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.
Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen.
Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.
“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”
Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.
EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Columbia student and Palestinian Mohsen Madawi was just arrested during a visit to the immigration office here in Colchester, VT. More to follow. Footage by: Christopher Helali pic.twitter.com/I9JvPS2DLn
Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.
In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
With Donald Trump’s inauguration, groups like Betar and Canary Mission have been at the center of a push to place scrutiny on foreign students active in campus pro-Palestine movements. At Columbia, one behind-the-scenes push came from a WhatsApp group that included alumni and faculty who organized to get the students deported. Davidai was a member of the group, though there’s no indication he participated in talk of deportation, whether about Mahdawi or other students.
Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.
After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself.
Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.
Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.
“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.”
His fears arise from the toll Israel’s attacks and occupation have taken on Mahdawi’s family. Growing up in the West Bank, his community has suffered losses for years. He said he lost his childhood best friend, his uncle, two cousins, several of whom were killed in the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against occupation that lasted from 2000 to 2005.
“I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”
More recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence in the occupied Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks, Mahdawi said. His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed, and his father’s store was blown up as part of the violence in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Now, he is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation as hundreds across the country have had their visas revoked under the Trump administration’s sweeps and abductions of immigrants. Mahdawi is one of the few cases of legal permanent residents arrested, meaning he did not have a student visa revoked but is facing an effort by the government to cancel his green card. Other permanent residents have faced deportation over allegations that they violated immigration law or had their residency revoked over pro-Palestinian views.
“This is the outcome,” Mahdawi said. “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”
Attacks and Government Scrutiny
In December 2023, Mahdawi appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment focused on antisemitism on college campuses.
Mahdawi criticized how Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik had responded to the October 7 attacks, saying that she was ignoring the plight of Palestinians. And, a past leader of Columbia’s Palestinian student union, Mahdawi said pro-Israel factions on campus wanted to silence those protesting genocide.
In the wake of the interview, he became the subject of increasing surveillance and attacks from Zionist groups. He said he also started receiving death threats. Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, two Zionist groups that have become hubs for doxing and bullying of Palestine solidarity activists, created profiles for him. The profiles claimed that Mahdawi — whose activist work centered on finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts between Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians — was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.
By late 2024, Mahdawi was visited at his apartment by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force official. Mahdawi said he is still unsure of the purpose of the FBI visit. Mahdawi said Columbia refused to provide him with video footage of his apartment complex capturing the visit. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Then, in early 2025, Trump formalized his plans to deport pro-Palestine student protesters with an executive order.
Shortly after, Betar, which said it sent a list of students it wanted deported to the White House, posted about Mahdawi. So did the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU, which is run by a member of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group that worked to deport students. The group postedmultipletimes about Mahdawi and other organizers, tagging law enforcement agencies.
Shortly afterward, Mahdawi went into hiding. In response to a final email last month pleading with the school to move him to a safe location, a high-ranking official in the Columbia administration wrote, “The University’s outside counsel will be in touch with your counsel.” Mahdawi’s lawyer said Columbia responded and said they could not give him safe campus housing where he would be better insulated from ICE.
Last month, Betar posted about Mahdawi again. The group said Mahdawi was part of a group of students Betar was confident would “shortly be deported.”
Earlier this month, Mahdawi received an email from USCIS notifying him that he was scheduled to conduct an interview to obtain his U.S. citizenship. He said he was expecting the interview to take place in December or January, in line with the expected timeline to move from his green card status through the naturalization process. When he received the email, however, he was worried it might be a trap.
In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible.
Mahdawi said he spoke personally with Welch, who said his office would be on standby pending what happened with Mahdawi’s case. Offices for Sanders and Balint said they would remain on standby pending news of Mahdawi’s status after the interview. (Welch, Sanders, and Balint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
Mahdawi said the government’s efforts to chill speech went beyond issues related to Israel or Palestine.
“That’s why they’re crushing universities now, it’s not only about Palestine,” Mahdawi said.
As for his hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen one day and continuing his master’s degree studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi’s future is unclear.
“People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi said. “I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”
Update: April 14, 2025, 1:42 p.m. ET This story has been updated to include a filing made by Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team challenging his detention by the government.
A few days after she announced that the Trump administration will seek the death penalty against alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sat down for an interview with Fox News Sunday, where she was asked to respond to fears that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Her answer was predictable. The real constitutional crisis, Bondi said, is the barrage of legal challenges to Trump’s agenda.
“The president is going to comply with the law,” Bondi insisted before making clear that the law is irrelevant in the face of Trump’s mission to Make America Safe Again. Her Department of Justice had just indefinitely suspended a federal prosecutor who admitted in court that there was no evidence against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man exiled to a Salvadoran prison as a result of an “administrative error” — and whose continued imprisonment was decried by a federal judge as “wholly lawless.” To Bondi, the real problem was the prosecutor. “He shouldn’t have taken the case,” she told the Fox News host. “He shouldn’t have argued it if that’s what he was going to do.”
In other words, DOJ prosecutors must fall in line or pay the consequences.
The exchange was a chilling glimpse of what lies on the horizon when it comes to Trump’s broader priorities. As Trump revamps the DOJ to better suit his agenda, the decision to seek death against Mangione reflects his long-standing desire to ramp up capital punishment. In an executive order immediately following his inauguration, Trump proclaimed his intention to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” As Bondi told the Fox News host, “We’re gonna seek the death penalty whenever possible.”
Mangione, 26, is facing trial in three different jurisdictions for the murder of Brian Thompson last December. In addition to state charges in New York and Pennsylvania, Mangione is being prosecuted in the Southern District of New York based on federal gun laws and the allegation that he crossed state lines to stalk and kill Thompson. Although lawyers on both sides have said that Mangione will be tried first in state court, it’s possible this could change. In a statement earlier this month, defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo argued that “Luigi is caught in a high-stakes game of tug-of-war between state and federal prosecutors, except the trophy is a young man’s life.”
It’s too soon to tell what Mangione’s case might reveal about Trump’s pursuit of death sentences going forward. But Mangione’s lawyers argue that Bondi has trampled the usual process. In a motion filed April 11, they asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from seeking death against their client, citing its lawless conduct in the Abrego Garcia case. “These are not normal times,” they wrote.
“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision to seek death for Mr. Mangione,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told me in early April. According to the defense motion, the answer is adamantly no. The prosecution is “a political stunt,” the lawyers argue, accusing Bondi of ignoring “the established Department of Justice death penalty protocol, which she has wholly abandoned.”
Although the attorney general retains the authority to decide whether to seek a death sentence, such prosecutions usually originate with a recommendation from a local U.S. attorney. The process includes soliciting input from defense lawyers, who are given a chance to meet with the DOJ’s Review Committee on Capital Cases in Washington D.C., in order to provide any mitigating evidence that would render a death penalty prosecution inappropriate. But Mangione’s lawyers say they were afforded only a single “hastily assembled” video meeting in the last days of Joe Biden’s administration. After Trump took office, there was no word on a final decision. Instead, Bondi issued a press release announcing her goal of executing their client.
This was in stark contrast to the Biden DOJ, which “often took months and in some cases, more than a year” to decided whether or not to seek a death sentence, Maher said. “And I think that timing reflected a cautious approach that is appropriate for any use of the federal death penalty.”
Trump, of course, is not known for his careful deliberation about anything. Fueled by resentments and revenge fantasies, his executive order on the death penalty was itself a rebuke of the Biden DOJ’s reluctance to seek new death sentences — and especially of Biden’s decision to grant clemency to 37 men on federal death row. Although Bondi is wrong to claim, as she did in her Fox interview, that prosecutors never pursued the death penalty under Biden tenure, his DOJ chose only once to seek a new death sentence, against Payton Gendron, the declared white supremacist who in May 2022 slaughtered 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
The Buffalo case has yet to go to trial in federal court. Mangione, who has not yet been indicted, is likely to wait years, too. The unique demands of a capital case are both time-consuming and expensive. In addition to the investigative resources required for the guilt phase of any trial, an adequate death penalty defense also involves a separate, in-depth mitigation investigation. The cost can run millions in taxpayer dollars.
No matter how fast Bondi hopes to make an example of Mangione, a death sentence must still ultimately be handed down by a jury. And there’s a world of difference between charging someone like Mangione with a death-eligible crime and persuading 12 people to send him to death row. The last federal defendant who went on trial for his life in a Manhattan courtroom was Sayfullo Saipov, who drove a truck into a crowded bike path on Manhattan’s West side, killing eight people and injuring many more. The horrific attack, carried out in the name of the Islamic State, took place in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. In an all-caps tweet, Trump immediately called for the death penalty. But Saipov did not go to trial until after Trump left office. Although then-Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed forward in seeking death, the jury ultimately deadlocked. Saipov was sentenced to life in prison.
