrant status in the United States,” said Andre Watson, assistant director of the national security division for Homeland Security Investigations, in the filing. Watson added that existing laws and regulations “do not provide” the DHS-run Student Exchange and Visitor Program “the authority to terminate nonimmigrant status by terminating a SEVIS record.”
This will be news to many hundreds of students who have had their SEVIS records terminated by DHS in recent weeks — and were then told by their schools or the government that they have thus lost their immigration status and must immediately leave the country.
“Under pressure from ICE, schools have been advising students they are out of status after SEVIS record termination, and in many cases disenrolling them as a result,” said Nathan Yaffe, an attorney representing international students facing deportation in other cases. “Now ICE has submitted sworn declarations that SEVIS record termination has no legal effect on the student whatsoever.”
“Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”
Based on school officials checking their SEVIS records, hundreds of students have been led to believe that they had lost their student immigration status because a terminated record in the database is broadly taken to mean a student has fallen out of status.
The DHS’s latest claims to the contrary in court are sure to only sow further confusion, but they are strong grounds, Yaffe said, for schools to immediately stop disenrolling students believed to be out of status due to SEVIS record checks.
“Any school that continues to disenroll (and refuses to re-enroll) students is voluntarily punishing students to align itself with the Trump administration’s agenda,” Yaffe said. “Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”
What Schools Told Students
The DHS declaration was filed in response to a lawsuit broughtby four Michigan students, who are suing the Trump administration over the reported loss of their F-1 student statuses. In response, the government argued that the case should be thrown out, since DHS did not remove the students’ statuses when it terminated their SEVIS records.
According to Inside Higher Ed, 16 lawsuits from at least 50 students have challenged the Trump administration over visa revocations and deportation threats. A number of the suits have challenged DHS’s authority to summarily change students’ statuses on SEVIS. It was only for the first time in the Michigan case, however, that the government said that its SEVIS interventions had no bearing on a student’s status.
The admission was an apparent effort by the government to dodge legal challenges. The students are suing to have their legal student immigration status restored, and the government is suggesting that their SEVIS terminations never changed the students’ statuses, so the agency cannot be sued for its actions. Communications from government agencies and school administrations, however, have up until this point taken a SEVIS termination to mean that a student’s status is terminated too.
In an email sent by a school official at the University of Michigan to one of the Michigan plaintiffs, for example, the student was told, “In our daily review of SEVIS, we learned that your SEVIS record was ‘terminated’ by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.” The school official continued: “We do not have any additional information, but this termination means you no longer hold valid F-1 status within the United States. You will need to cease any employment immediately. Since this termination does not carry a grace period, we must recommend you make plans to exit the United States immediately.”
The government’s defense in court, however, claimed the direct opposite, noting in a filing: “There are no legal consequences to the termination of a SEVIS record.”
The University of Michigan and Wayne State University — the two schools attended by plaintiffs in the Michigan lawsuit — did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, nor did DHS, ICE, the State Department, and the Department of Justice, which represents the administration in court.
A student plaintiff in another, similar case filed in California received an email directly from the State Department, informing them that their student visa had been revoked. The email fails to distinguish in any meaningful way between visa status and legal immigration status, which are not the same thing. In one paragraph, the State Department tells the student that their visa has been “revoked under Section 221(i) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act.”
The email later notes, “Remaining in the United States without a lawful immigration status can result in fines, detention, and/or deportation” — without informing the student that they may very well still have lawful immigration status.
“Given the gravity of this situation, individuals whose visa was revoked may wish to demonstrate their intent to depart the United States using the CBP Home App,” the State Department email told the student.
Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University fled to Canada in March after being targeted by ICE. After DHS terminated her SEVIS status, Srinivasan wrote in a statement that Columbia “arbitrarily de-enrolled” her, ending her “legal status, worker status, and housing.” She blamed “ICE threats and Columbia complicity” for her decision to flee.
The Homeland Security website, which offers official guidance on international student rules and regulations, suggests that a terminated record indicates that the student’s legal status has been terminated too. The site notes that a terminated record in SEVIS means that a student “loses all on- and/or off-campus employment authorization,” “cannot re-enter the United States on the terminated SEVIS record,” and that ICE agents may investigate to “confirm the departure of the student.”
DHS also says that a terminated record “could indicate that the nonimmigrant no longer maintains” their legal status, but that it is “designated school officials,” rather than ICE and other DHS agents who “mostly terminate” these records.
“That Clearly Is BS”
The State Department has been removing student visas en masse. Over 1,200 student visas have been revoked, almost entirely from nonwhite students, since President Donald Trump announced plans to target international students, particularly those who have expressed support for Palestinian freedom.
The removal of a student visa, however, is not the same as, and does not entail, the removal of legal nonimmigrant status in the U.S. as a student.
A visa is required for an international student to legally enter the country to study here. After entering, however, the visa does not affect the student’s immigration status. A student with an expired or revoked visa can remain in legal nonimmigrant student status while not leaving the country; a university has no legal reason to disenroll that student or prevent their continued study in the U.S..
The DHS declaration in Michigan went further in making the distinction between having a visa revoked and being eligible for deportation.
“Prudential visa revocation, absent other factors, does not make an individual amendable to removal,” wrote Watson, the HSI official.
That is, the revocation of a student visa is not, in and of itself, necessarily grounds for a student to be deported. Yet schools have been reacting to SEVIS terminations, not visa revocations, when they have disenrolled students or advised students to immediately leave the country.
This does not mean that the students currently targeted by Trump’s administration are safe. A student in legal immigration status with a revoked visa is at significant risk should ICE seek to pursue deportation proceedings against them. The agency would have to send the student a notice to appear before an immigration judge, and there would be a hearing about the student’s deportability, at which the student could challenge their visa revocation.
The process can be frightening for students, as the cases of detained legal permanent residents like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and visa holders like Rümeysa Öztürk make clear. The Trump administration has shown little compunction about taking the next step toward making individual students deportable, attempting to carry out the mass removal of students for minor legal violations, as well as for entirely legal political speech under spurious “foreign policy” grounds and bunk charges of antisemitism.
In trying to stave off litigation, DHS has been clear in other cases that students who have had their visas revoked and SEVIS records terminated have not fallen out of legal status.
“The issue Plaintiffs seek to avoid is the real issue before this court: the State Department revoked Plaintiffs’ visa,” the government argued in another case filed by students in Georgia, “but those actions are un reviewable here.”
“Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?”
The government is claiming that the students have directed their legal challenge at the wrong government agency, but that they also cannot sue the State Department, because the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is deployingto summarily remove visas “expressly precludes visa revocations from judicial review.” According to the Trump administration the students could only challenge Rubio’s wide and reckless discretion to revoke their visas “in removal proceedings if the revocation is the sole basis for removal.”
Federal judges hearing students’ cases around the country have so far not been impressed with the government’s arguments. At least five federal courts have issued temporary restraining orders on deportation orders linked to SEVIS terminations. On Wednesday, District Court Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., specifically ordered DHS’s Watson to testify in court over the claims in his declaration, which was also submitted by the government in the case filed by students there.
“I’ve got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is BS,” Reyes told the government. “And now, his two very experienced lawyers can’t even tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the Court can’t tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the government’s counsel can’t tell him if he’s here legally.”
The judge said, “Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?”
Five Just Stop Oil supporters found guilty for planning an action at Heathrow have launched appeals against their convictions after evidence emerged of serious misconduct by the jury.
Just Stop Oil: appeals against sentence launched
The five launching appeals were among eight Just Stop Oil supporters found guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by majority verdict at Isleworth Crown Court after a seven week trial before Judge Duncan.
Raj Chada of Hodge, Jones, and Allen will be filing appeals on behalf of Rosa Hicks and Hannah Schafer, while Adam Beard, Sally Davidson and Sean O’Callaghan will be filing separate appeals.
The grounds of the appeal include that the Attorney General has received evidence of juror misconduct during the trial which has been referred for police investigation. The misconduct arose from one juror making internet searches about the defendants and the Just Stop Oil campaign and sharing that within the jury room. In light of this evidence the appeal will say that the guilty verdicts are manifestly unsafe.
Further grounds for appeal include that the judge was wrong to imply that the existence of a climate emergency is a matter of opinion as that contradicts the agreed facts in the case and that the police exhibited prejudicial conduct during the trial including in front of the jury. They wrongly arrested Sally Davidson, mid-trial, after confusion over her bail conditions and arrested a Just Stop Oil supporter who had been sitting in the public gallery at court and in sight of one of the jurors, who later described the incident to two further jurors.
‘Devastating’
One of the appellants, Sally Davidson, 37, a hairdresser from Portland, Dorset said:
The prospect of facing a retrial is personally devastating but in the interest of justice we have no other option but to appeal these convictions. Some of our group have now spent nine months in prison awaiting trial and now sentencing.
Judge Duncan ruled early in our trial that the reality of climate breakdown while “concerning” was irrelevant to the jurors deliberations. She then intervened to stop us each and every time we tried to communicate the severity of climate collapse, and the threat it poses to the rule of law. In trials like ours, relating to acts of conscience, juries are being routinely told they must ignore reality, and focus on evidence without the relevant context.
This trend by members of the Judiciary to attempt to decouple the law from morality is not how most people understand the British legal system to work. It is obvious that these trials are politically motivated, morally wrong and a huge waste of public money. Money that could be better spent supporting vulnerable people and those who are being made increasingly unsafe due to the deadly impacts of unchecked fossil fuel burning.
Adam Beard, 55, a gardener from Stroud, who had represented himself at trial said:
After seven months in prison on remand for resisting the genocidal burning of fossil fuels, and more than seven weeks in court, it now looks like our convictions followed misconduct by at least one member of the jury. This followed a trial where we were frequently stopped by the judge from telling the jury the truth.
We will be sentenced on 16 May and I am likely to face further time in prison. For the sake of justice it is imperative that our convictions be quashed and my co-defendants who are still in prison be released.
A ‘gruelling trial’ – and now this?
Hannah Schafer, 61, a sailing instructor from Cardigan said:
We have been through a long and gruelling seven week trial which must have cost the state a small fortune. Much of this time was spent arguing about why we shouldn’t be allowed to explain our actions to the jury. We are now undertaking an appeal due to issues around the behavior of that jury. Is it any wonder they used their initiative to find out more after being fobbed off and sent out of the room numerous times during the trial?
This has led to a situation where our convictions could be deemed unsafe and we may have to go through the whole trial again. We have all spent time in prison, at yet more cost to taxpayers, and face long custodial sentences at our next appearance on 16 May.
Is this a sensible way to police peaceful protest? Is it a sensible use of the overstretched and under funded justice system? Does it represent good value for money? Or would it be more sensible to address the issues we are trying to draw attention to – the need to take urgent action to halt the death and destruction being willfully wrought on the world by the fossil fuel industry.
Tim Crosland, a former government lawyer and spokesperson for Defend Our Juries, said:
There is compelling evidence that these convictions resulted from a juror conducting Google research and sharing partially false and highly prejudicial information with their fellow jurors. Given the concealment of evidence from juries in these cases, it’s not surprising that juries lose faith in the process, with unpredictable results.
As it is, it should be obvious to everyone that that is a fatal flaw in the trial process and the convictions must now be quashed as a matter of urgency. For the moment the trial judge is left in the invidious position of having to pass sentence on people on 16 May, knowing that they have not properly been convicted of anything.
Let’s hope some common sense and humanity prevails.
Just Stop Oil: time will tell
The Heathrow trial , which was due to start on 20 January, was delayed after Isleworth Crown Court experienced problems with its heating system and ran into the limit of its ‘sitting days’ allowed by the Ministry of Justice. Defendants were told that the trial would be postponed to September 2025 at the earliest and possibly would not be heard until February 2027. Four days later they were informed that the trial would begin on 27 January.
The Heathrow eight are due to be sentenced on 16th May.
