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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Trump Says Undocumented Immigrants Shouldn’t Get Trials Before Deportation
The president claimed that countries were sending their prisoners to the United States and that he needed to bypass the constitutional demands of due process to expel them quickly.
By Luke Broadwater, Reporting from the White House, April 22, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/us/politics/trump-undocumented-immigrants-trials-deportation.html
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” President Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump asserted on Tuesday that undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to trials, insisting that his administration should be able to deport them without appearing before a judge.
The remarks, which he made in the Oval Office in front of reporters, were Mr. Trump’s latest broadside against the judiciary, which he has said is inhibiting his deportation powers. Mr. Trump falsely claimed that countries like Congo and Venezuela had emptied their prisons into the United States and that he therefore needed to bypass the constitutional demands of due process to expel the immigrants quickly.
“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Mr. Trump said. “It wasn’t meant. The system wasn’t meant. And we don’t think there’s anything that says that.”
He claimed that the “very bad people” he was removing from the country included killers, drug dealers and the mentally ill.
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Mr. Trump said. “The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”
He made similar statements in a social media post on Monday in which he wrote, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks have drawn swift backlash.
Representative Jonathan L. Jackson, Democrat of Illinois, wrote on social media: “‘We can’t give everyone a trial' — excuse me, what?! That’s straight-up #dictator talk. Due process isn’t optional because it’s inconvenient. This is the United States, not a banana republic. If you want to shred the Constitution, just say so.”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after the Supreme Court, early on Saturday, temporarily blocked the administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
Mr. Trump issued a proclamation last month invoking the Alien Enemies Act as a way to deport immigrants he alleged were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang. The law, which was passed in 1798, has been used only three times before in U.S. history, during periods of declared war.
The Supreme Court has ruled that those subject to the statute needed to be given the opportunity to challenge their removal.
The Trump administration has also been dogged by the case of a Salvadoran man living in Maryland who was deported because of an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ordered the administration nearly two weeks ago to facilitate his return so he could go through the legal system in the United States, but the White House has so far not fulfilled that order.
The White House posted on social media that the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was “never coming back.”
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2) Harvard Plans to Use Trump’s Haste Against Him as It Fights Funding Cut
Harvard’s lawyers suggest the administration was sloppy when it froze billions in federal funding. A mundane but crucial law is essential to the university’s case against the government.
By Alan Blinder and Michael C. Bender, April 22, 2025
Harvard University contends that the Trump administration moved too hastily in its move to pull the school’s funding, ignoring its own rules. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
In the three months since President Trump returned to power, his administration has prized speed and shock value.
Harvard University is wagering that White House strategy could be used against it.
The 51-page lawsuit the university filed on Monday, intended to fight the administration’s freeze of billions in federal funding, hinges largely on a statute that provides specific timelines for federal agencies to draft rules and impose penalties.
This wonky workhorse of American law, known as the Administrative Procedure Act, has been cited in a majority of lawsuits filed this year against the Trump administration, including complaints seeking to reverse funding reductions to the United States Agency for International Development, local schools and Voice of America.
While Mr. Trump’s strategy has generated headlines, the outcomes of these cases will determine whether that approach will also produce lasting policy victories.
In Harvard’s case, the university is seeking to fend off accusations of discrimination from the administration’s antisemitism task force, a group that was put together to move faster than typical federal civil rights investigators.
The administration preferred to work with Harvard and encouraged the university to “come to the negotiating table in good faith” instead of grandstanding, said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Harvard is showboating,” Mr. Fields said. “But they know more than anyone that not playing ball is going to hurt their team. They need to be in compliance with federal law in order to get federal funds.”
Harvard turned to the administrative procedure law after facing a crush of government demands that included, among other conditions, audits of its faculty for plagiarism and political views, along with changes to admissions and hiring. The university argues that Washington is seeking to exert unconstitutional sway — and that its effort is defined by sloppiness that blasted past due process.
In some ways, the administration’s zeal for speed has already proven costly. The list of demands emailed to the university on April 11 was sent by mistake, Trump officials have said. But while there have been differing accounts about why the email was mishandled, the demands were so onerous that Harvard officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.
Trump officials tried to reopen negotiations in recent days, but Harvard refused. Instead, the university has accused the administration of breaking the law.
“Defendants,” Harvard wrote in the lawsuit, “failed to comply with their own regulations before freezing Harvard’s federal financial assistance.”
In another section, Harvard notes that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids certain kinds of discrimination, requires a detailed process before it can be a basis for freezing money. The Trump administration, Harvard says, did “the precise opposite.”
Elsewhere in its complaint, the university contends that the government’s moves against it were “arbitrary and capricious” and could not be explained, or explained reasonably.
For universities putting up legal fights against the Trump administration, and familiar with deliberative processes that traditionally govern federal grants, the procedure act may be their most essential tool.
In February, the law was the foundation of a challenge to the administration’s effort to change how universities are reimbursed for overhead costs related to National Institutes of Health research. Last week, universities and their industry associations turned to the law again after the Department of Energy sought to cut research funding. Harvard is now embracing much of the same playbook.
But for an administration that has signaled it would like to make an example of a top university — all the better to cow other universities — the deluge of abrupt pressure is part of the point.
