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.
The number of international students at Arizona State University who have had their visas revoked is now at least 50, according to an attorney representing the students.
Last week, Arizona Luminaria reported on eight students at ASU who had their visas revoked. That number has increased quickly, with at least three students facing some time in immigration detention, according to senior attorney Ami Hutchinson, with Green Evans-Schroeder, the Tucson, Arizona-based law firm representing the students. She said students she’s spoken to are confused.
“They’re really, really afraid.”
“They still seem to think that someone made a mistake. That it shouldn’t have happened and this was just all a misunderstanding,” Hutchinson said.
“They’re really, really afraid,” she added.
One ASU student remains in detention, and has been locked up for about 10 days, according to Hutchinson.
An ASU spokesperson would not confirm the number of students. Hutchinson told Arizona Luminaria she estimates the total number of revoked international student visas across the country to be around 1,000, based on other attorneys and firms working in Arizona and other states.
Hutchinson told Arizona Luminaria that ASU is “being supportive” of the students and has been paying Green Evans-Schroeder for a portion of their consultation fees with the students. ASU did not immediately respond about paying the consultation fees.
A spokesperson for the University of Arizona did not comment last week on whether any UA students have had their visas revoked, saying, “we care deeply about the safety and well-being of our campus community.”
Arizona Luminaria reached out again to the media office and directly to UA’s president, Suresh Garimella, for comment about possible visa revocations. The offices did not immediately respond.
A message March 31 informed UA students: “Be sure to check your email regularly for updates from U.S. Department of State (DOS). Some messages may include time-sensitive information related to your immigration status, visa compliance requirements, or the impact of any policy changes.”
The UA has recommended that all international students carry a copy of their passport, their visas, and proof of their immigration status on them at all times.
Notice of the visa revocations has been coming to the students via email, Hutchinson said. That has left students confused and unsure of what to do next.
Should they go to class? Should they prepare to leave the country, keep an eye out for federal immigration officers on campus?
Students at ASU who have had their visas revoked may still be able to go to classes, but Hutchinson said multiple students were set to graduate this spring and will not be able to obtain their degree.
“They can’t do that now, and so it just throws away many years of their studies,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson laid out other potential options for the students. They can wait and see what happens next, even if that risks possible detention and/or deportation. Or they can file a lawsuit, claiming that the U.S. government didn’t follow the proper procedures in canceling their visas. They can also request to have their status reinstated, though Hutchinson said that may not be viable for many of the students given the current political climate.
“The growing number of visa revocations at Arizona universities and across the country is part of the Trump administration’s disturbing efforts to silence dissent, target immigrants, and undermine the pillars of a free society,” Noah Schramm, a policy strategist at the ACLU of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria. “The ACLU of Arizona unequivocally condemns the targeting of non-citizen students through the abuse of immigration authority and as punishment for protected expression.”
Wanting to Leave
The student who remains in immigration detention had a known conviction for driving under the influence from years ago, according to Hutchinson.
Hutchinson said the student was nearly done with their studies. At this point, they are willing to go home if that means they can get out of detention.
According to Hutchinson, the student said they want to leave the country and never come back because they want to go somewhere where they are treated with dignity and respect.
Arizona Luminaria reached out to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues visas, as well as the State Department, for comment. Luminaria also asked for the students’ nationalities and why their visas were revoked.
Officials with the federal agencies did not immediately respond.
“Bizarre and Unlawful”
In March, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to 60 colleges and universities “warning them of potential enforcement actions” if they don’t protect Jewish students on campus.
Hutchinson said attorneys in Arizona and other states representing students with revoked visas are wondering whether students who protested the war in Gaza, or engaged in other forms of political activity, at these institutions are being targeted.
She added that all of the students they’ve worked with are from India, China, or Muslim-majority countries.
Applying for a student visa to study in the United States is a complex process that is both expensive and laborious. Besides paying hundreds of dollars in fees, getting interviewed, and obtaining the visa and booking travel, students must acquire and maintain active status in the “Student and Exchange Visitor Information System” database, known as SEVIS.
A lawsuit filed April 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California alleges that hundreds of students across the country have had their SEVIS status “abruptly and unlawfully terminated.”
“Until recently, government policy generally allowed these students to remain in the United States and continue their studies.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement revoked the SEVIS status of several of the ASU students. They were told that was because of their failure to maintain legal status in the country, Hutchinson said. That’s because, in a sort of circular logic, the State Department canceled their student visas.
A letter developed by Green Evans-Schroeder explaining to students why their visa may have been revoked offers a bit of recent historical context.
“In the past, it has been relatively common for international students who were arrested, charged, or even convicted of minor offenses — typically misdemeanors — to receive notices that their student visas had been revoked,” according to the letter. “However, until recently, government policy generally allowed these students to remain in the United States and continue their studies until their Form I-20 expired.”
Hutchinson said Green Evans-Schroeder and other firms were considering joining or filing lawsuits, as well as possibly filing a class-action suit.
The hope is to bring these lawsuits not only saying that the government messed up and “did not do what they’re supposed to do, but also, the underlying basis is bizarre and unlawful,” Hutchinson said.
A mother and her three children swept up in an immigration raid in the hometown of border czar Tom Homan have been released following an outpouring of support from locals outraged at their detention.
The release of the family was confirmed Monday by immigration activists working on the family’s behalf and by Jennifer Gaffney, the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District, where the three children are enrolled.
“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after eleven days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Gaffney said in a statement.
“In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through. We are very thankful to everyone who has reached out with kindness and offered support.”
The family was taken into custody in a March 27 raid at a large dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. Customs and Border Protection agents say the target of their operation was a South African national charged with trafficking in child sexual abuse material, who they apprehended. But authorities also detained the family as well as three other immigrants without documentation. By March 30, the family had been whisked away to the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately run detention facility in Texas.
The response in Sackets Harbor and the surrounding Jefferson County, located on the shores of Lake Ontario on the western edge of New York’s North Country Region, was one of disbelief and anger — not least because Homan hails from the area and owns a home in Sackets Harbor.
In initial statements about the detention of the family, a CBP spokesperson indicated the family was in the process of deportation. But amid the backlash, Homan told a local news channel last week that the family was merely being questioned for their own safety, due to the nature of the allegations against the man targeted in the raid.
On Saturday, as many as 1,000 people attended a rally in Sackets Harbor, demanding the return of the family and marching past Homan’s house, according to local news reports. It was that pressure that ensured the family’s return, according to Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.
“The Sackets Harbor community’s steadfast concern, care and love for their neighbors is what brought this family home,” Awawdeh said in a statement Monday. “However, this incident will cause lasting trauma for the family, school and community affected. Donald Trump, Tom Homan and ICE must stop this campaign of cruelty, and the harm they are causing our local communities.”
A CBP spokesperson referred questions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A spokesperson for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) has submitted legal submissions to the Birmingham University Misconduct Panel on behalf of Mariyah Ali and Antonia Listrat, urging the university to dismiss the proceedings against the students.
The students were targeted for protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza and for demanding that the university divest from arms companies like BAE Systems. Their hearing, set for Monday 7 April, is part of a nationwide crackdown on Palestine solidarity across UK campuses.
Birmingham University: cracking down on pro-Palestinian voices
Despite mounting condemnation—including from Coventry MP Zarah Sultana, who called the disciplinary action “an assault on democratic rights”, and Gina Romero, United Nations Special Rapporteur, who expressed concern over “harassment, intimidation, and reprisals” against Birmingham University students for peaceful protest —the university has pressed ahead with punitive measures.
The student body has shown overwhelming support—electing Antonia as Guild President and Mariyah as Ethnic Minorities Officer and passing a Palestine solidarity motion (later blocked by union trustees). This disciplinary action directly contradicts the democratic will of students. Silencing elected representatives for protest sets a dangerous precedent for campus democracy.
A joint investigation by Liberty Investigates and Sky News revealed that at least 28+ UK universities have disciplined 113+ students and staff for Palestine activism since October 2023. Moreover, some institutions have collaborated with police and private spies to surveil and intimidate protesters, fuelling a climate of fear.
Under the Education Act 1986 and Human Rights Act 1998, universities are legally bound to protect freedom of expression, including the right to protest and challenge institutional policies. The University of Birmingham is violating these obligations by penalising students for their political beliefs and setting a dangerous precedent that stifles dissent. Such actions create a ‘chilling effect’, deterring students from engaging in critical debate and undermining the very purpose of higher education as a space for open inquiry.
The ELSC calls on Birmingham University to immediately dismiss these charges and uphold its legal duty to protect freedom of speech, expression, and assembly on campus. We urge students, staff, and the wider public to oppose this repression and stand in solidarity with those facing retaliation for their activism.
Punished for opposing genocide and war crimes
Anna Ost, Senior Legal Officer at ELSC, said:
We are deeply concerned that the university’s intention and effect in targeting these two students is to dissuade the wider University community from speaking out for Palestine. The University needs to change its approach, drop the disciplinaries, and demonstrate that fundamental freedoms are still promoted on its campus.
Mariyah Ali said:
The disciplinary process against Antonia and me is a blatant attempt to suppress dissent and silence the wider student movement. This authoritarian crackdown is not just an attack on our right to protest—it is a display of institutional Islamophobia and bureaucratic repression. The student movement for Palestine is stronger than ever. Instead of charging students, the University of Birmingham must focus on divesting from companies complicit in genocide and war crimes.
Antonia Listrat said:
Protest is an integral part of campus life and of a healthy and progressive society. As far-right rhetoric rises throughout the world, we need to make a huge effort to protect our rights and uphold international law and morality. Enabling genocide and profiting from human rights violations is quite a violent stance that the University of Birmingham has taken. Funding genocide is violent, protesting genocide is peaceful.
The BBC’s news verification service, Verify, digitally reconstructed a residential tower block in Mandalay earlier this week to show how it had collapsed in a huge earthquake on March 28 in Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia largely cut off from the outside world.
The broadcaster painstakingly pieced together damage to other parts of the city using a combination of phone videos, satellite imagery and Nasa heat detection images.
Verify dedicated much time and effort to this task for a simple reason: to expose as patently false the claims made by the ruling military junta that only 2000 people were killed by Myanmar’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake.
The West sees the country’s generals as an official enemy, and the BBC wanted to show that the junta’s account of events could not be trusted. Myanmar’s rulers have an interest in undercounting the dead to protect the regime’s image.
The BBC’s determined effort to strip away these lies contrasted strongly with its coverage — or rather, lack of it — of another important story this week.
Israel has been caught in another horrifying war crime. Late last month, it executed 15 Palestinian first responders and then secretly buried them in a mass grave, along with their crushed vehicles.
Israel is an official western ally, one that the United States, Britain and the rest of Europe have been arming and assisting in a spate of crimes against humanity being investigated by the world’s highest court. Fourteen months ago, the International Court of Justice ruled it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a fugitive from its sister court, the International Criminal Court. Judges there want to try him for crimes against humanity, including starving the 2.3 million people of Gaza by withholding food, water and aid.
Israel is known to have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, in its 18-month carpet bombing of the enclave. But there are likely to be far more deaths that have gone unreported.
This is because Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s health and administrative bodies that could do the counting, and because it has created unmarked “kill zones” across much of the enclave, making it all but impossible for first responders to reach swathes of territory to locate the dead.
The latest crime scene in Gaza is shockingly illustrative of how Israel murders civilians, targets medics and covers up its crimes — and of how Western media collude in downplaying such atrocities, helping Israel to ensure that the extent of the death toll in Gaza will never be properly known.
Struck ‘one by one’ Last Sunday, United Nations officials were finally allowed by Israel to reach the site in southern Gaza where the Palestinian emergency crews had gone missing a week earlier, on March 23. The bodies of 15 Palestinians were unearthed in a mass grave; another is still missing.
All were wearing their uniforms, and some had their hands or legs zip-tied, according to eyewitnesses. Some had been shot in the head or chest. Their vehicles had been crushed before they were buried.
Two of the emergency workers were killed by Israeli fire while trying to aid people injured in an earlier air strike on Rafah. The other 13 were part of a convoy sent to retrieve the bodies of their colleagues, with the UN saying Israel had struck their ambulances “one by one”.
Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity — which is why it initially tried to black out the story
More details emerged during the week, with the doctor who examined five of the bodies reporting that all but one — which had been too badly mutilated by feral animals to assess — were shot from close range with multiple bullets. Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “The bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”
Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes, observed that one of the paramedics in the convoy was in contact with the ambulance station when Israeli forces started shooting: “During the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew.
“The conversation was about gathering the [Palestinian] team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”
Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs in Palestine, reported that, on the journey to recover the bodies, he and his team witnessed Israeli soldiers firing on civilians fleeing the area. He saw a Palestinian woman shot in the back of the head and a young man who tried to retrieve her body shot, too.
Concealing slaughter The difficulty for Israel with the discovery of the mass grave was that it could not easily fall back on any of the usual mendacious rationalisations for war crimes that it has fed the Western media over the past year and a half, and which those outlets have been only too happy to regurgitate.
Since Israel unilaterally broke a US-backed ceasefire agreement with Hamas last month, its carpet bombing of the enclave has killed more than 1000 Palestinians, taking the official death toll to more than 50,000. But Israel and its apologists, including Western governments and media, always have a ready excuse at hand to mask the slaughter.
Israel disputes the casualty figures, saying they are inflated by Gaza’s Health Ministry, even though its figures in previous wars have always been highly reliable. It says most of those killed were Hamas “terrorists”, and most of the slain women and children were used by Hamas as “human shields”.
Israel has also destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, shot up large numbers of ambulances, killed hundreds of medical personnel and disappeared others into torture chambers, while denying the entry of medical supplies.
Israel implies that all of the 36 hospitals in Gaza it has targeted are Hamas-run “command and control centres”; that many of the doctors and nurses working in them are really covert Hamas operatives; and that Gaza’s ambulances are being used to transport Hamas fighters.
Even if these claims were vaguely plausible, the Western media seems unwilling to ask the most obvious of questions: why would Hamas continue to use Gaza’s hospitals and ambulances when Israel made clear from the outset of its 18-month genocidal killing rampage that it was going to treat them as targets?
Even if Hamas fighters did not care about protecting the health sector, which their parents, siblings, children, and relatives desperately need to survive Israel’s carpet bombing, why would they make themselves so easy to locate?
Hamas has plenty of other places to hide in Gaza. Most of the enclave’s buildings are wrecked concrete structures, ideal for waging guerrilla warfare.
Israeli cover-up Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity — which is why it initially tried to black out the story.
Given that it has banned all Western journalists from entering Gaza, killed unprecedented numbers of local journalists, and formally outlawed the UN refugee agency Unrwa, it might have hoped its crime would go undiscovered.
But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine, and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies — using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?
‘Deeply disturbed’ All available evidence indicates that Israel killed all or most of the emergency crews in cold blood — a grave war crime.
But as the story broke on Monday, the BBC’s News at Ten gave over its schedule to a bin strike by workers in Birmingham; fears about the influence of social media prompted by a Netflix drama, Adolescence; bad weather on a Greek island; the return to Earth of stranded Nasa astronauts; and Britain’s fourth political party claiming it would do well in next month’s local elections.
All of that pushed out any mention of Israel’s latest war crime in Gaza.
Presumably under pressure from its ordinary journalists — who are known to be in near-revolt over the state broadcaster’s persistent failure to cover Israeli atrocities in Gaza — the next day’s half-hour evening news belatedly dedicated 30 seconds to the item, near the end of the running order.
This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal
The perfunctory report immediately undercut the UN’s statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the deaths, with the newsreader announcing that Israel claimed nine “terrorists” were “among those killed”.
Where was the BBC Verify team in this instance? Too busy scouring Google maps of Myanmar, it would seem.
If ever there was a region where its forensic, open-source skills could be usefully deployed, it is Gaza. After all, Israel keeps out foreign journalists, and it has killed Palestinian journalists in greater numbers than all of the West’s major wars of the past 150 years combined.
This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal. It was a chance for the BBC to do actual journalism about Gaza.
Why was it necessary for the BBC to contest the narrative of an earthquake in a repressive Southeast Asian country whose rulers are opposed by the West but not contest the narrative of a major atrocity committed by a Western ally?
Missing in action This is not the first time that BBC Verify has been missing in action at a crucial moment in Gaza.
Back in January 2024, Israeli soldiers shot up a car containing a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, and her relatives as they tried to flee an Israeli attack on Gaza City. All were killed, but before Hind died, she could be heard desperately pleading with emergency services for help.
Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed. It took two weeks for other emergency crews to reach the bodies.
It was certainly possible for BBC Verify to have done a forensic study of the incident — because another group did precisely that. Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, used available images of the scene to reconstruct the events.
It found that the Israeli military had fired 335 bullets into the small car carrying Hind and her family. In an audio recording before she was killed, Hind’s cousin could be heard telling emergency services that an Israeli tank was near them.
The sound of the gunfire, most likely from the tank’s machine gun, indicates it was some 13 metres away — close enough for the crew to have seen the children inside.
Not only did BBC Verify ignore the story, but the BBC also failed to report it until the bodies were recovered. As has happened so often before, the BBC dared not do any reporting until Israel was forced to confirm the incident because of physical evidence.
We know from a BBC journalist-turned-whistleblower, Karishma Patel, that she pushed editors to run the story as the recordings of Hind pleading for help first surfaced, but she was overruled.
When the BBC very belatedly covered Hind’s horrific killing online, in typical fashion, it did so in a way that minimised any pushback from Israel. Its headline, “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”, managed to remove Israel from the story.
Evidence buried A clear pattern thus emerges. The BBC also tried to bury the massacre of the 15 Palestinian first responders — keeping it off its website’s main page — just as Israel had tried to bury the evidence of its crime in Gaza’s sand.
The story’s first headline was: “Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza”. Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene.
Only later, amid massive backlash on social media and as the story refused to go away, did the BBC change the headline to attribute the killings to “Israeli forces”.
But subsequent stories have been keen to highlight the self-serving Israeli claim that its soldiers were entitled to execute the paramedics because the presence of emergency vehicles at the scene of much death and destruction was “suspicious”.
In one report, a BBC journalist managed to shoe-horn this same, patently ridiculous “defence” twice into her two-minute segment. She reduced the discovery of an Israeli massacre to mere “allegations”, while a clear war crime was soft-soaped as only an “apparent” one.
Notably, the BBC has on one solitary occasion managed to go beyond other media in reporting an attack on an ambulance crew. The footage incontrovertibly showed a US-supplied Apache helicopter firing on the crew and a young family they were trying to evacuate.
There was no possibility the ambulance contained “terrorists” because the documentary team were filming inside the vehicle with paramedics they had been following for months. The video was included near the end of a documentary on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, seen largely through the eyes of children.
But the BBC quickly pulled that film, titled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, after the Israel lobby manufactured a controversy over one of its child narrators being the son of Gaza’s deputy Agriculture Minister, who served in the Hamas-run civilian government.
Wholesale destruction The unmentionable truth, which has been evident since the earliest days of the 18-month genocide, is that Israel is intentionally dismantling and destroying Gaza’s health sector, piece by piece.
According to the UN, Israel’s war has killed at least 1060 healthcare workers and 399 aid workers — those deaths it has been possible to identify — and wrecked Gaza’s health facilities. Israel has rounded up hundreds of medical staff and disappeared many of them into what Israeli human rights groups call torture chambers.
One doctor, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, has been held by Israel since he was abducted in late December. During brief contacts with lawyers, Dr Safiya revealed that he is being tortured.
Other doctors have been killed in Israeli detention from their abuse, including one who was allegedly raped to death.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply
Why is Israel carrying out this wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health sector? There are two reasons. Firstly, Netanyahu recently reiterated his intent to carry out the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
He presents this as “voluntary migration”, supposedly in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the enclave’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians to other countries.
There can be nothing voluntary about Palestinians leaving Gaza when Israel has refused to allow any food or aid into the enclave for the past month, and is indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Israel’s ultimate intention has always been to terrify the population into flight.
Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, was secretly recorded last month stating that “there are no uninvolved in Gaza”— a constant theme from Israeli officials. He also suggested that there should be a “death sentence” for anyone Israel accuses of holding a gun, including children.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has threatened the “total devastation” of Gaza’s civilian population should they fail to “remove Hamas” from the enclave, something they are in no position to do.
Not surprisingly, faced with the prospect of an intensification of the genocide and the imminent annihilation of themselves and their loved ones, ordinary people in Gaza have started organising protests against Hamas — marches readily reported by the BBC and others.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply, and no one will come to your aid in your hour of need.
You are alone against our snipers, drones, tanks and Apache helicopters.
Too much to bear The second reason for Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector is that we in the West, or at least our governments and media, have consented to Israel’s savagery — and actively participated in it — every step of the way. Had there been any meaningful pushback at any stage, Israel would have been forced to take another course.
When David Lammy, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, let slip in Parliament last month the advice he has been receiving from his officials since he took up the job last summer — that Israel is clearly violating international law by starving the population — he was immediately rebuked by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office.
Let us not forget that Starmer, when he was opposition leader, approved Israel’s genocidal blocking of food, water and electricity to Gaza, saying Israel “had that right”.
In response to Lammy’s comments, Starmer’s spokesperson restated the government’s view that Israel is only “at risk” of breaching international law — a position that allows the UK to continue arming Israel and providing it with intelligence from British spy flights over Gaza from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.
Our politicians have consented to everything Israel has done, and not just in Gaza over the past 18 months. This genocide has been decades in the making.
Three-quarters of a century ago, the West authorised the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine to create a self-declared Jewish state there. The West consented, too, to the violent occupation of the last sections of Palestine in 1967, and to Israel’s gradual colonisation of those newly seized territories by armed Jewish extremists.
The West nodded through waves of house demolitions carried out against Palestinian communities by Israel to “Judaise” the land. It backed the Israeli army creating extensive “firing zones” on Palestinian farmland to starve traditional agricultural communities of any means of subsistence.
The West ignored Israeli settlers and soldiers destroying Palestinian olive groves, beating up shepherds, torching homes, and murdering families. Even being an Oscar winner offers no immunity from the rampant settler violence.
The West agreed to Israel creating an apartheid road system and a network of checkpoints that kept Palestinians confined to ever-shrinking ghettoes, and building walls around Palestinian areas to permanently isolate them from the rest of the world.
It allowed Israel to stop Palestinians from reaching one of their holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, on land that was supposed to be central to their future state.
The West kept quiet as Israel besieged the two million people of Gaza for 17 years, putting them on a tightly rationed diet so their children would grow ever-more malnourished. It did nothing — except supply more weapons — when the people of Gaza launched a series of non-violent protests at their prison walls around the enclave, and were greeted with Israeli sniper fire that left thousands dead or crippled.
The West only found a collective voice of protest on 7 October 2023, when Hamas managed to find a way to break out of Gaza’s choking isolation to wreak havoc in Israel for 24 hours. It has been raising its voice in horror at the events of that single day ever since, drowning out 18 months of screams from the children being starved and exterminated in Gaza.
The murder of 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers is a tiny drop in an ocean of Israeli criminality — a barbarism rewarded by Western capitals decade after decade.
This genocide was made in the West. Israel is our progeny, our ugly reflection in the mirror — which is why Western leaders and establishment media are so desperate to make us look the other way. That reflection is too much for anyone with a soul to bear.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and media critic, and author of many books about Palestine. He is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the Middle East Eye and the author’s blog with permission.
The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulleduncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.
The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.
That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.
“It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”
He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.
Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”
But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.
“6:08 p.m.”
Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood.
On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.
In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs that repeatedly fails, or being shot to death isn’t much of a choice.
This is especially true because despite Sigmon’s legal team’s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.
Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.
Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 — three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner’s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful and frequently botched methods of execution.
On April 11, Mikal Mahdi is set to be the second man executed by firing squad in the state’s history. Mahdi was accused of multiple killings, including the murder of a police officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004, but his attorneys argue that he never should have been given the death penalty because his extensive history of abuse, mental illness, and trauma wasn’t properly presented to the judge. They also argue that since his sentencing, society has gained a deeper understanding of how these issues impact decision-making.
One of his attorneys, David Weiss, noted that since his arrest at the age of 21, Mahdi has become practically a different person. Weiss said that Mahdi loves to read nonfiction, keep up with current events, and even paint for his fellow death-row inmates upon request.
“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person.”