Two of the eight, Luke Elson and Luke Watson have been in prison on remand since 24 July 2024. Will Goldring was remanded following the trial to await sentencing. Rory Wilson, who pleaded guilty in September, was recently granted bail after being on remand for eight months.
If leave to appeal is granted the case may not be heard for many months. If the appeal were to be successful, and the convictions quashed, the most likely outcome is that the prosecution would seek a retrial.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just signed a contract worth $73 million with a firm whose executives are accused of taking part in a scheme to manufacture evidence against a co-worker during their time working at the Department of Homeland Security.
According to a contract document reviewed by The Intercept, federal contractor Universal Strategic Advisors will provide services pertaining to ICE’s “non-detained docket,” a master list of millions of noncitizens believed to be removable from the United States but not yet in the agency’s custody.
The contract cites President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, an overwhelming glut of potential deportees, and a shortage of officers to process them all as justification for hiring a private vendor to assist with the collection of biometric data, coordinating removals, and monitoring immigrant populations.
The document says that with a fleet of new outsourced employees, ICE can reassign hundreds of officers to tasks that better align with Trump’s recent executive orders aimed at maximizing the agency’s detention and deportation operations. With the contractors onboard, the document says at least 675 ICE officers “will be able to take all appropriate actions to comply with the EO’s by prioritizing conducting at-large arrests, removals, and detention related activities.”
A former ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said they were concerned by this plan to further privatize the agency’s operations at the same time as the Trump administration has dramatically slashed its workforce and gutted important oversight bodies like the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “I certainly take issue with them firing career feds and demolishing whole offices, just to hire contractors to do the same work, many of them who are former ICE employees now retired,” the official said.
The responsibilities handed over to US Advisors are vast:
“[Contractors] will manage field office alien check-ins, monitor immigration case statuses (and the outcome), assist with coordinating removals, update contact information to ensure that the alien can be located, respond to telephone calls, triage complaints and grievances, manage outreach mailboxes, enter data into ICE’s system of record, manage alien files, capture biometrics, organize and collect immigration related documents, field questions related to the immigration process, coordinate with ICE to assign aliens to an appropriate monitoring program, and notify ICE if someone is not complying with the terms of a conditional release or when someone is a risk to community safety.”
“I don’t like, in general, to attach a profit motive to these inherently governmental services,” the former ICE official said, explaining that while the contract’s scope seems mostly administrative, the work in question has serious implications for millions living in the United States. “This is the backbone of decisions that are going to impact peoples’ lives; it’s a very high impact work stream.”
They also questioned the contract’s rationale of hiring private sector workers to handle administrative tasks in order to free up ICE officers to hit the streets. “If they’re just doing the arrests and they’re not following the case, not understanding the complexities, it gives the officers a much more limited view of the impact of their work. They’re not hearing when they’re talking about their kids, or why they might need to be released,” the ICE source explained.
The procurement document notes that ICE is turning to US Advisors without conducting the typical competition for the business among other potential vendors, owing to, it says, the “emergency” conditions declared by Trump. “ICE would be unable to recruit, hire, vet, train, and deploy staff as quickly as a contractor can,” the notice reads. According to an April 9 filing, however, a rival vendor is protesting the contract with the Government Accountability Office, leaving the contract temporarily on hold.
US Advisors has the right pedigree: The company has previously provided staffing support for ICE and is run by former Department of Homeland Security officials.
But this executive team, while well-credentialed, has a checkered past: US Advisors CEO Brian DeMore and Chief Talent Officer David Marin are both named defendants in a lawsuit stemming from their time working at DHS. In 2019, former ICE officer Kui Myles filed suit alleging she was the victim of a scheme to manufacture criminal evidence against her after she complained of workplace harassment, resulting in her false arrest, false imprisonment, and invasion of privacy.
Myles, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, further alleges she was subject to discrimination based on her national origin, and says her co-workers fabricated a report that she was illegally “housing Chinese nationals” as part of their conspiracy to discredit her. Myles alleges she was then placed under DHS surveillance, which revealed she was not in fact housing undocumented Chinese immigrants. At this point, Myles alleges that campaign to essentially frame her for criminal wage theft was executed at the “direction and instigation” of ICE officials including DeMore, then an ICE assistant field office director, and Marin, at the time a deputy field office director. All told, Myles accuses Marin and DeMore of engaging in a conspiracy to violate both her constitutional and civil rights under federal law.
Neither ICE nor US Advisors responded to a request for comment.
Certain ICE tasks struck this source as particularly unfit for outsourcing: “Dealing with grievances — what if it’s a grievance against the contractor? They want to stay on ICE’s good side, so they probably want to minimize grievances,” they explained. “You’re really going to contract out community safety decisions?”
Privatization is not a novelty among federal agencies generally or ICE specifically. Trump’s deportation fixation has signaled a feeding frenzy for corporations like the private prison firm GEO Group, up for a $350 million DHS contract renewal, and Deployed Resources, which operates migrant detention camps and just won a $3.8 billion ICE contract. The source said, “This is the game at ICE — they all work with their old buddies.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just signed a contract worth $73 million with a firm whose executives were accused of taking part in a scheme to manufacture evidence against a co-worker during their time working at the Department of Homeland Security.
According to a contract document reviewed by The Intercept, federal contractor Universal Strategic Advisors will provide services pertaining to ICE’s “non-detained docket,” a master list of millions of noncitizens believed to be removable from the United States but not yet in the agency’s custody.
The contract cites President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, an overwhelming glut of potential deportees, and a shortage of officers to process them all as justification for hiring a private vendor to assist with the collection of biometric data, coordinating removals, and monitoring immigrant populations.
The document says that with a fleet of new outsourced employees, ICE can reassign hundreds of officers to tasks that better align with Trump’s recent executive orders aimed at maximizing the agency’s detention and deportation operations. With the contractors onboard, the document says at least 675 ICE officers “will be able to take all appropriate actions to comply with the EO’s by prioritizing conducting at-large arrests, removals, and detention related activities.”
A former ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said they were concerned by this plan to further privatize the agency’s operations at the same time as the Trump administration has dramatically slashed its workforce and gutted important oversight bodies like the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “I certainly take issue with them firing career feds and demolishing whole offices, just to hire contractors to do the same work, many of them who are former ICE employees now retired,” the official said.
The responsibilities handed over to US Advisors are vast:
“[Contractors] will manage field office alien check-ins, monitor immigration case statuses (and the outcome), assist with coordinating removals, update contact information to ensure that the alien can be located, respond to telephone calls, triage complaints and grievances, manage outreach mailboxes, enter data into ICE’s system of record, manage alien files, capture biometrics, organize and collect immigration related documents, field questions related to the immigration process, coordinate with ICE to assign aliens to an appropriate monitoring program, and notify ICE if someone is not complying with the terms of a conditional release or when someone is a risk to community safety.”
“I don’t like, in general, to attach a profit motive to these inherently governmental services,” the former ICE official said, explaining that while the contract’s scope seems mostly administrative, the work in question has serious implications for millions living in the United States. “This is the backbone of decisions that are going to impact peoples’ lives; it’s a very high impact work stream.”
They also questioned the contract’s rationale of hiring private sector workers to handle administrative tasks in order to free up ICE officers to hit the streets. “If they’re just doing the arrests and they’re not following the case, not understanding the complexities, it gives the officers a much more limited view of the impact of their work. They’re not hearing when they’re talking about their kids, or why they might need to be released,” the ICE source explained.
The procurement document notes that ICE is turning to US Advisors without conducting the typical competition for the business among other potential vendors, owing to, it says, the “emergency” conditions declared by Trump. “ICE would be unable to recruit, hire, vet, train, and deploy staff as quickly as a contractor can,” the notice reads. According to an April 9 filing, however, a rival vendor is protesting the contract with the Government Accountability Office, leaving the contract temporarily on hold.
US Advisors has the right pedigree: The company has previously provided staffing support for ICE and is run by former Department of Homeland Security officials.
But this executive team, while well-credentialed, has a checkered past: US Advisors CEO Brian DeMore and Chief Talent Officer David Marin were both named defendants in a lawsuit stemming from their time working at DHS. In 2019, former ICE officer Kui Myles filed suit alleging she was the victim of a scheme to manufacture criminal evidence against her after she complained of workplace harassment, resulting in her false arrest, false imprisonment, and invasion of privacy.
Myles, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, further alleged she was subject to discrimination based on her national origin, and said her co-workers fabricated a report that she was illegally “housing Chinese nationals” as part of their conspiracy to discredit her. Myles alleged she was then placed under DHS surveillance, which revealed she was not in fact housing undocumented Chinese immigrants. At this point, Myles alleged that a campaign to essentially frame her for criminal wage theft was executed at the “direction and instigation” of ICE officials including DeMore, then an ICE assistant field office director, and Marin, at the time a deputy field office director. All told, Myles accused Marin and DeMore of engaging in a conspiracy to violate both her constitutional and civil rights under federal law.
Myles’s lawsuit is ongoing. In 2022 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit determined the litigation could continue, but a subsequent ruling dismissed the case against the individual defendants, including Marin and DeMore, on the grounds that they could not be sued in this context for their work as federal agents, while the larger case against the government continues.
Neither ICE nor US Advisors responded to a request for comment.
Certain ICE tasks struck this source as particularly unfit for outsourcing: “Dealing with grievances — what if it’s a grievance against the contractor? They want to stay on ICE’s good side, so they probably want to minimize grievances,” they explained. “You’re really going to contract out community safety decisions?”
Privatization is not a novelty among federal agencies generally or ICE specifically. Trump’s deportation fixation has signaled a feeding frenzy for corporations like the private prison firm GEO Group, up for a $350 million DHS contract renewal, and Deployed Resources, which operates migrant detention camps and just won a $3.8 billion ICE contract. The source said, “This is the game at ICE — they all work with their old buddies.”
Correction: April 26, 2025 A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Marin and DeMore were still being sued, when in fact the suit against them as individual defendants was dismissed in 2023. The article has been updated to reflect that fact.
A researcher says the Israeli prison system aims to subjugate the Palestinian people as rallies across the West Bank marked Prisoners’ Day today while yet another prisoner was reported dead.
“When you have the statistics that one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and you understand that 50 percent of our population are children under 18 — that means that roughly one in every two male adults has been arrested, subjugated and criminalised by Israeli authorities,” researcher and former detainee Al-Aboudi told Al Jazeera.
He is the director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, based in Ramallah, occupied West Bank.
The goal, said Al-Aboudi, who himself was detained in 2019, is to break Palestinian resilience.
“It’s only in Israeli jails that you will find doctors, professors, academics, physicists — the creme de la creme of Palestinian civil society is being targeted, incarcerated because Israel doesn’t want any kind of Palestinian agency, any Palestinian collective agency, any kind of Palestinian leadership,” he said.
Palestinians mark Prisoners’ Day on April 17 each year, reports Al Jazeera.
Human rights organisations warn that Palestinian detainees are subject to some of the worst conditions in Israeli prisons.
Detainees tell of torture, starvation
They are not allowed visits from family, lawyers or doctors, and former detainees tell of torture, abuse and starvation by Israeli prison authorities.
Musab Hassan Adili, a 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner from the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, was reported to have died on Wednesday night in Israel’s Soroka Hospital, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
Palestine marches for prisoners’ freedom. Video: Al Jazeera
Adili had been detained in March last year and sentenced to 13 months in Israeli prison. He was supposed to be released in a couple of days, his family said.
His death brings the number of Palestinian prisoners who have died in Israeli prisons to 64 since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel in 2023.
An estimated one million palestonians — about 20 percent of their population have been detained by Israeli forces since 1967, affecting nearly every Palestinian family. Many of the prisoners who are children who have been detained without charge, legal or family representation and without due process. Image: Al Jazeera Creative Commons
‘Shameless double standard’
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has condemned what it calls the “clear and shameless double standard” of those demanding the release of Israeli captives in Gaza but staying silent while thousands of Palestinians languish in Israel’s jails, including women and children.