To some of the administration’s allies, the government’s haste to curb what it contends is endemic campus antisemitism is a virtue. The federal government’s civil rights investigations are ordinarily long and steeped in procedures and policies that, the administration’s allies contend, can make bad situations worse.
“My greater worry has been with the slowness of investigations, historically, and with the great amount of time in which students are left without recourse or remedy,” Kenneth L. Marcus, the Education Department’s top civil rights official during Mr. Trump’s first term, said in an interview before the administration’s fight with Harvard fully erupted.
Catherine Lhamon, who was assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department during the Obama and Biden administrations, said that the process was too long for prosecuting civil rights violations, particularly when infractions affected students directly. But she added that those were issues for Congress to consider.
“Congress decided at a crucible moment in our nation’s history that there should be federal civil rights protections and a pretty onerous process for the government to say those laws have been violated and federal funds should not be spent,” Ms. Lhamon said. “What we’re seeing now is what Congress was worried about when those principles were written, which is that somebody might try to weaponize these particular protections.”
Harvard has also reached for concepts of American law — like First Amendment protections — that are less about bureaucratic procedures and easier sells in the still-essential court of public opinion.
But even part of Harvard’s First Amendment argument partially relies on the procedure act, which says that an action by a federal agency that runs “contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity” is illegal.
“In terms of what Harvard is specifically doing, it is pushing back against agency action, and we have an entire legal framework,” said Osamudia R. James, a professor at the University of North Carolina whose specialties include administrative law.
Harvard officials are hoping that the government’s speedy tactics will steer the case toward a speedy end. The university’s lawsuit asked the Federal District Court in Massachusetts to expedite the case.
So far, Harvard has not requested an interim step, like a preliminary injunction. Although the university has not ruled out seeking some kind of short-term relief, its early approach is a signal that it believes the court may be able to act definitively and quickly on grounds that may not require much spectacle.
To make its case, Harvard has hired a roster of legal heavyweights, many of them with deep experience in Washington and close ties to the conservative establishment.
William A. Burck, who worked in George W. Bush’s White House and now is an outside ethics adviser to Mr. Trump’s company and sits on the Fox Corporation’s board, was the first lawyer listed in the lawsuit. Robert K. Hur, the U.S. attorney in Maryland during Mr. Trump’s first term and later the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents, came next.
Other lawyers representing Harvard include Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, who was one of Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court litigators; Steven P. Lehotsky, who worked in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia; Mary Elizabeth Miller, who worked for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.; and Katherine C. Yarger, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Jonathan F. Cohn was a deputy assistant attorney general during Mr. Bush’s administration. Scott A. Keller is a former solicitor general in Texas who later worked as chief counsel for Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.
The outcome of the legal case may be beside the point, Professor James said.
“If you lose ultimately at the court but millions of people now believe that all of these institutions are hotbeds of discrimination, that they don’t provide any benefits to the communities in which they operate, that they don’t produce anything of value,” she said, adding, “that might be a win if you are hostile to higher education institutions.”
Seamus Hughes contributed research.
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3) Trump Wants You to Think Resistance Is Futile. It Is Not.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, April 23, 2025
Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
The American constitutional system is built on the theory that the self-interest of lawmakers can be as much of a defense against tyranny as any given law or institution.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Our Constitution is nothing more than a “parchment barrier” if not backed by the self-interest and ambition of those tasked with leading the nation.
One of the most striking dynamics in these first months of the second Trump administration was the extent to which so many politicians seemed to lack the ambition to directly challenge the president. There was a sense that the smart path was to embrace the apparent “vibe shift” of the 2024 presidential election and accommodate oneself to the new order.
But events have moved the vibe in the other direction. Ambition is making a comeback.
Last week, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador, where he met with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a victim of the Trump administration’s removal program under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Under their reading of the law, which allows the president to summarily detain or expel foreign nationals from the United States, the Trump administration has sent hundreds of alleged gang members, most of Venezuelan origin, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia is one of the men trapped in this black zone. Despite his protected legal status, he was arrested, detained, accused of gang activity and removed from the United States. At no point did the government prove its case against Abrego Garcia, who has been moved to a lower-security prison, nor did he have a chance to defend himself in a court of law or before an immigration judge. As one of Abrego Garcia’s representatives in the United States Senate, Van Hollen met with him to both confirm his safety and highlight the injustice of his removal.
“This case is not just about one man,” Van Hollen said at a news conference following his visit. “It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America. If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America.”
Later, in an interview with CNN, Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of ignoring the Supreme Court, which earlier this month told the White House to comply with a district court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return: “Facilitate does not mean you do nothing.” As for the president’s claim that Abrego Garcia is actually a dangerous gang member and so he wasn’t actually removed in error (as the administration acknowledged in a court filing), “What Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject,” Van Hollen said. “The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.”
The goal of Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison itself — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is reportedly organizing a trip to El Salvador, and a group of House Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California arrived on Monday. “While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Representative Garcia said in a statement. “That is why we’re here, to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”
“We are demanding the Trump administration abide by the Supreme Court decision and give Kilmar and the other migrants mistakenly sent to El Salvador due process in the United States,” Garcia added.