It would be an understatement to say that Mangione is a more sympathetic figure than Saipov among most Americans. Mangione’s folk hero status is such that his defense team has set up a website complete with an FAQ section and a note from their client expressing regret that he cannot respond to every letter he receives. Whatever Trump’s DOJ does to bring him to trial, there is a significant chance a jury will spare his life.
The same is likely to be true of Trump’s future prosecutions. Although there has recently been a resurgence of executions — and an expansion of new methods — in states across the country, jurors continue to reject the death penalty year after year. “The American public has made a very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” Maher said. “This hasn’t changed, even with President Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty.”
What’s Past Is Prologue
In ordinary times, Trump’s ambitions of expanding the death penalty might have been dismissed as a dream whose time has passed. It would be hard to imagine Trump beating the record of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill created 60 death-eligible crimes with the stroke of a pen. It was this expansion of the federal death penalty that set the stage for Trump’s execution spree, allowing him to carry out 13 executions in the last six months of his term.
Yet there is a less-discussed flipside to this decades-long history, one that reveals how rarely federal death penalty prosecutions have actually culminated in an execution. The DOJ’s dubious track record is captured in statistics collected by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, which tracks completed cases dating back to 1988, the year the federal death penalty was reinstated. As of June 2024, 4,983 federal defendants had been charged with death-eligible crimes. Of those, the DOJ authorized a death penalty prosecution for 541 people. In the vast majority of these cases, the outcome was something other than death: 146 people entered a guilty plea before or at trial. Another 151 went to trial but received a life sentence from a jury. In 110 cases, the government withdrew its death penalty authorization before trial or after a death sentence was reversed.
In total, 83 defendants — 15 percent — of the 541 were sentenced to die. And of those 83, 16 have been executed. Today there are only three people remaining on federal death row.
Such figures mirror the history of the so-called “modern” death penalty as a whole. In state after state, the majority of death sentences never lead to an execution. The federal system has only ever represented a small fraction of the nation’s death sentences. Even the most aggressive death penalty push is unlikely to reverse this trend.
As her handling of Mangione’s case suggests, Bondi appears ready to keep pushing prosecutions in non-death penalty states. Last week, the DOJ announced a second death penalty prosecution in Colorado, which abolished capital punishment in 2020. But such a project is neither unprecedented nor a guarantee of success. Some 25 years ago, under George W. Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft made it a point to aggressively seek death sentences in states without the death penalty. What followed was a bipartisan era of increased capital prosecutions in non-death penalty jurisdictions, with little to show for it.
In New York, the DOJ sought a wave of new death sentences after the state’s death penalty law was overturned in 2004. A Staten Island man named Ronell Wilson had faced the death penalty in state court for murdering two undercover New York police officers in 2003. But after the New York Court of Appeals struck down the death penalty law, the Bush administration swooped in to try the case instead. Wilson became the first federal defendant sentenced to die in New York in 50 years.
Wilson’s trial judge, Eastern District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis, would later raise alarm over the high costs of federal death penalty cases. In 2010, he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder about his decision to continue a death penalty prosecution inherited from the Bush administration. The cost of seeking death against the defendant, a mobster who was already serving life in prison, had already reached $3 million before trial, Garaufis wrote. But Holder pressed forward. In 2011, jurors deliberated for just two and a half hours before rejecting a death sentence.
By then, Wilson’s death sentence had been vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit due to prosecutorial misconduct. Holder sought a new death sentence and, this time, succeeded: In 2013, a second jury sentenced Wilson to die. But that sentence, too, was overturned after the 2nd Circuit ordered Garaufis to reconsider defense lawyers’ contention that their client had an intellectual disability. In 2016, Garaufis resentenced Wilson to life.
Today, Wilson is the only person in the modern era to receive a federal death sentence in New York. In the Southern District alone, the DOJ has authorized a death penalty prosecution in 17 cases, according to Mangione’s defense team. None of those defendants are facing execution. The odds remain firmly on Mangione’s side.
With his next federal hearing on April 18 — and his next state hearing not scheduled until June — Mangione faces a long legal saga, as does the family of his victim, who will likely wait several years before his federal death penalty trial to begin. The trial itself will last at least several months from jury selection to the sentencing phase. And in the event that federal prosecutors do convince 12 people to sentence him to die, his appeals will likely stretch out over at least a decade, if not two.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are trying to track down undocumented immigrants, they seek out all the data they can find. In Arizona, they’ve found a special trove that’s ripe for abuse.
The Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, database offers a rare glimpse into the financial lives of millions of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. The database contains details about more than 340 million wire transfers sent via Western Union and more than two dozen other companies that immigrants rely on to send money back home.
The database contains a record of every transfer of $500 or more sent using these services to or from Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. For each transaction, TRAC captures the name and home address for both the sender and the recipient, plus dozens of other sensitive data points.
“This database is a loaded weapon lying around for the taking.”
“This database is a loaded weapon lying around for the taking,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which has called for TRAC to be shut down. “This is a data collection program that disproportionately sweeps in the records of poor people and immigrants, groups that the Trump administration is going out of its way to target.”
TRAC is unusual in many ways.
The data dragnet is powered by Arizona’s state attorney general using administrative subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s sign-off. But TRAC operates as a nonprofit and a clearinghouse for ICE and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies around the country to access the data. The current Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, is aggressively suing the Trump administration on numerous fronts — yet the database is an invaluable potential resource for its anti-immigrant campaign. And despite being a target of privacy advocates and lawsuits for years, TRAC has continued to suck up data.
ICE has played an outsized role in TRAC over the years, chipping in data of its own at times. ICE agents have also been top users of the database, served on TRAC’s board, and even funded its operations.
But Mayes’s office and TRAC downplayed concerns that ICE might use the data to target immigrants for deportation. The database does not contain details about immigration status, they noted, and it’s intended exclusively to investigate money laundering along the border, which was how TRAC first started more than a decade ago. Before searching the data, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023.
“TRAC offers officials a massive grab-bag of data to root around in.”
But privacy advocates told The Intercept that TRAC has insufficient safeguards and unacceptable risks, particularly under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has been shifting agents at ICE and other agencies away from investigating money launderers, with orders to prioritize deportations and raids. Agents who are grabbing U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and visa holders off the streets on pretext; shipping people to a mega-prison in El Salvador based on “administrative errors”; and filing questionable search warrant applications might simply lie to access data that makes the deportation machine run a bit more smoothly. On Monday, ICE inked an agreement with the IRS to obtain data about undocumented workers, including their home addresses.
“The Trump administration has already shown that it is acting recklessly at best with who it deports and why,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “TRAC offers officials a massive grab-bag of data to root around in for transactions it can label suspicious, and there isn’t currently any oversight.”
“Limitless” Investigative Power
TRAC’s origin story is a testament to that familiar bipartisan itch to expand surveillance powers. Despite an early loss in state court over the dragnet, Mayes and her predecessors — one fellow Democrat and two Republicans — used settlement agreements and administrative subpoenas to build the database into a go-to resource for cops and federal agents nationwide.
It started with one subpoena to a single company. In 2006, then-Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat and former mayor of Phoenix, demanded data from Western Union about all wire transfers of $300 or more to any location in the Mexican border state of Sonora from any location worldwide over a three-year period. He did this under the state racketeering law, A.R.S. § 13-2315, which requires financial institutions to produce records in response to “reasonable” requests from the attorney general’s office.
Western Union initially proposed providing partially anonymized data to protect its customers’ privacy.
This wasn’t acceptable to Goddard and a task force of federal and state agencies, which wanted as much data as possible — including about innocent customers’ transactions — to establish “control groups.”
Western Union fought the subpoena, and in 2007 a state appellate court ruled Goddard had exceeded his authority under the racketeering law. The Arizona Court of Appeals was concerned at the subpoena’s sheer breadth, especially its geographic coverage far beyond Arizona state lines, and ruled it was not “reasonable” under the law.
“It would provide a justification for requesting financial data from anywhere in the world.”
“The argument the Attorney General makes here would make the investigative power granted in A.R.S. § 13-2315 limitless,” the court found. “It would provide a justification for requesting financial data from anywhere in the world merely because it might serve to provide a baseline of ‘innocent data.’”
After losing the court battle over the subpoena, Goddard turned up the pressure on Western Union by suing it directly. In 2010, Western Union settled with the attorney general’s office and agreed to comply with subpoenas for data about wire transfers above $500.
Beside the higher threshold amount, the scope of data sharing under the settlement agreement was even broader than what Goddard had previously sought. Western Union agreed to share five years’ worth of historical data and give Goddard’s office “near real time” data about transactions sent to or from “the area within 200 miles north and south of the United States/Mexico border,” plus all of Arizona. Unlike the prior subpoena, this included portions of every state on both sides of the border.