In a statement marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, PIJ said the “international community is tarnished by its silence regarding the suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, which has continued for decades”.
Of the nearly 10,000 Palestinians that support groups say are held in Israeli prisons, 3498 are held without charge or trial under what’s known as “administrative detention”.
PIJ said that 400 children and almost 30 women are among those held, while some 2000 people from Gaza have been arrested by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023, and that the prisoners who have died in Israeli jails suffer from medical negligence and torture.
According to PIJ, the October 7 attacks on Israel were launched “primarily to impose a genuine prisoner exchange deal that would free prisoners from the occupation’s prisons and alleviate the suffering of our people”.
“Their liberation has become an unwavering goal in the battle for dignity and freedom,” it said.
En enero de 2018, Vanessa Domínguez y su marido llevaban unos años coqueteando con la idea de mudarse a otro barrio de El Paso, Texas. Su hija estaba matriculada en una de las mejores escuelas primarias del condado, pero como la familia vivía justo fuera de los límites del distrito, su posición era tenue. Los administradores de la escuela podían decidir devolverla a su distrito de residencia en cualquier momento. Mudarse más cerca le garantizaría su plaza. Y cuando el dueño de la casa notificó a Domínguez que quería duplicarles el alquiler, ella y su marido sintieron más urgencia de mudarse.
Finalmente, llegó su oportunidad. El jefe de Domínguez era propietario de una casa de tres dormitorios y dos baños en Ranchos del Sol, un barrio de clase media-alta del este de El Paso, y buscaba un nuevo inquilino.
Con una isla de cocina, techos altos y un parque al otro lado de la calle donde los niños jugaban a menudo al fútbol, la casa era perfecta para la joven familia. Y lo más importante, la propiedad estaba dentro de los límites del distrito escolar.
«La propiedad en su conjunto parecía atractiva y el barrio bastante tranquilo», recuerda Domínguez.
Unos niños juegan en un parque del barrio situado detrás del almacén de Cardinal Health en el este de El Paso Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
En la misma calle que la casa de Vanessa Domínguez, un hombre limpia su coche mientras su nieta juega. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Unos niños juegan en un parque del barrio situado detrás del almacén de Cardinal Health en el este de El Paso. En la misma calle que la casa de Vanessa Domínguez, un hombre limpia su coche mientras su nieta juega y Cindy Martínez barre mientras su nieta, Emerie, juega. Sus casas se encuentran justo detrás del almacén de Cardinal en el este de El Paso. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Cindy Martínez barre mientras su nieta, Emerie, juega. Sus casas se encuentran justo detrás del almacén de Cardinal en el este de El Paso. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Una vez instalados, la hija de Domínguez se aficionó a corretear por el jardín, donde había un cerezo en flor, y la familia solía hacer barbacoas al aire libre. Domínguez apenas se fijó en el almacén que se encontraba justo detrás del muro de adoquines de su jardín. No fue hasta el mandato de permanecer en casa de COVID-19 en 2020 cuando se fijó en el flujo de camiones que entraban y salían de las instalaciones. A veces oía el estruendo de los camiones de 18 ruedas a las seis y media de la mañana.
Aun así, no le dio mucha importancia. No se daba cuenta de que el almacén era propiedad de Cardinal Health, uno de los mayores distribuidores de dispositivos médicos del país, ni de que formaba parte de una amplia cadena de suministro de la que depende la población estadounidense para recibir una atención médica adecuada.
Pero para Domínguez y su familia, lo que parecía poco más que una molestia menor era en realidad una amenaza creciente, que según un análisis de datos de Grist basado en registros estatales sugiere que podría estar exponiéndolos a niveles peligrosamente altos de un producto químico tóxico.
Las casas en la calle detrás del almacén de Cardinal Health al este de El Paso tienen vistas al muelle de carga de la instalación. Un análisis de datos realizado por Grist reveló que es probable que los residentes de ciertas zonas del barrio estén expuestos a niveles peligrosamente altos de óxido de etileno. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Cardinal Health utiliza ese almacén, y otro al otro lado de la ciudad, para guardar dispositivos médicos que han sido esterilizados con óxido de etileno. Entre los miles de compuestos que liberan cada día las instalaciones contaminantes, éste es uno de los más tóxicos, según la EPA, que descubrió en el año 2016 que el producto químico es mucho más peligroso de lo que se creía. Un análisis independiente de 2021 concluyó que es responsable de más de la mitad del riesgo excesivo de cáncer derivado de las operaciones industriales en todo el país. La exposición a largo plazo a este producto químico se ha relacionado con cánceres de mama y de los ganglios linfáticos, y la exposición a corto plazo puede causar irritación de la cavidad nasal, dificultad para respirar, sibilancias y constricción bronquial, según la Agencia para el Registro de Sustancias Tóxicas y Enfermedades. La familia de Domínguez llegaría a experimentar algunos de estos síntomas, pero sólo años más tarde sospecharían que estaban relacionados con la exposición al óxido de etileno.
Almacenes como los de El Paso son omnipresentes en todo el país. A través de solicitudes de acceso a la información y trabajo de campo, Grist ha identificado al menos 30 almacenes en Estados Unidos que almacenan productos esterilizados con óxido de etileno. Los utilizan empresas como Boston Scientific, ConMed y Becton Dickinson, así como Cardinal Health. Y no se encuentran sólo en zonas industriales de las ciudades: están cerca de colegios y parques infantiles, gimnasios y complejos de apartamentos. Desde fuera, los almacenes no llaman la atención. Parecen cualquier otro centro de distribución. Muchos ocupan cientos de miles de metros cuadrados y decenas de camiones entran y salen cada día. Pero cuando estas instalaciones cargan, descargan y trasladan productos médicos, expulsan óxido de etileno al aire. La mayoría de los vecinos no saben que estos edificios poco llamativos son una fuente de contaminación tóxica. Tampoco lo saben la mayoría de los camioneros, que a menudo son contratados de forma temporal, ni muchos de los empleados de los almacenes.
Almacenes que albergan productos esterilizados con óxido de etileno
Grist recopiló una lista de bodegas en Estados Unidos que informaron que almacenan productos esterilizados con óxido de etileno y otros utilizados por los principales fabricantes y distribuidores de dispositivos médicos.
Confirmados
Potenciales
Cargando datos del mapa…
Fuente: Análisis de Grist
Mapa: Lylla Younes / Clayton Aldern / Grist
Puede hallar una lista completa de las direcciones de los almacenes y las respuestas que las compañías le dieron a Grist aquí.
Grist identificó a los principales fabricantes y distribuidores de dispositivos médicos del país y recopiló una lista de aproximadamente 100 almacenes de los que son propietarios o que utilizan. Algunas de estas empresas han informado a los reguladores estatales o federales de que gestionan al menos un centro de distribución que almacena productos esterilizados con óxido de etileno. Otros fueron identificados en persona por los reporteros de Grist como destinatarios de productos procedentes de instalaciones de esterilización. Pero como las empresas utilizan múltiples métodos de esterilización, no está claro si cada uno de ellos emite óxido de etileno. No obstante, Grist decidió publicar la información para demostrar la magnitud del problema potencial: es casi seguro que hay docenas, si no cientos, de almacenes más que los 30 de los que tenemos certeza, y miles de trabajadores más expuestos al óxido de etileno sin saberlo.
Identificar estos almacenes y los cerca de 30 que emiten alguna cantidad de óxido de etileno fue un proceso laborioso, en parte porque la información acerca de estas instalaciones no está fácilmente disponible. Los reporteros de Grist vigilaron las instalaciones de esterilización, hablaron con camioneros y trabajadores de almacenes, y buscaron en bases de datos de propiedades.
El problema es «mucho mayor de lo que todos suponemos», afirma Rick Peltier, catedrático de Ciencias de la Salud Medioambiental de la Universidad de Massachusetts. «La falta de transparencia sobre el destino de estos productos nos preocupa».
Un conductor camina hacia su camión momentos antes de salir del almacén de Cardinal en el este de El Paso. Los conductores de camiones están entre las personas que no son conscientes de su exposición a las emisiones de óxido de etileno de la instalación. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
En el almacén de El Paso, detrás de la casa de Domínguez, Grist habló con varios empleados de Cardinal que dijeron que sabían poco sobre los riesgos de estar expuestos al óxido de etileno. Cardinal Health, que emplea a una mano de obra mayoritariamente latina en el almacén, exige que algunos obreros lleven monitores y mantengan ventanas y rejillas de ventilación abiertas para la circulación. Pero los trabajadores con los que habló Grist no sabían qué es lo que está monitorizando la empresa.
«Creo que se debe a un tipo de gas que estamos respirando», dijo un trabajador a Grist mientras descansaba. «No sé cómo se llama».
A lo largo del último año, Grist se ha puesto en contacto con Cardinal Health en múltiples ocasiones. La empresa no facilitó representantes para entrevistas ni respondió a preguntas concretas por escrito. En respuesta a la lista de almacenes de Cardinal que Grist identificó, un portavoz señaló en un breve comentario que la «mayoría de las direcciones que usted ha enumerado ni siquiera son instalaciones médicas». Sin embargo, las ubicaciones de los almacenes se corroboraron con información disponible en el sitio web de la empresa.
Un cartel que dice «Aquí trabajan héroes de la salud» cuelga afuera del almacén de Cardinal Health cerca del aeropuerto de El Paso. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Las operaciones de Cardinal se extienden al otro lado de la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México. La empresa tiene una fábrica en Ciudad Juárez (México), donde se empaquetan gasas, batas quirúrgicas, sábanas, escalpelos y otros utensilios médicos en kits que proporcionan «todo lo que un médico necesita» para llevar a cabo una intervención quirúrgica, según explica un trabajador. Los kits terminados se transportan en camión de vuelta a El Paso o a Nuevo México, donde son esterilizados con óxido de etileno por terceras empresas contratadas por Cardinal. A continuación, los productos se transportan en camión a uno de los dos almacenes de Cardinal en El Paso, donde permanecen hasta que se envían a los hospitales de todo el país. Durante todo el trayecto, en los camiones que los transportan y en los almacenes que los guardan, la superficie de los dispositivos esterilizados desprende óxido de etileno, un proceso llamado desgasificación.
La Agencia de Protección Ambiental de Estados Unidos (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency o EPA) regula las instalaciones donde se esterilizan los productos sanitarios, controlando los procesos y los protocolos de seguridad para mantener las emisiones de óxido de etileno en niveles seguros. Pero por múltiples razones, el gobierno federal —y la gran mayoría de los estados— ha hecho la vista gorda con los almacenes. Y ello a pesar de que estos centros de almacenamiento liberan a veces más óxido de etileno y suponen un riesgo mayor que las instalaciones de esterilización. Los reguladores de Georgia encontraron que ese era el caso en 2019, y un análisis de Grist encontró que el almacén junto a la casa de Domínguez planteaba una amenaza mayor que la instalación de esterilización de Nuevo México de la que Cardinal recibe productos.
Una señal de advertencia sobre el óxido de etileno en las instalaciones de Santa Teresa.Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Camiones cargan y descargan productos en un centro de esterilización de Santa Teresa, Nuevo México. La instalación utiliza óxido de etileno y forma parte de una amplia cadena de suministro médico.Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
«La EPA sabe que los riesgos del óxido de etileno se extienden mucho más allá de las paredes de la instalación de esterilización», dijo Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, abogado de la organización medioambiental sin fin de lucro Earthjustice que trabaja con sustancias químicas tóxicas, «que la sustancia química permanece con el equipo cuando se lleva a un almacén, y que sigue liberándose, amenazando a los trabajadores y amenazando a las comunidades circundantes.»
«La EPA tenía la obligación legal de abordar esos riesgos», añadió.