“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person,” said Weiss. “And you see that a lot in capital cases where people get older, oftentimes in cases like Mikal’s where people were very young at the time that their crimes were committed, they changed a tremendous amount over the years in prison.”
There are parallels between Mahdi’s story and Sigmon’s. Both men suffered from unaddressed trauma, and both appear to have changed dramatically as the years stretched on with them behind bars.
Sigmon had always been a deeply religious man. “He expressed deep remorse at his jury trial, and he arrived on death row and just threw himself into study and prayer,” said King. “He was spending a lot of time trying to work toward some redemption through repentance and also an understanding of his faith.”
King said that he served as a sort of unofficial chaplain for his fellow death-row members, who he called “brothers.” For his last meal, he’d even requested three buckets of original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with his “brothers.” His request was ultimately denied.
As for Mahdi, his request for mercy is still ongoing.
Attorneys for Mahdi note that at his original trial, the arguments made in favor of a life sentence over the death penalty only lasted for 30 minutes, which couldn’t begin to cover the lifetime of trauma Mahdi suffered. As a young child, his mother was forced to leave after suffering abuse at the hands of his father. From there, his life continued to get worse. His father pulled him from school in fifth grade. Mahdi was in and out of juvenile facilities and prison, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, up until his final arrest at 21.
The fact that this wasn’t properly explained to the judge at the time is at the heart of Mahdi’s case. “This goes well beyond a typical claim about ineffective assistance of counsel and was just really an egregious miscarriage of justice,” said Weiss.
In Sigmon’s final words, read aloud by King, he prayed for a world where Mahdi and his other brothers on death row would never have to die the way he did.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote, “and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty.”
The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulleduncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.
The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.
That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.
“It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”
He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.
Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”
But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.
“6:08 p.m.”
Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood.
On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.
In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs that repeatedly fails, or being shot to death isn’t much of a choice.
This is especially true because despite Sigmon’s legal team’s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.
Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.
Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 — three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner’s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful and frequently botched methods of execution.
On April 11, Mikal Mahdi is set to be the second man executed by firing squad in the state’s history. Mahdi was accused of multiple killings, including the murder of a police officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004, but his attorneys argue that he never should have been given the death penalty because his extensive history of abuse, mental illness, and trauma wasn’t properly presented to the judge. They also argue that since his sentencing, society has gained a deeper understanding of how these issues impact decision-making.
One of his attorneys, David Weiss, noted that since his arrest at the age of 21, Mahdi has become practically a different person. Weiss said that Mahdi loves to read nonfiction, keep up with current events, and even paint for his fellow death-row inmates upon request.
“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person.”
“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person,” said Weiss. “And you see that a lot in capital cases where people get older, oftentimes in cases like Mikal’s where people were very young at the time that their crimes were committed, they changed a tremendous amount over the years in prison.”
There are parallels between Mahdi’s story and Sigmon’s. Both men suffered from unaddressed trauma, and both appear to have changed dramatically as the years stretched on with them behind bars.
Sigmon had always been a deeply religious man. “He expressed deep remorse at his jury trial, and he arrived on death row and just threw himself into study and prayer,” said King. “He was spending a lot of time trying to work toward some redemption through repentance and also an understanding of his faith.”
King said that he served as a sort of unofficial chaplain for his fellow death-row members, who he called “brothers.” For his last meal, he’d even requested three buckets of original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with his “brothers.” His request was ultimately denied.
As for Mahdi, his request for mercy is still ongoing.
Attorneys for Mahdi note that at his original trial, the arguments made in favor of a life sentence over the death penalty only lasted for 30 minutes, which couldn’t begin to cover the lifetime of trauma Mahdi suffered. As a young child, his mother was forced to leave after suffering abuse at the hands of his father. From there, his life continued to get worse. His father pulled him from school in fifth grade. Mahdi was in and out of juvenile facilities and prison, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, up until his final arrest at 21.
The fact that this wasn’t properly explained to the judge at the time is at the heart of Mahdi’s case. “This goes well beyond a typical claim about ineffective assistance of counsel and was just really an egregious miscarriage of justice,” said Weiss.
In Sigmon’s final words, read aloud by King, he prayed for a world where Mahdi and his other brothers on death row would never have to die the way he did.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote, “and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty.”
Environmental justice efforts at the 10 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional offices have stopped and employees have been placed on administrative leave, per an announcement from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin last month. Former EPA employees involved with environmental justice work across the country say rural communities will suffer as a result.
Before being shuttered in early March, the EPA’s environmental justice arm was aimed at making sure communities were being treated fairly and receiving their due protection under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to the EPA administrator under the Biden administration, told the Daily Yonder that this work had big implications for rural places since there are pollution concerns in rural areas across the country.
“EPA was very focused on making sure that not just on the regulatory side, but also on the investment side, we were pushing resources into rural communities,” said Hoover.
According to Hoover, most of the pollution challenges the U.S. faces are not new. He said that the employees, now on leave, who staffed the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were deeply knowledgeable on the issues affecting communities in their regions — issues that can go on for decades. Hoover said he worries about recent changes to the agency under the Trump administration, which also include a series of deregulatory actions and a proposed 65 percent budget cut.
“I trust that the great folks at EPA who remain will still try valiantly to fill those gaps, but the reality is that this administration is pushing to cut EPA’s budget, pushing employees to leave, and that’s going to restrict EPA’s ability to help rural communities tackle their most significant pollution challenges,” Hoover said.
One rural community that has faced years of environmental challenges is where Sherri White-Williamson lives in rural Sampson County, North Carolina. In 2021, the county’s landfill ranked second on the list of highest methane emitters in the U.S. The county is also the second-largest producer of hogs nationwide, and in 2022, it accounted for nearly three percent of all U.S. hog sales.
The hog industry is known for its pollution from open waste storage pits that emit toxic chemicals into nearby neighborhoods. For years, concerns about North Carolina’s hog industry have centered on the disproportionate harm that its pollution does to low-income communities and communities of color since hog farms frequently locate their operations adjacent to such communities in rural counties.
White-Williamson is also an EPA veteran. She worked on environmental justice initiatives at the agency’s Washington, D.C., office for over a decade before moving back home to southeastern North Carolina. She is now the executive director of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN, which she founded in Sampson County in 2020 to empower her neighbors amidst environmental challenges like those wrought by the hog farms and the landfill.
In her early work with EJCAN, White-Williamson said she noticed that conversations about environmental justice often centered on urban areas. Since then, White-Williamson said she has focused on educating the public about what environmental justice looks like in rural communities.
“A lot of our issues have to do with what the cities don’t want or dispose of will end up in our communities,” said White-Williamson. “The pollution, the pesticides, the remnants of the food processing all ends up or stays here while all of the nice, clean, freshly prepared product ends up in a local urban grocery store somewhere.”
Another misconception about environmental justice, according to White-Williamson, is that it exists exclusively to serve communities of color. During her time at the EPA, White-Williamson said she spent time in communities with all kinds of racial demographics while working on environmental justice initiatives.
“I spent a lot of time in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, and places where the populations aren’t necessarily of color, but they are poor-income or low-income places where folks do not have access to the levers of power,” White-Williamson said.
When pollution impacts local health in communities without access to such “levers of power,” the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were a resource — and a form of accountability. Without those offices, it will be more difficult for rural communities to get the services they need to address health concerns, said Dr. Margot Brown, senior vice president of justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“They’re dismantling the ecosystem of health protections for rural Americans, and by dismantling them, they’ll make them more susceptible to future hazards,” Brown said of the Trump administration’s decisions at the EPA. “It will impair health and well-being for generations to come.”
Brown worked at the EPA for nearly 10 years under President Obama and then under President Trump during his first administration. Her time there included a stint as deputy director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection. She, along with Hoover and White-Williamson, said that community members will likely need to turn to their state governments or departments of environmental quality in the absence of the regional environmental justice offices.
But White-Williamson noted that state governments, too, receive federal funding. Frozen funds across federal agencies and cuts to healthcare programs, including Medicaid, could wind up compounding challenges for rural communities trying to mitigate environmental health impacts.
“The communities that most need the assistance and guidance will again find themselves on the short end of the stick and end up being the ones that are suffering more than anybody else,” White-Williamson said.
Hoover described it as a “one-two punch” for rural communities. On the one hand, he said, rural places are losing access to healthcare facilities because of budget cuts.
“And on the other hand, they are also sicker because the government is no longer stopping polluters from polluting their air and their water.”
Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to a campus gate across from the graduate School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) this week, braving rain and cold to demand the school release information related to the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former SIPA student.
Democracy Now! was at the protest and spoke to Jewish and Palestinian students calling on the school to reveal the extent of its involvement in Khalil’s arrest.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Here in New York City, Jewish students chained themselves to gates at Columbia University on Wednesday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now in an ICE jail in Louisiana.
On March 8, federal agents detained Khalil at his university-owned apartment building, even though he is a legal permanent resident of the United States. They revoked his green card.
I went up to Columbia yesterday and spoke to some of the students at the protest.
PROTESTERS: Release Mahmoud Khalil now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Release Mahmoud Khalil now!
CARLY: Hi. My name is Carly. I’m a Columbia SIPA graduate student, second year. And I’m chained to this gate today as a Jewish student and friend of Mahmoud Khalil’s, demanding answers on how his name got to DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and which trustee specifically handed over that information.
We believe that there is a high chance that our new president, Claire Shipman, handed over that information. And we, as Jewish students, demand transparency in that process.
Protesting Jewish students chain themselves to Columbia gates. Video: Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: What makes you think that the new president, Shipman, gave over his [Khalil’s] information?
CARLY: There was a Forward article with that leak. And there has not been transparency from the Columbia administration to Jewish students, when they claim that they are doing all of this to protect Jewish students.
We would like to be consulted in that process, instead of being spoken for. You know, as Jewish students and to the Jewish people at large, being political pawns in a game is not a new occurrence, and that’s something that we very much are here to say, “Hey, you cannot weaponise antisemitism to harm our friends and peers.”
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about being chained. Are you willing to risk arrest or suspension or expulsion from Columbia?
CARLY: Yeah, I mean, just for speaking out for Palestine on Columbia’s campus, you know that you’re risking arrest and expulsion. That is the precedent they have set, and that is something that we all know at this point.
We are now in a situation where, for many of us, our good friend is in ICE detention. And as Jewish students, we feel we need to do more.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you know Mahmoud Khalil? You said you’re at SIPA. What are you studying there?
CARLY: Yeah, so, I’m a human rights student, and we were classmates. We were classmates and friends. And it’s been a deeply troubling few weeks. And, you know, everyone at SIPA, the students at SIPA, we really are just hoping for his safe return.
For me as a graduate in May, I truly hope we get to walk together at graduation.
AMY GOODMAN: Did he hear that you were out here? And did he send you a message?
CARLY: Yes. So, it has gotten back to Mahmoud that Jewish students are out here chained to the gate, and he did send a message that I read earlier that expressed his gratitude.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me what he said?
CARLY: Yes, I can pull up the message. I don’t want to misquote him. OK.
“The news of students chaining themselves to the Columbia gates has reached Mahmoud in the detention center in Louisiana, where he’s currently being held. He knows what’s happening. He was very emotional when he heard about it, and he wanted to thank you all and let you know he sees you.”
SARAH BORUS: My name is Sarah Borus. I am a senior at Barnard College.
AMY GOODMAN: Why a Jewish action right now?
SARAH BORUS: So, the government, when they abducted Mahmoud, they literally put — Donald Trump put out a post that said, “Shalom, Mahmoud.”
They are saying that this is in the name of Jewish safety. But there is a reason that it is four white Jews that were on that fence or that were on that gate, and that’s because we are not the ones that are being targeted by the government.
It is Muslim students, Arab students, Palestinian students, immigrant students that are being targeted.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you respond to those who say the protests here are antisemitic?
SARAH BORUS: I have been involved in these protests for my last two years here. The community of Jewish students that I have found is one of the most wonderful in my life. To call these protests antisemitic, honestly, degrades the Jewish religion by making it about a nation-state instead of the actual religion itself.
SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. I am here for the same reason.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.
SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?
SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled.
I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences.
And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.
PROTESTERS: ICE off our campus now! ICE off our campus now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Answer our demands now! Answer our demands now!
MARYAM ALWAN: My name is Maryam Alwan. I’m a senior at Columbia. I’m also Palestinian, and I’m friends with Mahmoud. I’m here in solidarity with my Jewish friends, who are in solidarity with all Palestinian students and Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.
We are all here today because we miss our friend, and it’s inconceivable to us that the board of trustees are reported to have handed his name over to the federal government, and the fact that these board of trustees have now taken over the university.
Just yesterday, the University Senate at Columbia released an over 300-page report called the Sundial Report, which reveals that the board of trustees has completely endangered both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students in the name of quashing dissent and cracking down on protests like never before, eroding shared governance, academic freedom.
And so this has been a long-standing process over 1.5 years to get us to the point where we are today, where people are getting kidnapped from their own campuses. And we can’t just sit by and let the federal government do whatever they want to our own university without standing up against it.
So, whatever we can do.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean to you that it’s Jewish students who have chained themselves to the gates?
MARYAM ALWAN: It means a lot to me, especially because of all of the rhetoric that surrounds these protests saying that we’re violent or threatening, when, from day one, I was part of Students for Justice in Palestine when it was suspended, and we were working alongside Jewish Voice for Peace from day one.
The media just completely twisted the narrative. So, the fact that my Jewish friends are still to this day fighting, no matter what the personal cost is to them — I’ve seen the way that the university has delegitimised their Jewish identity, put them through trials, saying that they’re antisemitic, when they are proud Jews, and they’ve taught me so much about Judaism.
So it just means a lot to see, like, the solidarity between us even almost two years later now.
AHARON DARDIK: My name’s Aharon Dardik. I’m a junior here at Columbia. And we’re here to protest the trustees putting students in danger and not taking accountability.
AMY GOODMAN: Why the chains on your wrists?
AHARON DARDIK: We, as Jewish students, chained ourselves earlier today to a gate on campus, and we said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was among the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try and deport him.
AMY GOODMAN: Where are you originally from?
AHARON DARDIK: I’m originally from California, but my family moved to Israel-Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: And being from Israel-Palestine, your thoughts on what’s happening there?
AHARON DARDIK: There’s never a justification for killing innocent civilians and for war crimes and genocide that’s being committed now. And I know many, many other people there who are leftist Israeli activists who are doing their best to end the occupation, to end the war and the genocide and to end Israeli apartheid.
But they need more support from the international community, which currently sees supporting Israel as synonymous with supporting the fascist Israeli government that’s perpetrating this genocide, that’s continuing the occupation.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices from a protest on Wednesday when Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to university gates in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now detained by ICE in a Louisiana jail.
Students continued their action into the early hours of yesterday morning through the rain, even after Columbia security and New York police arrived on the scene to cut the chains and forcibly remove protesters.
Special thanks to Laura Bustillos.
Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.
Eight international students at Arizona State University have had their visas revoked amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and a crackdown on students expressing their political views.
An ASU spokesperson confirmed Wednesday in an email to Arizona Luminaria that the students’ visas were revoked recently — in the first two days of April and in late March.
Little more is publicly known about who the students are or why their visas were revoked.
The ASU spokesperson wouldn’t comment on whether any of the students who had their visas revoked have been arrested.
“The only thing we can tell you at this time is that eight out of our 15,100 international students have had their visas revoked. These were not protest related,” the spokesperson wrote.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late last month that more than 300 visas, primarily student visas, have been recently revoked by the State Department.
“No one has a right to a visa. These are things that we decide,” Rubio said. “We deny visas every day, and we can revoke visas. If you have the power to deny, you have the power to revoke.”
The university spokesperson, repeatedly saying they couldn’t offer specifics, added that “none of the eight students I mentioned previously are from Latin American countries.”
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked.”
Michael Kintscher, an ASU graduate student and president of United Campus Workers of Arizona, also confirmed that their international classmates are being targeted.
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked,” they said.
Arizona Luminaria reached out to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues visas, as well as the State Department for comment. The news organization also asked for the students’ nationalities and why their visas were revoked.
Officials with the federal agencies did not immediately respond.
Citing student privacy protections, Mitch Zak, spokesperson for the University of Arizona, would not say whether any UA students have had their visas revoked.
“UA International Student Services and International Faculty/Scholar Services monitor immigration-related developments and provide students and scholars with updates to ensure they are informed and in compliance with federal regulations,” Zak added.
The UA has recommended that all international students carry a copy of their passport, their visas, and proof of their immigration status on them at all times.
Eight international students at Arizona State University have had their visas revoked amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and a crackdown on students expressing their political views.
An ASU spokesperson confirmed Wednesday in an email to Arizona Luminaria that the students’ visas were revoked recently — in the first two days of April and in late March.
Little more is publicly known about who the students are or why their visas were revoked.
The ASU spokesperson wouldn’t comment on whether any of the students who had their visas revoked have been arrested.
“The only thing we can tell you at this time is that eight out of our 15,100 international students have had their visas revoked. These were not protest related,” the spokesperson wrote.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late last month that more than 300 visas, primarily student visas, have been recently revoked by the State Department.
“No one has a right to a visa. These are things that we decide,” Rubio said. “We deny visas every day, and we can revoke visas. If you have the power to deny, you have the power to revoke.”
The university spokesperson, repeatedly saying they couldn’t offer specifics, added that “none of the eight students I mentioned previously are from Latin American countries.”
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked.”
Michael Kintscher, an ASU graduate student and president of United Campus Workers of Arizona, also confirmed that their international classmates are being targeted.
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked,” they said.
Arizona Luminaria reached out to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues visas, as well as the State Department for comment. The news organization also asked for the students’ nationalities and why their visas were revoked.
Officials with the federal agencies did not immediately respond.
Citing student privacy protections, Mitch Zak, spokesperson for the University of Arizona, would not say whether any UA students have had their visas revoked.
“UA International Student Services and International Faculty/Scholar Services monitor immigration-related developments and provide students and scholars with updates to ensure they are informed and in compliance with federal regulations,” Zak added.
The UA has recommended that all international students carry a copy of their passport, their visas, and proof of their immigration status on them at all times.
Anna Feder worked at Emerson College in Boston for 17 years. For 12 of them, she ran the school’s exhibitions and festivals program and curated the Bright Lights Cinema Series, which screened documentaries about liberation struggles, social justice, and marginalized communities.
According to a civil lawsuit filed by Feder against the college this week, the school administration never interfered with her programming until 2023, when she scheduled a screening of the film “Israelism,” a documentary by Jewish filmmakers about young American Jews coming to reject Zionism. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Emerson leadership pressured Feder to cancel the planned November screening.
Feder agreed to postpone and screened the film in February 2024. She then wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Emerson’s treatment of campus speech about Palestine. And even as a crackdown across the U.S. on all things pro-Palestine got underway, she continued a longtime partnership with the Boston Palestine Film Festival.
Then, in August, Emerson abruptly ditched Feder and her program.
“Emerson terminated Ms. Feder, cancelled the entire Bright Lights program, and barred Ms. Feder from campus,” her lawsuit says.
“We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech.”
Feder’s suit is the first of its kind in thistime of campusrepression. Filed in Massachusetts state court, the suit claims that Emerson violated Feder’s free speech rights and that, while it is a private college, it is nonetheless obligated to uphold First Amendment protections.
Private institutions are not as a matter of course subject to the First Amendment, which protects against government violations. Private colleges are, on the whole, permitted to enact greater restrictions on speech on their premises than public institutions.
Feder’s suit, however, claims that a Massachusetts law, Article 16 of the state’s Declaration of Rights, extends First Amendment protections usually applied to government violations of civil rights to private actors, too — including universities and colleges. (Emerson did not respond to a request for comment about the suit.)
The suit against Emerson is a test case. If successful, Feder’s effort could set a precedent for holding Massachusetts colleges — of which there are many — to legal account for constitutional violations of free speech. A minority of other states, including California, have similar statutes on the books, which could be deployed in a similar vein.
More broadly, Feder’s suit exemplifies ways those facing apparent retribution for pro-Palestine speech on campus have had to seek new ways to contest their school’s actions, including in the courts.
“If we don’t defend our rights vigorously, they will surely be taken away,” said Feder.
“It’s a scary time to be public in this way, but it’s also the highest expression of my Jewish values,” she said. “We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech — particularly on college campuses.”
Not a Budget Issue
Emerson claimed, according to Feder’s lawsuit, that it was terminating Feder’s position and canceling the Bright Lights program for budgetary reasons.
The suit directly challenges that claim: “The Bright Lights series was a very inexpensive program in comparison with other non-academic programs that were not cancelled, and Ms. Feder had recently cut the program budget even further.”
The lawsuit also notes that the series “was an extremely popular program and core to Emerson’s academic programs.” Forty percent of Emerson undergraduates are enrolled in the Visual and Media Arts department, to which the film series was consistently relevant, the suit says.
Other details in the suit suggest the termination was not a normal layoff over budget concerns.
Feder was, due to provisions in her union contract, employed for 60 days after Emerson announced her termination. During that time, she was banned from campus and told she would be fired “for cause” if she made public statements about the Bright Lights series. Feder said that she had never previously heard of such requirements during a laid-off employee’s notice period.
According to Feder’s lawsuit, she was not laid off but terminated “for asserting her legally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression.” That speech involved screening an Israel-critical film and “support for Palestinians and student activism in support of the Palestinian cause,” she claims.
“We are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
“Our film has played at hundreds of campuses in the U.S., is made by Emmy and Peabody-winning Jewish filmmakers, won the audience award for best documentary at the U.S.’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and tells what is arguably the defining story of American Jews in our time,” said Erin Axelman, the co-director of “Israelism.”
“Yet because our film is critical of Israel,” Axelman said, “we are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
Axelman noted that polling from the Israeli government showed over 40 percent of American Jewish teenagers believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
“Emerson’s behavior is pathetic, and history will judge them for it,” they added. “We stand with Anna.”
New Approach to Free Speech
If Feder’s attorneys can establish in court that the Massachusetts free speech statute applies to Emerson’s actions, it could spur the use of the law by other faculty, staff, and students in the state who believe their freedom of speech has been violated by private colleges retaliating against pro-Palestine activism.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the state’s Supreme Court has not yet decided whether private colleges and universities are covered by Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
Schools have been sued under the act before. Emerson itself faced a lawsuit in 1989 from a professor who claimed she was denied a promotion and tenure on the basis of her expression of her political beliefs. The case was settled out of court, but an initial ruling from a judge clarified that the case had merit.
There are reasons to suspect that Emerson may not be held to account. Over the last 18 months, numerous public universities, which are unambiguously beholden to the First Amendment, have readily seen Palestine student activists arrested, speakers canceled, and faculty terminated.
Even if Feder’s suit does not lead to a ruling that private colleges must uphold First Amendment free speech standards in Massachusetts, the case is nonetheless an effort to hold Emerson responsible for its treatment of Palestine solidarity speech — to, at the very least, have to face a legal challenge. For the most part, schools have only shown a readiness to respond to pressures from pro-Israel groups and their allies in government.
Schools around the country have already faced a host of federal civil suits from individuals and groups under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits against discrimination based on shared ancestry.
The vast majority of these cases have been cases of alleged antisemitism, and schools including Columbia, Harvard, and New York University have reached settlements with student plaintiffs for monetary sums and agreements to change school policies, purportedly around combating antisemitism.
These legal remedies have, in certain cases, involved the further erosion of distinctions between anti-Zionist expression and antisemitism in campus disciplinary policies and conduct codes.
Harvard, for example, agreed to adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism to deploy in its disciplinary processes as a part of settlement agreements. The IHRA definition, which has been used to include criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism, was officially embraced by the Biden administration and, in turn, the Trump administration has used the expansive view of antisemitism for its own political attacks.
Meanwhile, there have been a smaller number of lawsuits against universities for their treatment of pro-Palestine students or for discrimination against Muslim and Arab students. Pro-Palestine students, for instance, sued Columbia in February for alleged Title VI violations.
Already a “Chilling Effect”
At a time when the Trump administration is targeting Palestine solidarity activists for deportation, and right-wing doxing carries higher risks than ever, there are a number of reasons why individual students, staff, and faculty members might fear coming forward as named plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Other burdens, like expense, can also make the courts a difficult route for anti-repression work. Feder, for example, has launched a fundraiser for her legal costs.