All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll shows Trump slightly underwater on the issue with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.
Americans are even negative on the specifics of the president’s handling of immigration. Most Americans, 82 percent, say the president should follow federal court rulings even when he disagrees with them. A smaller but still significant majority says the president should stop deporting people in defiance of court orders. And Americans are broadly opposed to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in America for long periods of time, or who have children who are U.S. citizens, or who are law-abiding except for breaking immigration law.
Americans may have liked to hear the president talk tough on immigration, but when it came to real actions affecting real people, they are much less supportive. And in traveling to El Salvador, dramatizing the plight of Abrego Garcia and attacking Trump on the most unpopular aspect of his immigration policies, Democrats like Van Hollen are creating the kinds of negative attention for Trump that could turn more Americans against the president’s immigration policies.
These Democrats are also highlighting the vital importance of political leadership after months during which it seemed to have vanished from liberal politics in the United States. Despite a narrow victory with one of the smallest popular vote margins on record, there was a real sense — as Trump began his second term — that his vision had won America over. The United States was Trump country, and the best anyone could do was to adjust to the new reality.
Many elites and institutions that took a posture of opposition to Trump in his first term looked to cooperate — and in the case of Silicon Valley, even assisted — in his second. Likewise, powerful Democrats abandoned resistance in favor of a more measured, supposedly realistic approach. “It’s just accepting the reality that Trump won. And us just saying he’s a chaotic guy goes nowhere. That’s just baked into people’s consciousness,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said in January. “The fact is, people want change. So that means we have to be willing to change as well.” Or, as one unnamed Democratic adviser told Politico just after Trump’s inauguration, “The path to prominence is not in endless resistance headlines.”
Democrats would, in the words of a former administration, lead from behind. They would follow the public’s outrage if and when it materialized. Otherwise, they would work with the administration when it made sense. They might even hand him a little bipartisan success. As Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania put it in a January interview with ABC News, “the Republicans are going to drive the agenda, and I’m going to find a way to work together along on all of those kinds of priorities.”
This approach would make some kind of sense if Trump were a normal president in pursuit of a normal, albeit conservative, political agenda.
But Trump is not a normal president. And it’s hard to say that he aspires to be a president at all, if by president we mean an executive officer, bounded by the law, who serves ultimately at the pleasure of the American people. No, Trump wants to be a strongman. The undisputed leader of a personalist autocracy where no other institution — no other power — can meaningfully oppose him or his designs. Recall his promise to be “a dictator on day one.” Perhaps he means day 100 and beyond, too.
Cooperation with a leader of this ilk is little more than appeasement. It is little more than a license for him to go faster and push further — to sprint toward the consolidated authoritarian government of Trump’s dreams (and those, especially, of his most reactionary allies and advisers with their eyes on Hungary, Turkey and even Russia and China).
The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite — to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its most maximalist aims.
But all the while there was real weakness. There were the tens of millions of Americans who voted against Trump, still opposed him and remained dismayed by his lawless cruelty. There was the clear disorganization of the Trump administration, the fact that it was split between rival power centers and that Trump did not, in the four years between his first and second terms, become more able or adept at managing the executive branch. He looked exclusively for loyalty, and the result — following his initial blitz of executive orders — was haphazard incompetence across a number of different fronts.
For as much as Trump tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth was that he was as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it may have looked at first glance.
It helped that the White House overplayed its hand again and again. When institutions like Columbia University effectively surrendered to the administration, they did not buy themselves grace as much as they were forced into Trump’s service as agents of his will. There would be no bargaining. There was no deal you could cut to save your Cloud City. You could either submit or resist.
It is in the last two months that we have finally begun to see resistance. Ordinary people began boycotts and took to the streets in large protests. Lawyers challenged the administration on virtually every one of the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. And Democrats began to tap into and amplify grass roots anti-Trump energy, from the anti-oligarchy rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Booker’s record-breaking speech on the Senate floor. The courts have clearly taken note of the shift in public sentiment, delivering major defeats and decrying the president’s attacks on cherished American liberties.
The Trump administration is still pushing to realize its vision — and high-profile prisoners like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk still face deportation — but the administration is no longer on a glide path to success. It could even careen toward failure. By exercising political leadership, by acting like an opposition, both lawmakers and ordinary citizens have turned smooth sailing into rough waters for the administration. And while there is still much to do — Abrego Garcia has not been released, there are reports that the administration has sent at least one detainee to Rwanda, and there is also at least one person who is missing from all records — it’s also true that Trump and his people are not an unstoppable force.
Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be, if no one stands in the way. But every time we — and especially those with power and authority — make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration’s authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.
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4) 21 Years Later, Deported Back to a ‘Home’ He Barely Knew
Two decades had passed since Nascimento Blair was last in Jamaica, his homeland. Much had changed, including Mr. Blair himself.
By Luis Ferré-SadurnÃ, Photographs by Todd Heisler, April 24, 2025
Luis Ferré-Sadurnà and Todd Heisler reported from Kingston, Jamaica, where they chronicled the circumstances of a man deported to his homeland.