En 2009, Cardinal Health se puso en contacto con la Comisión de Calidad Medioambiental de Texas (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality o TCEQ), el regulador medioambiental estatal, para solicitar permisos para sus emisiones de óxido de etileno. En ese momento, no se sabía que el compuesto químico era tan tóxico como lo es en realidad, y los funcionarios de la TCEQ hicieron pocas preguntas sobre el efecto que las emisiones tendrían para los residentes cercanos. El informe de Grist indica que la empresa no tenía ninguna responsabilidad legal de informar a las autoridades estatales, pero parece haberlo hecho como un acto de responsabilidad. La empresa no parece estar infringiendo ninguna norma estatal ni federal.
Las solicitudes de la empresa incluían un diagrama rudimentario de un camión llegando a un almacén, una flecha apuntando al aire para indicar las emisiones de óxido de etileno de la instalación, y un camión saliendo del almacén. «Debido a la descarga de los camiones con remolque, Cardinal Health está registrando el EtO fugitivo que se escapa al abrir cada uno de los remolques», señaló, utilizando la abreviación para el óxido de etileno.
Para calcular qué cantidad de la sustancia química se escapaba de los camiones que transportan productos esterilizados, Cardinal Health, siguiendo las instrucciones de la TCEQ durante el proceso de obtención de permisos, utilizó un modelo de la EPA desarrollado para los sistemas de tratamiento de aguas residuales y multiplicó la estimación por el número de camiones que esperaba que dejaran productos cada año. No está claro por qué la agencia dio instrucciones a Cardinal Health para que utilizara un modelo de aguas residuales para un contaminante atmosférico cuando existían alternativas, pero estos cálculos imprecisos llevaron a la empresa a calcular que sus operaciones de almacenamiento emitían al menos 479 libras al año. La TCEQ concedió los permisos a Cardinal sin exigir a la empresa que tomara medidas para reducir la contaminación ni que avisara a los residentes.
Cuatro años después, la empresa parecía haber hecho un esfuerzo por determinar cálculos más precisos. En un experimento realizado en 2013, la empresa instaló sopladores en un camión y midió la cantidad de óxido de etileno emitido, pero no incluyó otros detalles relevantes —como cuándo se realizaron las mediciones y cuántos productos transportaba el camión— en los registros de la TCEQ que Grist revisó. Cardinal descubrió que, en los primeros cinco minutos después de que un camión entra en el almacén, los productos esterilizados emiten óxido de etileno en sus niveles más altos. Pero después de cinco minutos, en lugar de reducirse a cero, los niveles de desgasificación se mantuvieron estables en 7 partes por millón durante las dos horas siguientes.
Después de ser esterilizados con óxido de etileno, los productos
médicos se empaquetan y se cargan en camiones.
Jesse Nichols / Parker Ziegler / Grist
Los documentos disponibles al público no ofrecen detalles sobre la procedencia de los camiones, el número de paquetes que transportaban o el tiempo que hacía que se habían esterilizado los productos —detalles clave que determinan la velocidad a la que el óxido de etileno se desprende, según Peltier. Si los dispositivos médicos en el camión que examinó Cardinal recorrieron una distancia corta o si el camión estaba casi vacío cuando se realizó el experimento, la empresa podría haber subestimado enormemente las emisiones.
«Demasiadas veces, estos permisos son sólo esperanzas y sueños», dijo Peltier. «En la práctica, como hemos aprendido en muchas de estas instalaciones, nuestras esperanzas y sueños no siempre se cumplen, y a veces tenemos emisiones mucho mayores de las que esperábamos. Y eso es lo que esperaría aquí».
Además, los análisis no tomaron en cuenta las emisiones de óxido de etileno una vez que los productos fueron trasladados al interior de las instalaciones de Cardinal.
Los toxicólogos llevan mucho tiempo identificando el óxido de etileno como una sustancia química peligrosa. En 1982, el Centro de Recursos para la Salud Laboral de la Mujer de la Universidad de Columbia publicó una serie de hojas informativas para educar a los trabajadores sobre esta sustancia química, y en 1995, la Biblioteca del Congreso publicó un estudio sobre los riesgos de utilizar el gas para desinfectar materiales de archivo. Sin embargo, no fue hasta 2016 cuando la EPA actualizó el valor de toxicidad del óxido de etileno, una cifra que define la probabilidad de desarrollar cáncer si uno está expuesto a una determinada cantidad de una sustancia química a lo largo de la vida. Ese mismo año, la agencia publicó un informe en el que reevaluaba el óxido de etileno utilizando un estudio epidemiológico de más de 18.000 trabajadores de instalaciones de esterilización. Los toxicólogos de la agencia determinaron que el producto químico era 30 veces más tóxico para los adultos y 60 veces más tóxico para los niños de lo que se creía anteriormente.
Datos sobre el óxido de etileno
¿Qué es el óxido de etileno? El óxido de etileno es un gas tóxico, incoloro e inodoro, que se utiliza para esterilizar productos médicos, fumigar especias y fabricar otros químicos industriales. Según la Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos (FDA, por sus siglas en inglés), aproximadamente la mitad de todos los dispositivos médicos estériles en Estados Unidos se desinfectan con óxido de etileno.
¿Cuáles son las fuentes de exposición al óxido de etileno? Las fuentes industriales de emisiones óxido de etileno se dividen en tres categorías principales: fabricación de productos químicos, esterilización médica y fumigación de alimentos.
¿Cuáles son los efectos en la salud de la exposición al óxido de etileno? El óxido de etileno, al que la EPA ha catalogado como carcinógeno, es dañino en concentraciones por encima de 0.1 partes por trillón si se está expuesto a él a lo largo de la vida. Numerosos estudios lo han vinculado con el cáncer de pulmón y el cáncer de mama, así como con enfermedades del sistema nervioso y daño pulmonar. La exposición aguda al químico puede provocar pérdida del conocimiento, convulsiones o coma.
¿Cómo regula la EPA el óxido de etileno? Una norma de 2024 exige que las instalaciones de esterilización instalen equipo que minimice la cantidad del químico que se libera al aire. Sin embargo, la nueva regulación no contempla las emisiones de otras partes de la cadena de suministro de los dispositivos médicos, como los almacenes y los camiones que los transportan. La administración de Trump ha indicado que derogará la norma.
Determinaron que el óxido de etileno era uno de los contaminantes del aire más tóxicos regulados por el gobierno federal. La exposición prolongada se relacionó con tasas elevadas de linfoma y cáncer de mama entre las trabajadoras. En un estudio de 7.576 mujeres que habían pasado al menos un año trabajando en una instalación de esterilización médica, 319 desarrollaron cáncer de mama. Según un análisis de la organización sin fines de lucro Unión de Científicos Conscientes, aproximadamente 14 millones de personas en Estados Unidos viven cerca de una instalación de esterilización médica.
Como resultado de la nueva evaluación de la EPA, las empresas de todo el país se vieron sometidas a un mayor escrutinio, y algunas instalaciones de esterilización comenzaron a recibir inspecciones más frecuentes. Pero los reguladores de Texas cuestionaron el informe de la EPA. En 2017, ocho años después del primer permiso concedido a Cardinal Health, la TCEQ lanzó su propio estudio sobre el producto químico y estableció un umbral para las emisiones de óxido de etileno que era 2.000 veces más permisivo que el de la EPA, lo que desencadenó una batalla legal que aún se está desarrollando en los tribunales. En el caso de los almacenes, que no están sujetos al escrutinio federal, la actitud permisiva de la TCEQ se tradujo en una supervisión prácticamente nula.
A principios de 2020, la gente de todo el mundo tenía poca energía para otra cosa que no fuera la pandemia de COVID-19. Y, sin embargo, el aumento de la demanda de dispositivos médicos esterilizados y luego mascarillas significaba que más camiones con más materiales pasaban por almacenes como el que está justo detrás del patio trasero de los Domínguez.
Para calcular aproximadamente el nivel de exposición de su familia al óxido de etileno durante ese periodo, Grist pidió a un experto en modelización del aire, que pasara las emisiones declaradas por Cardinal Health por un modelo matemático que simula cómo se dispersan las partículas contaminantes por la atmósfera. (Este mismo modelo es utilizado por la EPA y las empresas, incluida Cardinal, durante el proceso de obtención de permisos). Grist recopiló la información sobre las emisiones a partir de los archivos de permisos que la empresa había presentado al estado.
Los resultados indicaron que las concentraciones de óxido de etileno en el bloque de Domínguez equivalían a un riesgo de cáncer estimado de 2 entre 10.000; es decir, si 10.000 personas están expuestas a esa concentración de óxido de etileno a lo largo de su vida, cabría esperar que dos desarrollaran cáncer a causa de la exposición.
1 milla
La EPA nunca ha sido muy clara sobre el nivel de riesgo de cáncer que considera aceptable para la población. En cambio, ha utilizado «puntos de referencia» de riesgo para guiar las decisiones sobre la autorización de nuevas fuentes de contaminación cerca de las comunidades. El límite inferior de este espectro de riesgos es 1 en 1 millón, un nivel por encima del cual la agencia ha dicho que se esfuerza por proteger al mayor número posible de personas. En el extremo superior del espectro está 1 entre 10.000 —un nivel que los expertos en salud pública han argumentado durante mucho tiempo que es demasiado permisivo, ya que el riesgo de cáncer de una persona por exposición a la contaminación se acumula al riesgo de cáncer que ya tiene por factores genéticos y ambientales. El riesgo para Domínguez y su familia es incluso mayor.
Según los resultados del modelizador del aire, 603.000 residentes de El Paso, aproximadamente el 90% de la población de la ciudad, están expuestos a un riesgo de cáncer superior a 1 en 1 millón sólo por los dos almacenes de Cardinal Health. Más de 1.600 personas, incluidos muchos vecinos de Domínguez, están expuestas a niveles superiores al umbral de aceptabilidad de la EPA de 1 entre 10.000. El análisis también estimó que el riesgo del almacén de Cardinal Health es mayor que el de una instalación de esterilización médica de Sterigenics, situada a apenas 35 millas en Santa Teresa, Nuevo México. Estos resultados subrayan la cantidad de óxido de etileno que puede acumularse en el aire simplemente por la liberación de gases. Grist proporcionó estos resultados a Cardinal Health, la TCEQ y la EPA. Ninguno de ellos respondió específicamente a las preguntas sobre estos hallazgos.
1 milla
En 2021, Domínguez dio a luz a su segundo hijo y, en los años siguientes, tanto ella como sus hijos empezaron a sufrir problemas respiratorios. Su hijo pequeño, en particular, desarrolló graves problemas respiratorios, y un neumólogo le recetó un inhalador y medicamentos antialérgicos para ayudarle a respirar mejor. Su hija, ya adolescente, se quejaba de dolores de cabeza persistentes. Y ella también empezó a tener dolores de cabeza sinusales.
Mientras tanto, Cardinal Health estaba ampliando sus operaciones. En 2023, la empresa solicitó a la TCEQ una actualización de su permiso «lo antes posible». En el almacén al otro lado de la ciudad de donde vive Domínguez, la empresa pronto esperaba recibir casi cuatro veces más camiones que transportaban productos esterilizados —potencialmente hasta 10.000 camiones al año— y el aumento del tráfico de camiones «podría incrementar las emisiones potenciales» de óxido de etileno.
Cardinal se basó en el experimento de 2013 para estimar las emisiones de la instalación, simplemente multiplicando esa concentración por el nuevo número máximo de camiones que la instalación estaría autorizada a recibir. El cálculo aproximado llevó a la empresa a estimar que el almacén situado al otro lado de la ciudad de Domínguez aumentaría sus emisiones a 1.000 libras de la sustancia química al año.
Camiones aparcados frente a un almacén de Cardinal Health cerca del aeropuerto de El Paso. La empresa solicitó un permiso para aceptar cargamentos de hasta 10.000 camiones al año en 2023. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Cardinal también calculó que el equipo médico emitiría 637 libras de óxido de etileno al año dentro del almacén. Sin embargo, alegó que esas emisiones son «de minimus», es decir, fuentes insignificantes de contaminación. Según la legislación del estado de Texas, las emisiones mínimas, como los vapores que pueden formarse en un armario de limpieza donde se almacenan disolventes o los gases producidos por el funcionamiento de aparatos de aire acondicionado o calefactores, pueden quedar excluidas de los permisos.