“There are not many available resources,” said Yaman Salahi, an attorney who focuses on corporate and government misconduct. “Second, whoever would come forward as a potential plaintiff is exposing themselves to a very high risk of retaliation from employers or future employers or future schools.”
Salahi said that a “chilling effect” was already present.
“This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t come forward. It’s very important that they do. But it does require being thoughtful and strategic,” Salahi said. “I do think that without more and more test cases to try to hold firm on what is supposed to be protected expression, we are going to see a pretty troubling slide in what those freedoms look like.”
Anna Feder worked at Emerson College in Boston for 17 years. For 12 of them, she ran the school’s exhibitions and festivals program and curated the Bright Lights Cinema Series, which screened documentaries about liberation struggles, social justice, and marginalized communities.
According to a civil lawsuit filed by Feder against the college this week, the school administration never interfered with her programming until 2023, when she scheduled a screening of the film “Israelism,” a documentary by Jewish filmmakers about young American Jews coming to reject Zionism. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Emerson leadership pressured Feder to cancel the planned November screening.
Feder agreed to postpone and screened the film in February 2024. She then wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Emerson’s treatment of campus speech about Palestine. And even as a crackdown across the U.S. on all things pro-Palestine got underway, she continued a longtime partnership with the Boston Palestine Film Festival.
Then, in August, Emerson abruptly ditched Feder and her program.
“Emerson terminated Ms. Feder, cancelled the entire Bright Lights program, and barred Ms. Feder from campus,” her lawsuit says.
“We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech.”
Feder’s suit is the first of its kind in thistime of campusrepression. Filed in Massachusetts state court, the suit claims that Emerson violated Feder’s free speech rights and that, while it is a private college, it is nonetheless obligated to uphold First Amendment protections.
Private institutions are not as a matter of course subject to the First Amendment, which protects against government violations. Private colleges are, on the whole, permitted to enact greater restrictions on speech on their premises than public institutions.
Feder’s suit, however, claims that a Massachusetts law, Article 16 of the state’s Declaration of Rights, extends First Amendment protections usually applied to government violations of civil rights to private actors, too — including universities and colleges. (Emerson did not respond to a request for comment about the suit.)
The suit against Emerson is a test case. If successful, Feder’s effort could set a precedent for holding Massachusetts colleges — of which there are many — to legal account for constitutional violations of free speech. A minority of other states, including California, have similar statutes on the books, which could be deployed in a similar vein.
More broadly, Feder’s suit exemplifies ways those facing apparent retribution for pro-Palestine speech on campus have had to seek new ways to contest their school’s actions, including in the courts.
“If we don’t defend our rights vigorously, they will surely be taken away,” said Feder.
“It’s a scary time to be public in this way, but it’s also the highest expression of my Jewish values,” she said. “We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech — particularly on college campuses.”
Not a Budget Issue
Emerson claimed, according to Feder’s lawsuit, that it was terminating Feder’s position and canceling the Bright Lights program for budgetary reasons.
The suit directly challenges that claim: “The Bright Lights series was a very inexpensive program in comparison with other non-academic programs that were not cancelled, and Ms. Feder had recently cut the program budget even further.”
The lawsuit also notes that the series “was an extremely popular program and core to Emerson’s academic programs.” Forty percent of Emerson undergraduates are enrolled in the Visual and Media Arts department, to which the film series was consistently relevant, the suit says.
Other details in the suit suggest the termination was not a normal layoff over budget concerns.
Feder was, due to provisions in her union contract, employed for 60 days after Emerson announced her termination. During that time, she was banned from campus and told she would be fired “for cause” if she made public statements about the Bright Lights series. Feder said that she had never previously heard of such requirements during a laid-off employee’s notice period.
According to Feder’s lawsuit, she was not laid off but terminated “for asserting her legally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression.” That speech involved screening an Israel-critical film and “support for Palestinians and student activism in support of the Palestinian cause,” she claims.
“We are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
“Our film has played at hundreds of campuses in the U.S., is made by Emmy and Peabody-winning Jewish filmmakers, won the audience award for best documentary at the U.S.’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and tells what is arguably the defining story of American Jews in our time,” said Erin Axelman, the co-director of “Israelism.”
“Yet because our film is critical of Israel,” Axelman said, “we are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
Axelman noted that polling from the Israeli government showed over 40 percent of American Jewish teenagers believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
“Emerson’s behavior is pathetic, and history will judge them for it,” they added. “We stand with Anna.”
New Approach to Free Speech
If Feder’s attorneys can establish in court that the Massachusetts free speech statute applies to Emerson’s actions, it could spur the use of the law by other faculty, staff, and students in the state who believe their freedom of speech has been violated by private colleges retaliating against pro-Palestine activism.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the state’s Supreme Court has not yet decided whether private colleges and universities are covered by Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
Schools have been sued under the act before. Emerson itself faced a lawsuit in 1989 from a professor who claimed she was denied a promotion and tenure on the basis of her expression of her political beliefs. The case was settled out of court, but an initial ruling from a judge clarified that the case had merit.
There are reasons to suspect that Emerson may not be held to account. Over the last 18 months, numerous public universities, which are unambiguously beholden to the First Amendment, have readily seen Palestine student activists arrested, speakers canceled, and faculty terminated.
Even if Feder’s suit does not lead to a ruling that private colleges must uphold First Amendment free speech standards in Massachusetts, the case is nonetheless an effort to hold Emerson responsible for its treatment of Palestine solidarity speech — to, at the very least, have to face a legal challenge. For the most part, schools have only shown a readiness to respond to pressures from pro-Israel groups and their allies in government.
Schools around the country have already faced a host of federal civil suits from individuals and groups under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits against discrimination based on shared ancestry.
The vast majority of these cases have been cases of alleged antisemitism, and schools including Columbia, Harvard, and New York University have reached settlements with student plaintiffs for monetary sums and agreements to change school policies, purportedly around combating antisemitism.
These legal remedies have, in certain cases, involved the further erosion of distinctions between anti-Zionist expression and antisemitism in campus disciplinary policies and conduct codes.
Harvard, for example, agreed to adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism to deploy in its disciplinary processes as a part of settlement agreements. The IHRA definition, which has been used to include criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism, was officially embraced by the Biden administration and, in turn, the Trump administration has used the expansive view of antisemitism for its own political attacks.
Meanwhile, there have been a smaller number of lawsuits against universities for their treatment of pro-Palestine students or for discrimination against Muslim and Arab students. Pro-Palestine students, for instance, sued Columbia in February for alleged Title VI violations.
Already a “Chilling Effect”
At a time when the Trump administration is targeting Palestine solidarity activists for deportation, and right-wing doxing carries higher risks than ever, there are a number of reasons why individual students, staff, and faculty members might fear coming forward as named plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Other burdens, like expense, can also make the courts a difficult route for anti-repression work. Feder, for example, has launched a fundraiser for her legal costs.
“There are not many available resources,” said Yaman Salahi, an attorney who focuses on corporate and government misconduct. “Second, whoever would come forward as a potential plaintiff is exposing themselves to a very high risk of retaliation from employers or future employers or future schools.”
Salahi said that a “chilling effect” was already present.
“This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t come forward. It’s very important that they do. But it does require being thoughtful and strategic,” Salahi said. “I do think that without more and more test cases to try to hold firm on what is supposed to be protected expression, we are going to see a pretty troubling slide in what those freedoms look like.”
Residents of an informal Port Moresby settlement that was razed following the gang rape and murder of a woman by 20 men say they are being unfairly punished by Papua New Guinea authorities over alleged links to the crime.
Human rights advocates and the UN have condemned the killing but warned the eviction by police has raised serious concerns about collective punishment, violations of national law, police misconduct and governance failures.
A community spokesman said more than 500 people living at the settlement at the capital’s Baruni rubbish dump were forcibly evicted by the police in response to the killing of 32-year-old Margaret Gabriel on February 15.
Port Moresby newspapers reported the gang rape and murder by 20 men of 32-year-old Margaret Gabriel . . . “Barbaric”, said the Post-Courier in a banner headline. Image: BenarNews
Authorities accuse the settlement residents, who are primarily migrants from the Goilala district in Central Province, of harboring some of the men involved in her murder.
Prime Minister James Marape condemned Gabriel’s death as “inhuman, barbaric” and a “defining moment for our nation to unite against crime, to take a stand against violence”, the day after the attack.
He assured every effort would be made to prosecute those responsible and his “unwavering support” for the removal of settlements like Baruni, calling them “breeding grounds for criminal elements who terrorise innocent people.”
Gabriel was one of three women killed in the capital that week.
Charged with rape, murder
Four men from Goilala district and two from Enga province, all aged between 18 and 29, appeared in a Port Moresby court on Monday on charges of her rape and murder.
The case has again put a spotlight again on gender-based violence in PNG and renewed calls for the government to find a long-term solution to Port Moresby’s impoverished settlements.
Dozens of families, some of whom have lived in the Baruni settlement for more than 40 years, were forced out of their homes on February 22 and are now sleeping under blue tarpaulins at a school sports oval on the outskirts of the capital.
Spokesman for the evicted Baruni residents, Peter Laiam . . . “My people are innocent.” Image: Harlyne Joku/Benar News
“My people are innocent,” Peter Laiam, a community spokesman and school caretaker, told BenarNews, adding that police continued to harass the community at their new location.
“They told me I had to move these people out in two weeks’ time or they will shoot us.”
Laiam said a further six men from the settlement were suspected of involvement in Gabriel’s death, but had not been charged, and the community has fully cooperated with police on the matter, including naming the suspects.
Authorities however were treating the entire population as “trouble makers,” Laiam added.
“They also took cash and building materials like corrugated iron roofing for themselves” he said.
No police response
Senior police in Port Moresby did not respond to ongoing requests from BenarNews for reaction to the allegations.
Assistant Commissioner Benjamin Turi last week thanked the evicted settlers for information that led to the arrest of six suspects, The National newspaper reported.
Police Minister Peter Tsiamalili Junior defended the eviction at Baruni last month, telling EMTV News it was lawful and the settlement was on state-owned land.
Bare land left after homes in the Baruni settlement village were flattened by bulldozers at Port Moresby, PNG. Image: Harlyne Joku/Benar News
Police used excavators and other heavy machinery to tear down houses at the Baruni settlement, with images showing some buildings on fire.
Residents say the resettlement site in Laloki lacks adequate water, sanitation and other facilities.
“They are running out of food,” Laiam said. “Last weekend they were washed out by the rain and their food supplies were finished.”
Separated from their gardens and unable to sell firewood, the families are surviving on food donations from local authorities, he said.
Human rights critics
The evictions have been criticised by human rights advocates, including Peterson Magoola, the UN Women Representative for PNG.
“We strongly condemn all acts of sexual and gender-based violence and call for justice for the victim,” he said in a statement last month.
“At the same time, collective punishment, forced evictions, and destruction of homes violate fundamental human rights and disproportionately harm vulnerable members of the community.”
The evicted families living in tents at Laloki St Paul’s Primary School, on the outskirts of Port Moresby, PNG. Image: Harlyne Joku/Benar News
Melanesian Solidarity, a local nonprofit, called on the government to ensure justice for both the murder victim and displaced families.
It said the evictions might have contravened international treaties and domestic laws that protect against unlawful property deprivation and mandate proper legal procedures for relocation.
The Baruni settlement, which is home primarily to migrants from Goilala district, was established with consent on the customary land of the Baruni people during the colonial era, according to Laiam.
Central Province Governor Rufina Peter defended the evicted settlers on national broadcaster NBC on February 20, and their contribution to the national capital.
“The Goilala people were here during pre-independence time. They are the ones who were the bucket carriers,” she said.
‘Knee jerk’ response
She also criticised the eviction by police as “knee jerk” and raised human rights concerns.
The Goilala community in Central Province, 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the capital, was the center of controversy in January when a trophy video of butchered body parts being displayed by a gang went viral, attracted erroneous ‘cannibalism’ reportage by the local media and sparked national and international condemnation.
The evictions at Baruni have touched off again a complex debate about crime and housing in PNG, the Pacific’s most populous nation.
Informal settlements have mushroomed in Port Moresby as thousands of people from the countryside migrate to the city in search of employment.
Critics say the impoverished settlements are unfit for habitation, contribute to the city’s frequent utility shortages, and harbour criminals.
Mass evictions have been ordered before, but the government has failed to enact any meaningful policies to address their rapid growth across the city.
While accurate population data is hard to find in PNG, the United Nations Population Fund estimates that the number of people living in Port Moresby is about 513,000.
Lack basic infrastructure
At least half of them are thought to live in informal settlements, which lack basic infrastructure like water, electricity and sewerage, according to 2022 research by the PNG National Research Institute.
A shortage of affordable housing and high rental prices have caused a mismatch between demand and supply.
Melanesian Solidarity said the government needed to develop a national housing strategy to prevent the rise of informal settlements.
“This eviction is a wake-up call for the government to implement sustainable urban planning and housing reforms rather than resorting to forced removals,” it said in a statement.
“We stand with the affected families and demand justice, accountability, and humane solutions for all Papua New Guineans.”
Stefan Armbruster, Sue Ahearn and Harry Pearl contributed to this story. Republished from BenarNews with permission. However, it is the last report from BenarNews as the editors have announced a “pause” in publication due to the US administration withholding funds.
A stoush between the Chief Human Rights Commissioner and a Jewish community leader has flared up following a showdown at Parliament.
Appearing before a parliamentary select committee today, Dr Stephen Rainbow was asked about his recent apology for incorrect comments he made about Muslims earlier this year.
“If my language has been injudicious . . . then I have apologised for that,” he told MPs.
“I’ve apologised publicly. I’ve apologised privately. I’ve met with FIANZ [The Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand] to hear their concerns and to apologise to them, both in person and publicly, and I hold to that apology.”
The apology relates to a meeting he had with Jewish community leader Philippa Yasbek, from the anti-Zionist Jewish groups Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu, in February.
Yasbek said Rainbow claimed during the meeting that the Security Intelligence Services (SIS) threat assessment found Muslims posed a greater threat to the Jewish community in New Zealand than white supremacists.
In fact, the report states “white identity-motivated violent extremism [W-IMVE] remains the dominant identity-motivated violent extremism ideology in New Zealand”.
Rainbow changed his position
Rainbow told the committee he had since changed his position after receiving new information.
He said was disappointed he had “allowed [his] words to create a perception there was a prejudice there” and he would do everything in his power to repair his relationship with the Muslim community.
“Please be assured that I take this as a learning, and I will be far more measured with my comments in future.”
But Rainbow disputed another of Yasbek’s assertions that he had also raised the supposed antisemitism of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.
“It’s going to be really unhelpful if I get into a he-said-she-said, but I did not say the comments that were attributed to me about that. I do not believe that,” Rainbow said.
“I emphatically deny that I said that.”
‘It definitely stuck in my mind’ – Jewish community leader Yasbek, who called for Rainbow’s resignation yesterday, was watching the select committee hearing from the back of the room.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, Yasbek said she was certain Rainbow had made the comments about Afghan refugees.
“It was particularly memorable because it was so specific and he said that he was concerned about the risk of anti-semitism in the community of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.
“It’s very specific. It’s not a sort of detail that one is likely to make up, and it definitely stuck in my mind.”
Yasbek said the race relations commissioner and two Human Rights Commission staff members were also in the room and should be interviewed to corroborate what happened.
“There were multiple witnesses. I am concerned that he has impugned my integrity in that way which is why there should be an independent investigation of this matter.”
Alternative Jewish Voices’ Philippa Yasbek . . . “there should be an independent investigation of this matter.” Image: RNZ
Raised reported comments
Speaking to RNZ later, FIANZ chairman Abdur Razzaq said he raised the commissioner’s reported comments about Afghan refugees when he met with Rainbow several weeks ago.
“I raised it at the meeting with him and he did not correct me. At my meeting there were other members of the Human Rights Commission. He did not say he didn’t [say that].”
Razzaq said it was up to the justice minister as to whether or not Rainbow was fit for the role.
“When you hear statements like this, like ‘greatest threat’, he has forgotten it was precisely this kind of Islamophobic sentiment which gave rise to the terrorist of March 15, rise to the right-wing extremist terrorists to take action and they justify it with these kinds of statements.”
“[The commissioner] calls himself an academic, a student of history. Where is his lessons learned on this aspect? To pick a Muslim community by name… he has to really genuinely look at himself as to what he is doing and what he is saying.”
Minister backs Rainbow: ‘Doing his best’ Speaking at Parliament following the hearing, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said he backed Rainbow and believed the commissioner would learn from the experience.
“The new commissioner is doing his best. By his own admission he didn’t express himself well. He has apologised and he will be learning from that experience, and it is my expectation that he will be very careful in the way that he communicates in the future.”
Goldsmith said he stood by his appointment of Rainbow, despite the independent panel tasked with leading the process taking a different view.
“There’s a range of opinions on that. The advice that I had originally from the group was a real focus on legal skills, and I thought actually equally important was the ability to communicate ideas effectively.”
Speaking in Christchurch on Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Rainbow had got it “totally wrong” and it was appropriate he had apologised.
“He completely and quite wrongfully mischaracterised a New Zealand SIS report talking about threats to the Jewish community and he was wrong about that.
“He has subsequently apologised about that but equally Minister Goldsmith has or is talking to him about those comments as well.”
‘Not elabiorating further’
RNZ approached the Human Rights Commission on Thursday afternoon for a response to Yasbek doubling down on her recollection Rainbow had talked about the supposed antisemitism of Afghan refugees in West Auckland.
“The Chief Commissioner will not be elaborating further about what was said in the meeting,” a spokesperson said.
“He’s happy to discuss the matter privately with the people involved,” a spokesperson said.
“Dr Rainbow acknowledges that what was said caused harm and offence and what matters most is the impact on communities. That is why he has apologised unreservedly and stands by his apology.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When Canary Mission, the pro-Israel “blacklist” group, turned its sights on the University of Pennsylvania, it didn’t just perform its usual work of compiling dossiers on students, professors, and campus organizations.
Instead, Penn merited greater attention: Canary Mission produced a highly produced report — one of several dozen “campaigns” the blacklist group has put together since the October 7, 2023, attacks against Israel.
“UPenn’s problem with campus antisemitism gained international attention following the brutal Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023,” Canary Mission, which purports to expose anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic bias, wrote on its page about Penn. “UPenn, along with a number of other prominent Ivy League schools, has been a bastion of SUPPORT for Hamas.”
Canary Mission, whose profiles are reportedly being used by U.S. immigration authorities to target pro-Palestine activists, urges its readers to action on Penn by listing the email and phone number for the school’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson. The page goes on to lay out a vast anti-Israel conspiracy.
Unbeknownst to most of the University of Pennsylvania community, however, the call was coming from inside the house.
A foundation tied to the spouse of a Penn trustee is among a small group of publicly known donors to the secretive Canary Mission.
According to a tax document, the Israel-based Canary Mission received $100,000 in 2023 from the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, whose treasurer is Jaime Peisach, the husband of Penn trustee Cheryl Peisach. (Cheryl Peisach, Jaime Peisach, and Penn did not respond to requests for comment.)
“It’s profoundly inappropriate for a trustee’s spouse to engage in that sort of activity.”
For some members of the Penn community, the Peisach family’s support for Canary Mission — whose online dossiers alleging antisemitism, often compiled with thin evidence, have been criticized as cyberbullying — raises questions about their commitment to the school’s well-being and academic freedom.
“It’s profoundly inappropriate for a trustee’s spouse to engage in that sort of activity,” said Anne Norton, a political science professor at Penn.
“I’d ask if someone is doing harm to the university fundraising, to the work of the faculty, to the students — for such a person to do this,” Norton said, “is reprehensible.”
The Peisach family, whose patriarch Natan made a fortune from textile and cut flowers companies, are funders of a bevy of right-wing pro-Israel causes and have donated prodigiously to Penn. According to tax filings, the family foundation has given more than a million dollars in the last five years to the university.
Canary Gathers Dirt
Canary Mission’s main work is a roster of thousands of dossiers on what it considers to be antisemitic and anti-Israel activists, whether in academia, entertainment, or any other field. The site publishes its targets’ photos, names, and affiliations alongside what it purports to be their antisemitic statements.
While the far-right pro-Israel group Betar has said it passed names of noncitizen pro-Palestine activists to the Trump administration, Canary Mission has said only that it lists its dossiers online.
The site has long been accused of cyberbullying — giving a road map for pro-Israel online mobs to dox and harass supporters of Palestinian rights. Last year, Reuters reported that students and a scholar targeted by Canary Mission subsequently received online messages calling for their expulsion, deportation, rapes, and killings.
Even before the October 7 attacks took pro-Israel doxing to new heights, the group was drawing sharp criticisms from academia.
“Canary Mission is an extremist website that declares that its purpose is to document ‘people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews,’” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote in a June 2023 open letter. “I condemn this targeting of particular students because of their speech with the goal of harming their employment opportunities.”
Canary Mission’s dossiers frequently cover low-level activists based on thin material — much of which, critics allege, conflates criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Many of the activists named by the Canary Mission have done little more than make innocuous pro-Palestinian social media posts or attended protests, only to be attacked as antisemites in Canary posts that quickly become the most prominent Google search result for their names.
Those targeted by Canary Mission have few means of recourse. According to Reuters, lawyers told one student targeted by the group that, because Canary Mission is not registered in the U.S., there was little hope for a lawsuit against the group. Canary Mission itself maintains an “Ex-Canary” page for formerly listed people who it says have renounced antisemitism, though the site offers no transparency on how to become delisted.
“Due to a fear of harassment, Ex-Canaries’ identities may be removed,” the page says. “For inquiries about becoming an Ex-Canary, please visit the Contact Us page.”
The contact page reads only “Down for maintenance.”
Shadowy Israel-Based Group
Little of how Canary Mission operates is publicly known. Its website doesn’t say where the group is based — according to tax filings by U.S. nonprofits that have donated to Canary, it’s in Israel — and lists no officials or employees.
Because it is not a registered U.S. nonprofit, Canary Mission doesn’t disclose any information about its board members or employees.
In 2018, based on two anonymous sources, The Forward reported that Jonathan Bash, a British-born Jerusalem resident, had claimed in private conversations that he ran Canary Mission. (A later report also tied him to another Canary-linked Israeli group.) Bash had also worked with another group with apparent ties to Canary but denied in 2015 the groups were connected.
While some of its known donors are Jewish foundations in the U.S. — at least one pledged to stop donating after its contribution was publicized — several people and family foundations have also been identified. In 2021, Jewish Currents reported that Michael Leven, a former top official at Las Vegas Sands, the casino owned by the late, far-right pro-Israel and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson, gave $50,000 to Canary Mission.
In 2016, as the result of an investigation, pro-Israel donor Adam Milstein was fingered as a major Canary Mission funder. At the time, Milstein denied funding the group.
From Inside the Penn Community
By all outward appearances, the Peisach family is committed to supporting the University of Pennsylvania.
Cheryl Peisach is one of 44 members of the university’s prestigious board of trustees. Another family member is on the board of advisers of the university’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. And, in 2022, a member of the family, most of whom are based in Florida, contributed $1 million to establish a center to connect entrepreneurial students with successful alumni.
Both Jaime and Cheryl Peisach are Penn alums and, according to a school profile of Cheryl, one son graduated from Penn and another is currently attending.
“Actively involved at Penn, Cheryl is Co-President of the Class of 1987 and also serves on the Wharton Undergraduate Executive Board,” says the online profile. “She is currently Co-chair of the programming committee for the Trustees Council of Penn Women, where she has been involved for 8 years.”
With the foundation funding for Canary Mission, however, the Peisach family has also quietly funded another venture impacting the university.
Before the October 7 attacks, Canary Mission was already taking aim at Penn. When Penn scholars and campus groups organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, the blacklist group had already published a standalone webpage titled “Penn Sponsoring Israel Hate Fest” alleging that the event was hosting purported antisemites.
Several Peisach family members signed an open letter addressed to then-Penn President Liz Magill from “alumni and supporters” blasting her decision to go forward with the event.
“The fact that University of Pennsylvania academic departments are co-sponsoring the Festival and its platforming of outright antisemitism without denunciation from the university is unacceptable,” said the letter whose signatures included Natan Peisach, Jaime Peisach, and at least seven other family members.