Supporters hugged Mr. Blair outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency offices in New York City. For years, check-ins were a common occurrence for him. This time felt different. Credit...Dawn Ravella
Nascimento Blair returned home in shackles.
He landed in Jamaica in February, 21 years after he had abandoned the island, seated next to dozens of his countrymen who were also handcuffed. As he stepped off the plane at the seaside airport in Kingston and felt the scorching Caribbean sun of his youth, Mr. Blair, 46, was greeted with suspicion.
Still dazed, he looked out of place. He had on the same winter clothes — a peacoat, turtleneck, gray suit and Chelsea boots — he had been wearing when U.S. immigration authorities had abruptly detained him on a frigid morning in New York City weeks earlier.
He noticed his slightly Americanized accent as he sat through hours of interrogation by Jamaican authorities at the airport. And he felt like an outcast as Jamaican officials snapped his mug shot, took his fingerprints and asked about his past.
“They don’t look at you like a Jamaican,” Mr. Blair said. “They look at you like a criminal.”
Mr. Blair did not give them details about his past, an odyssey that began with a side hustle dealing marijuana in the New York suburbs as a 24-year-old Jamaican transplant, which led to a kidnapping conviction he disputed and a 15-year prison sentence he fulfilled.
It was his criminal past that had gotten him deported from the United States, where he had been rebuilding his life and seeking redemption. He had earned two college degrees, started a trucking business, mentored people released from prison, cared for a fiancée with breast cancer, taken classes at Columbia University.
None of it would stave off deportation: He was among the first few thousand immigrants scattered across the globe during the early days of President Trump’s deportation campaign.
On paper, Mr. Blair fit the profile of the people Mr. Trump says he wants to deport: those with criminal backgrounds. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security blamed the Biden administration for not deporting Mr. Blair sooner.
But to Mr. Blair and his supporters, his life story was one of rehabilitation, nuanced and filled with qualities that they believe Mr. Trump’s deportation machine disregards as it flies out immigrants en masse.
His removal from the United States and dizzying journey back to the Caribbean raises a fundamental question Americans are grappling with as they consider the president’s immigration crackdown: Who deserves to stay?
After shuttling between detention centers for weeks, Mr. Blair was back in Jamaica, a proud island known for revering its national heroes — Bob Marley, Usain Bolt, Marcus Garvey — but not for welcoming deportees warmly.
Mr. Blair was home, except Jamaica did not feel like home.
A Cryptic Call From ICE
A judge ordered Mr. Blair to be deported after he was convicted of kidnapping in 2006, accused of abducting an acquaintance who had stolen weed from his apartment. Yet he was allowed to remain in the United States after leaving prison in 2020 because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency did not consider Mr. Blair a priority for deportation.
That was during Mr. Trump’s first term. He vowed it would be different in the second.
The deportation order loomed over Mr. Blair as he rebuilt his life after prison. Mr. Blair, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., and worked in Harlem, had to check in at the ICE office in downtown Manhattan seven times over five years. The visits became an uneventful ritual — getting a piece of paper signed by an immigration officer — that usually took just a few minutes.
But on Jan. 31, about two weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Blair got a call from an unknown number. It was ICE. An officer told him to report to the office in three days, much earlier than his previously scheduled May check-in.
Mr. Blair asked if everything was OK.
The officer was vague.
Immigration lawyers have noticed more people under ICE supervision receiving similar calls. People were arrested during ICE check-ins under the Biden administration, too, but the tactic appears to be growing under Mr. Trump as a way to easily detain immigrants without having to grab them in their homes or workplaces, which the agency argues puts its officers and the public at risk.
Mr. Blair, who goes by Blair, dressed up, as he typically did, and headed to the ICE office. Unlike many immigrants who wade through the country’s convoluted immigration system without legal or financial support, he was not alone.
Nearly 50 friends, supporters and New Yorkers — an unlikely contingent of community organizers, college professors and faith leaders — showed up outside in solidarity, bearing posters.
They had banded together to try to stop his deportation through a flurry of last-minute letters to ICE casting him in a sympathetic light — a rehabilitated man who had repaid his debt to society.
“I feel if Trump met him, he would think this guy makes America great,” said Dawn Ravella, a social worker who befriended Mr. Blair through a group she founded that supports former prisoners. “He was born in Jamaica, but made in America. A person who did something bad, had remorse, paid their dues and paid it forward by living a life of kindness and service.”
Mr. Blair entered the ICE office on Feb. 3 with his lawyer, Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia law professor and a criminal defense lawyer who was helping him on a pro bono basis.
They were ushered into a small room where three officers told them that they were taking Mr. Blair into custody. Mr. Harcourt tried to de-escalate the situation, but the officers told him he first had to fill out a form indicating that he was Mr. Blair’s lawyer.
Mr. Harcourt stepped out to complete the form. The door closed behind him. Inside the room, the officers pinned Mr. Blair to the wall, handcuffed him and whisked him away to a cell, Mr. Blair said.
“The way they tricked Blair into coming in to get arrested,” Mr. Harcourt said. “The way they tricked me to get me out of their sights. It was pure deceit, in a way that I don’t even experience in the deepest depths of the criminal justice system.”