«A ver, si soy profesor de universidad, no quiero estar pensando en los compuestos orgánicos volátiles que salen de los marcadores con los que escribo en la pizarra», dijo Ron Sahu, ingeniero mecánico y consultor con décadas de experiencia trabajando con reguladores medioambientales estatales y federales y con operadores industriales. Sin embargo, las excepciones arriba, continuó Sahu, «no se pensaron para compuestos altamente tóxicos como el óxido de etileno».
Como exigen las normas de Texas, Cardinal estudió instalaciones de todo el país que emiten cantidades comparables de óxido de etileno e hizo un resumen de la tecnología que utilizan para reducir las emisiones. Dado el volumen de las emisiones del almacén, las instalaciones más análogas eran las propias esterilizadoras. La empresa encontró dos esterilizadoras en Texas que utilizan equipos capaces de reducir sus emisiones en un 99%.
Pero estas opciones, concluyó Cardinal, tenían un «coste excesivo» y las emisiones del almacén eran «muy bajas». En su lugar, la empresa dijo que simplemente «restringiría» el número de camiones que descargan productos esterilizados: sólo tres por hora y 10.000 al año. En otras palabras, ampliaría sus operaciones, pero de forma controlada, con el fin de evitar métodos probados para reducir las emisiones de óxido de etileno.
Grist envió a la TCEQ preguntas detalladas por escrito sobre los permisos que concedió a Cardinal. Aunque las preguntas se basaban en documentos que la agencia ya había hecho públicos, un portavoz requirió que Grist enviara una solicitud formal de acceso a los registros «debido al nivel de exigencia y a la cantidad de información técnica que solicita».
Finalmente, en 2023, la TCEQ concedió el nuevo permiso a Cardinal.
Al mismo tiempo que Cardinal Health ampliaba sus operaciones en Texas, la lucha por lograr una supervisión más estricta del óxido de etileno se extendía por todo el país. Individuos de Lakewood, Colorado, presentaron demandas privadas por daños sanitarios relacionados con la exposición al óxido de etileno; otros se unieron a demandas colectivas contra empresas de esterilización y la EPA.
Finalmente, en abril de 2023, la EPA propuso regulaciones largamente esperadas para reducir las emisiones de óxido de etileno de las esterilizadoras. Si bien el proyecto de norma abarcaba las emisiones de los centros de almacenamiento ubicados en las propias instalaciones, no incluía los almacenes externos. Tampoco se incluyeron en el proyecto de norma otras disposiciones que los defensores del medio ambiente esperaban, como el control obligatorio del aire en las proximidades de las instalaciones.
De acuerdo con el procedimiento estándar, la EPA abrió un periodo de 75 días para comentarios públicos y posibles revisiones del proyecto de norma. Earthjustice organizó una reunión de defensores comunitarios de todo el país para aumentar la presión sobre la agencia para que reforzara su propuesta. Residentes de California, Texas, Puerto Rico y otros lugares con instalaciones de esterilización pasaron dos días en Washington, D.C., haciendo peticiones a los miembros del Congreso, reuniéndose con la EPA y compartiendo sus historias de exposición.
Daniel Savery, un representante legislativo de Earthjustice que ayudó a organizar el evento, dijo a Grist que la reunión con la Oficina de Aire y Radiación de la EPA contó con una buena asistencia y que los líderes expresaron empatía por las historias que escucharon. Pero cuando la agencia publicó la norma definitiva en marzo de 2024, no se incluyeron ni los almacenes externos ni la vigilancia obligatoria del aire. La normativa hace referencia al problema de los almacenes externos e indica la intención de la agencia de recopilar información sobre ellos, un primer paso que Savery cree que no se habría incluido en la norma si no fuera por la presión de las reuniones de Washington. No obstante, añadió, la EPA debería haber recopilado información sobre los almacenes de suministros médicos hace mucho tiempo.
«Esta no es su primera vez en el ruedo», dijo Savery, aludiendo a los ocho años que los defensores llevan presionando a la agencia para que aborde la exposición al óxido de etileno desde que se determinó su alta toxicidad en 2016. La Oficina del Inspector General de la EPA, un organismo de control independiente de la agencia, había pedido a los reguladores federales ya en 2020 que hicieran un mejor trabajo informando al público sobre su exposición al óxido de etileno de la industria de la esterilización. «En gran parte, el país sigue con una venda en los ojos respecto a estas fuentes de emisiones», señaló Savery.
El almacén de Cardinal Health en el este de El Paso está a unos cientos de metros de un barrio residencial. La empresa tiene permisos del estado para emitir óxido de etileno, pero los residentes no son conscientes de su exposición al producto químico. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Los esfuerzos para frenar las emisiones de óxido de etileno parecen poco probables durante el segundo mandato del presidente Donald Trump. El nominado de Trump para dirigir la oficina de calidad del aire de la EPA, Aaron Szabo, fue cabildero de la industria de la esterilización, y la agencia hace poco pidió a las esterilizadoras que buscan una exención de las reglas de óxido de etileno que envíen sus peticiones a una dirección de correo electrónico dedicada al gobierno. Desde entonces, la administración de Trump también ha dicho en presentaciones judiciales que planea «revisar y reconsiderar» las normas para las empresas de esterilización.
Un portavoz de la EPA dijo que no pueden «hablar de las decisiones de la administración Biden-Harris» y citó la reciente decisión de la agencia de ofrecer exenciones a las esterilizadoras. El portavoz también se refirió a otra decisión de la EPA de regular el óxido de etileno como pesticida. Esa decisión «podría requerir un estudio específico para recopilar datos sobre la exposición de los trabajadores al EtO en dispositivos médicos fumigados», dijo el portavoz. Sin embargo, al igual que con la regla de las esterilizadoras, la administración de Trump también podría decidir rescindir la determinación de pesticidas.
«El óxido de etileno de estos almacenes simplemente no está regulado», dijo Sahu, el ingeniero mecánico. «No hay ningún control, así que todo acabará tarde o temprano en el aire ambiente».
El pasado agosto, una mañana nublada en el este de El Paso (Texas), cuando la mayoría de la gente apenas empezaba su día, los trabajadores de Cardinal Health estaban sentados en sus coches aparcados en una calle cerca del almacén, a tiro de piedra del patio trasero de Domínguez. Habiendo empezado sus turnos a las 5 de la mañana, todos estaban de descanso. Un joven trabajador hablaba con su novia. Otro miraba Facebook. Y otro comía Takis, manchándose los dedos de un rojo vivo.
Algunos de sus trabajos requieren mover palés del tamaño de un frigorífico llenos de dispositivos médicos esterilizados. Otros abren con mucho cuidado los palés envueltos en plástico, trasladan las cajas de cartón que contienen los kits médicos al interior del almacén y los vuelven a empaquetar para enviarlos en camiones a hospitales de todo el país. Lo hacen con guantes protectores, mascarillas básicas y redecillas para el pelo —precauciones que la empresa exige para garantizar la esterilidad de los equipos médicos, no la protección de los trabajadores.
Un camión cargado de dispositivos médicos sale del almacén de Cardinal Health en el este de El Paso. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
Grist habló con varios de ellos mientras descansaban o salían de sus turnos. Aunque ninguno de los trabajadores quiso hablar con los reporteros de Grist de forma oficial, por miedo a represalias de su empleador, compartieron sus experiencias sobre el trabajo en el almacén. La mayoría no sabía que estaban expuestos al óxido de etileno. Algunos habían oído hablar del producto químico, pero desconocían su grado de exposición y los riesgos que entrañaba.
Grist también distribuyó folletos a los trabajadores y a los residentes cercanos explicando los riesgos de la exposición al óxido de etileno. Dos trabajadores llamaron a Grist utilizando el número de contacto del folleto y dijeron que habían desarrollado cánceres después de empezar a trabajar allí. Los tipos de cáncer que se les habían diagnosticado se han relacionado con la exposición al óxido de etileno.
Desde que se enteró de las emisiones del almacén, Domínguez dice que ahora se lo piensa dos veces antes de dejar jugar a su hijo pequeño en el patio trasero. «Estamos dentro de la casa la mayor parte del tiempo por esa razón», dijo.
Domínguez había estado considerando comprar la propiedad de su jefe, pero ahora el futuro de su familia en su casa es incierto.
Nota del editor: Earthjustice es anunciante de Grist. Los anunciantes no tienen ningún papel en las decisiones editoriales de Grist.
Creamos una guía informativa —disponible en inglés y español— en colaboración con organizaciones comunitarias, organizaciones sin fines de lucro y residentes que, durante años, han impulsado una mayor regulación del EtO. Este folleto contiene información sobre el EtO, así como maneras de lograr que los funcionarios públicos aborden el asunto de las emisiones, recursos legales de referencia y más. Puede verlo, descargarlo, imprimirlo y compartirlo.
Si usted es un periodista local o un miembro de la comunidad que quiere saber más sobre cómo investigamos este problema y los pasos a seguir para obtener más información sobre los almacenes en su zona, lea esto.
Students at Columbia University’s Middle Eastern studies department were suffering from whiplash. Over two days in March, they went from being reassured by Middle Eastern studies faculty that the university was supporting their embattled department to, just a day later, being hit with news that Columbia had cut a deal with the Trump administration.
At stake was some $400 million in federal funding from the school that had been suspended by the White House. The Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department — or MESAAS as it is formally known — was at the center of the storm.
Pushing back on the White House’s demands proved too tall an order at Columbia. The university administration made an announcement on March 21 that laid out a raft of policy changes. Among them was a plan to appoint a new senior vice provost whose work would include “a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East,” the announcement said.
MESAAS scholars immediately saw the school had cut a deal that put them in the crosshairs.
“It’s saying one thing to the federal government and saying another thing to faculty and students.”
Now, for the first time, several insiders at MESAAS are speaking up about the turmoil facing their department, the back-and-forth between the Trump administration and university leadership, and how they are the ones caught in the lurch.
“The university is being quite opaque in its language and its messaging, and it’s saying one thing to the federal government and saying another thing to faculty and students,” said Craig Birckhead-Morton, a 22-year-old graduate student at MESAAS. “Obviously, it’s been very frustrating for us, this duplicitous behavior of the university.”
“I’ve spoken with several of my classmates who are also afraid of either their ability to research the things that they’re researching being restricted, or them conducting that research and coming under attack for it,” he said. “This is very scary.”
Short-Lived Reassurance
The rollercoaster ride had begun only last month. On March 7, the White House put the university on notice: The Trump administration announced that it was canceling some $400 million in federal funding to Columbia.
In negotiations over the funding, the White House made a series of demands on March 13, including that the Middle Eastern studies department be placed under academic receivership for a minimum of five years — taking control of the department out of its own faculty’s hands. A Wall Street Journal article published on March 19 said Columbia was about to cave to Donald Trump’s demands, with a deadline approaching the following day.
Then, on the day of the deadline, came an email from Gil Hochberg, the chair of MESAAS. Hochberg and three other senior faculty from the department had met with two high-level senior deans from the university. They had come away from the hourlong Zoom discussion feeling relatively optimistic about maintaining “academic self-governing” at MESAAS.
“While many questions remain open, the four of us who attended today’s meeting, feel significantly more reassured that our department is being supported by the university as much as possible under the circumstances,” said the email, which was reviewed by The Intercept.
“We were told that it is very unlikely that we will hear anything determined this weekend,” Hochberg wrote. “The situation is complex and will take time — more time than we would like. March 20 was one deadline, but not a legally binding one.”
Defying Hochberg’s expectations, word from the Columbia administration came down quickly.
The very next day, on March 21, Columbia University made a sweeping list of announcements, chief among them that the university was going to appoint a new senior vice provost that same week, whose work would include reviewing programs that touch on the Middle East, ensuring “balanced” curricula, and processes by which curricular changes are made. (Neither Hochberg nor Columbia responded to requests for comment.)