Magill resisted a pressure campaign from activist groups like Canary Mission and top donors to cancel the festival. She ultimately resigned as president in the wake of the October 7 attacks and a donor’s threat to rescind a $100 million gift to Penn’s prestigious business school, Wharton, if she continued in the job.
Penn’s campus has emerged as a hotbed for activism supporting Palestinian human rights and criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza, but the university has also employed a heavy-handed response to campus protests.
Last year, 12 Penn police officers, wearing tactical gear and armed with assault rifles, raided the off-campus home of several Penn students. The police seized a personal electronic device and took one student for questioning, later revealing they were investigating the vandalism of a Benjamin Franklin statue conducted by pro-Palestinian activists.
Cheryl isn’t the only Peisach tied to both the university and the family’s foundation. Monica Peisach Sasson, who is on the board of advisers of Penn’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy, is also the vice president of the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation. Sasson also signed onto the alumni letter about the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. (Sasson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Sasson is also a board member at Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting Israeli military soldiers and veterans. In the same year the Peisach Family Foundation gave $100,000 to Canary Mission, the group sent $180,000 to Friends of the IDF.
When Canary Mission, the pro-Israel “blacklist” group, turned its sights on the University of Pennsylvania, it didn’t just perform its usual work of compiling dossiers on students, professors, and campus organizations.
Instead, Penn merited greater attention: Canary Mission releases a highly produced report — one of several dozen “campaigns” the blacklist group has put together since the October 7, 2023, attacks against Israel.
“UPenn’s problem with campus antisemitism gained international attention following the brutal Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023,” Canary Mission, which purports to expose anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic bias, wrote on its page about Penn. “UPenn, along with a number of other prominent Ivy League schools, has been a bastion of SUPPORT for Hamas.”
Canary Mission, whose profiles are reportedly being used by U.S. immigration authorities to target pro-Palestine activists, urges its readers to action on Penn by listing the email and phone number for the school’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson. The page goes on to lay out a vast anti-Israel conspiracy.
Unbeknownst to most of the University of Pennsylvania community, however, the call was coming from inside the house.
A foundation tied to the spouse of a Penn trustee is among a small group of publicly known donors to the secretive Canary Mission.
According to a tax document, the Israel-based Canary Mission received $100,000 in 2023 from the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, whose treasurer is Jaime Peisach, the husband of Penn trustee Cheryl Peisach. (Cheryl Peisach, Jaime Peisach, and Penn did not respond to requests for comment.)
“It’s profoundly inappropriate for a trustee’s spouse to engage in that sort of activity.”
For some members of the Penn community, the Peisach family’s support for Canary Mission — whose online dossiers alleging antisemitism, often compiled with thin evidence, have been criticized as cyberbullying — raises questions about their commitment to the school’s well-being and academic freedom.
“It’s profoundly inappropriate for a trustee’s spouse to engage in that sort of activity,” said Anne Norton, a political science professor at Penn.
“I’d ask if someone is doing harm to the university fundraising, to the work of the faculty, to the students — for such a person to do this,” Norton said, “is reprehensible.”
The Peisach family, whose patriarch Natan made a fortune from textile and cut flowers companies, are funders of a bevy of right-wing pro-Israel causes and have donated prodigiously to Penn. According to tax filings, the family foundation has given more than a million dollars in the last five years to the university.
Canary Gathers Dirt
Canary Mission’s main work is a roster of thousands of dossiers on what it considers to be antisemitic and anti-Israel activists, whether in academia, entertainment, or any other field. The site publishes its targets’ photos, names, and affiliations alongside what it purports to be their antisemitic statements.
While the far-right pro-Israel group Betar has said it passed names of noncitizen pro-Palestine activists to the Trump administration, Canary Mission has said only that it lists its dossiers online.
The site has long been accused of cyberbullying — giving a road map for pro-Israel online mobs to dox and harass supporters of Palestinian rights. Last year, Reuters reported that students and a scholar targeted by Canary Mission subsequently received online messages calling for their expulsion, deportation, rapes, and killings.
Even before the October 7 attacks took pro-Israel doxing to new heights, the group was drawing sharp criticisms from academia.
“Canary Mission is an extremist website that declares that its purpose is to document ‘people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews,’” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote in a June 2023 open letter. “I condemn this targeting of particular students because of their speech with the goal of harming their employment opportunities.”
Canary Mission’s dossiers frequently cover low-level activists based on thin material — much of which, critics allege, conflates criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Many of the activists named by the Canary Mission have done little more than make innocuous pro-Palestinian social media posts or attended protests, only to be attacked as antisemites in Canary posts that quickly become the most prominent Google search result for their names.
Those targeted by Canary Mission have few means of recourse. According to Reuters, lawyers told one student targeted by the group that, because Canary Mission is not registered in the U.S., there was little hope for a lawsuit against the group. Canary Mission itself maintains an “Ex-Canary” page for formerly listed people who it says have renounced antisemitism, though the site offers no transparency on how to become delisted.
“Due to a fear of harassment, Ex-Canaries’ identities may be removed,” the page says. “For inquiries about becoming an Ex-Canary, please visit the Contact Us page.”
The contact page reads only “Down for maintenance.”
Shadowy Israel-Based Group
Little of how Canary Mission operates is publicly known. Its website doesn’t say where the group is based — according to tax filings by U.S. nonprofits that have donated to Canary, it’s in Israel — and lists no officials or employees.
Because it is not a registered U.S. nonprofit, Canary Mission doesn’t disclose any information about its board members or employees.
In 2018, based on two anonymous sources, The Forward reported that Jonathan Bash, a British-born Jerusalem resident, had claimed in private conversations that he ran Canary Mission. (A later report also tied him to another Canary-linked Israeli group.) Bash had also worked with another group with apparent ties to Canary but denied in 2015 the groups were connected.
While some of its known donors are Jewish foundations in the U.S. — at least one pledged to stop donating after its contribution was publicized — several people and family foundations have also been identified. In 2021, Jewish Currents reported that Michael Leven, a former top official at Las Vegas Sands, the casino owned by the late, far-right pro-Israel and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson, gave $50,000 to Canary Mission.
In 2016, as the result of an investigation, pro-Israel donor Adam Milstein was fingered as a major Canary Mission funder. At the time, Milstein denied funding the group.
From Inside the Penn Community
By all outward appearances, the Peisach family is committed to supporting the University of Pennsylvania.
Cheryl Peisach is one of 44 members of the university’s prestigious board of trustees. Another family member is on the board of advisers of the university’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. And, in 2022, a member of the family, most of whom are based in Florida, contributed $1 million to establish a center to connect entrepreneurial students with successful alumni.
Both Jaime and Cheryl Peisach are Penn alums and, according to a school profile of Cheryl, one son graduated from Penn and another is currently attending.
“Actively involved at Penn, Cheryl is Co-President of the Class of 1987 and also serves on the Wharton Undergraduate Executive Board,” says the online profile. “She is currently Co-chair of the programming committee for the Trustees Council of Penn Women, where she has been involved for 8 years.”
With the foundation funding for Canary Mission, however, the Peisach family has also quietly funded another venture impacting the university.
Before the October 7 attacks, Canary Mission was already taking aim at Penn. When Penn scholars and campus groups organized the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, the blacklist group had already published a standalone webpage titled “Penn Sponsoring Israel Hate Fest” alleging that the event was hosting purported antisemites.
Several Peisach family members signed an open letter addressed to then-Penn President Liz Magill from “alumni and supporters” blasting her decision to go forward with the event.
“The fact that University of Pennsylvania academic departments are co-sponsoring the Festival and its platforming of outright antisemitism without denunciation from the university is unacceptable,” said the letter whose signatures included Natan Peisach, Jaime Peisach, and at least seven other family members.
Magill resisted a pressure campaign from activist groups like Canary Mission and top donors to cancel the festival. She ultimately resigned as president in the wake of the October 7 attacks and a donor’s threat to rescind a $100 million gift to Penn’s prestigious business school, Wharton, if she continued in the job.
Penn’s campus has emerged as a hotbed for activism supporting Palestinian human rights and criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza, but the university has also employed a heavy-handed response to campus protests.
Last year, 12 Penn police officers, wearing tactical gear and armed with assault rifles, raided the off-campus home of several Penn students. The police seized a personal electronic device and took one student for questioning, later revealing they were investigating the vandalism of a Benjamin Franklin statue conducted by pro-Palestinian activists.
Cheryl isn’t the only Peisach tied to both the university and the family’s foundation. Monica Peisach Sasson, who is on the board of advisers of Penn’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy, is also the vice president of the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation. Sasson also signed onto the alumni letter about the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. (Sasson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Sasson is also a board member at Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting Israeli military soldiers and veterans. In the same year the Peisach Family Foundation gave $100,000 to Canary Mission, the group sent $180,000 to Friends of the IDF.
Brazen crimes against humanity have become the norm. World powers do nothing in response. At best, they put out weak statements of concern. Now, the US does not even bother with that.
Israel and the US are planning the violent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, knowing full well that no one will stop them.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are sitting on their hands, despite what appeared to be significant rulings last year on Israeli war crimes by the ICC and on the “plausible risk” of genocide by the ICJ.
Israeli anti-Zionist commentator Alon Mizrahi posted on X this week:
“As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since 24 May 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned Rafah action.
“Tens of thousands have been exterminated since then, and hundreds of thousands have been injured. Babies starved and froze to death, and thousands of children lost limbs.
“Not a word from the ICJ. Zionism and American imperialism have rendered international law null and void. Everyone is allowed to do as they please to anyone. The post-World War II masquerade is truly over.”
As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since 24 May 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned…
Under the US Joe Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the smirking US spokesperson Matt Miller would make performative statements about “concern” over the killing of Palestinians with weapons they had supplied. (They would never use a word as clear as “killing”, always preferring the perpetrator-free “deaths”).
Today, under the Donald Trump regime, even the mask of respect for the rituals of international diplomacy has been thrown aside.
This is the law of the jungle, and the winner is the government that uses superior force to seize what it believes is theirs, and to silence and destroy those who stand in their way.
Brutally targeted Last week, a group of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), civil defence and UN staff rushed to the site of Israeli air strikes to rescue wounded Palestinians in southern Gaza.
PRCS is the local branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which, like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), provides essential health services to Palestinians in a devastated, besieged war zone.
Alongside other international aid groups, they have been repeatedly and brutally targeted by Israel.
That pattern continued on March 23, when Israeli forces committed a heinous, deliberate massacre that left eight PRCS members, six members of Gaza’s civil defence, and one UN agency employee dead.
The bodies of 14 first responders were found in Rafah, southern Gaza, a week after they were killed. The vehicles were mangled, and the bodies dumped in a mass grave. Some were mutilated, one decapitated.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said some of the bodies were found with their hands tied and with wounds to their heads and chests.
“This grave was located just metres from their vehicles, indicating the [Israeli] occupation forces removed the victims from the vehicles, executed them, and then discarded their bodies in the pit,” civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, describing it as “one of the most brutal massacres Gaza has witnessed in modern history”.
Under fire: Israel’s war on medics. Video: Middle East Eye
‘Killed on way to save lives’
The head of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office in Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, said: “Today, on the first day of Eid, we returned and recovered the buried bodies of eight PRCS, six civil defence and one UN staff.
“They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives. This should never have happened.”
Nothing happened following previous lethal attacks, such as the killing of seven World Central Kitchen staff on 1 April 2024, exactly one year ago, when the victims were British, Polish, Australian, Palestinian, and a dual US-Canadian citizen.
Despite a certain uproar that was absent when dozens or hundreds of Palestinians were massacred, Israel was not sanctioned by Western powers or the UN. And so, it continued killing aid workers.
Israel declared Unrwa a “terror” group last October and has killed more than 280 of its staff — accounting for the majority of the 408 aid workers killed in Gaza since October 2023.
The international response to this latest massacre? Zilch.
#GAZA – New images emerge from the execution and burial site of 15 Red Crescent and Civil Defense members in Tal al-Sultan, Rafah, southern Gaza Strip
On March 24, the #IDF surrounded the five ambulances and their crew members, handcuffed them, executed them, buried them in a… pic.twitter.com/KM5DLWpfyH
Official silence On Sunday, Save the Children, Medical Aid for Palestinians and Christian Aid took out ads in the UK Observer calling for the UK government to stop supplying arms to Israel in the wake of renewed Israeli attacks in Gaza: “David Lammy, Keir Starmer, your failure to act is costing lives.”
The British prime minister is too busy touting his mass deportation of “illegal” migrants from the UK to comment on the atrocities of his close ally, Israel. He has said nothing in public.
Lammy, UK Foreign Secretary, has found time to put out statements on the Myanmar earthquake, Nato, Russian attacks on Ukraine, and the need for de-escalation of renewed tensions in South Sudan.
His last public comment on Israel and Gaza was on March 22, several days after Israel’s horrific massacre of more than 400 Palestinians at dawn on 18 March: “The resumption of Israeli strikes in Gaza marks a dramatic step backward. Alongside France and Germany, the UK urgently calls for a return to the ceasefire.”
No condemnation of the slaughter of nearly 200 children.
In response to a request for comment from Middle East Eye, a Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “We are outraged by these deaths and we expect the incident to be investigated transparently and for those responsible held to account. Humanitarian workers must be protected, and medical and aid workers must be able to do their jobs safely.
“We continue to call for a lift on the aid blockade in Gaza, and for all parties to re-engage in ceasefire negotiations to get the hostages out and to secure a permanent end to the conflict, leading to a two-state solution and a lasting peace.”
As this article was being written, Lammy put out a statement on X that, as usual, avoided any direct mention of who was committing war crimes. “Gaza remains the deadliest place for humanitarians — with over 400 killed. Recent aid worker deaths are a stark reminder. Those responsible must be held accountable.”
Age of lawlessness The new world order of 2025 is a lawless one.
The big powers and their allies are committed to the violent reordering of the map: Palestine is to be forcibly absorbed into Israel, with US backing. Ukraine will lose its eastern regions to Vladimir Putin’s Russia with US support.
Smaller nations can be attacked with impunity, from Yemen to Lebanon to Greenland (no US invasion plan as yet, but the mood music is growing louder with every statement from Trump and Vice-President JD Vance).
This has always been the way to some extent. Still, previously in the post-war world, adherence to international law was the official position of great powers, including the US and the Soviet Union.
Israel, however, never had time for international law. It was the pioneer of the force-is-right doctrine. That doctrine is now the dominant one.
International law and international aid are out.
In the UK last Thursday, a group of youth activists were meeting at the Quaker Friends House in central London to discuss peaceful resistance to the genocide in Gaza.
Such a police action would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but new laws introduced under the last government have made such raids against peaceful gatherings increasingly common.
This is the age of lawlessness. And anyone standing up for human rights and peace is now the enemy of the state, whether in Palestine, London, or at Columbia University.
Joe Gill has worked as a journalist in London, Oman, Venezuela and the US, for newspapers including Financial Times, Morning Star and Middle East Eye. His Masters was in Politics of the World Economy at the London School of Economics. Republished from Middle East Eye under Creative Commons.
Pro-Palestinian students at a protest encampment at Columbia University in New York City on April 29, 2024.Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty
I’ve lived a lot of life but can’t say I’ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.
On March 14, a day before the story broke of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementto Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.
My body involuntarily began to tremble.
Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had with Mahmoud Khalil six days before, and just as they have attempted to do with other students on Columbia’s campus.
I didn’t leave my apartment for four days.
Dismantling the American Dream
The chaos unfurling at Columbia is no longer about Palestine, Israel, or divestment. And insofar as it ever was, the administration’s ever-tightening grip on Columbia is not about antisemitism — and it is not at Harvard University, where the specter of antisemitism is being used to threaten funding there just as it was at Columbia.
It is about freedom of speech, immigration policy, constitutional equality, police, and control over people’s lives. The crackdown is a declaration about upward mobility and dictating what “opportunity” looks like for different people.
This is about Donald Trump’s systematic and calculated dismantling of the American Dream, encapsulated in a singularly defining moment in American history. It’s about McCarthyist accusations of “antisemitism” being leveraged as a scapegoat to justify Trump’s ruthless and indiscriminate assault on international students.
With the administration now unleashing on Harvard and other schools sure to come soon, we are at a critical opportunity to come up for air and recognize that what is happening here under the auspices of rooting out “antisemitism” is, in fact, an assault on the American Dream. It’s a program that runs counter to the values and liberties Columbia, many other universities, and the country as a whole espouse.
An Immigration Policy of Terrorism
Unlike other forms of violence, terrorism is a tactic intended to rupture society. It is the deliberate use of physical and narrative violence wielded against symbolic victims to coerce, intimidate, and hijack established institutions and policies. Terrorism triangulates violence by targeting innocent victims for the purpose of igniting mass hysteria and chronic fear.
Those four days holed up in my apartment after Noem tweeted a video of me offered a visceral glimpse into the terror that international students at Columbia and beyond experience every day.
For Srinivasan, the line was much more direct: Noem exploited her terror as a marketing ploy to promote a new “self-deportation” app.
Referring to Srinivasan’s harried departure as a self-congratulatory gold star for a successful immigration policy — that is to say, the Trump administration’s immigration policy of terror.
This is the strategy of the federal government, abetted by Columbia, with its constant invocation of the specter of “antisemitism.”
Antisemitism at Columbia
Antisemitism at elite institutions is a very real and reprehensible problem. Yet accusations of “antisemitism” at Columbia now serve as a catch-all cudgel wielded to silence voices of dissent.
Most ironically, this weaponization of the accusation has led to the silencing of Jewish student voices, and disregard for the real issues Jewish students and faculty face.
The Jewish community at Columbia is a tremendous part of our diverse and inspiring, campus life. To use Jews as political pawns is antisemitic. To scapegoat and put a target on their backs is antisemitic.
For then–interim president Katrina Armstrong to offer empty platitudes about supposed values rather than acknowledging how her actions have vilified Jewish students is antisemitic.
This form of antisemitism uses the very real experiences of bigotry and racism hurled at our Jewish community as a tool to achieve its own financial interests and autocratic goals.
What is happening at Columbia is not and has never been about protecting our Jewish community.
The Antidote
I was asked to accompany Srinivasan just an hour before I needed to arrive at the airport. I went because she feared being disappeared, apprehended, or detained without anyone knowing where she was.
As a light-skinned U.S. citizen, I carry a learned confidence around authority and law enforcement. Yet, even with such a privilege, anxiety pulsed through my chest as our plane touched down in Canada.
I can’t adequately capture the relief that washed over me as Srinivasan passed through the immigration checkpoint unchallenged. And as I exhaled for the first time in what felt like days, my thoughts drifted to my own family’s story.
During World War II, my Chinese grandfather fled to the United States without “documentation.” Despite the barriers imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was drawn by the promise of the American Dream.
My mother’s family can be traced back to Peregrine White — the first child to be born aboard the Mayflower. These stories run deep in my veins, reflecting both the immigrant experience and the American journey. Together, they illuminate the essence of what we have come to recognize as the American Dream: struggle, sacrifice, and a conviction that the freedom our shores offer is for all.
The Trump administration’s tired strategy is to turn us as Americans against each other in a divisive zero-sum game — to pit Democrat against Republican, the “elite” against the working class, the Jewish community against those calling to end the Palestinian genocide, the immigrant against the citizen.
The antidote is already baked into our national creedos: “We the people.” This is not a description of adversaries. Each of us, immigrants included, are part of a rich and storied history of struggle, sacrifice, and self-determination.
If our democracy is to survive, it’s imperative that we reject the forces of autocracy that seek to divide us and remember that immigrants, perhaps more than anyone, are the lifeblood of the American Dream.
Pro-Palestinian students at a protest encampment at Columbia University in New York City on April 29, 2024.Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty
I’ve lived a lot of life but can’t say I’ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.
On March 14, a day before the story broke of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementto Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.
My body involuntarily began to tremble.
Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had with Mahmoud Khalil six days before, and just as they have attempted to do with other students on Columbia’s campus.
I didn’t leave my apartment for four days.
Dismantling the American Dream
The chaos unfurling at Columbia is no longer about Palestine, Israel, or divestment. And insofar as it ever was, the administration’s ever-tightening grip on Columbia is not about antisemitism — and it is not at Harvard University, where the specter of antisemitism is being used to threaten funding there just as it was at Columbia.
It is about freedom of speech, immigration policy, constitutional equality, police, and control over people’s lives. The crackdown is a declaration about upward mobility and dictating what “opportunity” looks like for different people.
This is about Donald Trump’s systematic and calculated dismantling of the American Dream, encapsulated in a singularly defining moment in American history. It’s about McCarthyist accusations of “antisemitism” being leveraged as a scapegoat to justify Trump’s ruthless and indiscriminate assault on international students.
With the administration now unleashing on Harvard and other schools sure to come soon, we are at a critical opportunity to come up for air and recognize that what is happening here under the auspices of rooting out “antisemitism” is, in fact, an assault on the American Dream. It’s a program that runs counter to the values and liberties Columbia, many other universities, and the country as a whole espouse.
An Immigration Policy of Terrorism
Unlike other forms of violence, terrorism is a tactic intended to rupture society. It is the deliberate use of physical and narrative violence wielded against symbolic victims to coerce, intimidate, and hijack established institutions and policies. Terrorism triangulates violence by targeting innocent victims for the purpose of igniting mass hysteria and chronic fear.
Those four days holed up in my apartment after Noem tweeted a video of me offered a visceral glimpse into the terror that international students at Columbia and beyond experience every day.
For Srinivasan, the line was much more direct: Noem exploited her terror as a marketing ploy to promote a new “self-deportation” app.
Referring to Srinivasan’s harried departure as a self-congratulatory gold star for a successful immigration policy — that is to say, the Trump administration’s immigration policy of terror.
This is the strategy of the federal government, abetted by Columbia, with its constant invocation of the specter of “antisemitism.”
Antisemitism at Columbia
Antisemitism at elite institutions is a very real and reprehensible problem. Yet accusations of “antisemitism” at Columbia now serve as a catch-all cudgel wielded to silence voices of dissent.
Most ironically, this weaponization of the accusation has led to the silencing of Jewish student voices, and disregard for the real issues Jewish students and faculty face.
The Jewish community at Columbia is a tremendous part of our diverse and inspiring, campus life. To use Jews as political pawns is antisemitic. To scapegoat and put a target on their backs is antisemitic.
For then–interim president Katrina Armstrong to offer empty platitudes about supposed values rather than acknowledging how her actions have vilified Jewish students is antisemitic.
This form of antisemitism uses the very real experiences of bigotry and racism hurled at our Jewish community as a tool to achieve its own financial interests and autocratic goals.
What is happening at Columbia is not and has never been about protecting our Jewish community.
The Antidote
I was asked to accompany Srinivasan just an hour before I needed to arrive at the airport. I went because she feared being disappeared, apprehended, or detained without anyone knowing where she was.
As a light-skinned U.S. citizen, I carry a learned confidence around authority and law enforcement. Yet, even with such a privilege, anxiety pulsed through my chest as our plane touched down in Canada.
I can’t adequately capture the relief that washed over me as Srinivasan passed through the immigration checkpoint unchallenged. And as I exhaled for the first time in what felt like days, my thoughts drifted to my own family’s story.
During World War II, my Chinese grandfather fled to the United States without “documentation.” Despite the barriers imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was drawn by the promise of the American Dream.
My mother’s family can be traced back to Peregrine White — the first child to be born aboard the Mayflower. These stories run deep in my veins, reflecting both the immigrant experience and the American journey. Together, they illuminate the essence of what we have come to recognize as the American Dream: struggle, sacrifice, and a conviction that the freedom our shores offer is for all.
The Trump administration’s tired strategy is to turn us as Americans against each other in a divisive zero-sum game — to pit Democrat against Republican, the “elite” against the working class, the Jewish community against those calling to end the Palestinian genocide, the immigrant against the citizen.
The antidote is already baked into our national creedos: “We the people.” This is not a description of adversaries. Each of us, immigrants included, are part of a rich and storied history of struggle, sacrifice, and self-determination.
If our democracy is to survive, it’s imperative that we reject the forces of autocracy that seek to divide us and remember that immigrants, perhaps more than anyone, are the lifeblood of the American Dream.
Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.
The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency. The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries.
The orders — issued by the state of Berlin, whose Senate administration oversees immigration enforcement — are set to take effect in less than a month. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.
The cases are drawing comparisons to the U.S.’s use of deportation orders to suppress social movements.