From New York to Louisiana
It was close to midnight when Mr. Blair was transferred to a jail a short drive north in Orange County, N.Y., where ICE holds many people rounded up in New York.
ICE officers paraded Mr. Blair and other detainees before loading them into vans, posing for photos with the immigrants like trophies, he said.
“This is the new administration,” Mr. Blair recalled an officer telling him. “You weren’t a priority then, you’re a priority now.”
Mr. Blair was handed a yellow jumpsuit at the Orange County jail, his first time behind bars since leaving prison. The staff were respectful and he was allowed visitors, Mr. Blair said, but things deteriorated after his 17-day stay there.
On Feb. 21, his birthday, he was transferred with little explanation to a jail in Nassau County on Long Island. The next day, he was awakened about 3 a.m. and taken to Newark Liberty International Airport. There, he and other detainees were put on a plane operated by GlobalX, a charter company that is under contract to ICE. The detainees wore arm and leg restraints that left Mr. Blair’s wrists swollen.
The plane departed about 8:30 a.m., stopping in Boston, Buffalo and Pennsylvania to pick up others in custody, mostly men, Mr. Blair recalled. They landed more than 12 hours later in Louisiana, where Mr. Blair was given back his clothes and held for five days at a deportation staging facility.
That’s where Mr. Blair got a close-up look at the Trump administration’s deportation efforts: Detainees — Mexicans, Colombians, Guatemalans — were marched from the facility by nationality each day before being quickly replenished with more soon-to-be deportees.
“When 50 people leave in the morning, by 10:30 a.m., the door opens and 60 more people walk in,” Mr. Blair recalled.
A Conviction Haunts an Arrival
The GlobalX plane that landed at Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston at 11:29 a.m. on Feb. 27 — carrying Mr. Blair and more than 50 other Jamaicans — was the second deportation flight to Jamaica after Mr. Trump took office.
Caribbean nations have been bracing for an influx of flights packed with repatriated citizens, as well as people looking to self-deport to avoid the shame associated with deportation.
Jamaicans deported to the island, many of whom have criminal backgrounds, have long had to grapple with social stigma that stems from a widely held perception that deportees are unemployable, dangerous and destined to fuel crime.
Growing up, Mr. Blair attended an all-boys prep school in Jamaica and chased dreams of playing soccer in England. Yet in 2005, less than two years after moving to the United States on a work visa to join his father and other relatives in New York, the state with the largest Jamaican population, Mr. Blair wound up sitting in a Westchester jail.
Before landing in jail, Mr. Blair had joined a bustling Jamaican community in Westchester, where he moved into a basement apartment in Mount Vernon owned by his aunt. He settled into a job at a Brooklyn moving company, earning enough to send money back to his siblings. He also began meeting other Jamaicans, including some who sold marijuana, which was still criminalized at the time.
Mr. Blair soon began dealing. First, small amounts to co-workers. Then, about five pounds, worth thousands of dollars a week, he said.
“I got caught up selling weed and fell in love with the money,” he said. “I strayed from my soccer dreams.”
Those dreams were resoundingly shattered on Oct. 11, 2005, when an 18-year-old who lived in Mr. Blair’s building broke into his apartment and stole half a pound of marijuana and money. Mr. Blair did not report the break-in to the police, fearful of getting busted for possessing marijuana. Instead, he took matters into his own hands.
“Somebody took something from me, and I wanted to get it back,” he said.
Prosecutors and Mr. Blair differ on what happened next.
The police arrested him and two other men the following day, after they were accused of kidnapping the teenager, holding him at another apartment and demanding $5,000 from the teenager’s father over the phone. Mr. Blair was accused of pistol-whipping the 18-year-old and driving him to the apartment, where prosecutors say he was tied up. The police freed the teenager that night after raiding the apartment, where they found two handguns and two pounds of marijuana.
The two other suspects pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced sentences. Mr. Blair pleaded not guilty and went to trial in 2006 and faced seven felony counts, including kidnapping and weapon charges.
Mr. Blair admitted that he demanded money from the teenager but maintains that he never held him against his will, never hit him with a gun and never tied him up. During the two-week trial, Mr. Blair testified that police officers beat him while he was chained to a desk and coerced testimony that was used at the trial.
The jury struggled to render a verdict, and a mistrial seemed possible, but a judge instructed the jurors to continue deliberating after they said they were deadlocked, according to court documents. After five days of deliberations, the jury found Mr. Blair guilty of kidnapping in the first degree, but not the other charges.
A judge sentenced him to a prison term of 15 years to life.
A ‘Metamorphosis’ in Prison
The man from Jamaica stood out at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a notorious maximum-security prison. Indeed, by many accounts, the Nascimento Blair that emerged from prison on April 9, 2020, was a changed man.
He had learned, slowly, to let go after years spent in the prison’s law library challenging his conviction. In filings that he often wrote himself, Mr. Blair argued, unsuccessfully, that his court-appointed lawyer had failed to properly represent him and that some of his constitutional rights had been denied during trial.
“I noticed the part I played in my incarceration,” he said, maintaining that he had not kidnapped anyone, even as he took responsibility for selling weed illegally. “You wouldn’t run into crooked stuff if you weren’t doing crooked stuff.”