Since Columbia’s announcement, uncertainty has reigned. The new vice provost was set to be appointed in the week of March 21. Only after three weeks, Oon April 15, did the university announce Miguel Urquiola, a dean of social science at Columbia, as the new vice provost. Urquiola’s academic background is in economics, but his first major task as senior vice provost is to conduct a “thorough review” of Middle Eastern studies.
“Honestly, I don’t understand what this means,” said a MESAAS student, a Ph.D. candidate who asked that their name not be used due to concerns over their visa status. “It doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean for them to claim that they’ll be able to see how something is ‘balanced’? They’re not the people who are experts in these fields.”
Inside MESAAS, scholars have viewed the developments of recent weeks as Columbia caving to the Trump administration’s demands. They fear control of the department is being wrested away from faculty — and, to make matters worse, little clarity has been available to students on how to navigate the changes since Columbia’s announcement in late March.
“There is no information that has been given since, so I’m just waiting,” said a Palestinian student at Columbia who asked for anonymity because of the crackdown on dissent at the school. “There’s just a general confusion.”
The Ph.D. candidate laid blame for the chaos on the university administration, not the department faculty.
“The faculty have also not been kept in the loop with a lot of these updates of what’s going on,” they said. “We do feel supported by our faculty, but we are isolated by the university administration.”
Photo: Meghnad Bose
Chaos on the Inside
For students at the Middle Eastern studies department, the university’s apparent capitulation was particularly galling because it felt like an indictment of the department with no substantive critiques.
“The MESAAS department is not being attacked right now because of a lack of rigor in its coursework or a deficiency in the quality of the research that’s being produced,” said Birckhead-Morton, the graduate student. “The MESAAS department is one of the greatest Middle Eastern Studies departments in the country.”
Other students, too, had come to Columbia looking to study at the highly regarded department.
“I came to Columbia specifically looking at MESAAS being home to some of the best scholars on Palestine,” said the Palestinian student. “Being able to work with them just really inspired me to apply to Columbia — it was my top choice.”
The internal MESAAS email and subsequent university announcement had come during spring break at Columbia. With classes set to resume on March 24, the Palestinian student felt dread over returning to campus.
“I was considering fully dropping out,” they said.
“In the past few weeks, I’ve just been very disillusioned by it all,” they said. “I would like my department to show a little ounce of courage.”
Wresting Control From MESAAS
For professors at Columbia, the move against faculty control at MESAAS reflects a larger attack by the Trump administration on academic freedom in the name of ideological conformity.
“The federal government doesn’t get to tell ice cream shops what flavors to serve in what kind of cone, and they don’t get to tell universities what subjects to teach or how to teach them,” said Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia. “From the outside, the fact that MESAAS was targeted without justification or explanation suggests to me that this attack is being driven not by a concern for academic excellence or anyone’s safety, but by an extremist ideological agenda that has employed the federal government to remake the university for its own ends.”
Among the university’s announcements on March 21 was a policy change stating that Columbia would be appointing “new faculty members with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments of Economics, Political Science, and School for International and Public Affairs.”
These appointments, according to Columbia, would be “reinforcing the University’s commitment to excellence and fairness in Middle East studies.”
Work on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was the obvious target of the changes, Birckhead-Morton said, but other areas of study could come under the same scrutiny.
“Any coursework related to Palestine will certainly be the first to be removed or restricted or modified under this new regime that’s being imposed on us — that’s the biggest worry,” he said. “But there are other courses that are on settler colonialism, for example, that aren’t specific to Palestine, but could come under attack based on the statements of the university.”
For his part, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia, denounced the attacks on the department in an op-ed from immigration detention in Louisiana, where he is being held after having his green card revoked for his activism at the university against Israel’s war on Gaza. In his op-ed, Khalil referred to the pressures on MESAAS as “McCarthyist and racist interventions at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department.”
While no active MESAAS professors responded to requests for comment, retired professors have been more forthcoming about recent developments at the department.
Rashid Khalidi, a former Arab studies professor at MESAAS, recently wrote, “It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.” And Sheldon Pollock, a former chair of the MESAAS department, likened the government’s demands of Columbia to “a ransom note”: “Like a mob boss, the government threatens to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance.”
Professors at other departments also spoke out against the announced changes.
“Many people in the educational establishment were telling Columbia that it should resist these demands by the Trump administration, and it should stand up and take a stand forcefully,” said Michael Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics at Columbia and vice president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which sued the Trump administration over the revoked funding.
Thaddeus said the university’s decision not to pursue its own legal action against the Trump administration was “extremely disappointing.”
Conference Disrupted
Each year, students at MESAAS get a chance to present their research at the department’s graduate conference. This year, the conference — on the theme of uprisings in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa — was scheduled to take place at the university, in person, on April 10 and 11.
On April 1, though, an email went out to some participants announcing changes in the programming.
“In light of recent events at Columbia University, New York City, and the United States at large, we are writing to you about some last-minute measures we are taking in order to protect the safety of our conference participants,” said the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The Intercept. “The conference, including the keynote address, will now happen only on Zoom.”
The email went on to say that, despite the lack of an in-person forum, there would still be additional security measures. “We will be vetting all audience members, and request you to reply to this email with a list of people (friends, family, colleagues) with whom you want to share access to the conference,” the email said.
“We haven’t been directed to do this,” said the MESAAS Ph.D. candidate. “It’s really for our protection and for the protection of everyone speaking that these steps are being taken, to make sure that we can still continue to have these conversations without becoming targets ourselves.”
“It’s more like an underground secret meeting than a public rally.”
“It is kind of an effort to keep the conference going despite all the odds that we are facing right now,” they said. “There is some concern that we will be constrained even further if we are in person.”
The Ph.D. candidate, however, added that the fact that the department had to change the program is a sign of the pressures on academic freedoms at Columbia and, in particular, MESAAS.
Another MESAAS student, who was slated to present at the conference and asked for anonymity because they are an international student, noted that the climate on campus meant that the events were not as widely promoted as usual.
“I am still happy that my work will be seen by people, but am sad and a little disappointed that it will be a smaller audience,” the student said. “It’s more like an underground secret meeting than a public rally.”
The Wider Struggle
When it comes to pressures on Middle Eastern studies departments, Columbia is far from alone. Despite recently rejecting the Trump administration’s demands, Harvard University in March dismissed the faculty leaders of their Center for Middle Eastern Studies, or CMES. Nonetheless, five days later, the Trump administration announced that it would be reviewing close to $9 billion in federal funding and multiyear grant commitments to the school.
“What happened at CMES at Harvard is shocking and egregious,” said Birckhead-Morton, the MESAAS graduate student. “So, they’ve come for Columbia, they’ve come for Harvard, we don’t want this to happen to other universities. We have to defend Middle Eastern studies across the board.”
Birckhead-Morton, who is Black and Muslim American, said the crackdown on Columbia’s academic functioning is part of a broader trend to attack scholarship seen as a threat to the powers that be.
“This is a continuation of the attack on critical race theory and ethnic studies,” he said. “It’s not just a Palestine issue or an Arab issue or a Middle East issue. These struggles and these histories are connected, and this crackdown is really going to affect us all.”
“This is an attack on scholarship, dissent, and critical thinking.”
In a decision which has all the hallmarks of TERF Island, the UK Supreme Court has ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer exclusively to characteristics assigned at birth – thanks to a campaign by anti-trans campaigners who have mobilised under anti-feminist left hate campaigns and far-right hate movements.
This judgment, delivered by Lord Hodge, has significant implications for the rights of transgender women across the UK, as well as other members of gender queer communities.
The UK Supreme Court: siding with the anti-trans lobby
The case was brought forward by the anti-trans campaign group For Women Scotland, which has a history of challenging the inclusion of trans women in definitions of “woman” within Scottish legislation . Their legal challenge was supported by author and anti-trans bigot J.K. Rowling, who contributed £70,000 to the cause.
The group predictably argued that the inclusion of trans women with Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) in the definition of “woman” diluted the meaning of the term and infringed upon the rights of cisgender women.
They sought a legal interpretation that would exclude trans women from this category, regardless of their legal recognition.
This ruling effectively excludes trans women, even those with GRCs, from legal protections and opportunities afforded to cisgender women under the Equality Act. As the Guardian noted:
In a defeat for the Scottish government… [the court’s] decision will mean that transgender women can no longer sit on public boards in places set aside for women.
It could have far wider ramifications by leading to much greater restrictions on the rights of transgender women to use services and spaces reserved for women
The Supreme Court has undermined the legal recognition that trans people have fought hard to obtain. It sets a concerning precedent for the erosion of trans rights in the UK.
Trampling over trans people’s rights
By prioritising a gender normative definition of sex over legal gender recognition, the court’s decision disregards the lived experiences and identities of trans women. It raises questions about their access to single-sex spaces, participation in public life, and protection against discrimination.
The Supreme Court’s decision reflects a troubling trend within politics and justice to favour a narrow, right-wing view of gender, ignoring the complexities of gender identity and trampling over the rights of trans people.
This approach fails to consider the social and legal realities and plays right into the hands of the anti-trans lobby, the far-right, and bigots.
Ellie Gomersall is a 25-year-old trans woman living in Glasgow’s Southside.
She was previously president of NUS Scotland from 2022-2024 and is an activist for the Scottish Green Party. She is also a columnist for the National.
Ellie said of the Supreme Court ruling:
I’m gutted to see this judgement from the Supreme Court, which ends twenty years of understanding that transgender people with a gender recognition certificate are able to be, for almost all intents and purposes, recognised legally as our true genders.
These protections were put in place in 2004 following a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, meaning today’s ruling undermines the vital human rights of my community to dignity, safety and the right to be respected for who we are.
This ruling represents yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace. With hate crimes against trans people on the rise across Britain, it’s time for the UK Labour government to stop sitting on the fence when it comes to the human rights of trans people, to step up, and defend one of the most vulnerable minorities in the country.
The rise of the far-right – now endorsed by the Supreme Court
Right-wing campaign groups like For Women Scotland, while claiming to advocate for women’s rights, are little more than anti-trans pressure groups that align themselves with the worst elements of right-and far-right wing politics. They have focused their efforts on excluding trans women, thereby perpetuating discrimination and division.
Their actions, supported by high-profile figures, contribute to a hostile environment for trans people and detract from the broader goal of gender equality.
This ruling represents a huge setback for trans rights in the UK. It challenges the progress made since the introduction of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and signals an authoritarian, right-wing shift towards intolerance and repression.
The decision may embolden further legal challenges aimed at rolling back the rights of trans people, affecting their access to healthcare, legal recognition, and protection from discrimination.
It is imperative that lawmakers and society at large recognise the importance of upholding the rights and dignity of everyone – not just who a handful of bigoted women say they should.
The anti-trans lobby does not care for women’s rights. It only cares for its own, narrow-minded campaign which seeks to present trans women as a threat.
Yet paradoxically, by aligning with the far-right, groups like For Women Scotland are – at a time when women’s bodily autonomy and healthcare rights are being rolled back across the world – actually damaging their own alleged cause.
A Palestinian advocacy group has called on NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters to take a firm stand for international law and human rights by following the Maldives with a ban on visiting Israelis.
Maher Nazzal, chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, said in an open letter sent to both NZ politicians that the “decisive decision” by the Maldives reflected a “growing international demand for accountability and justice”.
He said such a measure would serve as a “peaceful protest against the ongoing violence” with more than 51,000 people — mostly women and children — being killed and more than 116,000 wounded by Israel’s brutal 18-month war on Gaza.
Since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18, at least 1630 people have been killed — including at least 500 children — and at least 4302 people have been wounded.
The open letter said:
Dear Prime Minister Luxon and Minister Peters,
I am writing to express deep concern over the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to urge the New Zealand government to take a firm stand in support of international law and human rights.