“If someone is being expelled simply for their political beliefs, that’s a massive overreach.”
“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”
“From a legal perspective, we were alarmed by the reasoning, which reminded us of the case of Mahmoud Khalil,” Gorski said, referring to the Palestinian Columbia University graduate and U.S. permanent resident who was seized from his apartment building on allegations related to campus pro-Palestine activities.
The four people slated for deportation, Cooper Longbottom, Kasia Wlaszczyk, Shane O’Brien, and Roberta Murray, are citizens of, respectively, the U.S., Poland, and in the latter two cases Ireland.
Under German migration law, authorities don’t need a criminal conviction to issue a deportation order, said Thomas Oberhäuser, a lawyer and chair of the executive committee on migration law at the German Bar Association. The reasons cited, however, must be proportional to severity of deportation, meaning that factors like whether someone will be separated from their family or lose their business come into play.
“The key question is: How severe is the threat and how proportionate the response?” said Oberhäuser, who is not involved in the case. “If someone is being expelled simply for their political beliefs, that’s a massive overreach.”
“Impermissible”
Each of the four protesters faces separate allegations from the authorities, all of which are sourced from police files and tied to pro-Palestine actions in Berlin. Some, but not all, of the allegations would correspond to criminal charges in Germany; almost none of them have been brought before a criminal court.
The protests in question include a mass sit-in at the Berlin central train station, a road blockade, and the late-2024 occupation of a building at the Free University Berlin.
The only event that tied the four cases together was the allegation that the protesters participated in the university occupation, which involved property damage, and alleged obstruction of an arrest — a so-called de-arrest aimed at blocking a fellow protesters’ detention. None of the protesters are accused of any particular acts of vandalism or the de-arrest at the university. Instead, the deportation order cites the suspicion that they took part in a coordinated group action. (The Free University told The Intercept it had no knowledge of the deportation orders.)
Some of the allegations are minor. Two, for example, are accused of calling a police officer “fascist” — insulting an officer, which is a crime. Three are accused of demonstrating with groups chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine Will be Free” — which was outlawed last year in Germany — and “free Palestine.” Authorities also claim all four shouted antisemitic or anti-Israel slogans, though none are specified.
Two are accused of grabbing an officers’ or another protesters’ arm in an attempt to stop arrests at the train station sit-in.
O’Brien, one of the Irish citizens, is the only one of the four whose deportation order included a charge – the accusation that he called a police officer a “fascist” – that has been brought before a criminal court in Berlin, where he was acquitted.
All four are accused, without evidence, of supporting Hamas, a group Germany has designated as a terrorist organization.
“What we’re seeing are the harshest possible measures available, based on accusations that are extremely vague.”
Three of the four deportation orders explicitly invoke alleged public safety threats and support for Hamas to argue that the protesters are not entitled to their constitutional rights to free expression and assembly in deportation proceedings.
“What we’re seeing are the harshest possible measures available, based on accusations that are extremely vague and in part completely unfounded,” said Gorski, the lawyer for two of the protesters.
In an unprecedented move, said Gorski, three of the four deportation orders cite Germany’s national pledge to defend Israel – the country’s Staatsräson, German for reason of state – as justification.
Oberhäuser, of the Bar Association’s immigration committee, said Staatsräson is a principle rather than a meaningful legal category. And a parliamentary body recently argued that there are no legally binding effects of the provision.
The distinction, said Oberhäuser, makes the use of Staatsräson in deportation proceedings legally dubious: “That’s impermissible under constitutional law.”
Internal Objections
Internal emails obtained by The Intercept show political pressure behind the scenes to issue the deportation orders, despite objections from Berlin immigration officials.
The battle played out between bureaucrats from the branches of the Senate of Berlin, the state’s executive governing body under the authority of Kai Wegner, the mayor, who is in turn elected by the city’s parliamentary body.
After the Berlin Senate’s Interior Department asked for a signed deportation order, Silke Buhlmann, head of crime prevention and repatriation at the immigration agency, raised objections.
“There are no final criminal convictions to substantiate a sufficiently serious and actual threat.”
In an email, Buhlmann noted her concerns were shared by the immigration agency’s top official Engelhard Mazanke.
Buhlmann explicitly warned that the legal basis for revoking the three EU citizens’ freedom of movement was insufficient — and that deporting them would be unlawful.
“In coordination with Mr. Mazanke, I inform you that I cannot comply with your directive of December 20, 2024 — to conduct hearings for the individuals listed under a) to c) and subsequently determine loss of freedom of movement — for legal reasons,” Buhlmann wrote, referring to the three citizens of EU states as cases A to C. Buhlmann wrote that, though the police reports “suggest a potential threat to public order from the individuals concerned, there are no final criminal convictions to substantiate a sufficiently serious and actual threat.”
The internal objection, known as a remonstration, was quickly overruled by Berlin Senate Department official Christian Oestmann, who dismissed the concerns and ordered to proceed with the expulsion orders anyway.
“[F]or these individuals, continued freedom of movement cannot be justified on grounds of public order and safety, regardless of any criminal convictions,” he wrote. “I therefore request that the hearings be conducted immediately as instructed.”
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Senate Department told The Intercept that the Interior department had authority over the immigration office.
“The Senate Department for the Interior and Sport exercises technical and administrative supervision over the State Office for Immigration,” the spokesperson said. “As part of this role, it holds the authority to issue directives.”
The Senate declined to comment on the specifics of the cases, citing privacy protections. The immigration agency did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
In the end, Mazanke, the top immigration justice official, complied with the directive and signed the order.
The Targets
In Interviews with The Intercept, the four protesters on the receiving end of the deportation orders declined to discuss the specific allegations levelled against them.
All four have, for the meantime, been ordered to leave Germany by April 21, 2025, or face forcible deportation.
The most severe consequences would be faced by Longbottom, a 27-year-old American student from Seattle, Washington, who would be barred by the order from entering any of the 29 Schengen Zone countries for two years after leaving Germany.
Longbottom, who denied any antisemitism, told The Intercept they have only six months left to complete their master’s degree at Berlin’s Alice Salomon University studying human rights work.
“Will I be able to finish my Master’s program here? Where am I going to live?” Longbottom said. “All of these questions are very unclear.”
Longbottom, who is trans, lives in Berlin with their partner, an Italian citizen. The prospect of being separated weighs heavily on them.
“I don’t have anything to start over with,” they said. “As a trans person, the idea of going back to the U.S. right now feels really scary.”
Kasia Wlaszczyk, 35, a cultural worker and Polish citizen, said he never imagined this could happen. He emphasized that allegations of antisemitism are predominantly a racist tactic levelled against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in Germany and the deportation orders reflected an increase in the use of the allegation against anyone standing in solidarity with them.
“Germany weaponizes these accusations,” he said.
Wlaszczyk, who is also trans, hasn’t lived in Poland since the age of ten.
“If this goes through, it would uproot me from the community I’ve built here.” he said.
The sense of an impending loss of community was common among the protesters.
“They’re being used as guinea pigs.”
“My illusion of Berlin has been shattered by the lack of response to the genocide,” said Shane O’Brien, 29, an Irish citizen. The violent repression of Arab communities in Berlin, he said, left him shaken.
After three years in Berlin, the threat of removal now feels like a rupture to Roberta Murray, 31, who is also Irish.
“My life is here,” they said. “I’m not making any plans for Ireland. I believe that we will win — and that we’ll stay. I don’t believe this will hold up in a court.”
Gorski and other attorneys now filed an urgent motion for interim relief alongside a formal appeal challenging the legality of the deportation orders.
He noted that he has worked on similar cases where migration law was used to target pro-Palestinian activists for their speech, but what sets the current four cases apart, he said, is the openness with which Germany’s so-called Staatsräson is used to justify expulsions.
“These people’s criminal records are clean,” Gorski said. Yet the Berlin government appears to be constructing a narrative of “imminent danger” to sidestep due process.
Gorski warned that the cases are a test run for broader repression against immigrants and activists in Germany, not just about four protesters.
Megan Wallace had just been booked at the St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, when she started hearing gossip about its most notorious resident. Michelle Taylor, then 34, had allegedly set fire to her own house in 2018, killing her 11-year-old son. The motive was insurance money. Everyone at the jail seemed disgusted by her. “The guards treated her like shit,” Wallace said.
A mother herself, Wallace vowed to stay away from Taylor. But after a couple of months, Taylor was moved out of solitary confinement and into her cellblock. “The stories I’d heard didn’t add up to how she was in real life,” Wallace said. Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated. Other women at the jail were openly cruel toward her, but she didn’t lash out. “She slept all day and wouldn’t get up for breakfast or lunch.”
Wallace knew how it felt to be judged by people who didn’t have all the facts. She had spiraled into addiction after the sudden death of her husband, culminating in her arrest two days after Christmas in 2022. Prosecutors accused her of drug trafficking, which she insisted was bogus. As Wallace fought her own charges, she started to feel sorry for Taylor. “All she did was cry about her son,” Wallace said. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to live.’”
Wallace eventually opened up to Taylor about losing her husband. They formed a bond that strengthened over time. As Wallace got to know Taylor, she seemed less like a monster and more like a grieving mother who had suffered unspeakable trauma. David wasn’t the only child Taylor had lost. Her middle child, Natalie, who was born with cerebral palsy, died in a tragic accident five years before the fire. News reports about Taylor mentioned her daughter’s death, leading to callous comments online and lurid rumors at the jail. “People said she drowned her daughter in the bathtub and locked her son in a closet and took off the door handle,” Wallace said.
Taylor didn’t talk about the fire in jail. But she’d always sworn she had no idea how it started — she barely escaped herself. Although Wallace had no way to know the truth, it seemed obvious to her that Taylor had loved her children and her home. By the time Wallace saw her own charges dropped in the summer of 2023, she felt certain that the fire had been an accident and that Taylor had been wrongly accused.
Back home, Wallace started reading everything she could about arson cases. She learned about people who had been wrongfully convicted based on junk science. And she discovered that the Florida state fire lab, which examined the evidence in Taylor’s case, had once lost its accreditation after misidentifying gasoline in numerous cases. One name came up over and over again: John Lentini, a renowned Florida fire scientist who had helped exonerate people all over the country. In October 2023 she wrote him an email with the subject line “Please help.”
As it turned out, Lentini had been contacted about the case before, by a defense attorney who no longer represented Taylor. At that time, Lentini was skeptical he could help; there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of arson. According to the lab, a dozen fire debris samples taken from Taylor’s home contained gasoline.
“The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit.”
Although Lentini was a fierce and vocal critic of the lab, he found it hard to believe that it would produce a report containing so many false positives. In a call with Taylor’s new lawyer, he offered to examine the underlying data from the fire debris samples — but he was doubtful it would change much. “If there really was that much gasoline in the house,” he told Wallace, “there is nothing I can do.”
But on January 4, 2024, Wallace received an email from Lentini. “Michelle is not guilty,” it read. “The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit. Every part of the state’s case rests on that.”
Family photographs belonging to the Taylor family, shown after the fire at 1041 Lee St. in St. Augustine, Fla.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
Today the state of Florida is prepared to convict Taylor for killing her son, despite the fact that the only direct evidence of arson has been thoroughly discredited.
More than a year after Lentini raised red flags about the state’s case, writing in an expert report that it is based on “unreliable methodology and incorrect opinions regarding the presence of ignitable liquid residue,” several other leading fire experts have agreed with his conclusions. They include two different lab directors who are also veteran forensic chemists. One of them examined the data from the state lab, while the other retested the carbon strips used to analyze fire debris from the scene. Both recently submitted reports to Taylor’s defense attorney saying there is no evidence of gasoline.
The lab’s conclusions have also been contradicted by two forensic chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who reviewed Lentini’s expert report and agreed in depositions last April that the gasoline findings were unsupported.
The lab has not responded directly to these claims. But in January, the analyst who examined the fire debris evidence in Taylor’s case submitted an amended report backtracking on some of her original findings “due to the re-evaluation of the data.” Four of the samples she previously said were positive for gasoline were now determined to be negative for any ignitible liquid. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a detailed list of comments in time for publication.
Despite the ongoing dismantling of evidence supporting its arson case, prosecutors with the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit have refused to drop the charges against Taylor. They insist she is a habitual liar and a fraud — a mother so diabolical she was willing to set fire to her house with her children inside to “further her lifestyle.” They point to a paper trial that proves her willingness to commit arson “in an attempt to fraudulently collect insurance funds. Her 11-year-old-son … died as a result.” Yet the investigation carried out on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company did not find evidence of arson either. Fire debris analysis conducted at a private lab in the aftermath of the fire revealed no gasoline or other ignitable liquid.
To Lentini and others who have worked on wrongful convictions, the case against Taylor is a version of an all-too-familiar story. In the absence of reliable forensic evidence, prosecutors put together a circumstantial case that can convince a jury a defendant is capable of murder, even if the science does not add up. In cases where a child has died, which are especially emotionally charged, it does not take much to cast parents or caretakers in a suspicious light. Mothers who escape a fire without their children are often judged harshly for that fact alone — and those with a checkered past are easier still to demonize, especially when the state can show that they were guilty of fraud. In the case of Angela Garcia, a Cleveland woman tried three times for killing her daughters in a fire, prosecutors seized on evidence of financial fraud to win a conviction and life sentence despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence of arson. Her sentencing judge accused her of treating her daughters “like coins in a slot machine.”
Out of 26 cases in which the state fire lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.
In Taylor’s case, prosecutors have made clear that they plan to tell the story of a bad mother who senselessly sacrificed her only son for material gain. But that theory eclipses a different story, one with frightening implications for anyone who survives a fire in Florida. According to Lentini, Taylor’s case is the sixth time he has personally seen a misdiagnosis of gasoline by chemists at the state fire lab — and there is reason to believe there are many more. A review of the lab in 2016 by the nation’s leading accrediting body for crime labs found that analysts were using flawed methodology to identify gasoline in fire debris evidence. Out of 26 cases in which the lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.
Yet rather than reconsider its case against Taylor, prosecutors have sought to suppress any reference to the lab’s problematic history when the case goes to trial. “The State respectfully requests that no party or witness in the case be allowed to comment on the prior loss of accreditation by the State Lab,” Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton wrote in a pretrial motion last spring, arguing that it was “not relevant.”
With a trial date set for June, Taylor and her attorney were reluctant to speak on the record about the case. But the likeliest scenario is that neither side will have a chance to tell their story to a jury. After long refusing to consider a plea negotiation for a crime she insists she did not commit, Taylor has been forced to confront the risk of going to trial against prosecutors intent on proving their case with or without reliable evidence of arson. In Florida, a first-degree felony murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. With her next court date set for April 2, a guilty plea to a lesser charge and years in prison may be the best of a bad set of options.
The first 911 call on the night of the fire consisted mostly of harrowing screams. “My house is on fire!” cried Taylor’s 18-year-old daughter, Bailey, wailing that her brother was inside.
The fire was at 1041 Lee St., just east of downtown St. Augustine. On a recording of the call, which was placed at 9:42 p.m. on October 23, 2018, the screaming continues while a 911 operator tries to get information. After two minutes, Bailey says she needs to call her dad and hangs up.
The second 911 call came two minutes later from Heather Anderson, who lived across from the Taylors — the last two houses on a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood just a few miles from the beach.
Taylor had shown up at her door begging for help. There was soot on her face, and she was hysterical. Anderson’s husband raced to the house in search of David. But now the fire was spreading, Anderson said, her voice trembling. She saw the Taylor’s small chihuahua Milo run out of the house. But David was nowhere to be seen.
Taylor had fled the house without her phone or keys. Witnesses described her frantically trying to get back inside. A St. Augustine police officer who was first on the scene tried to ask her questions to no avail. “Due to the emotional state of Michelle and Bailey, I was unable to gather any information in regards to how the fire started or why David was not able to get out,” he later wrote in a report.
Firefighters arrived at 9:49 p.m. Ten minutes later, they found David’s body, lying face down and covered in debris. He was unrecognizable.
Left/Top: Michelle Taylor, photographed by investigators to document her injuries on the night of the fire at 1041 Lee St in St. Augustine, Fla., on Oct. 23, 2018. Taylor’s 11-year-old son David died in the fire. Right/Bottom: The St. Augustine house belonging to Michelle and Dennis Taylor on the night of the fire. Michelle was accused of setting fire to the home to collect insurance money and charged with first-degree felony murder.Photos: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
In Florida, fatal fires are investigated by the state fire marshal’s Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations, which dispatches personnel around the clock. The bureau also sometimes calls upon the ATF to provide additional resources — “an extra shovel,” as the supervising lieutenant said in a deposition in Taylor’s case. That night, the BFAEI called ATF Special Agent Kristie Calhoun, who drove out to the scene from Jacksonville. She would be in charge of determining the cause of the fire.
The Taylors lived in a modern, one-story home with a stone facade. It had an open floor plan, with the kitchen to the right of the entrance and a hallway leading to four bedrooms on the left. Toward the back was the living room and the area most heavily damaged by the fire, which investigators would label the area of origin. The drywall was gone from the walls, and “the entire drywall ceiling had fallen to the floor, exposing the wooden roof structure,” Calhoun wrote in her report. What was left of the insulation was all over the ground.
Around 1:20 a.m., Mason Patrou, a rookie detective with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office tried to interview Taylor at a local hospital, where she and Bailey were being treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation. “Michelle was very hesitant to speak with us and clearly displeased with our presence,” Patrou later wrote.
Until the fire, the evening had not been out of the ordinary. Taylor, who’d recently lost her job as a custodian for the local school board, had a meal with her husband Dennis and their children at Texas Roadhouse. Upon coming home, Taylor briefly ran out to buy lottery tickets. Dennis got a call from a friend who’d shot a deer and wanted help retrieving it; he left around 8 p.m. Taylor and David went to her room to watch TV. At one point, Taylor said she went outside to look for a homework assignment David said he’d left in the car, then settled back into her bedroom, where they watched back-to-back episodes of the sitcom “Mom.”
It was during the second episode that Taylor said she heard the smoke detectors go off. She opened her bedroom door to find thick, dark smoke. “Michelle said her and David went out of her bedroom, banged on Bailey’s door and they all tried to get out the front door but they couldn’t get the door open,” Patrou wrote. “It was so black you couldn’t see anything.” They turned down the hallway “when David went back for the dog.” She lost sight of him. She and Bailey then ran to the spare bedroom and climbed out of the window.
Taylor said she had no idea how the fire started. But there were a few possibilities. “Michelle stated that there was a candle lit on the coffee table, near the couch,” Patrou wrote. Asked if there was anything flammable nearby, “she cited a white runner on the table and the dog, which runs loose and jumps on couch.” There was also an old electric recliner in the living room inherited from Taylor’s grandmother, which plugged into the wall and constantly malfunctioned. Dennis had recently tried to repair the electrical wires, splicing and reconnecting them using heat shrink wrap and a glue gun.
Finally, Taylor sometimes smoked in the house. Although it was unclear whether Taylor was smoking that night, a fire marshal’s detective would report that a lighter and cigarette butt had been found in the debris.
All of these scenarios were consistent with the area of origin. In the back corner of the living room, the couch and the recliner had been almost entirely consumed by the fire, with only their metal frames remaining.
Nevertheless, suspicions of arson had crept in by the time the sun came up on October 24. A K9 handler had swept the home with his accelerant-detecting dog, a black labrador named Fresca, who alerted in five different places. Fire debris samples were collected in each spot, to be examined at the state fire marshal lab, which would determine whether there was proof of an ignitable liquid.
In early November, three samples came back positive for gasoline.
The Florida State Fire Marshal’s office is governed by Florida’s Department of Financial Services, which oversees fraud and fire investigations alike. At the time of the fire, the Chief Financial Officer and fire marshal was Jimmy Patronis, whose most recent annual report boasted “an arrest rate for the crime of arson well above the national average.”
Florida is only one of two states in the country whose fire marshal has its own lab for fire debris analysis. Although numerous agencies are involved in fire investigation, most forensic evidence is processed at the bureau’s state-of-the-art facility in Havana, just outside Tallahassee.
In mid-November, Calhoun and a team of investigators returned to the scene of the fire. For three days they excavated the site, collecting fire debris for additional testing. Seventeen samples were placed into tightly sealed metal cans and sent to the lab.
Most fire debris analysis works roughly like this: Cans are heated in an oven. The resulting vapors are captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can. The strips are then injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The former (GC) separates compounds in a given sample, while the latter (MS) detects the compounds, ultimately producing an electronic signature called a chromatogram. The resulting graph looks like an irregular combination of peaks and valleys, which mark the chemical compounds in the sample. The patterns are compared to graphs of known substances to see if there is a match.
Left/Top: A metal paint can used to collect fire debris samples for testing at the Bureau of Forensic Services lab in Havana, Fla. According to the state, numerous samples contained the presence of gasoline, proving that the fire was arson. Right/Bottom: The front entrance to the Taylor home on the morning after the fire, with a view to the living room in the back of the house. Investigators concluded that the fire started in the living room but that it developed too quickly to be accidental.Photos: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The process is straightforward in theory. But in practice, interpreting the data can be fraught with uncertainty. Modern homes are replete with synthetic materials, which make up everything from shoes to rugs to couch cushions. Many are made from petroleum-based products that share some of the same compounds as ignitable liquids. When these products burn and break down in a process called pyrolysis, the compounds contribute their own peaks to a chromatogram. Because today’s GCMS technology is highly sensitive and capable of picking up trace amounts of material, chromatograms from a fire debris sample are often crowded with detail. One training video by the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida says “finding an ignitable liquid residue in fire debris is like searching for Waldo in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ puzzles.” The difference is that, unlike an ignitable liquid, Waldo is always somewhere to be found.
Gasoline, which is the accelerant most commonly used to commit arson, is a complex mixture that is especially tricky to identify within fire debris. Lab analysts have long abided by specific parameters when examining a sample for gasoline, starting by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios. But the interpretation is ultimately highly subjective.
In a 2019 podcast by Chemical & Engineering News, ATF chemist Michelle Evans said the difficulty of gasoline identification had made her more cautious in her analysis over the years. She told the host she was working on a case where the data was a little too ambiguous. “I think it’s there, but I don’t think I have enough to call it,” she said. “Maybe when I was starting out I might have actually identified gasoline. But in looking at the data, I don’t feel comfortable having to testify to that.”
Among the new samples sent from Taylor’s home to the Florida lab were two different types of vinyl flooring found in the house. A pair of boxes containing the same flooring had been found in the garage, pieces of which were collected as comparison samples. Such samples are key to distinguishing compounds found in synthetic materials from those found in an ignitable liquid. “Comparison samples allow the laboratory to evaluate the possible contributions of volatile pyrolysis products to the analysis,” Calhoun wrote in her report.
Comparison samples, in other words, are supposed to be clean of any ignitable liquid. So when the second set of lab results came back, something was clearly wrong. The flooring found boxed up in the garage had come back positive for gasoline. A third comparison sample, described as “underlayment from hallway closet floor,” also came back positive for gasoline.
Calhoun’s report attributed the false positives on the tiles to “soot staining,” attaching a photo that showed evidence of smoke in the garage. Yet the boxes were barely visible in the picture, let alone the tiles inside. In a deposition, the lab analyst who examined the flooring said she did not recall seeing soot on the comparison samples. Nor did she think that light smoke on the boxes would necessarily contaminate the tiles inside. “I mean I’m not, like, an expert in soot,” she said.
Lentini would later argue that the results from the comparison samples should have invalidated all of the gasoline findings. The soot explanation did not account for the false positive on the third comparison sample, he wrote in his report. What’s more, “if ‘soot’ can cause a false reading of gasoline, that can be applied to all of the debris samples.’”
But Calhoun did not see it this way. In December 2018, she obtained new vinyl tiles matching one of the previous comparison samples and submitted it to the lab. In February 2019, that one came back negative.
By then, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was convinced they had an arson case on their hands. Patrou, the lead detective, saw red flags in the family’s financial records. At the time of the fire, the Taylors had been behind in their mortgage payments. Their bank was threatening foreclosure if they did not pay by early 2019. Despite having enough money in the bank to cover the mortgage, financial records showed that six local churches “had made payments on behalf of the Taylors.”
But even more disturbing were interviews with Dennis’s side of the family, who immediately blamed Taylor. There was bad blood between Taylor and her mother-in-law; the two had almost come to blows on the night of the fire. Patrou wrote that Dennis’s mother told him she believed “Michelle deliberately burned the house down because Michelle didn’t have the money to do what she wanted.” Dennis’s sister agreed.