He soon turned to education. While incarcerated, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science from Mercy University and a master’s degree in leadership from the New York Theological Seminary.
He began writing poetry that he published online and in a newsletter that he circulated inside the prison. And he got married in 2012 to a Jamaican woman who visited him while he was in prison. Afforded conjugal visits, they had a son in 2014 but later divorced.
“Sing Sing was my metamorphosis,” said Mr. Blair, who made the dean’s list.
He had long assumed that ICE would pick him up after his release from prison and deport him, as the agency routinely does with immigrants after they serve their time. But on the day of his release, ICE informed the prison that it would not detain Mr. Blair, he said.
Still, when his aunt picked him up outside the prison, Mr. Blair sprinted to the car and reclined the passenger seat so he was hidden from view, in case ICE was waiting.
Given a chance to remain in the country, Mr. Blair began to rebuild his life. He enrolled at a Columbia program for former prisoners, the Justice-in-Education Initiative, and was considering applying for a doctoral program.
He obtained a work permit and became a health care caseworker at Harlem United, which provides H.I.V. care, mostly to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He became a mentor to people coming out of prison and joined the board of Rising Hope, which provides college education to inmates.
Freddy Medina, a formerly incarcerated man who works as a counselor for at-risk youth in Yonkers, said he met Mr. Blair more than a decade ago when Mr. Medina was searching for hope as “a young man with a troubled path and an unsure future.”
“Unbeknown to me that hope came from an unexpected place, and his name was Nascimento Blair,” Mr. Medina wrote in a letter to ICE. “He challenged me to look deeper into myself, and as a result, my behavior began to change and years later I am in direct service work helping others.”
Mr. Blair settled into the ground-floor apartment of a house in Yonkers, where he exercised in a makeshift gym on the porch, amassed a large collection of sneakers and worked from behind a desk in the living room, where he had framed a paralegal certificate from Columbia. He lived with his fiancée, who is also Jamaican, and had been caring for her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Five years had gone by since prison. He had recently purchased an 18-foot box truck, intending to one day have a trucking fleet. And he was thinking of buying a house next year.
“In a strange way, and going against any critique that I would have about the incarceration system in the United States, I would say that in Blair’s case, rehabilitation has worked,” said Neni Panourgiá, an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia who taught Mr. Blair and was given power of attorney to handle his affairs.
Rebuilding, Again, in Jamaica
The comforts Mr. Blair took for granted in the United States vanished in Jamaica.
His sister greeted him at the airport and let him stay in her house in the hills of Kirkland Heights, a breezy community overlooking Kingston where big houses are interspersed with more modest ones like his sister’s.
Just a few days after arriving, Mr. Blair was showering and flushing with buckets of water as the family dealt with a water outage, a frequent occurrence. His sister had carved out an abandoned and rundown section of the house for Mr. Blair to fix up as his own.
Termites had eaten into the window frames, and the roof was leaking. He would need to install a toilet and do the electric wiring himself.
“This is my freaking reality after I worked so hard,” he said. “What am I going to do?”
For a muscular man who speaks with great self-confidence — about his soccer skills, his intellect, his business acumen, his life transformation — Mr. Blair seemed to vacillate between lamenting his situation and embracing his circumstances.
He tried tapping into the restless energy that had rubbed off on him in New York to keep busy with his immediate needs: formally quitting the job he left behind, getting his belongings shipped to Jamaica, finding out how to obtain a local ID and dealing with a stray bull roaming the backyard.
Without a job or a car, Mr. Blair mostly languished in his sister’s home even as he expressed fear of becoming a burden to her.
As he began taking in the island — a drive by his school, a visit to the hotel kitchen where he used to toil, a stroll on the field where he pursued his soccer-playing dreams — Mr. Blair’s Jamaica seemed smaller to him.
The island also felt slightly foreign, and he felt like a foreigner in it.
Everywhere he went, whether ordering goat curry at a restaurant or asking for the price of paint at a hardware store, Mr. Blair was ever-paranoid about being slighted because he dressed or sounded more American than Jamaican.
He was preoccupied with the mug shot and fingerprints taken at the airport and how they would be used by the government. And he had no idea how he would begin a job search or how employers would reconcile his qualifications with his deportation.
“This deportation is not going to be good for his résumé,” his sister, Tamara Stewart, said. “They’re going to assume the worst.”
His prospects dimmed about a month after his arrival, when local news outlets wrote about his deportation after ICE issued a news release with his photo, publicizing his kidnapping conviction and touting his removal from the United States.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem have made it clear that we are prioritizing arresting and deporting the worst of the worst,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement.
On a recent Sunday morning, the sun seeped into the hilltop house as Mr. Blair’s nephew picked June plums from the backyard to make fresh juice. His grandmother made the bed, while his sister cooked breakfast: beef liver, cooked banana, dumplings and coffee.
They all sat to eat, next to two giant barrels awkwardly placed by the dining table. The barrels were stuffed with rice, canned beans, sacks of sugar and bottles of cooking oil — the dry goods Mr. Blair used to ship from New York to help feed his family.