Palestinian Forum of New Zealand chair Maher Nazzal at an Auckland pro-Palestinian rally . . . “New Zealand has a proud history of advocating for human rights and upholding international law.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
The Maldives has recently announced a ban on Israeli passport holders entering their country, citing solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemnation of the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
This decisive action reflects a growing international demand for accountability and justice.
New Zealand has a proud history of advocating for human rights and upholding international law. In line with this tradition, I respectfully request that the New Zealand government consider implementing a temporary suspension on the entry of Israeli passport holders. Such a measure would serve as a peaceful protest against the ongoing violence and a call for an immediate ceasefire and the protection of civilian lives.
I understand the complexities involved in international relations and the importance of maintaining diplomatic channels. However, taking a stand against actions that result in significant civilian casualties and potential violations of international law is imperative.
I appreciate your attention to this matter and urge you to consider this request seriously. New Zealand’s voice can contribute meaningfully to the global call for peace and justice.
Sincerely, Maher Nazzal
Chair
Palestine Forum of New Zealand
JUST IN: Maldives President officially signs the law banning Israelis from entering the country. pic.twitter.com/rKRnlEw6WK
President Mohamed Muizzu signed the legislation after it was passed on Monday by the People’s Majlis, the Maldivian parliament.
Muizzu’s cabinet initially decided to ban all Israeli passport holders from the idyllic island nation in June 2024 until Israel stopped its attacks on Palestine, but progress on the legislation stalled.
A bill was presented in May 2024 in the Maldivian parliament by Meekail Ahmed Naseem, a lawmaker from the main opposition, the Maldivian Democratic Party, which sought to amend the country’s Immigration Act.
The cabinet then decided to change the country’s laws to ban Israeli passport holders, including dual citizens. After several amendments, it passed this week, more than 300 days later.
“The ratification reflects the government’s firm stance in response to the continuing atrocities and ongoing acts of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinian people,” Muizzu’s office said in a statement.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that at least 1,613 Palestinians had been killed since 18 March, when a ceasefire collapsed, taking the overall death toll since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023 to 50,983.
The ban went into immediate effect.
“The Maldives reaffirms its resolute solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” the statement added.
Last year, in response to talk of a ban, Israel’s Foreign Ministry advised its citizens against travelling to the country.
The Maldives, a popular tourist destination, has a population of more than 525,000 and about 11,000 Israeli tourists visited there in 2023 before the Israeli war on Gaza began.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership betweenGrist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
Chicago city leaders are set to consider a major overhaul in how and where polluting businesses are allowed to open, nearly two years after the city settled a civil rights complaint that alleged a pattern of discrimination threatening the health of low-income communities of color.
The measure, expected to be introduced Wednesday, would transform how heavy industry is located and operated in the country’s third largest city. If passed into law, it would require city officials to assess the cumulative pollution burden on communities before approving new industrial projects.
As the Trump administration dismantles protections for poor communities facing lopsided levels of pollution, Chicago’s ordinance is a test case for local action under a federal government hostile toward environmental justice. Over the past three months, the Trump administration has already undone long-standing orders to address uneven environmental burdens at the federal level and challenged government programs monitoring environmental justice issues across the country.
Now, advocates are hoping the local legislation becomes a blueprint for how state and local governments can leverage zoning and permitting to protect vulnerable communities from becoming sacrifice zones.
“The Trump administration is trying to erase history,” said Gina Ramirez, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest director of environmental health. “You can’t erase our industrial past — it’s literally haunting us.”
Chicago’s industrial history is especially pronounced in low-income communities on the city’s South and West sides. The proposed ordinance would give these communities a voice in the permitting process via a new environmental justice advisory board, Ramirez said.
“Nobody wants to be sick,” said Cheryl Johnson, an environmental activist on the Far South Side who has been advocating for pollution protections for almost 40 years.
The Chicago ordinance is named after Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, who started fighting in the 1970s for the health of her neighbors at a public housing community surrounded by a “toxic doughnut” of polluters.
Cheryl Johnson runs People for Community Recovery, an organization started by her mother, with the same mission to protect human health. “The most important thing — and the only thing that we get — is good health or bad health,” Johnson said. “That’s what my mother fought for.”
In 2020, Johnson’s group, along with several other local environmental justice organizations, launched a civil rights complaint over the city’s role in the relocation of a metal-shredding operation from its longtime home on the North Side to a majority Black and Latino neighborhood on the far South Side of the city.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded in 2022 that Chicago had long placed polluters in low-income areas, while sparing majority-white affluent neighborhoods.
In a binding agreement with former President Joe Biden’s administration, the city promised to offer a legal fix. Former mayor Lori Lightfoot signed the agreement with HUD hours before she left office in 2023. Her successor, Mayor Brandon Johnson, vowed to follow the agreement and said that September that an ordinance proposal would be offered in short order.
But weeks and months turned into years, and community, health, and environmental advocates complained that the mayor was slow-walking his promises. Nearly two years later, the city is finally set to deliver.
Not all community groups are happy with the proposal. Theresa McNamara, an activist with the Southwest Environmental Alliance, said at a recent public meeting she didn’t think the measure would go far enough. She called it a “weak piece of crap” based on her understanding of the main points.
Experts said the law’s success would depend on the city’s will to execute and enforce it.
“There’s a lot of states and even cities that have assessment tools, but the question is, what do you do with those?” said Ana Baptisa, an environmental policy professor at The New School in New York.
In New Jersey, Baptista helped pass a similar ordinance — then the first of its kind — through the Newark City Council in 2016. Since then, local and state governments across the country have followed suit. At least eight states have passed this type of legislation, including California, Minnesota, New York, and Delaware.
Still, Baptista said Newark’s bill has failed to rein in polluting industries. “It proved to be what we feared: a sort of formality that oftentimes doesn’t even get completed,” she said.
Even without power to deny or constrain new pollution sources, the advisory board itself marks progress, according to Oscar Sanchez, whose Southeast Environmental Task Force helped file the original civil rights complaint,.
Sanchez added that as the federal government retreats from its commitments to environmental justice, state and local entities are on the front line of buffering communities from greater pollution burdens.
“We are pushing the needle of what people can try to achieve in their own communities,” he said.
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.”
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.”
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.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of Columbia University’s most renowned professors, denounced the institution where he has taught for more than two decades over its recent capitulations to the Trump administration.
After Donald Trump withdrew some $400 million in federal funding from the university and issued a list of demands, Columbia entered negotiations that concluded with the school caving to pressure from the White House. Among other concessions, the school made concessions about faculty appointments and placing the Middle East studies department under review.
“I worry that our university may have capitulated to some of the demands coming out of the Trump administration,” Stiglitz told The Intercept on Monday. “Academic freedom means that we have the right to criticize any government, anywhere, the American government or the government of any other country. We have to do it with decorum, conviction, and research, but the notion of academic freedom means that we have to maintain those rights.”
Stiglitz reserved his harshest rhetoric for the attempts to deport current and recent Columbia students, including the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil on March 8 and Mohsen Mahdawi earlier Monday in Vermont.
“What is clear is that it appears that there’s a pattern of intimidation,” he said, “a pattern where they’re trying to discourage people to protest, and a pattern that they’re particularly going after Palestinians.”
Speaking to The Intercept about the apparent struggle between protecting the university’s academic independence versus the attempts to regain the $400 million in revoked federal funding, Stiglitz said, “Obviously, the university cannot continue without money, but what is most important is academic freedom. If we lose our academic freedom, we have lost everything. And so at this moment, we have to decide what our priority is. To me, our priority is academic freedom and the defense of our community.”
Stiglitz, 82, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. At Columbia, Stiglitz was named a university professor, the school’s highest academic honor.
What follows is a transcript from The Intercept’s exclusive interview with Stiglitz, conducted in two parts at Columbia’s campus.
Joseph Stiglitz: So, I’m Joe Stiglitz, university professor. I teach at the Department of Economics in the Business School, and School of International and Public Affairs. I won the Nobel Prize in 2001. I’ve spent my life studying what makes for good societies, for good economies — and democracy is essential. An essential part of democracies is free media and strong universities. Strong universities are important because they provide the critique, to evaluate what governments are doing, to ascertain when there’s an encroachment on democracies, to criticize it when they are doing things that are against the interests of people, when there are conflicts of interest. That’s why anti-democratic forces always begin the attack on the media and on universities. And that’s what’s been happening in America today.
Professors have been given the right of tenure. There’s a reason for this tenure. It’s about academic freedom, that we have the freedom to assess what is going on, to talk about it, talk out. But with that right comes obligations. And so, it is our obligation to talk about what is going on, how the attacks on science, on our students, are undermining not only Columbia University and universities throughout our country, but are undermining our democracy and our standing in the international community, and threaten the future of our democracy and ofour economy.
Meghnad Bose: Professor Stiglitz, could you answer the question, who is the university? Because a lot of questions are being raised as to how the university will respond if there’s a consent decree that’s demanded. Who is the university, according to you?
JS: The university is a community. It is a community of students, scholars, researchers, where we have shared governance. Obviously, the ultimate responsibility is with the trustees, but the trustees have a fiduciary responsibility, and that fiduciary responsibility is not just about money. Obviously, the university cannot continue without money, but most important, most important is academic freedom. If we lose our academic freedom, we have lost everything. And so at this moment, we have to decide what our priority is. To me, our priority is academic freedom and the defense of our community.
MB: Do you believe the university has capitulated to the Trump administration’s demands?
JS: I worry that our university may have capitulated to some of the demands coming out of the Trump administration. Academic freedom means that we have the right to criticize any government, anywhere, the American government or the government of any other country. We have to do it with decorum and conviction, research, but the notion of academic freedom means that we have to maintain those rights.
MB: Professor, do you want to talk a little bit about these arrests and attempted deportations of Columbia students that have happened—first with Mahmoud Khalil on March 8, and the latest with Mohsen Mahdawi, who was arrested today, just minutes before we speak right now.
“There’s a pattern of intimidation, a pattern where they’re trying to discourage people to protest.”
JS: I don’t want to speak about each of the individual cases. What is clear is that it appears that there’s a pattern of intimidation, a pattern where they’re trying to discourage people to protest, and a pattern they’re going after particularly Palestinians. Obviously, anybody concerned about democratic rights has to be concerned about this kind of intimidation. The most disturbing to me were some cases where people have been detained, sometimes with people without clear identity. And you realize then at that moment, that could have been you. These individuals’ rights were abrogated. But if that had been me, my rights would have been abrogated.
MB: Now, all of this is happening as part of the Trump administration’s supposed fight against antisemitism on college and university campuses, but as part of the demands that the Trump administration laid out was the demand that the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia be placed into academic receivership, essentially that the control of the department be placed outside the department, outside the faculty of the department, for a minimum of five years. Columbia, while not exactly agreeing word by word to that, effectively agreed to it by announcing that it would appoint a senior vice provost whose job primarily, first of all, would be to ensure “fairness” and “balance” in Middle Eastern studies.
Do you see the federal government demanding this of a private university, and one department of a private university, without even substantiation as to why it’s doing so as an impingement on academic freedom?
JS: Very much so. It is a very big impingement. The withdrawal of funds from science without any due process, without proof of the allegations, with disproportionate responses to the allegations even were they proved, is clearly a violation.
MB: Which allegations are you talking about?
JS: Whatever the allegations that they put forward for discontinuing the science grant[s]. The question is, the law is fairly clear — that there are supposed to be hearings, there are supposed to be proportionate responses to violations. This is violating every one of them.
MB: My final question is, do you feel satisfied with the way that the university administration has responded to the Trump administration over this past month and a half?
“Of all the institutions who have worked the hardest to undo discrimination have been our universities.”
JS: I worry a lot that the concession on turning over oversight to a set of departments is a violation, a fundamental violation of academic freedom. I worry that what is being called antisemitism goes beyond what reasonable people would call antisemitism. All of us are concerned about antisemitism, just like we’re concerned about xenophobia, discrimination against African Americans, discrimination in every form. But of all the institutions in our society that have worked hardest to deal with discrimination which is pervasive in our society against all, [in] many, many forms — but of all the institutions who have worked the hardest to undo discrimination have been our universities. And among the universities that has had a long history of fighting antisemitism has been Columbia University. So the charges do not ring through.