The investigation into Taylor stretched into 2020, only to be derailed by the Covid pandemic. Calhoun’s final 45-page report was submitted in 2021. It synthesized the findings from the state fire investigators and the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, concluding that the fire could not have been an accident.
It had all happened too fast, Calhoun concluded. A timeline from the night of the fire had been put together through surveillance footage taken from the neighborhood’s security cameras. It showed Taylor going out to her car at 9:33 p.m. Only six minutes later, at 9:39 p.m., video showed smoke coming from the back of the house. The first 911 call came three minutes later. There was too little time between Taylor’s last appearance and the signs of the fire captured on the tape. “An ignition source such as a cigarette or candle scenario would be a slow growing fire,” Calhoun wrote, and if a small fire was already underway before Taylor went to her car, she would have spotted it on her way back to her bedroom.
There were at least some scenarios in which an accidental fire might have quickly overtaken the house. A cluster of living room furniture was near two windows and a pair of French doors — potentially powerful fuel, Calhoun noted. But the gasoline findings rendered other explanations moot. As Calhoun eliminated each accidental cause one by one, she wrote that each was “inconsistent with the presence of gasoline as confirmed by the laboratory analysis.”
In August 2021, Taylor was arrested for felony murder.
Fire investigators once described their work as an art more than a science. The process of determining the origin and cause of a fire relied as much on an investigator’s experience and intuition as on the evidence at the scene. When it came to uncovering arson, many fire investigators falsely believed they could figure out what happened based solely on visual indicators like “pour patterns” — places where an ignitable liquid had supposedly been poured, which caused a fire to burn hotter and faster than normal.
Lentini, who began his career as a forensic chemist before moving into fire investigation, had been trained to look for such signs of arson too. But in 1991, he worked on a case in Jacksonville that dramatically transformed the understanding of fire behavior, revealing how quickly an accidental fire could reach “flashover” — a critical concept often summarized as the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. In the right conditions, a smoldering fire can reach flashover in under four minutes.
Today fire investigations follow the scientific method, as set out by the National Fire Protection Association in NFPA 921: Guide for Fire Investigations. But for those sent to prison based on misconceptions about fire behavior, the advances in the field came too late. The most famous wrongful arson conviction is that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was accused of setting a fire in Corsicana, Texas, that killed his three children. Despite a race by fire experts to prove that his case was based on junk science, Willingham was executed in 2004.
That same year Texas executed Willingham, a fire broke out in Palatka, Florida, killing a woman named Tscharna Hampton. Her boyfriend, Randy Seal, was accused of dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. As in the Willingham case, fire investigators relied on discredited arson indicators. And as with Willingham, the state announced it would seek the death penalty.
“I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline.’”
Like Taylor, Seal was prosecuted in the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Lentini was hired as an expert for the defense. A lab analyst had identified gasoline in numerous samples. But when Lentini received the data, it was way off. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline,’” he said.
Lentini examined the carbon strips used to analyze the fire debris. He found no signs of gasoline. At the trial, he used a PowerPoint presentation to break down the science in the most accessible terms for the jury. “You go down to the gas station, you buy some gasoline, you evaporate it, you run it through your machines, you get a pattern,” he explained. In order to identify gasoline in a sample, “you’ve got to be able to match that pattern.”
“In the early days, the methodology was more or less: ‘The sample displays sufficient similarities to the standard for me to conclude that they are the same,’” Lentini went on. But this was entirely too subjective. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, which laid out criteria for gasoline, starting with a group of five compounds, whose peaks on a chromatogram had to appear in specific proportion to one another. “This is not a suggestion. This is not a guide. This says if you want to call it gasoline, you’ve got to have this stuff.”
While the Florida state lab purported to abide by this rule, known as ASTM E1618, the gasoline results showed otherwise. Not only were the ratios wrong, Lentini testified, but three of the necessary compounds were not present at all. In a deposition, a different expert later described the lab analyst’s approach as “peak pick.” If you zoom in close enough, the expert explained, virtually any chromatogram from a fire debris sample will contain patterns resembling gasoline. “It’s just, Let’s blow it up and let’s see what components show up,” he said.
With no real rebuttal to the chemistry, the prosecutor goaded Lentini on cross-examination, daring him to smell the blue jeans worn by Hampton when she died. “You’re not willing to do it, are you?” he asked. Lentini replied with obvious irritation. “They smell like burnt cloth,” he said. More importantly, “they don’t look like gasoline when analyzed with the gas chromatograph.” The prosecutor replied that jurors could use their “common sense” to conclude that the clothing smelled like gasoline.
Seal was found guilty but avoided the death penalty. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.
The Seal case was the first time Lentini saw the state lab analysts find what he has wryly called “Florida gasoline.” It would not be the last.
One year after Seal was convicted, a fire broke out inside an apartment complex outside Fort Lauderdale. Eleven-month-old Jada Reynolds was found in her crib, dead from smoke inhalation. Her mother, Sasheena Reynolds, had escaped the fire while carrying her 2-year-old son. Witnesses described her panic. “She kept saying, ‘My baby is inside the fire!,’” a neighbor told a reporter.
At first there was an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people went to the baby’s funeral and neighbors raised money for the family. Reynolds’s electricity had been cut off at the time of the fire; she relied on scented candles to illuminate the home, which were believed to have caused the blaze.
But everything changed when the fire marshal lab found evidence of gasoline. Reynolds was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Investigators said they’d suspected the fire was no accident given “how quickly the fire spread and burned.”
Lentini was hired by Reynolds’s defense attorney. The lab results echoed what he had seen in Seal’s case. Rather than face trial, Reynolds agreed to a plea deal and was released from jail in 2013. By then, Lentini had seen false gasoline findings in two other cases.
“I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”
In 2015, Lentini sat down to write a letter to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board. “After several weeks of careful consideration, I have concluded that it is my professional obligation to bring to your attention a serious issue,” he wrote. He warned that the lab had “a continuing laboratory policy of identifying gasoline where none exists, based on a subjective and highly speculative thought process.” Although the lab claimed to follow ASTM E1618 in theory, in practice it deviated completely from the standard. “I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”
There is no federal agency that regulates forensic labs. Accreditation bodies like ASCLD/LAB, which has since been renamed, are private entities whose leadership is closely tied to professional forensic associations and which charge labs to receive accreditation. Although labs must demonstrate certain protocols and best practices to remain in good standing, there is little oversight of the work itself. Indeed, at the time Lentini filed his complaint, the lab’s accreditation had just been renewed.
In January 2016, a team from ASCLD/LAB traveled to Havana, Florida, to visit the lab. It interviewed lab analysts as well as its director, Carl Chasteen. Two months later, reviewers reported their findings. “The interpretation methodology being employed by the laboratory is an undocumented, unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community,” they wrote. The numbers were alarming. “Of twenty-six(26) randomly selected cases in which gasoline or gasoline mixtures were reported, there were fourteen in which the interpretation of the data by the analyst resulted in an unsupported conclusion.”
The lab lost its accreditation as a result of the review. Chasteen appealed the results, writing in a 50-page letter that the review appeared “to repudiate all of our work over the years, our professional reputations, and our personal character.” A new panel of reviewers upheld the decision to revoke the lab’s accreditation.
Lentini considered the lab’s suspension a victory. But it was short-lived. After agreeing to a “corrective action plan,” Chasteen won back its accreditation. He also successfully sought accreditation from a second organization. By 2017, the lab had gone from being mired in scandal to boasting that it was the only public lab in the country dual-accredited by both organizations.
The saga had a critical impact in at least one case, however. The Florida Innocence Project filed a post-conviction appeal in Seal’s case based on the discoveries about the lab. New experts analyzed the evidence and concluded that the findings of gasoline had been wrong. In 2023, prosecutors offered Seal a plea deal and he accepted.
Before his release in 2024, Seal sent Lentini a handwritten note from prison. “I knew you were always right,” he wrote. “The lab was junk, still is. Thank you for what you did for me.”
Last spring I traveled to St. Augustine and drove to the site of the fire. The neighborhood is surrounded by longleaf pines, with modest homes set back from the road on green lots dotted by palm trees. Google Maps had captured the house after the fire, with boarded-up windows and piles of debris on blue tarps on the driveway. But when I arrived at 1041 Lee St., there was nothing but a concrete driveway leading to a gray slab.
Wallace told me that Taylor once described the house as her “dream home.” The family moved there in 2012 from a more rural area, mainly out of necessity. According to Dennis and Bailey, there was a man in the area who was a known pedophile; he had once tried to lure David into his car. “The cops said they couldn’t do anything about it,” Bailey told me. So they decided to move. “My mom and dad said it was to protect us.”
It took them six months to find a place they could afford, according to Dennis. The house on Lee Street was a foreclosure sale, which needed a lot of work. They painted and redid the floors and installed planters, a picnic table, and a bird bath outside. Because her daughter Natalie loved butterflies, Taylor took butterfly lawn ornaments she’d found at Dollar Tree and used them to decorate the entrance to the house.
A photograph of David Taylor on his gravestone at the Craig Memorial Park Mausoleum in St. Augustine, Fla.Photo: Liliana Segura
I met Wallace at a Hampton Inn off I-95. She brought a small stack of papers: police reports and testimonials about Taylor from family and friends, which she had collected for an upcoming bond hearing. They described Taylor as loving and generous to friends and strangers alike. “My mother never got to grieve properly,” Bailey wrote. “She would never hurt anybody, please just let her come home.”
Wallace said Lentini had breathed new life into Taylor’s defense. But she was also frustrated — she could not understand how prosecutors could stick to their case. She’d recently learned that, back in January, Calhoun had forwarded Lentini’s report to two different forensic chemists at the ATF, both of whom had sat down for depositions. One of them took issue with Lentini’s claim that the state lab “routinely identifies gasoline where it does not exist.” But he did not disagree with Lentini’s conclusions about the chromatography data. “The patterns that I’m seeing in the data do not appear to be gasoline to me,” he said.
The other analyst was Michelle Evans, who gave the 2019 podcast interview in which she said she’d become more cautious in her gasoline findings over time. She concurred that the data did not show the patterns required to identify gasoline. “This strongly supports there not being gasoline there.”
Not long after my trip to St. Augustine, Taylor was released on bond after nearly three years in jail and reunited with her family. As her joy and relief began to fade, so did her hope that prosecutors would ever drop her charges. The fear of a life sentence has given way to anguished uncertainty about whether to plead guilty after all. More than six years after the fire, Wallace said, “she just wants it to be over.”
On March 3, which would have been David’s 18th birthday, Taylor and her family met at the cemetery where he is buried alongside his sister Natalie, under a large oak tree dripping with Spanish moss. They ate cake and wrote messages on Mylar balloons, which they released into the air.
Wallace shared some photos via text. In one, Taylor stands smiling with Bailey, her sole remaining child, over brilliant yellow flowers.
The group at the cemetery included Taylor’s mother, four sisters, and her nieces and nephews, some of whom she helped raise. In phone calls, friends and relatives told me the state’s case never made any sense to them. Taylor wasn’t seeking a lavish lifestyle. Her whole life revolved around her home and her children. “Wherever they went they took their kids,” her mother told me. “She loved the ground her kids walked on.”
Megan Wallace had just been booked at the St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, when she started hearing gossip about its most notorious resident. Michelle Taylor had allegedly set fire to her own house in 2018, killing her 11-year-old son. The motive was insurance money. Everyone at the jail seemed disgusted by her. “The guards treated her like shit,” Wallace said.
A mother herself, Wallace vowed to stay away from Taylor. But after a couple of months, Taylor was moved out of solitary confinement and into her cellblock. “The stories I’d heard didn’t add up to how she was in real life,” Wallace said. Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated. Other women at the jail were openly cruel toward her, but she didn’t lash out. “She slept all day and wouldn’t get up for breakfast or lunch.”
Wallace knew how it felt to be judged by people who didn’t have all the facts. She had spiraled into addiction after the sudden death of her husband, culminating in her arrest two days after Christmas in 2022. Prosecutors accused her of drug trafficking, which she insisted was bogus. As Wallace fought her own charges, she started to feel sorry for Taylor. “All she did was cry about her son,” Wallace said. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to live.’”
Wallace eventually opened up to Taylor about losing her husband. They formed a bond that strengthened over time. As Wallace got to know Taylor, she seemed less like a monster and more like a grieving mother who had suffered unspeakable trauma. David wasn’t the only child Taylor had lost. Her middle child, Natalie, who was born with cerebral palsy, died in a tragic accident five years before the fire. News reports about Taylor mentioned her daughter’s death, leading to callous comments online and lurid rumors at the jail. “People said she drowned her daughter in the bathtub and locked her son in a closet and took off the door handle,” Wallace said.
Taylor didn’t talk about the fire in jail. But she’d always sworn she had no idea how it started — she barely escaped herself. Although Wallace had no way to know the truth, it seemed obvious to her that Taylor had loved her children and her home. By the time Wallace saw her own charges dropped in the summer of 2023, she felt certain that the fire had been an accident and that Taylor had been wrongly accused.
Back home, Wallace started reading everything she could about arson cases. She learned about people who had been wrongfully convicted based on junk science. And she discovered that the Florida state fire lab, which examined the evidence in Taylor’s case, had once lost its accreditation after misidentifying gasoline in numerous cases. One name came up over and over again: John Lentini, a renowned Florida fire scientist who had helped exonerate people all over the country. In October 2023 she wrote him an email with the subject line “Please help.”
As it turned out, Lentini had been contacted about the case before, by a defense attorney who no longer represented Taylor. At that time, Lentini was skeptical he could help; there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of arson. According to the lab, a dozen fire debris samples taken from Taylor’s home contained gasoline.
“The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit.”
Although Lentini was a fierce and vocal critic of the lab, he found it hard to believe that it would produce a report containing so many false positives. In a call with Taylor’s new lawyer, he offered to examine the underlying data from the fire debris samples — but he was doubtful it would change much. “If there really was that much gasoline in the house,” he told Wallace, “there is nothing I can do.”
But on January 4, 2024, Wallace received an email from Lentini. “Michelle is not guilty,” it read. “The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit. Every part of the state’s case rests on that.”
Family photographs belonging to the Taylor family, shown after the fire at 1041 Lee St. in St. Augustine, Fla.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
Today the state of Florida is prepared to convict Taylor for killing her son, despite the fact that the only direct evidence of arson has been thoroughly discredited.
More than a year after Lentini raised red flags about the state’s case, writing in an expert report that it is based on “unreliable methodology and incorrect opinions regarding the presence of ignitable liquid residue,” several other leading fire experts have agreed with his conclusions. They include two different lab directors who are also veteran forensic chemists. One of them examined the data from the state lab, while the other retested the carbon strips used to analyze fire debris from the scene. Both recently submitted reports to Taylor’s defense attorney saying there is no evidence of gasoline.
The lab’s conclusions have also been contradicted by two forensic chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who reviewed Lentini’s expert report and agreed in depositions last April that the gasoline findings were unsupported.
The lab has not responded directly to these claims. But in January, the analyst who examined the fire debris evidence in Taylor’s case submitted an amended report backtracking on some of her original findings “due to the re-evaluation of the data.” Four of the samples she previously said were positive for gasoline were now determined to be negative for any ignitible liquid. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a detailed list of comments in time for publication.
Despite the ongoing dismantling of evidence supporting its arson case, prosecutors with the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit have refused to drop the charges against Taylor. They insist she is a habitual liar and a fraud — a mother so diabolical she was willing to set fire to her house with her children inside to “further her lifestyle.” They point to a paper trial that proves her willingness to commit arson “in an attempt to fraudulently collect insurance funds. Her 11-year-old-son … died as a result.” Yet the investigation carried out on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company did not find evidence of arson either. Fire debris analysis conducted at a private lab in the aftermath of the fire revealed no gasoline or other ignitable liquid.
To Lentini and others who have worked on wrongful convictions, the case against Taylor is a version of an all-too-familiar story. In the absence of reliable forensic evidence, prosecutors put together a circumstantial case that can convince a jury a defendant is capable of murder, even if the science does not add up. In cases where a child has died, which are especially emotionally charged, it does not take much to cast parents or caretakers in a suspicious light. Mothers who escape a fire without their children are often judged harshly for that fact alone — and those with a checkered past are easier still to demonize, especially when the state can show that they were guilty of fraud. In the case of Angela Garcia, a Cleveland woman tried three times for killing her daughters in a fire, prosecutors seized on evidence of financial fraud to win a conviction and life sentence despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence of arson. Her sentencing judge accused her of treating her daughters “like coins in a slot machine.”
Out of 26 cases in which the state fire lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.
In Taylor’s case, prosecutors have made clear that they plan to tell the story of a bad mother who senselessly sacrificed her only son for material gain. But that theory eclipses a different story, one with frightening implications for anyone who survives a fire in Florida. According to Lentini, Taylor’s case is the sixth time he has personally seen a misdiagnosis of gasoline by chemists at the state fire lab — and there is reason to believe there are many more. A review of the lab in 2016 by the nation’s leading accrediting body for crime labs found that analysts were using flawed methodology to identify gasoline in fire debris evidence. Out of 26 cases in which the lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.
Yet rather than reconsider its case against Taylor, prosecutors have sought to suppress any reference to the lab’s problematic history when the case goes to trial. “The State respectfully requests that no party or witness in the case be allowed to comment on the prior loss of accreditation by the State Lab,” Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton wrote in a pretrial motion last spring, arguing that it was “not relevant.”
With a trial date set for June, Taylor and her attorney were reluctant to speak on the record about the case. But the likeliest scenario is that neither side will have a chance to tell their story to a jury. After long refusing to consider a plea negotiation for a crime she insists she did not commit, Taylor has been forced to confront the risk of going to trial against prosecutors intent on proving their case with or without reliable evidence of arson. In Florida, a first-degree felony murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. With her next court date set for April 2, a guilty plea to a lesser charge and years in prison may be the best of a bad set of options.
The first 911 call on the night of the fire consisted mostly of harrowing screams. “My house is on fire!” cried Taylor’s 18-year-old daughter, Bailey, wailing that her brother was inside.
The fire was at 1041 Lee St., just east of downtown St. Augustine. On a recording of the call, which was placed at 9:42 p.m. on October 23, 2018, the screaming continues while a 911 operator tries to get information. After two minutes, Bailey says she needs to call her dad and hangs up.
The second 911 call came moments later from Heather Anderson, who lived across from the Taylors — the last two houses on a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood just a few miles from the beach.
Taylor, then 34, had shown up at her door begging for help. There was soot on her face, and she was hysterical. Anderson’s husband raced to the house in search of David. But now the fire was spreading, Anderson said, her voice trembling. She saw the Taylor’s small chihuahua Milo run out of the house. But David was nowhere to be seen.
Taylor had fled the house without her phone or keys. Witnesses described her frantically trying to get back inside. A St. Augustine police officer who was first on the scene tried to ask her questions to no avail. “Due to the emotional state of Michelle and Bailey, I was unable to gather any information in regards to how the fire started or why David was not able to get out,” he later wrote in a report.
Firefighters arrived at 9:49 p.m. They found David’s body lying face down and covered in debris. He was unrecognizable.
Left/Top: Michelle Taylor, photographed by investigators to document her injuries on the night of the fire at 1041 Lee St in St. Augustine, Fla., on Oct. 23, 2018. Taylor’s 11-year-old son David died in the fire. Right/Bottom: The St. Augustine house belonging to Michelle and Dennis Taylor on the night of the fire. Michelle was accused of setting fire to the home to collect insurance money and charged with first-degree felony murder.Photos: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
In Florida, fatal fires are investigated by the state fire marshal’s Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations, which dispatches personnel around the clock. The bureau also sometimes calls upon the ATF to provide additional resources — “an extra shovel,” as the supervising lieutenant said in a deposition in Taylor’s case. That night, the BFAEI called ATF Special Agent Kristie Calhoun, who drove out to the scene from Jacksonville. She would be in charge of determining the cause of the fire.
The Taylors lived in a modern, one-story home with a stone facade. It had an open floor plan, with the kitchen to the right of the entrance and a hallway leading to four bedrooms on the left. Toward the back was the living room and the area most heavily damaged by the fire, which investigators would label the area of origin. The drywall was gone from the walls, and “the entire drywall ceiling had fallen to the floor, exposing the wooden roof structure,” Calhoun wrote in her report. What was left of the insulation was all over the ground.
Around 1:20 a.m., Mason Patrou, a rookie detective with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office tried to interview Taylor at a local hospital, where she and Bailey were being treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation. “Michelle was very hesitant to speak with us and clearly displeased with our presence,” Patrou later wrote.
Until the fire, the evening had not been out of the ordinary. Taylor, who’d recently lost her job as a custodian for the local school board, had a meal with her husband Dennis and their children at Texas Roadhouse. Upon coming home, Taylor briefly ran out to buy lottery tickets. Dennis got a call from a friend who’d shot a deer and wanted help retrieving it; he left around 8 p.m. Taylor and David went to her room to watch TV. At one point, Taylor said she went outside to look for a homework assignment David said he’d left in the car, then settled back into her bedroom, where they watched back-to-back episodes of the sitcom “Mom.”
It was during the second episode that Taylor said she heard the smoke detectors go off. She opened her bedroom door to find thick, dark smoke. “Michelle said her and David went out of her bedroom, banged on Bailey’s door and they all tried to get out the front door but they couldn’t get the door open,” Patrou wrote. “It was so black you couldn’t see anything.” They turned down the hallway “when David went back for the dog.” She lost sight of him. She and Bailey then ran to the spare bedroom and climbed out of the window.
Taylor said she had no idea how the fire started. But there were a few possibilities. “Michelle stated that there was a candle lit on the coffee table, near the couch,” Patrou wrote. Asked if there was anything flammable nearby, she cited a white runner on the table, adding that the dog ran loose and jumped on the couch. There was also an old electric recliner in the living room inherited from Taylor’s grandmother, which plugged into the wall and constantly malfunctioned. Dennis had recently tried to repair the electrical wires, splicing and reconnecting them using heat shrink wrap and a glue gun.
Finally, Taylor sometimes smoked in the house. Although it was unclear whether Taylor was smoking that night, a fire marshal’s detective would report that a lighter and cigarette butt had been found in the debris.
All of these scenarios were consistent with the area of origin. In the back corner of the living room, the couch and the recliner had been almost entirely consumed by the fire, with only their metal frames remaining.
Nevertheless, suspicions of arson had crept in by the time the sun came up on October 24. A K-9 handler had swept the home with his accelerant-detecting dog, a black Labrador named Fresca, who alerted in five different places. Fire debris samples were collected in each spot, to be examined at the state fire marshal lab, which would determine whether there was proof of an ignitable liquid.
In early November, three samples came back positive for gasoline.
The Florida State Fire Marshal’s office is governed by Florida’s Department of Financial Services, which oversees fraud and fire investigations alike. At the time of the fire, the Chief Financial Officer and fire marshal was Jimmy Patronis, whose most recent annual report boasted “an arrest rate for the crime of arson well above the national average.”
Florida is only one of two states in the country whose fire marshal has its own lab for fire debris analysis. Although numerous agencies are involved in fire investigation, most forensic evidence is processed at the bureau’s state-of-the-art facility in Havana, just outside Tallahassee.
In mid-November, Calhoun and a team of investigators returned to the scene of the fire. For three days they excavated the site, collecting fire debris for additional testing. Seventeen samples were placed into tightly sealed metal cans and sent to the lab.
Most fire debris analysis works roughly like this: Cans are heated in an oven. The resulting vapors are captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can. The strips are then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution that is injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The former (GC) separates compounds in a given sample, while the latter (MS) detects the compounds, ultimately producing an electronic signature called a chromatogram. The resulting graph looks like an irregular combination of peaks and valleys, which mark the chemical compounds in the sample. The patterns are compared to graphs of known substances to see if there is a match.