The state attorney general’s office now had a data pipeline from one of the biggest players in the wire transfer industry. And it was just the beginning.
“Unorthodox Arrangement”
In early 2014, Western Union signed a second settlement with Goddard’s successor, Republican Tom Horne. This agreement expanded the data sharing to its current scope: all wire transfers above $500 to and from the entire country of Mexico plus the entirety of four U.S. southern border states — Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas — regardless of proximity to the border.
By this point, the dragnet had expanded beyond Western Union too. Horne’s office sent subpoenas to at least five of its competitors in late 2013, records show, including to MoneyGram, Sigue, and Continental Exchange Solutions.
The 2014 agreement also marked the establishment of TRAC as a separate nonprofit entity, initially bankrolled by Western Union and under the control of the attorney general’s office through its board. TRAC’s first director and president served simultaneously as a special agent supervisor at the agency, records show.
In 2015, Republican Mark Brnovich took over as Arizona’s attorney general. An early advocate for the argument that undocumented immigrants constitute an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, Brnovich was recently tapped as Trump’s ambassador to Serbia.
During Brnovich’s tenure, TRAC expanded rapidly, from 75 million transaction records compiled from 14 different companies in 2017 to 145 million records from 28 firms in early 2021, according to meetingminutes of TRAC’s board. In 2021 alone, TRAC added a “25% increase of data,” other minutes show. TRAC’s user base also exploded, from 300 different law enforcement agencies and 600 users in 2017 to nearly 700 agencies and 11,600 users in late 2021.
As of 2018, ICE was the top agency using the database.
As of 2018, ICE was the top agency using the database, with almost 950 active user accounts, records show. During the Brnovich years, the agency became a key player in other ways. A top ICE agent in Phoenix joined TRAC’s board in 2017. In summer 2019, when the Western Union settlement concluded and the company was no longer on the hook to finance TRAC, ICE kicked in a year of funding.
Around this time, ICE also started contributing data about millions of wire transfers to TRAC using its own legally dubious administrative subpoenas, according to findings published by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. in 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2021, agents at two different offices of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations sent a type of federal subpoena called a “customs summons” to multiple companies, including Western Union. By law, this type of subpoena is limited to investigations related to merchandise imports and customs duties, a limitation which agents at ICE and other DHS components have flagrantly ignored before.
Some of ICE’s subpoenas covered transactions thousands of miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, demanding data for more than a dozen additional countries spanning from the Caribbean to China and parts of Europe.
The Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI had also demanded data from certain companies, Wyden found.
“This unorthodox arrangement between state law enforcement, DHS and DOJ agencies to collect bulk money-transfer data raises a number of concerns about surveillance disproportionately affecting low-income, minority and immigrant communities,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general.
After Wyden raised concerns about the legality of their subpoenas, ICE withdrew them. A few months later, an HSI agent received an award from the White House for his “innovation, creativity, and foresight” in getting TRAC access to “an additional stream of millions of financial transaction records.”
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes during an interview with The Associated Press on Nov. 21, 2024, in Philadelphia. Photo: Matt Slocum/AP
TRAC Under Mayes
Mayes narrowly won the state attorney general’s race in 2022, and she was sworn in as Wyden and the ACLU brought renewed scrutiny to TRAC. Once a Republican, Mayes switched parties in 2019, a change she attributed recently to her revulsion at the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
From the beginning of her administration, Mayes has defended TRAC. Like her predecessors, Mayes has overseen its continued expansion using administrative subpoenas under A.R.S. § 13-2315, but her office declined to comment on how the agency squares these subpoenas with the state appellate court’s decision from 2007. As of July 2024, 22 companies were “actively producing records” to TRAC, according to an HSI newsletter.
“The subpoenas are just as illegal now as they were several years ago,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.
Mayes has also taken steps to protect TRAC against legal challenges.
Shortly before she took office, four people whose data was swept up in TRAC filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against Western Union, MoneyGram, and other companies the plaintiffs used to send money to family abroad, as well as DHS and ICE. The plaintiffs alleged TRAC’s data sharing violates both federal and California financial privacy laws. In their defense, the companies pointed to the subpoenas they received over the years, including from Mayes’s staff.
TRAC wasn’t a defendant in the lawsuit, nor was the Arizona attorney general’s office. But in September, Mayes submitted a letter to the court defending TRAC. Mayes emphasized that she had “embraced and furthered” the program and claimed her office’s success at combating transnational criminal groups was “highly dependent” on her “ability to issue and enforce the subpoenas.”
“Because a primary issue before this Court is the legality of the Defendant [companies’] compliance with these subpoenas, it is difficult to identify a party more interested in such litigation than the State of Arizona,” Mayes wrote.
Wessler called the letter a “pretty aggressive attempt to shut litigants out of court,” particularly since this was “private litigation in a different court in a different state.”
Mayes’s letter cited a handful of federal prosecutions in which TRAC has played a role. One in particular, which resulted in drug trafficking and money-laundering convictions in California last October, shows the sheer scope of the database.
In December 2020, two informants told federal agents that they used a small money transmitter business in Oakland to launder drug proceeds to Mexico. Cashiers had been using an unsuspecting victim’s ID and personal information as cover for the transactions.
A table included in court filings shows the data that TRAC already had on this innocent third party, along with the fraudsters. There were more than a dozen entries for wire transfers she sent to “family or friends in Mexico,” as an IRS agent wrote, as early as five years prior and for amounts between $650 and almost $3,000.
“I would be worried about whose hands this data would get into,” said Sarah Lopez, a migration scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied remittances from Mexican immigrants to their communities back home, of the detailed data compiled by TRAC. “There are millions of people sending repeat transactions” via wire transfers each year between Mexico and the U.S., she said, “then multiply it by two because people are being tracked on both sides of border.”
Lopez was skeptical that the $500 threshold amount in the TRAC subpoenas — unchanged for more than a decade — was a meaningful screen to prevent excessive surveillance of immigrants’ remittances. “Five hundred dollars is not a lot of money to send,” she said, noting that immigrants often send money to help with significant one-time expenses like housing and health care, and that service fees incentivize larger transfers.
TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, defended the $500 threshold as “striking the right balance” based on recent data about average remittance amounts to Mexico and recent discussions he had with companies that share their data. Two companies told TRAC that, in 2024, “nearly 80% of all of their transactions are below $500, which means TRAC only has insight into approximately 20% of all transactions,” Lebel wrote in an email.
Mayes’s letter to the court proved fatal to the class-action lawsuit over TRAC. In late September, the court dismissed the case entirely, ruling that her office had “a legally protected interest” in defending the subpoenas but could not be added to the case. In November, shortly after the election, Mayes submitted a similar letter in another federal lawsuit regarding TRAC, which is ongoing.
“Despite the lawsuit and the public scrutiny of its actions, AG Mayes’ office is doubling down on its surveillance tactics,” said Daniel Werner, a senior staff attorney with Just Futures, which represented the plaintiffs in the dismissed class action lawsuit.
A Model of Secrecy
When it comes to TRAC, Mayes has distinguished herself from Brnovich, her Republican predecessor, in one key respect: secrecy.
Under Brnovich, the attorney general’s office released hundreds of documents about TRAC’s internal operations to the ACLU. These included nearly 140 subpoenas sent to more than 20 companies, meeting minutes from the TRAC board, and user lists.
Over the past year, The Intercept submitted multiple records requests to Mayes’s office, seeking updated versions of many of these materials plus other records. The agency sent the same documents it released to the ACLU and materials about TRAC’s operations under prior administrations. But it refused to release almost any records about how TRAC currently works, including documents that would show how its database has grown and shed light on its relationship with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
Mayes’ office now claims it would violate A.R.S. § 13-2315 itself to disclose any more of the TRAC subpoenas. “We are correcting the previous administration’s error and following the law,” wrote Richie Taylor, Mayes’s communications director, in an email.
“Their argument is wrong and borderline frivolous,” Wessler told The Intercept, noting that the statute clearly shields the data obtained by the subpoenas but says nothing about the subpoenas themselves. “An attempt to shield these subpoenas behind a spurious claim of secrecy is galling.”
For basic materials like TRAC’s meeting minutes, Mayes’s office now claims that it has no obligation under Arizona law to provide them since TRAC is formally a separate entity. When The Intercept asked TRAC directly for these same materials, it claimed, in turn, not to be subject to public records requests given its nonprofit status.
“The Public Records Law is an important part of Arizona law, but it simply doesn’t apply to TRAC,” wrote attorney Andy Gaona, which represents TRAC, in a letter in December.