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 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 Office Horizon accounting software, which was fraught with unreliable reporting issues, turned into a huge scandal. It unjustly implicated over 900 subpostmasters in financial discrepancies between 1999 and 2015, leading to wrongful prosecutions and severe professional and personal consequences for many.
In an email addressed to members of the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), Bates highlighted the dismaying reality that, based on current progress, it might take until November 2027 for all claims to be resolved.
Under harsh scrutiny, many subpostmasters continue to endure the hardships of waiting for compensation, despite previous government announcements that those with quashed convictions would be eligible for payouts amounting to £600,000 each.
Bates stated:
It’s time for others to step up; hopefully you’ll all agree I’ve done my bit.
His call for action reflects not only a sense of urgency but also a deep frustration with the current state of affairs.
Frustration
The situation over the Post Office scandal was deemed so dire that Christopher Head, the youngest subpostmaster in Britain when he took on the role at just 18 years old, expressed his readiness to assist efforts in taking legal action against the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). He mentioned he had purposely made his case public to promote transparency within the process.
The infrastructure designed to address these injustices, notably the Group Litigation Order (GLO) scheme, has been labelled a “mess” by Bates. This scheme aimed to deliver justice to the 555 claimants who had collectively sued the Post Office between 2017 and 2019, but according to Bates, it has repeatedly fallen short.
In his words, he contended that:
Advice on how to streamline and speed up the scheme… is ignored out of hand with the feeblest of excuses.
He voiced concerns that not only the GLO scheme but all financial redress mechanisms are suffering due to systemic issues in their administration.
As frustration mounts among those affected by the Post Office scandal, Bates has suggested that revisiting the courts may be the swifter route to securing fair treatment for all subpostmasters. He noted the exasperation felt by many who, out of “desperation or despair” or under pressure, had settled for inadequate offers, implying that fresh legal action could provide a pathway for these claims to be reassessed fairly.
Post Office scandal: a distressing battle for justice
In light of the ongoing legal struggles, the prospect of launching a national fundraising campaign to offset the costs of pursuing legal options has also been floated. The emotional and financial toll on the victims of the Post Office scandal has reached alarming levels, underscoring the critical need for comprehensive redress and support for those wronged by the system.
The government’s silence on the matter, as indicated by the failure to respond to inquiries from the media, serves only to exacerbate feelings of disillusionment among affected subpostmasters.
They find themselves caught in a lengthy and distressing battle for justice, left to navigate a system that seems to continually sidestep accountability and fair compensation.
Former US President Barack Obama has taken to social media to praise Harvard’s decision to stand up for academic freedom by rebuffing the Trump administration’s demands.
“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” Obama wrote in a post on X.
He called on other universities to follow the lead.
Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and… https://t.co/gAu9UUqgjF
Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming, limit student protests over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and submit to far-reaching federal audits in exchange for its federal funding, university president Alan M. Garber ’76 announced yesterday afternoon.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote, reports the university’s Harvard Crimson news team.
The announcement comes two weeks after three federal agencies announced a review into roughly $9 billion in Harvard’s federal funding and days after the Trump administration sent its initial demands, which included dismantling diversity programming, banning masks, and committing to “full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security.
Within hours of the announcement to reject the White House demands, the Trump administration paused $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contracts to Harvard in a dramatic escalation in its crusade against the university.
More focused demands
On Friday, the Trump administration had delivered a longer and more focused set of demands than the ones they had shared two weeks earlier.
It asked Harvard to “derecognise” pro-Palestine student groups, audit its academic programmes for viewpoint diversity, and expel students involved in an altercation at a 2023 pro-Palestine protest on the Harvard Business School campus.
It also asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” — and immediately report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.
It called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship” and installing leaders committed to carrying out the administration’s demands.
And it asked the university to submit quarterly updates, beginning in June 2025, certifying its compliance.
Garber condemned the demands, calling them a “political ploy” disguised as an effort to address antisemitism on campus.
“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote.
“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”
The Harvard Crimson daily news, founded in 1873 . . . how it reported the universoity’s defiance of the Trump administration today. Image: HC screenshot APR
Hundreds of university staff and students in Melbourne and Sydney called on their vice-chancellors to cancel pro-Israel events earlier this month, write Michael West Media’s Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon
While Australia’s universities continue to repress pro-Palestine peace protests, they gave the green light to pro-Israel events earlier this month, sparking outrage from anti-war protesters over the hypocrisy.
Israeli lobby groups StandWithUs Australia (SWU) and Israel-IS organised a series of university events this week which featured Israel Defense Force (IDF) reservists who have served during the war in Gaza, two of whom lost family members in the Hamas resistance attack on October 7, 2023.
The events were promoted as “an immersive VR experience with an inspiring interfaith panel” discussing the importance of social cohesion, on and off campus.”
Hundreds of staff and students at Monash, Sydney Uni, UNSW and UTS signed letters calling on their universities to “act swiftly to cancel the SWU event and make clear that organisations and individuals who worked with the Israel Defense Forces did not have a place on UNSW campuses.”
SWU is a global charity organisation which supports Israel and fights all conduct it perceives to be “antisemitic”. It campaigns against the United Nations and international NGOs’ findings against Israel and is currently supporting actions to suspend United States students supporting Palestine.
It established an office in Sydney in 2022 and Michael Gencher, who previously worked at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, was appointed as CEO.
The event’s co-sponsor, Israel-IS, is a similar propaganda outfit whose mission is to “connect with people before they connect with ideas” particularly through “cutting edge technologies like VR and AI.”
Among their 18 staff, one employee’s role is “IDF coordinator’” while two employees serve as “heads of Influencer Academy”.
The events were a test for management at Monash, UTS, UNSW and USyd to see how far each would go in cooperating with the Israel lobby.
Some events cancelled At Monash, an open letter criticising the event was circulated by staff and students. The event was then cancelled without explanation.
At UNSW, 51 staff and postgraduate students signed an open letter to vice-chancellor Atilla Brungs, calling for the event’s cancellation. It was signed on their behalf by Jessica Whyte, an associate professor of philosophy in arts and law and Noam Peleg, associate professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice.
Prior to the scheduled event, Michael West Media sent questions to UNSW. After the event was scheduled to occur, the university responded to MWM, informing us that it had not taken place.
As of today, two days after the event was scheduled, vice-chancellor Brungs has not responded to the letter.
UTS warning to students The UTS branch of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students partnered with Israel-IS in organising the UTS event, in alignment with their core “pillars” of Zionism and activism. The student group seeks to “promote a positive image of Israel on campus” to achieve its vision of a world where Jewish students are committed to Israel.
UTS Students’ Association, Palestinian Youth Society and UTS Muslim Student Society wrote to management but deputy vice-chancellor Kylie Readman rejected pleas. She replied that the event’s organisers had guaranteed it would be “a small private event focused on minority Israeli perspectives” and that speakers would only speak in a personal capacity.
While acknowledging the conflict in the Middle East was stressful for many at UTS, she then warned students, “UTS has not received formal notification of any intent to protest, as is required under the campus policy. As such, I must advise that any protest activity planned for 2nd April will be unauthorised. I would urge you to encourage students not to participate in an unauthorised protest.”
Students who allegedly breach campus policies can face disciplinary proceedings that can lead to suspension.
UTS Student Association president Mia Campbell told MWM, “The warning given by UTS about protesting definitely felt intimidating and frightening to a number of students, including myself.
“Especially as a law student, misconduct allegations can affect your admission to the profession . . . but with all other avenues of communication exhausted between us and the university, it felt like we didn’t have a choice.
I don’t want to look back on what I was doing during this genocide and have done any less than what was possible at the time.
A UTS student reads the names of Gaza children killed in Israel’s War on Gaza. Image: Wendy Bacon/MWM
Sombre, but quietly angry protest
The UTS protest was sombre but quietly angry. Speakers read from lists naming dead Palestinian children.
One speaker, who has lost 120 members of his extended family in Gaza, explained why he protested: “We have to be backed into a corner, told we can’t protest, told we can’t do anything. We’ve exhausted every single policy . . . Add to all that we are threatened with misconduct.”
Do you think we can stay silent while there are people on campus who may have played a part in the killings in Gaza?
SWU at University of Sydney University of Sydney staff and students who signed an open letter received no reply before the event.
Activists from USyd staff in support of Palestine, Students Against War and Jews Against the Occupation ‘48 began protesting outside the Michael Spence building that houses the university’s senior executives on the Wednesday evening, April 2.
Escorted by UTS security, three SWU representatives arrived. A small group was admitted. Soon afterwards, the participants could be seen from below in the building’s meeting room.
A few protesters remained and booed the attendees as they left. These included Mark Leach, a far right Christian Zionist and founder of pro-Israeli group Never Again is Now. Later on X, he condemned the protesters and described Israel as a “multi-ethnic enclave of civilisation.”
Warning letters for students
Several student activists have received letters recently warning them about breaching the new USyd code of conduct regulating protests. USyd has also adopted a definition of anti-semitism which critics say could restrict criticism of Israel.
A Jews against Occupation ’48 speaker, Judith Treanor, said, “Welcoming this organisation makes a mockery of this university’s stated values of respect, non-harassment, and anti-racism.
“In the context of this university’s adoption of draconian measures to stifle freedom of expression in relation to Palestine, the decision to host this event promoting Israel reveals a shocking level of hypocrisy and a huge abuse of power.”
Jews Against the Occupation ‘48: L-R Suzie Gold, Laurie Izaks MacSween and Judith Treanor at the protest. Image: Vivienne Moore/MWM
No stranger to USyd
Michael Gencher is no stranger to USyd. Since October 2023, he has opposed student encampments and street protests.
On one occasion, he visited the USyd protest student encampment in support of Palestine with Richard Kemp, a retired British army commander who tirelessly promotes the IDF. Kemp’s most recent X post congratulates Hungary for withdrawing from “the International Criminal Kangaroo Court. Other countries should reject this political court and follow suit.”
Kemp and Gencher filmed themselves attempting to interrogate students about their knowledge of conflict in the Middle East on May 21, 2024, but the students refused to be provoked and declined to engage.
In May 2024, Gercher helped organise a joint rally at USyd with Zionist Group Together with Israel, a partner of far-right group Australian Jewish Association. Extreme Zionist Ofir Birenbaum, who was recently exposed as covertly filming staff at an inner city cafe, Cairo Takeaway, helped organise the rally.
Students at the USyd encampment told MWM that they experienced provocative behaviour towards them during the May rally.
Opposition to StandWithUs Those who oppose the SWU campus events draw on international findings condemning Israel and its IDF, explained in similar letters to university leaders.
After the USyd event, those who signed a letter received a response from vice-chancellor Mark Scott.
He explained, “We host a broad range of activities that reflect different perspectives — we recognise our role as a place for debate and disagreeing well, which includes tolerance of varied opinions.”
His response ignored the concerns raised, which leaves this question: Why are organisations that reject all international and humanitarian legal findings, including ones of genocide and ethnic cleansing,
being made to feel ‘safe and welcome’ when their critics risk misconduct proceedings?
SWU CEO Michael Gencher went on the attack in the Jewish press:
“We’re seeing a coordinated attempt to intimidate universities into silencing Israeli voices simply because they don’t conform to a radical political narrative.” He accused the academics of spreading “provable lies, dangerous rhetoric, and blatant hypocrisy.”
SWU regards United Nations and other findings against Israel as false.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.
Yaakov Aharon is a Jewish-Australian living in Wollongong. He enjoys long walks on Wollongong Beach, unimpeded by Port Kembla smoke fumes and AUKUS submarines. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission of the authors.
Maldives President officially signs the law banning Israelis from entering the country. 