Left/Top: A metal paint can used to collect fire debris samples for testing at the Bureau of Forensic Services lab in Havana, Fla. According to the state, numerous samples contained the presence of gasoline, proving that the fire was arson. Right/Bottom: The front entrance to the Taylor home on the morning after the fire, with a view to the living room in the back of the house. Investigators concluded that the fire started in the living room but that it developed too quickly to be accidental.Photos: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The process is straightforward in theory. But in practice, interpreting the data can be fraught with uncertainty. Modern homes are replete with synthetic materials, which make up everything from shoes to rugs to couch cushions. Many are made from petroleum-based products that share some of the same compounds as ignitable liquids. When these products burn and break down in a process called pyrolysis, the compounds contribute their own peaks to a chromatogram. Because today’s GCMS technology is highly sensitive and capable of picking up trace amounts of material, chromatograms from a fire debris sample are often crowded with detail. One training video by the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida says “finding an ignitable liquid residue in fire debris is like searching for Waldo in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ puzzles.” The difference is that, unlike an ignitable liquid, Waldo is always somewhere to be found.
Gasoline, which is the accelerant most commonly used to commit arson, is a complex mixture that is especially tricky to identify within fire debris. Lab analysts have long abided by specific parameters when examining a sample for gasoline, starting by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios. But the interpretation is ultimately highly subjective.
In a 2019 podcast by Chemical & Engineering News, ATF chemist Michelle Evans said the difficulty of gasoline identification had made her more cautious in her analysis over the years. She told the host she was working on a case where the data was a little too ambiguous. “I think it’s there, but I don’t think I have enough to call it,” she said. “Maybe when I was starting out I might have actually identified gasoline. But in looking at the data, I don’t feel comfortable having to testify to that.”
Among the new samples sent from Taylor’s home to the Florida lab were two different types of vinyl flooring found in the house. A pair of boxes containing the same flooring had been found in the garage, pieces of which were collected as comparison samples. Such samples are key to distinguishing compounds found in synthetic materials from those found in an ignitable liquid. “Comparison samples allow the laboratory to evaluate the possible contributions of volatile pyrolysis products to the analysis,” Calhoun wrote in her report.
Comparison samples, in other words, are supposed to be clean of any ignitable liquid. So when the second set of lab results came back, something was clearly wrong. The flooring found boxed up in the garage had come back positive for gasoline. A third comparison sample, described as “underlayment from hallway closet floor,” also came back positive for gasoline.
Calhoun’s report attributed the false positives on the tiles to “soot staining,” attaching a photo that showed evidence of smoke in the garage. Yet the boxes were barely visible in the picture, let alone the tiles inside. In a deposition, the lab analyst who examined the flooring said she did not recall seeing soot on the comparison samples. Nor did she think that light smoke on the boxes would necessarily contaminate the tiles inside. “I mean I’m not, like, an expert in soot,” she said.
Lentini would later argue that the results from the comparison samples should have invalidated all of the gasoline findings. The soot explanation did not account for the false positive on the third comparison sample, he wrote in his report. What’s more, “if ‘soot’ can cause a false reading of gasoline, that can be applied to all of the debris samples.’”
But Calhoun did not see it this way. In December 2018, she obtained new vinyl tiles matching one of the previous comparison samples and submitted it to the lab. In February 2019, that one came back negative.
By then, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was convinced they had an arson case on their hands. Patrou, the lead detective, saw red flags in the family’s financial records. At the time of the fire, the Taylors had been behind in their mortgage payments. Their bank was threatening foreclosure if they did not pay by early 2019. Despite having enough money in the bank to cover the mortgage, financial records showed that six local churches “had made payments on behalf of the Taylors.”
But even more disturbing were interviews with Dennis’s side of the family, who immediately blamed Taylor. There was bad blood between Taylor and her mother-in-law; the two had almost come to blows on the night of the fire. Patrou wrote that Dennis’s mother told him she believed “Michelle deliberately burned the house down because Michelle didn’t have the money to do what she wanted.” Dennis’s sister agreed.
The investigation into Taylor stretched into 2020, only to be derailed by the Covid pandemic. Calhoun’s final 45-page report was submitted in 2021. It synthesized the findings from the state fire investigators and the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, concluding that the fire could not have been an accident.
It had all happened too fast, Calhoun concluded. A timeline from the night of the fire had been put together through surveillance footage taken from the neighborhood’s security cameras. It showed Taylor going out to her car at 9:33 p.m. Only six minutes later, at 9:39 p.m., video showed smoke coming from the back of the house. The first 911 call came three minutes later. There was too little time between Taylor’s last appearance and the signs of the fire captured on the tape. “An ignition source such as a cigarette or candle scenario would be a slow growing fire,” Calhoun wrote, and if a small fire was already underway before Taylor went to her car, she would have spotted it on her way back to her bedroom.
There were at least some scenarios in which an accidental fire might have quickly overtaken the house. A cluster of living room furniture was near two windows and a pair of French doors — potentially powerful fuel, Calhoun noted. But the gasoline findings rendered other explanations moot. As Calhoun eliminated each accidental cause one by one, she wrote that each was “inconsistent with the presence of gasoline as confirmed by the laboratory analysis.”
In August 2021, Taylor was arrested for felony murder.
Fire investigators once described their work as an art more than a science. The process of determining the origin and cause of a fire relied as much on an investigator’s experience and intuition as on the evidence at the scene. When it came to uncovering arson, many fire investigators falsely believed they could figure out what happened based solely on visual indicators like “pour patterns” — places where an ignitable liquid had supposedly been poured, which caused a fire to burn hotter and faster than normal.
Lentini, who began his career as a forensic chemist before moving into fire investigation, had been trained to look for such signs of arson too. But in 1991, he worked on a case in Jacksonville that dramatically transformed the understanding of fire behavior, revealing how quickly an accidental fire could reach “flashover” — a critical concept often summarized as the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. In the right conditions, a smoldering fire can reach flashover in under four minutes.
Today fire investigations follow the scientific method, as set out by the National Fire Protection Association in NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. But for those sent to prison based on misconceptions about fire behavior, the advances in the field came too late. The most famous wrongful arson conviction is that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was accused of setting a fire in Corsicana, Texas, that killed his three children. Despite a race by fire experts to prove that his case was based on junk science, Willingham was executed in 2004.
That same year Texas executed Willingham, a fire broke out in Palatka, Florida, killing a woman named Tscharna Hampton. Her boyfriend, Randy Seal, was accused of dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. As in the Willingham case, fire investigators relied on discredited arson indicators. And as with Willingham, the state announced it would seek the death penalty.
“I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline.’”
Like Taylor, Seal was prosecuted in the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Lentini was hired as an expert for the defense. A lab analyst had identified gasoline in numerous samples. But when Lentini received the data, it was way off. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline,’” he said.
Lentini examined the carbon strips used to analyze the fire debris. He found no signs of gasoline. At the trial, he used a PowerPoint presentation to break down the science in the most accessible terms for the jury. “You go down to the gas station, you buy some gasoline, you evaporate it, you run it through your machines, you get a pattern,” he explained. In order to identify gasoline in a sample, “you’ve got to be able to match that pattern.”
“In the early days, the methodology was more or less: ‘The sample displays sufficient similarities to the standard for me to conclude that they are the same,’” Lentini went on. But this was entirely too subjective. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, which laid out criteria for gasoline, starting with a group of five compounds, whose peaks on a chromatogram had to appear in specific proportion to one another. “This is not a suggestion. This is not a guide. This says if you want to call it gasoline, you’ve got to have this stuff.”
While the Florida state lab purported to abide by this rule, known as ASTM E1618, the gasoline results showed otherwise. Not only were the ratios wrong, Lentini testified, but three of the necessary compounds were not present at all. In a deposition, a different expert later described the lab analyst’s approach as “peak pick.” If you zoom in close enough, the expert explained, virtually any chromatogram from a fire debris sample will contain patterns resembling gasoline. “It’s just, Let’s blow it up and let’s see what components show up,” he said.
With no real rebuttal to the chemistry, the prosecutor goaded Lentini on cross-examination, daring him to smell the blue jeans worn by Hampton when she died. “You’re not willing to do it, are you?” he asked. Lentini replied with obvious irritation. “They smell like burnt cloth,” he said. More importantly, “they don’t look like gasoline when analyzed with the gas chromatograph.” The prosecutor replied that jurors could use their “common sense” to conclude that the clothing smelled like gasoline.
Seal was found guilty but avoided the death penalty. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.
The Seal case was the first time Lentini saw the state lab analysts find what he has wryly called “Florida gasoline.” It would not be the last.
One year after Seal was convicted, a fire broke out inside an apartment complex outside Fort Lauderdale. Eleven-month-old Jada Reynolds was found in her crib, dead from smoke inhalation. Her mother, Sasheena Reynolds, had escaped the fire while carrying her 2-year-old son. Witnesses described her panic. “She kept saying, ‘My baby is inside the fire!,’” a neighbor told a reporter.
At first there was an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people went to the baby’s funeral and neighbors raised money for the family. Reynolds’s electricity had been cut off at the time of the fire; she relied on scented candles to illuminate the home, which were believed to have caused the blaze.
But everything changed when the fire marshal lab found evidence of gasoline. Reynolds was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Investigators said they’d suspected the fire was no accident given “how quickly the fire spread and burned.”
Lentini was hired by Reynolds’s defense attorney. The lab results echoed what he had seen in Seal’s case. Rather than face trial, Reynolds agreed to a plea deal and was released from jail in 2013. By then, Lentini had seen false gasoline findings in two other cases.
“I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”
In 2015, Lentini sat down to write a letter to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board. “After several weeks of careful consideration, I have concluded that it is my professional obligation to bring to your attention a serious issue,” he wrote. He warned that the lab had “a continuing laboratory policy of identifying gasoline where none exists, based on a subjective and highly speculative thought process.” Although the lab claimed to follow ASTM E1618 in theory, in practice it deviated completely from the standard. “I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”
There is no federal agency that regulates forensic labs. Accreditation bodies like ASCLD/LAB, which has since been renamed, are private entities whose leadership is closely tied to professional forensic associations and which charge labs to receive accreditation. Although labs must demonstrate certain protocols and best practices to remain in good standing, there is little oversight of the work itself. Indeed, at the time Lentini filed his complaint, the lab’s accreditation had just been renewed.
In January 2016, a team from ASCLD/LAB traveled to Havana, Florida, to visit the lab. It interviewed lab analysts as well as its director, Carl Chasteen. Two months later, reviewers reported their findings. “The interpretation methodology being employed by the laboratory is an undocumented, unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community,” they wrote. The numbers were alarming. “Of twenty-six(26) randomly selected cases in which gasoline or gasoline mixtures were reported, there were fourteen in which the interpretation of the data by the analyst resulted in an unsupported conclusion.”
The lab lost its accreditation as a result of the review. Chasteen appealed the results, writing in a 50-page letter that the review appeared “to repudiate all of our work over the years, our professional reputations, and our personal character.” A new panel of reviewers upheld the decision to revoke the lab’s accreditation.
Lentini considered the lab’s suspension a victory. But it was short-lived. After agreeing to a “corrective action plan,” Chasteen won back its accreditation. He also successfully sought accreditation from a second organization. By 2017, the lab had gone from being mired in scandal to boasting that it was the only public lab in the country dual-accredited by both organizations.
The saga had a critical impact in at least one case, however. The Florida Innocence Project filed a post-conviction appeal in Seal’s case based on the discoveries about the lab. New experts analyzed the evidence and concluded that the findings of gasoline had been wrong. In 2023, prosecutors offered Seal a plea deal and he accepted.
Before his release in 2024, Seal sent Lentini a handwritten note from prison. “I knew you were always right,” he wrote. “The lab was junk, still is. Thank you for what you did for me.”
Last spring I traveled to St. Augustine and drove to the site of the fire. The neighborhood is surrounded by longleaf pines, with modest homes set back from the road on green lots dotted by palm trees. Google Maps had captured the house after the fire, with boarded-up windows and piles of debris on blue tarps on the driveway. But when I arrived at 1041 Lee St., there was nothing but a concrete driveway leading to a gray slab.
Wallace told me that Taylor once described the house as her “dream home.” The family moved there in 2012 from a more rural area, mainly out of necessity. According to Dennis and Bailey, there was a man in the area who was a known pedophile; he had once tried to lure David into his car. “The cops said they couldn’t do anything about it,” Bailey told me. So they decided to move. “My mom and dad said it was to protect us.”
It took them six months to find a place they could afford, according to Dennis. The house on Lee Street was a foreclosure sale, which needed a lot of work. They painted and redid the floors and installed planters, a picnic table, and a bird bath outside. Because her daughter Natalie loved butterflies, Taylor took butterfly lawn ornaments she’d found at Dollar Tree and used them to decorate the entrance to the house.
A photograph of David Taylor on his gravestone at the Craig Memorial Park Mausoleum in St. Augustine, Fla.Photo: Liliana Segura
I met Wallace at a Hampton Inn off I-95. She brought a small stack of papers: police reports and testimonials about Taylor from family and friends, which she had collected for an upcoming bond hearing. They described Taylor as loving and generous to friends and strangers alike. “My mother never got to grieve properly,” Bailey wrote. “She would never hurt anybody, please just let her come home.”
Wallace said Lentini had breathed new life into Taylor’s defense. But she was also frustrated — she could not understand how prosecutors could stick to their case. She’d recently learned that, back in January, Calhoun had forwarded Lentini’s report to two different forensic chemists at the ATF, both of whom had sat down for depositions. One of them took issue with Lentini’s claim that the state lab “routinely identifies gasoline where it does not exist.” But he did not disagree with Lentini’s conclusions about the chromatography data. “The patterns that I’m seeing in the data do not appear to be gasoline to me,” he said.
The other analyst was Michelle Evans, who gave the 2019 podcast interview in which she said she’d become more cautious in her gasoline findings over time. She concurred that the data did not show the patterns required to identify gasoline. “This strongly supports there not being gasoline there.”
Not long after my trip to St. Augustine, Taylor was released on bond after nearly three years in jail and reunited with her family. As her joy and relief began to fade, so did her hope that prosecutors would ever drop her charges. The fear of a life sentence has given way to anguished uncertainty about whether to plead guilty after all. More than six years after the fire, Wallace said, “she just wants it to be over.”
On March 3, which would have been David’s 18th birthday, Taylor and her family met at the cemetery where he is buried alongside his sister Natalie, under a large oak tree dripping with Spanish moss. They ate cake and wrote messages on Mylar balloons, which they released into the air.
Wallace shared some photos via text. In one, Taylor stands smiling with Bailey, her sole remaining child, over brilliant yellow flowers.
The group at the cemetery included Taylor’s mother, four sisters, and her nieces and nephews, some of whom she helped raise. In phone calls, friends and relatives told me the state’s case never made any sense to them. Taylor wasn’t seeking a lavish lifestyle. Her whole life revolved around her home and her children. “Wherever they went they took their kids,” her mother told me. “She loved the ground her kids walked on.”
The second of a two-part series on the historic Rongelap evacuation of 300 Marshall islanders from their irradiated atoll with the help of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior crew and the return of Rainbow Warrior III 40 years later on a nuclear justice research mission. Journalist and author David Robie, who was on board, recalls the 1985 voyage.
SPECIAL REPORT:By David Robie
Mejatto, previously uninhabited and handed over to the people of Rongelap by their close relatives on nearby Ebadon Island, was a lot different to their own island. It was beautiful, but it was only three kilometres long and a kilometre wide, with a dry side and a dense tropical side.
A sandspit joined it to another small, uninhabited island. Although lush, Mejatto was uncultivated and already it was apparent there could be a food problem.Out on the shallow reef, fish were plentiful.
Shortly after the Rainbow Warrior arrived on 21 May 1985, several of the men were out wading knee-deep on the coral spearing fish for lunch.
But even the shallowness of the reef caused a problem. It made it dangerous to bring the Warrior any closer than about three kilometres offshore — as two shipwrecks on the reef reminded us.
The cargo of building materials and belongings had to be laboriously unloaded onto a bum bum (small boat), which had also travelled overnight with no navigational aids apart from a Marshallese “wave map’, and the Zodiacs. It took two days to unload the ship with a swell making things difficult at times.
An 18-year-old islander fell into the sea between the bum bum and the Warrior, almost being crushed but escaping with a jammed foot.
Fishing success on the reef The delayed return to Rongelap for the next load didn’t trouble Davey Edward. In fact, he was celebrating his first fishing success on the reef after almost three months of catching nothing. He finally landed not only a red snapper, but a dozen fish, including a half-metre shark!
Edward was also a good cook and he rustled up dinner — shark montfort, snapper fillets, tuna steaks and salmon pie (made from cans of dumped American aid food salmon the islanders didn’t want).
Returning to Rongelap, the Rainbow Warrior was confronted with a load which seemed double that taken on the first trip. Altogether, about 100 tonnes of building materials and other supplies were shipped to Mejatto. The crew packed as much as they could on deck and left for Mejatto, this time with 114 people on board. It was a rough voyage with almost everybody being seasick.
The journalists were roped in to clean up the ship before returning to Rongelap on the third journey.
‘Our people see no light, only darkness’ Researcher Dr Glenn Alcalay (now an adjunct professor of anthropology at William Paterson University), who spoke Marshallese, was a great help to me interviewing some of the islanders.
“It’s a hard time for us now because we don’t have a lot of food here on Mejatto — like breadfruit, taro and pandanus,” said Rose Keju, who wasn’t actually at Rongelap during the fallout.
“Our people feel extremely depressed. They see no light, only darkness. They’ve been crying a lot.
“We’ve moved because of the poison and the health problems we face. If we have honest scientists to check Rongelap we’ll know whether we can ever return, or we’ll have to stay on Mejatto.”
Kiosang Kios, 46, was 15 years old at the time of Castle Bravo when she was evacuated to “Kwaj”.
“My hair fell out — about half the people’s hair fell out,” she said. “My feet ached and burned. I lost my appetite, had diarrhoea and vomited.”
In 1957, she had her first baby and it was born without bones – “Like this paper, it was flimsy.” A so-called ‘jellyfish baby’, it lived half a day. After that, Kios had several more miscarriages and stillbirths. In 1959, she had a daughter who had problems with her legs and feet and thyroid trouble.
Out on the reef with the bum bums, the islanders had a welcome addition — an unusual hardwood dugout canoe being used for fishing and transport. It travelled 13,000 kilometres on board the Rainbow Warrior and bore the Sandinista legend FSLN on its black-and-red hull. A gift from Bunny McDiarmid and Henk Haazen, it had been bought for $30 from a Nicaraguan fisherman while they were crewing on the Fri. (Bunny and Henk are on board Rainbow Warrior III for the research mission).
“It has come from a small people struggling for their sovereignty against the United States and it has gone to another small people doing the same,” said Haazen.
Animals left behind Before the 10-day evacuation ended, Haazen was given an outrigger canoe by the islanders. Winched on to the deck of the Warrior, it didn’t quite make a sail-in protest at Moruroa, as Haazen planned, but it has since become a familiar sight on Auckland Harbour.
With the third load of 87 people shipped to Mejatto and one more to go, another problem emerged. What should be done about the scores of pigs and chickens on Rongelap? Pens could be built on the main deck to transport them to Mejatto but was there any fodder left for them?
The islanders decided they weren’t going to run a risk, no matter how slight, of having contaminated animals with them. They were abandoned on Rongelap — along with three of the five outriggers.
“When you get to New Zealand you’ll be asked have you been on a farm,” warned French journalist Phillipe Chatenay, who had gone there a few weeks before to prepare a Le Point article about the “Land of the Long White Cloud and Nuclear-Free Nuts”.
“Yes, and you’ll be asked to remove your shoes. And if you don’t have shoes, you’ll be asked to remove your feet,” added first mate Martini Gotjé, who was usually barefooted.
The last voyage on May 28 was the most fun. A smaller group of about 40 islanders was transported and there was plenty of time to get to know each other.
Four young men questioned cook Nathalie Mestre: where did she live? Where was Switzerland? Out came an atlas. Then Mestre produced a scrapbook of Fernando Pereira’s photographs of the voyage. The questions were endless.
They asked for a scrap of paper and a pen and wrote in English:
“We, the people of Rongelap, love our homeland. But how can our people live in a place which is dangerous and poisonous. I mean, why didn’t those American people test Bravo in a state capital? Why? Rainbow Warrior, thank you for being so nice to us. Keep up your good work.”
Each one wrote down their name: Balleain Anjain, Ralet Anitak, Kiash Tima and Issac Edmond. They handed the paper to Mestre and she added her name. Anitak grabbed it and wrote as well: “Nathalie Anitak”. They laughed.
Fernando Pereira’s birthday Thursday, May 30, was Fernando Pereira’s 35th birthday. The evacuation was over and a one-day holiday was declared as we lay anchored off Mejato.
Pereira was on the Pacific voyage almost by chance. Project coordinator Steve Sawyer had been seeking a wire machine for transmitting pictures of the campaign. He phoned Fiona Davies, then heading the Greenpeace photo office in Paris. But he wanted a machine and photographer separately.
“No, no … I’ll get you a wire machine,” replied Davies. ‘But you’ll have to take my photographer with it.” Agreed. The deal would make a saving for the campaign budget.
Sawyer wondered who this guy was, although Gotjé and some of the others knew him. Pereira had fled Portugal about 15 years before while he was serving as a pilot in the armed forces at a time when the country was fighting to retain colonies in Angola and Mozambique. He settled in The Netherlands, the only country which would grant him citizenship.
After first working as a photographer for Anefo press agency, he became concerned with environmental and social issues. Eventually he joined the Amsterdam communist daily De Waarheid and was assigned to cover the activities of Greenpeace. Later he joined Greenpeace.
Although he adopted Dutch ways, his charming Latin temperament and looks betrayed his Portuguese origins. He liked tight Italian-style clothes and fast sports cars. Pereira was always wide-eyed, happy and smiling.
In Hawai`i, he and Sawyer hiked up to the crater at the top of Diamond Head one day. Sawyer took a snapshot of Pereira laughing — a photo later used on the front page of the New Zealand Times after his death with the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents.
While most of the crew were taking things quietly and the “press gang” caught up on stories, Sawyer led a mini-expedition in a Zodiac to one of the shipwrecks, the Palauan Trader. With him were Davey Edward, Henk Haazen, Paul Brown and Bunny McDiarmid.
Clambering on board the hulk, Sawyer grabbed hold of a rust-caked railing which collapsed. He plunged 10 metres into a hold. While he lay in pain with a dislocated shoulder and severely lacerated abdomen, his crewmates smashed a hole through the side of the ship. They dragged him through pounding surf into the Zodiac and headed back to the Warrior, three kilometres away.
“Doc” Andy Biedermann, assisted by “nurse” Chatenay, who had received basic medical training during national service in France, treated Sawyer. He took almost two weeks to recover.
But the accident failed to completely dampen celebrations for Pereira, who was presented with a hand-painted t-shirt labelled “Rainbow Warrior Removals Inc”.
Pereira’s birthday was the first of three which strangely coincided with events casting a tragic shadow over the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage.
Dr David Robie is an environmental and political journalist and author, and editor of Asia Pacific Report. He travelled on board the Rainbow Warrior for almost 11 weeks. This article is adapted from his 1986 book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. A new edition is being published in July to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing.
The first of a two-part series on the historic Rongelap evacuation of 300 Marshall islanders from their irradiated atoll with the help of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior crew and the return of Rainbow Warrior III 40 years later on a nuclear justice research mission.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Shiva Gounden in Majuro
Family isn’t just about blood—it’s about standing together through the toughest of times.
This is the relationship between Greenpeace and the Marshall Islands — a vast ocean nation, stretching across nearly two million square kilometers of the Pacific. Beneath the waves, coral reefs are bustling with life, while coconut trees stand tall.
For centuries, the Marshallese people have thrived here, mastering the waves, reading the winds, and navigating the open sea with their canoe-building knowledge passed down through generations. Life here is shaped by the rhythm of the tides, the taste of fresh coconut and roasted breadfruit, and an unbreakable bond between people and the sea.
From the bustling heart of its capital, Majuro to the quiet, far-reaching atolls, their islands are not just land; they are home, history, and identity.
Still, Marshallese communities were forced into one of the most devastating chapters of modern history — turned into a nuclear testing ground by the United States without consent, and their lives and lands poisoned by radiation.
Operation Exodus: A legacy of solidarity Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands — its total yield roughly equal to one Hiroshima-sized bomb every day for 12 years.
During this Cold War period, the US government planned to conduct its largest nuclear test ever. On the island of Bikini, United States Commodore Ben H. Wyatt manipulated the 167 Marshallese people who called Bikini home asking them to leave so that the US could carry out atomic bomb testing, stating that it was for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”.