Although a distinct creature on paper, TRAC has been “supervised directly” by the attorney general’s office, as a 2019 manual described the relationship. For years, TRAC’s bylaws gave the attorney general the power to personally select its board of directors and designate its chair. These provisions were still in TRAC’s bylaws as of September 2019, the most recent copy released by the attorney general’s office.
The current TRAC board chair, defense attorney Andrew Pacheco, who took the role in 2022, was chief of the attorney general’s criminal division before going into private practice. While working at the agency, he “supervised the activities of the Transaction Record Analysis Center,” according to his firm bio. The prior TRAC chair, Paul Ahler, served simultaneously as the agency’s criminal division chief.
“It just can’t be that the AGO can shield these public records by creating a nonprofit entity whose board it controlled, and that exists solely to ingest records obtained by the AGO,” Wessler argued, referring to the attorney general’s office.
Mayes’s office said that the attorney general no longer has this level of authority over TRAC but said it did not have a copy of the current bylaws to substantiate this. “TRAC is governed entirely independent of the Attorney General’s Office,” Lebel, TRAC’s president, wrote. TRAC declined to provide its current bylaws as part of The Intercept’s records request.
Other records show close coordination over the years between agency officials and TRAC staff — who sometimes used official government email addresses — including on the subpoenas that fuel the database.
TRAC’s deputy director, Liz Barrick, who joined TRAC in 2018 after several years working at the attorney general’s office, drafted many of the administrative subpoenas herself, recordsshow, which she would forward to her former colleagues at the agency to review and sign before they were sent to the companies.
At one point in early 2018, Lebel and Barrick worked up subpoenas for wire transfers to and from an entirely new state: Georgia, which TRAC wanted to investigate as a “hub of racketeering activities.” For weeks, the pair emailed the attorney general’s office about the proper scope of the subpoenas. When one of the companies expressed concerns, Barrick responded with the agency’s position about modifying the subpoena.
TRAC staff also coordinated with ICE as the agency prepared to send its own data demands to Western Union, emails show. In 2019, Barrick emailed an ICE official some “language to be included in the subpoena.” A few months later, Ahler checked in with Barrick: “What is the status of our federal administrative subpoena to Western Union?”
And in 2021, when Western Union’s lawyer requested a meeting with the attorney general’s office about a recent subpoena, Barrick was added to the call.
TRAC and Mayes’s office both declined to answer whether their staff still collaborate on the subpoenas.
“TRAC really appears to operate more like a department of the AGO and not an independent organization,” said EPIC’s Kunkler. “The AG’s attempt to weaponize technicalities to avoid disclosing information looks an awful lot like intentionally laundering their actions through a nonprofit to avoid disclosure.”
“Wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.” These were the words from New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner Stephen Rainbow.
During a meeting with Philippa Yasbek from Jewish Voices for Peace, Dr Rainbow allegedly told her that information from the NZ Security Intelligence Services (NZSIS) threat assessment asserted that Muslims were the biggest threat to the Jewish community. More so than white supremacists.
But the NZSIS has not identified Muslims as the greatest threat to national security.
In the 2023 threat environment report, NZSIS stated that it: “Does not single out any community as a threat to our country, and to do so would be a misinterpretation of the analysis.
“White Identity-Motivated Violent Extremism (W-IMVE) continues to be the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Young people becoming involved in W-IMVE is a growing trend.”
Religiously motivated violent extremism (RMVE) did not come from the Muslim community, as Dr Rainbow has also misrepresented.
The more recent 2024 NZSIS report stated: “White identity-motivated violent extremism (W-IMVE) remains the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Terrorist attack-related material and propaganda, including the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto and livestream footage, continue to be shared among IMVE adherents in New Zealand and abroad.”
To implicate Muslims as being the greatest threat may highlight Dr Rainbow’s own biases, racist beliefs, and political agenda. These false narratives, that have recently been strongly pushed by the US and Israel, undermine social cohesion and lead to a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.
It is also deeply troubling that he has framed Muslim and Arab communities as potential sources of violent extremism while failing to acknowledge the very real and documented threats they have faced in Aotearoa.
The Christchurch Mosque attacks — the most horrific act of mass violence in New Zealand’s modern history — were perpetrated not by Muslims, but against them, by an individual radicalised by white supremacist ideology.
Chief Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow . . . “It is also deeply troubling that he has framed Muslim and Arab communities as potential sources of violent extremism while failing to acknowledge the very real and documented threats they have faced in Aotearoa.” Image: HRC
Since that tragedy, there have been multiple threats made against mosques, Arab New Zealanders, and Palestinian communities, many of which have received insufficient public attention or institutional response.
For a Human Rights Commissioner to overlook this context and effectively invert the victim-aggressor dynamic is not only factually inaccurate, but it also risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes and undermining the safety and dignity of communities who are already vulnerable.
Such narratives are inconsistent with the Human Rights Commission’s mandate to protect all people in New Zealand from discrimination and hate.
The dehumanisation of Muslims and Palestinians
As part of Israel’s propaganda, anti-Muslim and Palestinian tropes are used to justify violence against Palestinians by framing us as barbaric, aggressive, and as a threat. We are dehumanised in order to normalise the harm they inflict on our communities which includes genocide, land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid policies, dispossession, and occupation.
In October 2023, Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, described Palestinians as “horrible, inhuman animals” and was perplexed with the growing global concern for us.
That same month Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, referred to Palestinians as “human animals” when he announced Israel’s illegal and horrific siege on Gaza that included blocking water, food, medicine, and shelter to an entire population, the majority of which are children.
In making his own remarks about the Muslim community being a “threat” in New Zealand as a collective group, and labelling Palestinians being “barbaric”, Dr Stephen Rainbow has shattered the credibility of the Human Rights Commission. He has made it very clear that he is not impartial nor is he representing and protecting all communities.
Instead, Dr Rainbow is exacerbating divisions within society. This is a worrying trend that we are witnessing around the world; the de-humanising of groups to serve political agendas, retain power, or seek public support for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Dr Rainbow’s appointment also points a spotlight onto this government’s commitment to neutrality and inclusiveness in its human rights policies. Allowing a high-ranking official to make discriminatory remarks undermines New Zealand’s commitment to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A high-ranking official should not be allowed to engage in Islamic and Palestinian racist rhetoric without consequence. The public should be questioning the morals, principles, and inclusivity of those currently in power. Our trust is being eroded.
Dr Stephen Rainbow’s comments can also be seen as a breach of human rights principles, as he is supposed to uphold equality and non-discrimination. Yet his beliefs seem to be peppered with racism, often falsely based on religion, ethnicity, and race.
Foreign influence in New Zealand
This incident also shines accountability and concerns for foreign influence and propaganda seeping into New Zealand. The Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ) has published articles that some perceive as dehumanising toward Palestinians.
“The Left has found a new underdog to replace the Jews — the Palestinians — in spite of the fact that the treatment of gay people, women, and political opponents wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.”
By publicising these comments, The Israel Institute of New Zealand signalled its support of these offensive and racist serotypes. Such statements risk reinforcing a narrative that portrays Palestinians as inherently violent, uncivilised, and unworthy of basic rights and dignity.
This kind of rhetoric contributes to what many describe as anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and it warrants public scrutiny, especially when shared by organisations involved in shaping public discourse.
Importantly, the NZSIS 2024 threat report stated that “Inflammatory and violent language online can target anyone, although most appears directed towards those from already marginalised minority communities, or those affected by globally significant conflicts or events, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict.”
Other statements and reposts published online by the IINZ on their X account include:
“Muslims are getting killed, is Israel involved? No. How many casualties? Under 100,00, who cares? Why is this even on the news? Over 100,000. Oh, that’s too bad, what’s for dinner?” (12 February 2024)
“Fact. Gaza isn’t ‘ancestral Palestinian land’. We’ve been here long before them, and we’ll still be here long after the latest propaganda campaign.” (12 February 2024)
Palestinian society was also described as being “a violent, terror-supporting, Jew-hating society with genocidal aspirations.” (16 February 2025)
The “estimate of Hamas casualties, the civilian-to-combat death ratio could be as low as 1:1. This could be historically low for urban warfare.” (21 February 2025)
“There has never been a country called Palestine.” (25 February 2025)
Even showing a picture of Gaza before Israel’s bombing campaign with a caption saying, “Open air prison”. Next to it a picture of a completely destroyed Gaza with a caption that says “Victory.” (23 February 2025)
“Palestinian society in Gaza is in my eyes little more than a death loving cult of murderers and criminals of the lowest kind.” (28 February 2025)
Anti-Palestinian bias and racism
Portraying Muslims and Palestinians as a threat and extremist reflects both Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bias and potential racism. These statements risk dehumanising Palestinians and are typical of the settler colonial narrative used to erase indigenous populations by denying our history, identity and legal claim.