Now, they were feeding him, too.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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5) Trump Challenges Migrants’ Due Process Rights, Undercutting Bedrock Principle
White House officials are eschewing normal legal processes as they rush to ramp up deportations, saying there is no time to afford unauthorized immigrants any rights — and that they don’t deserve them anyway.
By Luke Broadwater, Reporting from Washington, April 23, 2025
While the Justice Department argues in court that it is working to comply with judges’ orders to provide migrants with due process before deporting them, President Trump and his top advisers are increasingly making a different argument altogether: Why should we?
In their rapid, maximalist campaign to apprehend and deport as many migrants as possible as quickly as possible, Mr. Trump and top members of his administration have abandoned any pretense of being bound by the constitutional limits that have constrained presidents of both parties in the past on immigration. Instead, they are asserting that when it comes to people who entered the United States illegally, the president has unchecked power to expel them without recourse, and that he has neither the time nor the obligation to do otherwise.
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday in the Oval Office. “The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”
He made similar remarks on social media on Monday, writing: “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
Such statements are alarming to legal experts who note that in the United States civil rights are for everyone — not just citizens.
“It’s enormously disturbing,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is so troubling to hear the president and top executive officials give so little regard to the Constitution. It’s important to emphasize that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment says no person can be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.’ It doesn’t say ‘citizen.’”
In recent days, Mr. Trump and his top advisers have railed against judges who have blocked their quick deportation efforts; declared there should be no trials for those accused of violating immigration laws; and mocked calls for those arrested to receive due process.
“I find it incredible that there’s all this push for more and more and more due process, more process for these designated terror groups, when, in fact, no one asked for due process when they crossed the border,” Thomas D. Homan, Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” said Wednesday. “No one asked for a vetting when they crossed the border. Where was all the media?”
The Supreme Court has held that immigrants present in the United States, regardless of legal status, are guaranteed due process rights, but what qualifies as due process varies depending on the person’s legal status and circumstances. Congress has created an expedited process for removing undocumented migrants who are newly arrived to the country, with limited opportunities for judicial review.
But the Trump administration is trying to go beyond that process by invoking wartime powers that erode fundamental principles of American society, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is the lead counsel in the challenges to the administration’s use of the law, the Alien Enemies Act.
“The right to due process is not a luxury, but one of our nation’s foundational principles, separating us from authoritarian regimes where someone can be picked up off the streets and never heard from again,” he said.
Mr. Chemerinsky said due process was particularly important because law enforcement often makes mistakes.
Some of the men the Trump administration deported had been identified as gang members based on their tattoos or certain articles of clothing, including a basketball jersey featuring the Chicago Bulls or the team’s former star Michael Jordan.
“Governments make mistakes, and due process is a way of making sure that if somebody’s going to be deported, they’re being deported lawfully,” he said.
Entering his second term, Mr. Trump pledged to carry out rapid deportations. While some of those arrested can be legally deported quickly without a hearing under immigration law — because they had been caught at the border, had resided in the country less than two years, or had already been under a deportation order — many must go through a formal process, which includes a hearing before an immigration judge. And immigration cases nationwide face a huge backlog.
In an attempt to get around the normal process, Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as a way to deport immigrants he accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang the administration said had invaded the United States. The law, which passed in 1798, had been used only three times before in U.S. history, all during periods of declared war.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, wrote on social media this month: “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”
Mr. Trump has even suggested he might send American citizens to serve sentences abroad. “Homegrowns are next,” he told El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who is holding Venezuelan migrants in a notorious prison, during a recent White House visit.
But at every turn, the Trump administration has found lawyers and judges standing in its way.
At one hearing, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Patricia Millett pointed out that the last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, against suspected Nazis during World War II, those accused were provided a 30-day notice to contest the accusation, and a hearing.
“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than what has happened here,” Judge Millett said last month.
Early on Saturday, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of the rarely invoked wartime law.
The Supreme Court has also ruled that those subject to the statute needed to be given the opportunity to challenge their removal.
“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday. “It wasn’t meant. The system wasn’t meant. And we don’t think there’s anything that says that.”
The Trump administration has also been dogged by the case of a Salvadoran immigrant living in Maryland who was deported to El Salvador because of an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court instructed the administration nearly two weeks ago to “facilitate” his return so he could go through the legal system in the United States, but the White House has so far not fulfilled that order.
The White House posted on social media that the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was “never coming back.”
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6) Cornell Cancels Kehlani Performance Over Her Stance on the War in Gaza
The R&B singer’s outspoken support for Palestinians had drawn criticism on the campus and beyond. Some students expressed disappointment at the cancellation.
By Alyce McFadden, April 23, 2025
Cornell University dropped a popular R&B singer from its annual campus concert over what the school’s president said were antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiments she had espoused.
The singer, Kehlani, has been an outspoken opponent of Israel’s war in Gaza, speaking out at concerts and on social media. In a 2024 music video for the song “Next 2 U,” Kehlani danced in a jacket adorned with kaffiyehs as dancers waved Palestinian flags in the background. During the video’s introduction, the phrase “Long Live the Intifada” appeared against a dark background.
Furor over the singer’s selection spread across Cornell’s campus and beyond after the school announced the lineup for the concert, an annual celebration called Slope Day that follows the last day of classes. The Ivy League university is among dozens being investigated by the White House over allegations of antisemitism, part of the Trump administration’s targeting of universities. Earlier this month, the White House froze $1 billion in funding for Cornell.