Exploiting their deep faith, he misled Bikinians into believing they were acting in God’s will, and trusting this, they agreed to move—never knowing the true cost of their decision
On March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo test was launched — its yield 1000 times stronger than Hiroshima. Radioactive fallout spread across Rongelap Island about 150 kilometers away, due to what the US government claimed was a “shift in wind direction”.
In reality, the US ignored weather reports that indicated the wind would carry the fallout eastward towards Rongelap and Utirik Atolls, exposing the islands to radioactive contamination. Children played in what they thought was snow, and almost immediately the impacts of radiation began — skin burning, hair fallout, vomiting.
The Rongelap people were immediately relocated, and just three years later were told by the US government their island was deemed safe and asked to return.
For the next 28 years, the Rongelap people lived through a period of intense “gaslighting” by the US government. *
Forced to live on contaminated land, with women enduring miscarriages and cancer rates increasing, in 1985, the people of Rongelap made the difficult decision to leave their homeland. Despite repeated requests to the US government to help evacuate, an SOS was sent, and Greenpeace responded: the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Rongelap, helping to move communities to Mejatto Island.
This was the last journey of the first Rainbow Warrior. The powerful images of their evacuation were captured by photographer Fernando Pereira, who, just months later, was killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior as it sailed to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific.
From nuclear to climate: The injustice repeats The fight for justice did not end with the nuclear tests—the same forces that perpetuated nuclear colonialism continue to endanger the Marshall Islands today with new threats: climate change and deep-sea mining.
The Marshall Islands, a nation of over 1,000 islands, is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. Entire communities could disappear within a generation due to rising sea levels. Additionally, greedy international corporations are pushing to mine the deep sea of the Pacific Ocean for profit. Deep sea mining threatens fragile marine ecosystems and could destroy Pacific ways of life, livelihoods and fish populations. The ocean connects us all, and a threat anywhere in the Pacific is a threat to the world.
But if there could be one symbol to encapsulate past nuclear injustices and current climate harms it would be the Runit Dome. This concrete structure was built by the US to contain radioactive waste from years of nuclear tests, but climate change now poses a direct threat.
Science, storytelling, and resistance: The Rainbow Warrior’s epic mission and 40 year celebration
At the invitation of the Marshallese community and government, the Rainbow Warrior is in the Pacific nation to celebrate 40 years since 1985’s Operation Exodus, and stand in support of their ongoing fight for nuclear justice, climate action, and self-determination.
This journey brings together science, storytelling, and activism to support the Marshallese movement for justice and recognition. Independent radiation experts and Greenpeace scientists will conduct crucial research across the atolls, providing much-needed data on remaining nuclear contamination.
For decades, research on radiation levels has been controlled by the same government that conducted the nuclear tests, leaving many unanswered questions. This independent study will help support the Marshallese people in their ongoing legal battles for recognition, reparations, and justice.
The path of the ship tour: A journey led by the Marshallese From March to April, the Rainbow Warrior is sailing across the Marshall Islands, stopping in Majuro, Mejatto, Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap, and Wotje. Like visiting old family, each of these locations carries a story — of nuclear fallout, forced displacement, resistance, and hope for a just future.
But just like old family, there’s something new to learn. At every stop, local leaders, activists, and a younger generation are shaping the narrative.
Their testimonies are the foundation of this journey, ensuring the world cannot turn away. Their stories of displacement, resilience, and hope will be shared far beyond the Pacific, calling for justice on a global scale.
A defining moment for climate justice The Marshallese are not just survivors of past injustices; they are champions of a just future. Their leadership reminds us that those most affected by climate change are not only calling for action — they are showing the way forward. They are leaders of finding solutions to avert these crises.
They are not only protecting their lands but are also at the forefront of the global fight for climate justice, pushing for reparations, recognition, and climate action.
This voyage is a message: the world must listen, and it must act. The Marshallese people are standing their ground, and we stand in solidarity with them — just like family.
Learn their story. Support their call for justice. Amplify their voices. Because when those on the frontlines lead, justice is within reach.
Shiva Gounden is the head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific. This article series is republished with the permission of Greenpeace.
* This refers to the period from 1957 — when the US Atomic Energy Commission declared Rongelap Atoll safe for habitation despite known contamination — to 1985, when Greenpeace assisted the Rongelap community in relocating due to ongoing radiation concerns. The Compact of Free Association, signed in 1986, finally started acknowledging damages caused by nuclear testing to the populations of Rongelap.
While in Georgetown, Guyana, on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter about what led to the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. The reporter mentioned an opinion piece Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024, published in The Tufts Daily, advocating for students’ calls to divest the school from companies with ties to Israel.
Rubio seemed to downplay the influence of the op-ed, written alongside three other Tufts graduate students, instead insinuating without evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, had vandalized her university, occupied buildings, and harassed students.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Government documents included in court filings, however, don’t back up Rubio’s claims of supposed unlawful behavior.
Several days before her arrest on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Öztürk’s student visa without notifying her, according to a DHS document through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, through which Öztürk had obtained her visa.
The government didn’t claim that Öztürk had broken any laws but instead cited a civil law provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The 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 hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The government has made the same argument in detaining former Columbia University student activist leader Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri, as well as in its efforts to arrest Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper.”
In each of these cases, attorneys for the students argued the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and academics over their support for Palestine are ultimately an attack on their free speech rights.
Öztürk’s case is notable in that her detention and possible deportation may very well center on a published piece of journalism.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper,” Öztürk’s attorneys wrote in a habeas petition for her release filed on Friday. “Rümeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others. Indeed, her arrest and detention are part of a concerted and systemic effort by Trump administration officials to punish students and others identified with pro-Palestine activism.”
Activists and free speech advocates have been quick to remind that crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech did not begin with the Trump administration.
Since October 7, 2023, schools have censored, suspended, or fired professors and students over their speech on Palestine and Israel. In response to student encampments, President Joe Biden delivered law-and-order messages to protesters, accusing pro-Palestinian movements of antisemitism.
School administrators regularly called police on student protests, leading to violent arrests. In his statement from jail dictated to lawyers by phone, Khalil blamed Columbia’s administrators for having “laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.”
In the case of Öztürk, such doxing campaigns may have been a factor in her arrest. Attorneys said Öztürk feared for her safety after pro-Israel group Canary Mission posted about her in early February, pointing to her 2024 essay. Canary Mission, which shares personal information about pro-Palestine activists online and is often used by other Zionist groups to dox people, said Öztürk took part in “anti-Israel activism” and cited her 2024 opinion piece as its sole source to back its claim.
In its “Catch and Revoke” program, the State Department also scours the social media accounts of student visa holders for purported pro-Hamas sentiment, which the government has conflated with pro-Palestine views.
Free speech advocates note that professing support for both Palestine and Hamas is protected by the First Amendment. Even so, international students have been increasingly careful about what they write or say online, legal advocates for student protesters told The Intercept. The recent arrests have also given international students pause over whether they should remain in the U.S.
During the press conference, Rubio also confirmed Axios reporting that the State Department has already revoked at least 300 student visas.
Rubio said, “We do it every day — every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
There are about 1.5 million student visa holders in the U.S.
After Öztürk’s arrest, DHS passed reporters an unsubstantiated claim that Öztürk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”
Öztürk’s op-ed, however, never mentions Hamas.
Instead, the 800-word opinion piece references mounting evidence of Israel’s violations of international law in its war in Gaza. It criticized the Tufts administration’s double standard of espousing diversity, civic engagement, and the exchange of ideas, but failing to uphold those values in its rejection of the students’ demands.
The piece also pointed to the movement against South African apartheid and Tufts’ decision in 1989 to divest from South Africa “and end its complicity with the then-racist regime.”
Several weeks before publishing the essay, Tufts’ student governing body had passed a series of resolutions, among them a call for the school to disclose and halt all of the university’s investments in companies tied to Israel. Hours after the vote, however, university administrators flatly rejected the resolutions. The following day, more than 150 students responded by holding a rally and die-in on campus.
The Tufts Daily March 26, 2024, opinion piece was a part of the growing campuswide dissent to the university’s rejection of student demands. The discontent would culminate in the school’s Palestinian solidarity encampment, which would last about one month before it was voluntarily dismantled by student activists.
“Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote.
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the op-ed was published, masked plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Öztürk outside of her Somerville, Massachusetts, home as she was on her way to to break her Ramadan fast with friends. Footage of her arrest, which was shared widely online, sparked immediate outrage with many referring to the arrest as “a kidnapping” or an “abduction.” For nearly 24 hours, Öztürk’s family and legal team was unaware of her whereabouts.
In defiance of a federal judge’s order to keep Öztürk in Massachusetts, ICE flew Öztürk to the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a privately run ICE jail, where she remains incarcerated.
Öztürk did not have access to her medications during the flight and suffered an asthma attack, her attorneys said in court filings.
Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper issued an order on Friday preventing the government from deporting Öztürk as the battle for her release plays out in court.
A spokesperson for Öztürk’s legal team defended the 2024 op-ed in a statement Friday and said that Öztürk “is entitled to express her opinions freely.” They added that the DHS has yet to provide any evidence to support their deportation case.
“Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of U.S. supplied bombs being dropped on Gaza killing over 1,000 people, including over 250 children in the last week. It appears the only thing Rumeysa is being targeted for is her right to free speech,” the spokesperson said.
Student journalists at Tufts have also stood firm against the Trump’s administration’s attacks on free speech. The Tufts Daily’s editors published a defense of Öztürk and her role in writing the op-ed.
“Öztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value,” the editors wrote.
While the editors said they were sensitive to the “well-being of our writers and sources,” the paper has no plans of slowing its coverage of Öztürk’s case or future opinion pieces by students.
“That said, the withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” the editors wrote. “In a moment of uncertainty and turmoil, we will continue to defend independent journalism by sharing others’ viewpoints and stories.”
While in Georgetown, Guyana, on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter about what led to the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. The reporter mentioned an opinion piece Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024, published in The Tufts Daily, advocating for students’ calls to divest the school from companies with ties to Israel.
Rubio seemed to downplay the influence of the op-ed, written alongside three other Tufts graduate students, instead insinuating without evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, had vandalized her university, occupied buildings, and harassed students.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Government documents included in court filings, however, don’t back up Rubio’s claims of supposed unlawful behavior.
Several days before her arrest on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Öztürk’s student visa without notifying her, according to a DHS document through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, through which Öztürk had obtained her visa.
The government didn’t claim that Öztürk had broken any laws but instead cited a civil law provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The 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 hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The government has made the same argument in detaining former Columbia University student activist leader Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri, as well as in its efforts to arrest Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper.”
In each of these cases, attorneys for the students argued the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and academics over their support for Palestine are ultimately an attack on their free speech rights.
Öztürk’s case is notable in that her detention and possible deportation may very well center on a published piece of journalism.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper,” Öztürk’s attorneys wrote in a habeas petition for her release filed on Friday. “Rümeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others. Indeed, her arrest and detention are part of a concerted and systemic effort by Trump administration officials to punish students and others identified with pro-Palestine activism.”
Activists and free speech advocates have been quick to remind that crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech did not begin with the Trump administration.
Since October 7, 2023, schools have censored, suspended, or fired professors and students over their speech on Palestine and Israel. In response to student encampments, President Joe Biden delivered law-and-order messages to protesters, accusing pro-Palestinian movements of antisemitism.
School administrators regularly called police on student protests, leading to violent arrests. In his statement from jail dictated to lawyers by phone, Khalil blamed Columbia’s administrators for having “laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.”
In the case of Öztürk, such doxing campaigns may have been a factor in her arrest. Attorneys said Öztürk feared for her safety after pro-Israel group Canary Mission posted about her in early February, pointing to her 2024 essay. Canary Mission, which shares personal information about pro-Palestine activists online and is often used by other Zionist groups to dox people, said Öztürk took part in “anti-Israel activism” and cited her 2024 opinion piece as its sole source to back its claim.
In its “Catch and Revoke” program, the State Department also scours the social media accounts of student visa holders for purported pro-Hamas sentiment, which the government has conflated with pro-Palestine views.
Free speech advocates note that professing support for both Palestine and Hamas is protected by the First Amendment. Even so, international students have been increasingly careful about what they write or say online, legal advocates for student protesters told The Intercept. The recent arrests have also given international students pause over whether they should remain in the U.S.
During the press conference, Rubio also confirmed Axios reporting that the State Department has already revoked at least 300 student visas.
Rubio said, “We do it every day — every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
There are about 1.5 million student visa holders in the U.S.
After Öztürk’s arrest, DHS passed reporters an unsubstantiated claim that Öztürk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”
Öztürk’s op-ed, however, never mentions Hamas.
Instead, the 800-word opinion piece references mounting evidence of Israel’s violations of international law in its war in Gaza. It criticized the Tufts administration’s double standard of espousing diversity, civic engagement, and the exchange of ideas, but failing to uphold those values in its rejection of the students’ demands.
The piece also pointed to the movement against South African apartheid and Tufts’ decision in 1989 to divest from South Africa “and end its complicity with the then-racist regime.”
Several weeks before publishing the essay, Tufts’ student governing body had passed a series of resolutions, among them a call for the school to disclose and halt all of the university’s investments in companies tied to Israel. Hours after the vote, however, university administrators flatly rejected the resolutions. The following day, more than 150 students responded by holding a rally and die-in on campus.
The Tufts Daily March 26, 2024, opinion piece was a part of the growing campuswide dissent to the university’s rejection of student demands. The discontent would culminate in the school’s Palestinian solidarity encampment, which would last about one month before it was voluntarily dismantled by student activists.
“Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote.
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the op-ed was published, masked plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Öztürk outside of her Somerville, Massachusetts, home as she was on her way to to break her Ramadan fast with friends. Footage of her arrest, which was shared widely online, sparked immediate outrage with many referring to the arrest as “a kidnapping” or an “abduction.” For nearly 24 hours, Öztürk’s family and legal team was unaware of her whereabouts.
In defiance of a federal judge’s order to keep Öztürk in Massachusetts, ICE flew Öztürk to the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a privately run ICE jail, where she remains incarcerated.
Öztürk did not have access to her medications during the flight and suffered an asthma attack, her attorneys said in court filings.
Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper issued an order on Friday preventing the government from deporting Öztürk as the battle for her release plays out in court.
A spokesperson for Öztürk’s legal team defended the 2024 op-ed in a statement Friday and said that Öztürk “is entitled to express her opinions freely.” They added that the DHS has yet to provide any evidence to support their deportation case.
“Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of U.S. supplied bombs being dropped on Gaza killing over 1,000 people, including over 250 children in the last week. It appears the only thing Rumeysa is being targeted for is her right to free speech,” the spokesperson said.
Student journalists at Tufts have also stood firm against the Trump’s administration’s attacks on free speech. The Tufts Daily’s editors published a defense of Öztürk and her role in writing the op-ed.
“Öztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value,” the editors wrote.
While the editors said they were sensitive to the “well-being of our writers and sources,” the paper has no plans of slowing its coverage of Öztürk’s case or future opinion pieces by students.
“That said, the withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” the editors wrote. “In a moment of uncertainty and turmoil, we will continue to defend independent journalism by sharing others’ viewpoints and stories.”
Global press freedom organisations have condemned the killing of two journalists in Gaza this week, who died in separate targeted airstrikes by the Israeli armed forces.
And protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand dedicated their week 77 rally and march in the heart of Auckland to their memory, declaring “Journalism is not a crime”.
Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old correspondent for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his car in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya, media reports said.
Video, reportedly from minutes after the airstrike, shows people gathering around the shattered and smoking car and pulling a body out of the wreckage.
Mohammed Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today television was killed earlier on Monday, reportedly along with his wife and son, in an Israeli airstrike on his home in south Khan Younis.
One Palestinian woman read out a message from Shabat’s family: “He dreamed of becoming a journalist and to tell the world the truth.
“But war doesn’t wait for dreams. He was only 23, and when the war began he left classes to give a voice to those who had none.”
Global media condemnation
In the hours after the deaths, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Palestinian press freedom organisations released statements condemning the attacks.
“CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s programme director.
“This nightmare in Gaza has to end. The international community must act fast to ensure that journalists are kept safe and hold Israel to account for the deaths of Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour.
“Journalists are civilians and it is illegal to attack them in a war zone.”
Honouring the life of Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat – killed by Israeli forces at 23 and shattering his dreams. Image: Del Abcede/APR
In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed it had targeted and killed Shabat and Mansour and labelled them as “terrorists” — without any evidence to back their claim.
The IDF also said that it had struck Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance fighters in Khan Younis, where Mohammed Mansour was killed.
In October 2024, the IDF had accused Shabat and five other Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in Gaza of being members of the militant arm of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Al Jazeera and Shabat denied Israel’s claims, with Shabat stating in an interview with the CPJ that “we are civilians … Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”
In its statement condemning the deaths of Shabat and Mansour, the CPJ again called on Israel to “stop making unsubstantiated allegations to justify its killing and mistreatment of members of the press”.
The CPJ estimates that more than 170 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation began gathering data in 1992.
However, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate says it believes the number is higher and, with the deaths of Shabat and Mansour, 208 journalists and other members of the press have been killed over the course of the conflict.
Under international law, journalists are protected civilians who must not be targeted by warring parties.
Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in its genocide in the blockaded enclave since October 7, 2023.
The Israeli carnage has reduced most of the Gaza to ruins and displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population, while causing a massive shortage of basic necessities.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its war on the enclave.
New Zealand protesters wearing mock “Press” vests in solidarity with Gazan journalists documenting the Israeli genocide. Image: Del Abcede/APR
Earlier this month, while hunting for Columbia University students to deport over their ties to Gaza protests, the Trump administration convinced a federal judge to sign off on search warrants for two students’ dorm rooms — then raided the residences with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
As details about the warrants have emerged, however, so have allegations that federal agents misled the court and secured the warrants under “false pretenses,” as one of the students whose room was searched, Yunseo Chung, claimed in a lawsuit challenging her deportation.
The warrants were predicated on probable cause that Columbia was “harboring” students who were in the country illegally, court filings indicate. Chung, however, is a lawful permanent resident, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport her based on her arrest and citation at a Gaza sit-in. She has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old.
“The basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”
“The idea that they went before a federal magistrate judge and said, ‘We have to search Ms. Chung’s residence for evidence of Columbia harboring her’ — that shows they’re willing to lie to a judge,” said Nathan Yaffe, an immigration attorney.
Yaffe represents both Chung and the other Columbia student who was targeted by the search warrants, Ranjani Srinivasan, who left the country in mid-March.
Most of the materials relating to the search warrants remain under seal in federal court, and Columbia declined to comment on them, citing student privacy protections. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the warrants.
“If the government falsified information to get the warrant, that is its own bundle of serious problems,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “But even if not, the basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”
“Harboring and Concealing”?
The search warrants served on Columbia first became public through a late-night statement from the university on March 13, just five days after the jarring arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia apartment building. The school did not include the targeted students’ names, the specific buildings, or the government’s legal justification for searching them.
“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote in her statement. Armstrong emphasized that university protocol “requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas” — which ICE satisfied by serving warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge.
“The University is obligated to comply with the law,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”
The next day, a top Justice Department official bragged about the unsuccessful raid in a speech. His remarks offered the first clues about the story the Trump administration told the federal judge who signed the warrants.
“Just last night we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” said Todd Blanche, the U.S. deputy attorney general. Blanche offered no evidence in his speech to support the allegation against the university.
The federal anti-harboring statute makes it a crime to knowingly conceal noncitizens who are in the country illegally. Like many of the country’s laws around immigration, the anti-harboring provision is written in broad language, which the Trump administration has wielded to threaten legal aid organizations and other groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights.
Broad as the language is, however, the law still has concrete requirements. First, the people being “harbored” must lack legal status to be in the U.S. And “harboring” requires some sort of active concealment or obstruction, as opposed to simply declining to assist ICE in deportation.
Courts have differed in their particular definitions, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose precedent is binding in New York federal courts, has ruled that a conviction for “harboring” requires “conduct tending substantially to facilitate an alien’s remaining in the United States illegally and to prevent government authorities from detecting his unlawful presence.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has not defined “harboring,” but in 2023 it interpreted other parts of the same statute to require proof of the defendant’s specific intent to break the law.
The typical case under the harboring statute involves active concealment to help people who are undocumented or who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge to avoid being located by ICE, explained David Leopold, an immigration attorney. He contrasted that active concealment with sanctuary churches that have welcomed undocumented people to live in their facilities, which offered some protection against ICE raids.
“The reason the churches weren’t charged with harboring,” Leopold said, “was that it was open and obvious that the person was living there. They weren’t hiding them surreptitiously.”
“Legal Impossibility”
When federal agents sought search warrants targeting Srinivasan and Chung’s residences, the anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification they offered to support probable cause of a federal crime, according to a copy of one of the warrants filed with Chung’s lawsuit.
So far, the government hasn’t offered evidence, at least not publicly, that Columbia was taking any active steps to obstruct ICE or conceal anyone on its campus. More fundamentally, both Chung and Srinivasan came to the U.S. entirely lawfully, and neither had appeared before an immigration judge, much less received a deportation order.
On May 5, Srinivasan learned that the State Department was revoking her student visa in an email from the U.S. consulate in India. In the following days, ICE agents visited her apartment building at Columbia twice without a warrant, threatening through the door to keep coming back until they put her in deportation proceedings.
On May 11, after Columbia informed Srinivasan that she had been withdrawn from enrollment because of her revoked visa and urged her to meet with immigration agents, she boarded a flight to Canada rather than fight her deportation. ICE was apparently unaware that Srinivasan was no longer in the U.S. when three agents searched her room two days later.
“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics and documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” a masked ICE agent explained to Srinivasan’s roommate, according to video reviewed by The Intercept. Before leaving, the agent identified himself as special agent Brian Carlucci and left her a copy of the search warrant, which he signed.
ICE did not follow the proper steps to revoke Srinivasan’s legal status in the country, Yaffe told The Intercept, which means she was always in the country lawfully.
“In my view it was unfounded to seek to execute a warrant for ‘harboring’ her,” Yaffe said, That “layer of pretext is not as clearcut” for Srinivasan as it was for Chung, he said, given the latter’s green card.
Chung and her attorneys first heard from DHS agents on March 9 that the State Department had determined she should be deported under the same arcane legal provision that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked against Khalil, who also has a green card.
On Thursday, Rubio told reporters he had revoked more than 300 students’ visas so far, and was finding new ones to revoke daily.
Whatever power Rubio may have to revoke visas and green cards over otherwise protected speech — which is currently being tested in numerous lawsuits by students who have been detained or threatened with deportation — his pronouncements do not immediately transform a lawful resident into an unlawful one, Chung’s attorneys told a federal court on Tuesday.
“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise.”
“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise,” attorney Ramzi Kassem said at the hearing. “And as long as she’s a permanent resident, she cannot be ‘harbored.’ The statute does not apply to her.”
Chung’s court filings did not include the more detailed affidavits that the agents submitted to federal Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger on March 13, which remain under seal.
“I can’t imagine what truthfully could have been said in those affidavits to make the harboring statute relevant,” Colangelo-Bryan said.
Chung’s lawsuit asserts the warrants were “obtained on false pretenses” and were just pretext to get close enough to arrest her and Srinivasan. In their warrant application, the government indicated to the judge that agents were searching for records related to the students’ “affiliation with Columbia University,” such as lease agreements, student conduct materials, and communications with the school.
ICE executed both warrants at Columbia between 9 and 10 p.m. on March 13, according to court filings. Yet they didn’t seize anything during their searches.
“It’s clear that they that they were not actually searching for anything relating to those documents,” Yaffe said, “leaving aside that it’s a legal impossibility to ‘harbor’ Ms. Chung.”
Other attorneys have been even more strident than Chung’s legal team in demanding answers about how the warrants were issued.
“Excuse the profanity, but this is absolutely fucking insane,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post, “and such a clear overreach that I can’t believe a magistrate judge authorized a warrant here.”
After the hearing on Tuesday, a different federal judge, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the District Court, issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from detaining Chung or moving her out of the state, as ICE did with Khalil and other student activists.
Buchwald’s order did not address Chung’s allegations about the search warrants, although she noted in the hearing that she had pulled the government’s affidavit from court files and was reviewing it.