The IINZ has published content that many see as mocking the deaths of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which is not only ethically questionable but can be seen as a complete lack of empathy.
And posting the horrific images of a completely destroyed Gaza, appears to revel in the suffering of others and contradicts basic ethical norms, such as decency and compassion.
There also appears to be a common theme among pro-Israeli organisations, not just the IINZ, that cast negative connotations on our national symbols including our Palestinian flag and keffiyeh.
In an article on the IINZ webpage, titled “A justified war”, they write “chorus of protesters wearing keffiyehs, waving their Palestinian and terrorist flags, and shouting about Israel’s alleged war crimes.”
It seemingly places the Palestinian flag — an internationally recognised national symbol– alongside so-called “terrorist flags,” suggesting an equivalence between Palestinian identity and terrorism. Many view this language as dehumanising and inflammatory, erasing the legitimate national and cultural characteristics of Palestinians and feeding into harmful stereotypes.
The Palestinian flag represents a people, their identity, and national aspirations.
There is nothing wrong with our keffiyeh, it is part of our national dress. The negative connotations of Palestinian cultural symbols have to stop, including vilifying other MPs or supporters who wear it in solidarity.
This is happening all too often in New Zealand and must be called out and addressed. Our keffiyeh is not just a scarf — it is a symbol of our Palestinian identity, our resistance, and our rich, historic and deeply rooted cultural heritage.
Pro-Israeli groups attack it because they aim to delegitimise Palestinian identity and resistance by associating it with violence, terrorism, or extremism.
In 2024, ISESCO and UNESCO both recognised the keffiyeh as an essential part of their Intangible Cultural Heritage lists as a way of safeguarding Palestinian cultural heritage and reinforcing its historical and symbolic importance.
As a safeguarded cultural artifact, much like indigenous dress and other traditional attire, attempts to ban or demonize it are acts of cultural erasure and need to be called out as such and dealt with accordingly.
In the same IINZ article titled “A Justified War”, the authors present arguments that appear to defend Israel’s military actions in Gaza, including the targeting of civilians.
Many within the community (most of us have been affected), including survivors and those with direct ties to the region, have found the article deeply distressing and feel that it lacks compassion for the victims of the ongoing violence, and the framing and tone of the piece have raised serious ethical concerns, especially as some statements are factually incorrect.
The New Zealand Palestinian communities affected by this unimaginable genocide are suffering. Our family members are being killed and are at threat daily from Israel’s aggression and illegal war.
Unfortunately, much rhetoric from this organisation aligns with Israeli state narratives and includes statements that some view as racist or immoral, warranting further scrutiny from the government.
There is growing public concern over the association of Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow with the IINZ, which promotes itself as a research and advocacy body.
A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination; aligning with Israel and publishing harmful rhetoric may lead to bias in policy decisions and discrimination.
It is also important to remember that we are not a monolithic group. Christian Palestinians exist (I am one) as well as Muslim and historically Jewish Palestinians. Christian communities have lived in Palestine for two thousand years.
This is also not a religious conflict, as many pro-Israeli groups wish the world to believe, and it is not complex. It is one of colonialism, dispossession, and human rights. A history that New Zealand is all too familiar with.
“A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination; aligning with Israel and publishing harmful rhetoric may lead to bias in policy decisions and discrimination.” Image: HRC screenshot APR
The need for accountability
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith’s inaction and disrespectful response, claiming that a staunchly pro-Israeli supporter can be impartial and will be “very careful” from now on, hints that he may also support some forms of racism, in this case against Muslims and Palestinians.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith . . . “There needs to be accountability for Goldsmith. Why has he not removed Dr Rainbow from office and acted appropriately?” Image: NZ Parliament
You cannot address only some groups who are discriminated against but then ignore others, or accept excuses for racist, intolerable actions or statements. This is not justice.
This is the application of selective principles, enforced and underpinned by political agendas, foreign influence, and racism. Does Goldsmith understand that justice is as much about human rights, fairness and accountability as it is about laws?
Without accountability, there is no justice at all, or perhaps he too is confused or uncertain about his role, as much as Dr Rainbow seems oblivious to his?
There needs to be accountability for Goldsmith. Why has he not removed Dr Rainbow from office and acted appropriately? If Dr Rainbow had said that Jews were the biggest threat to Muslims or that Israelis were the biggest threat to Palestinians, would this government and Goldsmith have sat back and said, “he didn’t mean it, it was a mistake, and he has apologised”?
Questions New Zealanders should be asking are, what kind of Human Rights Commissioner speaks of entire peoples this way? What kind of minister, like Paul Goldsmith, looks at that and does very little?
What kind of Government claims to champion justice, while turning a blind eye to genocide? This is betraying the very idea of human rights itself.
Although we are a small country here in New Zealand, we have remained strong by upholding and standing by our principles. We said no to apartheid in South Africa. We said no to nuclear weapons in the Pacific. We said no to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And we must now say no to dehumanisation — anywhere. Are we a nation that upholds justice or do we sit on the sidelines while the darkest times in modern history envelopes us all?
The attacks against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must stop. We have already faced horrific acts of violence against us here in New Zealand and currently in Palestine. We need support and humanity, not dehumanisation, demonisation and cruelty. This is not what New Zealand is about, we must do better together.
There needs to be a formal enquiry and policy review to see if structural biases exist in New Zealand’s Human Rights institutions. This should also be done across some government bodies, including the Ministry of Education and Immigration NZ, to determine if there has been discrimination or inequality in the handling of humanitarian visas and how the Education Ministry has handled the complaints of anti-Palestinian discrimination at schools.
Communities have particular concern at how the curriculum in many schools deals with the creation of the state of Israel but is silent on Palestinian history.
Public figures should be held to a higher standard, with consequences for spreading racially charged rhetoric.
The Human Rights Commission needs to rebuild trust in our multicultural New Zealand society. The only way this can be done is through fair and just measures that include enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, true inclusivity and action when there is an absence of these.
We are living in a moment where silence is complicity. Where apathy is betrayal.
This is a test of whether New Zealand, Minister Goldsmith and this government truly uphold human rights for all, or only for some.
When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.
The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings.
Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been.
For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.
Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.
“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program.
And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier.
“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.
An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.
No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.
Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers.
“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.
Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.
While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.”
It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine.
Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.
Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information.
But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”
After climate protesters were held on remand in 2021, their friends and family decided to set up Rebels in Prison Support (RIPS), to help others who find themselves locked up, often with no idea of how to navigate the prison system.
Rebels In Prison Support: defending the defenders
Originally aiming to support climate prisoners and starting off with just a crowdfunder to raise money, the group is now happy to provide vital support to any peaceful protester or non- violent activist who ends up in prison.
Rebels In Prison Support (RIPS) defines peaceful/non-violent as: ‘not causing harm to any human or animal’, and has so far assisted a total of 173 political prisoners, preparing and supporting them both practically and emotionally, and trying to make their experience in prison as comfortable as possible.
RIPS has supported activists from a wide range of organisations, including Palestine Action, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, Animal Rising, and Extinction Rebellion. This includes the 31 peaceful protesters and non-violent activists – who are currently in prisons across the country, including someone from Scottish campaign group This Is Rigged, and Daniel Day who climbed Big Ben in solidarity with Palestine and has been remanded in custody until his next hearing on Monday 14 April.
The biggest group is currently in Europe’s largest women’s jail known as HMP Bronzefield, in Surrey, where mental health services are ‘in their worst state for 15 years’, and the number of self-harm incidents average almost 210 each month.
Solidarity: one of the most important things
Louis Marwen has been volunteering with Rebels In Prison Support (RIPS) for the last two years, since he found himself unexpectedly thrown into the role of support person for his friend who was on remand. The experience made him aware of the benefits solidarity can provide for those who find themselves behind bars and led him to take on support roles for several other prisoners and become more and more involved with RIPS. He is now part of the core team, which coordinates a wider network of buddies and helpers.
Marwen explains that:
While there are physical things we can obviously help with, solidarity could be one of the most important things. When you go into prison, you don’t know anyone, you might not have been expecting it. It might have been very sudden, if you’ve just done an action or been arrested unexpectedly and having someone there makes you feel so much better.
Even though you’re on your own in that prison, knowing people are thinking of you and are there to support you, makes you realise you’re not on your own. I think it really makes a difference. Also, having people on the outside, that if something isn’t going right when you are in prison, can really help. You know people are watching and are always willing to help. You’re not on your own.
RIPS makes sure they are there to support a prisoner throughout the process. Pre-prison assistance includes ‘Preparing for Prison’ briefings, which aim to get a person ready both practically and psychologically for their time behind bars.
Sometimes people are also paired up with a buddy before they go to prison, rather than when they are already inside, so they can get to know their supporting person and have everything in place before getting arrested. The buddy helps the prisoner in many ways including forwarding messages of support and helping their family and friends at what is often a very emotional time for them.
Although most people organise their own buddy – usually someone they know who takes part in one of the RIPS trainings – there is also a list of support people who are trained up and understand the system who can be messaged and potentially allocated to a prisoner, if needed.
Far-reaching benefits of Rebels In Prison Support
In-prison support includes a support team which coordinates printing and postage, sending out a relevant weekly newsletter to the prisoner, and a weekly goodies package, if wanted – which includes jokes, poems, artwork, and puzzles. Prisoners also receive a lot of one-to-one support if needed.
When it comes to being on remand, the uncertainty around length of imprisonment can cause added distress and is made worse by limited prison resources. Hannah Schafer, 61, was supported by Rebels In Prison Support (RIPS) last year when she spent a month in prison on remand, after taking part in an action with Just Stop Oil.
She tells the Canary that RIPS support can have far reaching benefits.
RIPS helped me in many ways. One of them was financially; by transferring funds into my prison account so I could buy phone credit and extra food. This meant I was able to help out other prisoners who weren’t so lucky as to have private funds to spend.
The criminal justice system is brutal, and anything but just, to many people who get caught up in it. By providing support to protest related prisoners, RIPS helps flag up some of this injustice and hopefully will benefit all prisoners in the long run. I am expecting to return to prison next month, for an extended stay, and am very grateful to know RIPS are there.
Marwen says that RIPS are there to make sure everything is OK and are ready to help with any issues that may arise:
A lot of our prisoners are vegan, or sometimes halal. Prisons are generally pretty bad at meeting nutritional needs anyway, but if you’re vegan it’s even worse. Prisoners might also need us to get their medication, or to contact prison lawyers, or their solicitors.
Sometimes, if the prison doesn’t cooperate, we need to get a lot of people to phone in or email, to tell the prison that they are concerned about the prisoner because, generally, if you’re annoying, they often tend to listen more.
This has been confirmed by an ex-prisoner, who wishes to remain anonymous, but told the Canary that it is possible their life was saved because of one of RIPS phone campaigns:
There is every chance RIPS saved my life. My leg swelled up, a friend who is a retired GP visited me when I was in prison and said she thought it was a Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT), which can be fatal if left untreated.
The prison wasn’t taking this seriously, despite my friend ringing up the prison and explaining she is a qualified medical professional. RIPS put a call-out for people to ring the prison, and 100 phone calls later, and within 30 minutes, I had a nurse in my cell.
They took blood tests and then, a few days later, I was escorted to hospital, where they suspected DVT (confirmed by a hospital appointment the next day), so they prescribed me blood thinners. People die in prison due to precisely this lack of healthcare, and I was fortunate enough to have enough people outside of prison who cared enough to make a nuisance of themselves. The healthcare you can access in prison though shouldn’t be dependent on who you know.
Support on release
RIPS also provides support to those coming out of prison and, according to Marwen, this is the time when people can not only feel as though they have much less support, but are also much lonelier, especially if they are on licence and have certain conditions attached to their release, such as not being allowed to speak with other people from activist groups:
There’s a lot of things that can be complicated to work out after someone gets out of prison, so we ask that their buddy carry on supporting them if possible, and if that’s not possible we try and find someone who lives nearby, who can physically go see them and support them in that way.
We also help them to find a therapist if they need psychological support, while our PO box address allows people to still send letters to us, which we pass on to people once they are out of prison. RIPS also hold group chats for people who have been released, where they can talk with, and ask questions to, people with similar experiences as themselves.
Around the world, people are calling for change, but the injustices continue unabated. Here in the UK, dissent is being criminalised, and powers are being misused by an increasingly authoritarian government. This means that people who act on their conscience are increasingly finding themselves behind bars for non-violent activism and peaceful protest, something which should be considered unacceptable in a democracy.
Rebels In Prison Support: solidarity, not charity
Marwen said:
The numbers have been steadily increasing over the years. Back at the end of 2021 into 2022, there was an Insulate Britain campaign and although people were getting arrested all the time, there weren’t many court cases.
Things weren’t that bad with the first Just Stop Oil campaign either, or even Palestine Action a few years ago. Whereas now it’s not even convictions, but about people being remanded for a really long time, even though they’re only meant to be held for eight months, or less. We had someone from Just Stop Oil, who was part of the Manchester 5, who was remanded in prison for six months before being found not guilty.
The rest of them are still being held in prison until their sentencing in May- so by then they would have been in prison for nine months (because they have been found guilty of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance). This just did not used to happen.
RIPS now also advises everyone taking action with Just Stop Oil or Palestine Action to come along to their Preparing For Prison briefings, as there is a high chance of arrest.
Anyone wanting to get involved in any way with the important work of Rebels in Prison Support, or wanting more information, can make contact at rebelsinprison@gmail.com
Consider donating to the RIPS fundraiser. RIPS has a lot of outgoings and appreciates any contributions, no matter how small.
Create content to send to those in prison, such as articles, puzzles, poems, exercises.
Forward emails to prisoners via emailaprisoner.com and be in close communication with each prisoner’s support team.
Write messages of support to prisoners- the emails are found by clicking onto the prisoner boxes here.
Write to post- prisoners, using RIPS PO Box address, available from their email address
Organise a writing group, and regularly write to activists who are in prison.
Take part in a RIPS training, to learn how to become a prison buddy.
The Israeli military has reportedly only destroyed 25 percent of tunnels used by Hamas in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, say security sources.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the sources said that a vast network of tunnels remain in the Gaza Star despite 18 months of a ferocious Israeli onslaught, with many extending from Egypt — which shares a 12-kilometre border with the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli military claimed it has been focused on tunnels used for attacks rather than those used to store weapons or as command centres.
The security officials, cited by Channel 12, also said that face-to-face fighting with Hamas members had reduced, with groups fleeing into tunnels.
The Israeli military has been waging a war against the Palestinian group for more than 18 months, while also attacking civilian areas and facilities, with Israel often boasting over how many fighters they have killed and how much of their infrastructure has been destroyed.
The military claim to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters. However, at least 80 percent of casualties have been civilians, according to experts.
This also comes as Israeli forces remain stationed at the Philadelphi crossing between Egypt and Gaza — a narrow strip of land occupied by the military since May of last year.
Corridor to remain buffer zone
Last month, Defence Minister Israel Katz said the corridor would remain a buffer zone despite Egyptian demands for the Israeli army to withdraw.
Katz said the Israeli military would remain there to “counter ammunition and weapons smuggling” taking place through tunnels which connect the two pieces of land.
Katz even said that he had seen a number of functioning tunnels in the area. The minister was quoted as saying: “I saw with my own eyes quite a few tunnels crossing into Egypt; some were closed, and several were open.”
Tunnels have connected Gaza with Egypt as far back as the 1980s, but grew significantly in size and quantity following the Israeli economic blockade imposed on the territory in 2007.
The tunnels serve as a means to smuggle goods such as food, medicine and fuel supplies due to the siege. Weapons and cash have also been smuggled through the tunnels since.
Israel has repeatedly sought to dismantle such tunnels, destroying dozens every year. Israel also restricts the importation of construction material to prevent Hamas from building any more tunnels.
Israel continues to wage its war on the Gaza Strip, killing over 5,900 Palestinians since 7, October 2023. It has stepped up its attacks on the Palestinian enclave since March 18 following the collapse of a truce killing well over 1500 people since, according to the Health Ministry.
Republished from The New Arab under Creative Commons.
The Israeli military has reportedly only destroyed 25 percent of tunnels used by Hamas in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, say security sources.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the sources said that a vast network of tunnels remain in the Gaza Star despite 18 months of a ferocious Israeli onslaught, with many extending from Egypt — which shares a 12-kilometre border with the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli military claimed it has been focused on tunnels used for attacks rather than those used to store weapons or as command centres.
The security officials, cited by Channel 12, also said that face-to-face fighting with Hamas members had reduced, with groups fleeing into tunnels.
The Israeli military has been waging a war against the Palestinian group for more than 18 months, while also attacking civilian areas and facilities, with Israel often boasting over how many fighters they have killed and how much of their infrastructure has been destroyed.
The military claim to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters. However, at least 80 percent of casualties have been civilians, according to experts.
This also comes as Israeli forces remain stationed at the Philadelphi crossing between Egypt and Gaza — a narrow strip of land occupied by the military since May of last year.
Corridor to remain buffer zone
Last month, Defence Minister Israel Katz said the corridor would remain a buffer zone despite Egyptian demands for the Israeli army to withdraw.
Katz said the Israeli military would remain there to “counter ammunition and weapons smuggling” taking place through tunnels which connect the two pieces of land.
Katz even said that he had seen a number of functioning tunnels in the area. The minister was quoted as saying: “I saw with my own eyes quite a few tunnels crossing into Egypt; some were closed, and several were open.”
Tunnels have connected Gaza with Egypt as far back as the 1980s, but grew significantly in size and quantity following the Israeli economic blockade imposed on the territory in 2007.
The tunnels serve as a means to smuggle goods such as food, medicine and fuel supplies due to the siege. Weapons and cash have also been smuggled through the tunnels since.
Israel has repeatedly sought to dismantle such tunnels, destroying dozens every year. Israel also restricts the importation of construction material to prevent Hamas from building any more tunnels.
Israel continues to wage its war on the Gaza Strip, killing over 5,900 Palestinians since 7, October 2023. It has stepped up its attacks on the Palestinian enclave since March 18 following the collapse of a truce killing well over 1500 people since, according to the Health Ministry.
Republished from The New Arab under Creative Commons.
People protest against ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil outside the Newark courthouse on March 27, 2025, in Newark, N.J.by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty
Donald Trump’s administration moved this week to declare thousands of immigrants dead.
The 6,000-plus very-much-alive people, predominantly undocumented immigrants from Latin America, continue to eat, sleep, breathe, and work on U.S. soil. Their names have nonetheless been added to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” the database used to list dead people who should no longer receive benefits.
The New York Times, the first to report on the perverse repurposing of the death master file, noted with unusual pointedness that the administration was including “the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.”
The dead have no claim to rights.
Listing immigrants among the dead is a nasty workaround to swiftly remove access to means of survival in this country – permanently cutting off access to benefits, bank accounts, and the ability to legally work. It’s just the latest move in a relentless effort to make life so unliveable for immigrants, such that they will be forced to choose to leave, if not swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported first.
This is more than cruel expediency. Death is the point.
The Trump administration is openly stating its willingness to condemn millions of people to civic and social death on multiple fronts, from immigrants marked as dead by the Social Security Administration, to denying trans people access to passports, correct documentation, or any existence according to government records at all.
This is not mere metaphorical killing: Expulsion from official public life can be truly deadly.
Trump’s escalation of necropolitical rule – historian Achille Mbembe’s notion of governance organized around exposing certain groups to premature death and elimination – is producing a fascist reality that threatens to revoke the legal rights of whole swathes of the population.
The dead, after all, have no claim to rights.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Rights
These necropolitical affronts aren’t just visible on Social Security rolls. They are an unspoken part of so many of the immigration cases before us. Take, for example, the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, where he was involved in the anti-genocide protests, and, a permanent resident whose U.S. citizen wife is expecting their first child.
“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked in his March letter from a Louisiana ICE detention center. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”
On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled Mahmoud Khalil can be deported on baseless Trump administration claims that he poses a threat to American foreign policy.
“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family,” Khalil told the judge, after she informed him of her ruling. “I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”
Khalil’s lawyers will be appealing the decision and are pressing a separate habeas corpus petition in federal court in New Jersey. Like the kidnapping and detention of Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed and the revocation of hundreds of student visas apparently for participation in anti-genocide protests, Khalil’s predicament makes a mockery of constitutional protections.
Khalil’s fight against deportation on baseless charges of “antisemitism” and threats to “national security” is indeed a test case for the limits of basic constitutional and human rights under Trump.
“The right to have rights,” which was first mentioned by philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany, highlights that a person is not inherently rights-bearing but must be acknowledged as a member of a political community to be granted any other rights at all. We might speak of universal rights, but they must be recognized and only have material force when recognized by state powers.
It is precisely the removal of the right to have rights, the right to be recognized as a human under law, at which Trump aims.
It is no accident that Palestinians and their supporters are among the first targeted. Israel, the U.S., and the so-called rules-based international order have designated Palestinians outside the bounds of rightful acknowledgment — that is to say, expellable, detainable, and killable — for 76 years.
It is precisely the right to be recognized as a human under law at which Trump aims.
“I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights,” Khalil wrote in his letter.
Khalil’s lawyers are arguing that he has been targeted by the administration for nothing more than speech that should be protected under the First Amendment. There is even a particular measure in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act that is supposed to bar the government from deporting people as threats to “foreign policy” for speech alone.
And yet to assert these protections has proved fruitless. Where are Mahmoud Khalil’s rights?
Necropolitics Out in the Open
When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to round up Venezuelan immigrants, this, too, was an attack on the right to have rights. And it is proving successful: The majority of the 200-plus men rounded up on consistently groundless charges of gang membership had no criminal record. That didn’t stop them from being sent, with no due process, to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador.
This policy of extraordinary rendition as deportation only becomes darker with every new detail. U.S. designations of criminality have long been used to strip people of their basic rights. The potentially permanent removal to a totalitarian prison camp would not be justified even if every detainee were convicted of serious crimes.
Take the case of a man who the Trump administration admits was wrongly sent to El Salvador. Despite this admission, the government is fighting to not have to retrieve the man — going so far as to defy a court order on Friday. It reflects a commitment to the removal of demarcated people from the rights-bearing community.
Trump’s Republican Party has been described as a “death cult” since his first term, when MAGA Covid denialism took on deadly and suicidal forms. A rejection of medical science, a welcoming of environmental decimation, an all-out assault on basic welfare provisions, extraordinary worker exploitation, reproductive health care bans, an undying commitment to gunpower – these are typical morbidities of American reaction under capitalism, imbued with a messianic charge under Trump.
Like much of the Trumpian project, the administration this time round has a more honed, violent and unambiguously fascist mode of death-dealing.
Trump’s policies may leave the entire population, including his devoted base, more vulnerable to premature death and debility; Trumpian politics of domination, meanwhile, rely on clearly demarcating so-called enemies and threats as already dead, removable, or killable.
There is, however, at least one way that Trump’s “death cult” turns necropolitics on its head.
Necropolitical governance — the deadly, racist ordering of life and death by Western liberal democracies — have typically sought to administer death behind closed doors or far from home. The public was not supposed to learn about the tortures in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison or the abuses in Guantanamo Bay; the police killings, the racist brutality of prisons; the pollution and its grossly unequal distribution of environmental devastation; and much more.
The Trumpian move is to don the Totenkopf, to embrace and supercharge this monstrous and grossly unequal death tableau.
Khalil, meanwhile, continues to show us what it means to fight for the living.
“After the hearing, Khalil turned around to face the 22 observers and journalists filing out of the courtroom and formed the shape of a heart with his hands,” NPR reported. “He smiled.”
The Trump administration’s case to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil rests solely on a letter written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio which repeats the baseless claim that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism,” according to an individual who has reviewed the government’s filing.
The Department of Homeland Security submitted Rubio’s letter, a 1 ½-page declaration, on Wednesday evening at a Louisiana immigration court at the LaSalle ICE facility, a source familiar with the legal proceedings who has seen the letter told The Intercept. Khalil has been imprisoned at the ICE facility since March 9, a day after his arrest.
On Tuesday, Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to present evidence by Wednesday to justify its attempt to deport Khalil. Rubio’s letter was the sole piece of evidence provided by DHS attorneys, the source said.
Comans will preside over a hearing on Friday to decide whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to deport Khalil. If Comans rules against the government, Khalil could be released as early as Friday.
“If he’s not removable, I don’t want him to continue to be detained – I will have him released,” Comans told attorneys for Khalil and the government during Tuesday’s hearing, according to multiplereports.
Rubio’s letter does not include new allegations or new evidence to support its deportation claim against Khalil, a legal permanent resident, the source said.
Instead, the source said the letter cites the “adverse foreign policy” provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the same provision cited by the government when it imprisoned Khalil in Louisiana. The Trump administration’s attorneys have referred to the provision in multiple court documents in Khalil’s separate habeas petition case in New Jersey, in which Khalil’s legal team has been pushing for his release.
The rarely-used immigration law provision gives the Secretary of State the authority to request the deportation of an individual, who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country harms U.S. foreign policy interests.
The letter filed Wednesday asserts that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism” and that it is U.S. foreign policy to keep people out of the country who engage in such activities, the source said, adding that the government continues to conflate Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism. Rubio makes the determination in the letter without providing any further analysis, the source said.
The State Department did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
In previous public statements, Rubio has called Khalil “a supporter of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group which governs over Gaza, a common and baseless claim made by the Trump administration about student protesters who oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Khalil was a lead negotiator between the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Columbia University and school administrators in the spring of 2024. The student-led movement demanded the university disclose and withdraw its investments in companies that profit off of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Trump administration’s attorneys have previously accused Khalil of hiding certain employment experience from the government when applying for his green card. They claimed that Khalil failed to mention that he had previously worked for the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees. Khalil was an unpaid intern at UNRWA for a brief time in 2023.
The government, however, did not include these allegations in its filing in immigration court on Wednesday, the source said.
After Tuesday’s hearing, Marc Van Der Hout, a lead attorney on Khalil’s legal team, said the government has yet to provide “a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” He also criticized Judge Comans for moving too quickly on the case without giving the legal team more time to bolster its defense of Khalil against deportation.
“Yet the Immigration judge today stated she intends to rule Friday on the merits of this outlandish charge with no realistic opportunity for Mahmoud and his lawyers to contest this baseless charge,” Van Der Hout said in a statement on Tuesday. “If this turns out to be what happens Friday, it would be an uncalled for rush to judgement that would completely deprive Mahmoud of any due process, which is a foundation of our legal system.”
The Trump administration’s case to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil rests solely on a letter written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio which repeats the baseless claim that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism,” according to a copy of the letter shared with The Intercept.
The Department of Homeland Security submitted Rubio’s letter, a 1 ½-page declaration, on Wednesday evening at a Louisiana immigration court at the LaSalle ICE facility. The letter from Rubio is undated and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Khalil’s arrest on March 8. Khalil has been imprisoned at the Louisiana ICE facility since the day after his arrest.
On Tuesday, Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to present evidence by Wednesday to justify its attempt to deport Khalil. Rubio’s letter was the sole piece of evidence provided by DHS attorneys, the source said.
Comans will preside over a hearing on Friday to decide whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to deport Khalil. If Comans rules against the government, Khalil could be released as early as Friday.
“If he’s not removable, I don’t want him to continue to be detained — I will have him released,” Comans told attorneys for Khalil and the government during Tuesday’s hearing, according to multiplereports.
Rubio’s letter does not include new allegations or new evidence to support its deportation claim against Khalil, a legal permanent resident.
Instead, the letter cites the “adverse foreign policy” provision in the Immigration Nationality Act, the same provision cited by the government when it imprisoned Khalil in Louisiana. The Trump administration’s attorneys have referred to the provision in multiple court documents in Khalil’s separate habeas petition case in New Jersey, in which Khalil’s legal team has been pushing for his release.
The rarely used immigration law provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual, who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country harms U.S. foreign policy interests.
The letter filed Wednesday asserts that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism” and that it is U.S. foreign policy to keep people out of the country who engage in such activities. The letter also includes a second person targeted for deportation, but their name was redacted by the government. The government regularly conflates Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism.
“The public actions and continued presence of [redacted name] and Khalil in the United States undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States,” Rubio wrote. He then cited Trump’s “America First” executive order that calls on the secretary of state to “always put America and American citizens first” in foreign policy.
“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote.
The State Department did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
In previous public statements, Rubio has called Khalil “a supporter of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group which governs over Gaza, a common and baseless claim made by the Trump administration about student protesters who oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. During an interview with CBS News one week after Khalil’s arrest, Rubio refused to answer a question about whether the government has evidence linking Khalil to Hamas. Instead, Rubio deflected by accusing Khalil of leading protesters in “taking over” Columbia’s campus.
Khalil was a lead negotiator between the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Columbia University and school administrators in the spring of 2024. The student-led movement demanded the university disclose and withdraw its investments in companies that profit off of Israel’s war in Gaza. Protesters briefly occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind’s Hall, before NYPD officers raided the building, violently arresting dozens of students. Khalil was not among those arrested and faced a short suspension, which school officials quickly apologized for and rescinded after one-day
The Trump administration’s attorneys have previously accused Khalil of hiding certain employment experience from the government when applying for his green card. They claimed that Khalil failed to mention that he had previously worked for the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Khalil was an unpaid intern at UNRWA for a brief time in 2023.
The government, however, did not include these allegations in its filing in immigration court on Wednesday.
After Tuesday’s hearing, Marc Van Der Hout, a lead attorney on Khalil’s legal team, said the government has yet to provide “a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” He also criticized Judge Comans for moving too quickly on the case without giving the legal team more time to bolster its defense of Khalil against deportation.
“Yet the Immigration judge today stated she intends to rule Friday on the merits of this outlandish charge with no realistic opportunity for Mahmoud and his lawyers to contest this baseless charge,” Van Der Hout said in a statement on Tuesday. “If this turns out to be what happens Friday, it would be an uncalled for rush to judgement that would completely deprive Mahmoud of any due process, which is a foundation of our legal system.”
Update: April 10, 2025, 3:54 p.m. ET This article has been updated with additional details from the government filing in the case.
Phoebe Plummer was found guilty of conspiracy at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday 9 April, while the jury was unable to reach a verdict for her co-defendant. The pair took action with Just Stop Oil in November 2022 to demand an end to new oil and gas.
Phoebe Plummer: guilty again
Guido Wieser (21) and Phoebe Plummer (23) were on trial at Southwark Crown Court in front of Judge Cole in relation to their role in the actions that caused gridlock on the M25 between 7 and 10 November 2022.
Both defendants were arrested on 10 November 2022 after a vehicle they were travelling in was stopped by police. Phoebe Plummer was held in custody for a month before being released on a three-month electronic tag in connection with the charge.
Phoebe has been bailed until 15 May, when they will be sentenced alongside David Mann and Christopher Ford who pleaded guilty to the charges before trial.
During the trial, the judge ruled out all legal defences that would have allowed the defendants to argue that they were exercising their rights to protest in the face of the grave threat to humanity posed by the climate crisis. The Crown Prosecution Service had previously accepted as agreed facts the findings of the 2020 Net Zero Interim report, which stated:
Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Without global action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will change catastrophically with almost unimaginable consequences for societies across the world.
In their closing speech, Phoebe Plummer said:
In the body-worn footage of my arrest, one of the things I say is that scientists predict that soon there will be one billion climate refugees globally. The latest peer reviewed science predicts that we will reach that by 2030. One billion is a number so large that I find it difficult to comprehend.
Those people are not a number, or a statistic. They are real people, with names and faces, real people who haven’t caused this crisis, who aren’t to blame, but who are going to lose their homes, their safety, and possibly their lives. I agreed to climb a gantry in November 2022, because I thought it might have an impact that could reduce this suffering.
Another dodgy judge presiding over a Just Stop Oil case
Speaking before the verdict, Phoebe Plummer said:
The courts routinely deny us the ability to justify our actions as reasonable, proportionate and necessary and tell jurors not to acquit a defendant based on their conscience, leaving little leeway to return anything but a guilty verdict. Despite this, I stand by my actions and will not be deterred from engaging in necessary acts of nonviolent civil resistance to oppose injustice.
At one point during the trial the Judge threatened to order the arrests of anyone sitting outside the court holding placards referencing jury equity – the principle that juries can deliver verdicts based on their conscience.
This appeared to contradict a High Court ruling by Justice Saini in the Trudi Warner case last year. However, Judge Cole later backtracked from his view, calling such a measure “too extreme”.
In the second M25 conspiracy trial last month, six supporters were acquitted, while two—Ian Bates and Abigail Percy-Ratcliffe—were found guilty and now await sentencing. The first gantry conspiracy trial saw unprecedented custodial sentences, including five-year and four-year terms for members of the ‘Whole Truth Five’—the longest sentences in UK history for peaceful protest.
Those sentences were partially overturned in March by the Court of Appeal, which ruled that the defendants’ conscientious motivations and article 10 and 11 rights under the ECHR had been improperly disregarded at the time of sentencing.
Despite Phoebe Plummer’s verdict, Just Stop Oil says it “will continue to stand with those being prosecuted for peaceful resistance to fossil fuel expansion in the face of rapidly accelerating climate collapse”.
Berlin, April 9, 2025—On the fourth anniversary of the assassination of veteran Greek crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz, the Committee to Protect Journalists and six international media freedom and journalist organizations called for justice for “one of the most serious attacks on journalism in the European Union in recent years.”
Karaivaz was fatally shot outside his home in the capital Athens on April 9, 2021, in what is widely suspected to have been a professional contract killing linked to organized crime groups. In December 2024, an Athens court ruled that Karaivaz was murdered because of his journalistic work. No one has been held responsible for the murder.
The seven organizations urged authorities and prosecutors to “identify, detain, and prosecute all those involved in the killing, from the gunmen to the mastermind,” if necessary, with the assistance of bodies such as the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol.
Maldives President officially signs the law banning Israelis from entering the country. 