Cornell’s president, Michael I. Kotlikoff, wrote in an email on Wednesday that “although it was not the intention, the selection of Kehlani as this year’s headliner has injected division and discord” into the event.
“In the days since Kehlani was announced, I have heard grave concerns from our community that many are angry, hurt and confused that Slope Day would feature a performer who has espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos and on social media,” he wrote.
The protests over the war in Gaza have exposed broad disagreement about when criticism of Israel veers into antisemitic behavior. To some, the word “intifada,” which translates into rebellion or uprising, implies a call for violence against Israelis and Jews. But some pro-Palestinian demonstrators who use the term in chants regard it as a cry for liberation and freedom from oppression.
Mr. Kotlikoff said that his decision had come after meeting with members of the student board that planned the concert. The board members agreed that their choice had “compromised what is meant to be an inclusive event,” Mr. Kotlikoff said.
A representative for Kehlani did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview last year on the Breakfast Club podcast, Kehlani, who uses the pronouns she and they, said that they had “experienced a lot of pushback” and “a lot of loss” in response to their statements and social media posts about Gaza.
The move to rescind Kehlani’s invitation was an apparent reversal by Mr. Kotlikoff, who told students in a meeting last week that it was too late to find a replacement for the May 7 concert, according to the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun. The administration had not been aware of the singer’s stances, he said.
Muna Mohamed, a senior who is the history co-chair of Black Students United at Cornell, was disappointed by the decision. She said that, as a queer person of color, she had been excited by what Kehlani’s participation in Slope Day represented.
“I was ecstatic,” she said. And then, “to see it kind of torn from us so quickly, it was kind of like, oh, our happiness never really mattered in the long run.”
Cornellians for Israel, a student group, had called on the school to replace Kehlani as the headliner. In an Instagram post last week, the group wrote that choosing Kehlani to perform at an event geared toward the student body “effectively communicates that Israeli, Jewish and Zionist students are not a welcome part of that community.”
The group also circulated a petition and started a GoFundMe drive that had raised more than $28,500 by Wednesday to pay for a new performer.
On Tuesday, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, weighed in on social media, writing that the university “is making it clear where it stands” by including Kehlani in the concert program.
Amanda Silberstein, a member of Cornellians for Israel’s board and a junior, said she was relieved by the university’s decision. Ms. Silberstein said that Kehlani was welcome to hold different opinions, but she questioned why the singer had been invited at all.
“This was never about politics,” Ms. Silberstein said. “It was about the hate and the vitriol and the vile disgust that she expressed with a significant portion of the student population who was also funding her performance.”
Before the first day of classes last fall, pro-Palestinian demonstrators broke a glass door and spray-painted campus buildings with phrases, including “Israel bombs, Cornell pays.” A Cornell Ph.D. student who is a Gambian-British citizen and who participated in demonstrations left the country this year after facing possible deportation, one of several college students the Trump administration has targeted.
Last year, Mr. Kotlikoff faced backlash after the school invited another controversial guest from the opposite side of the political spectrum: Ann Coulter, a conservative commentator. At the time, Mr. Kotlikoff defended the decision as part of a commitment to freedom of speech and diversity of opinion.
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7) Trump Signs Executive Order Targeting College Accreditors
It was the latest move by President Trump in his effort to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system as he battles elite universities.
By Michael C. Bender, Reporting from Washington, April 23, 2025
President Trump signed seven education-related executive orders in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order targeting college accreditors, a group of largely unknown but long-established companies that evaluate the educational quality and financial health of universities.
The order, one of seven education-related measures he signed on Wednesday, was the latest move by Mr. Trump aimed at shifting the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives. His administration has escalated its fight with elite universities in recent weeks, demanding significant changes to hiring, admissions and curriculum practices. At least one, Harvard, has chosen to fight back, setting up a billion-dollar battle for academic independence.
A passing grade from accreditation companies, some of which have existed for more than a century, is crucial for colleges to gain access to $120 billion in federal financial aid approved each year. But Mr. Trump has blamed these businesses for promoting the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion policies that his administration has made a priority to stamp out.
During his last presidential campaign, Mr. Trump did not speak often about accreditors, which have long been a target of conservative Republicans. But when he did, he reserved some of his most biting attacks for them. In a policy video he posted in the summer of 2023, he vowed to take aim at “radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
Mr. Trump’s order would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval, according to the White House, which provided fact sheets about the measures. The text of the orders was not immediately available.
Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank that studies college accreditation policy, among other things, said that Mr. Trump’s order would undermine institutional independence, which, he said, “has helped our universities to be the best in the world.”
“The federal government has long stayed away from any involvement in a college’s curriculum or hiring, and current law prohibits this kind of intrusion into academic affairs,” Mr. Shireman said, adding that the executive order “steps far across this line.”
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the current accreditation system contributed to rising tuition costs and “pushes universities in ideological directions.”
“The Department of Education will create a competitive marketplace of higher education accreditors, which will give colleges and universities incentives and support to focus on lowering college costs, fostering innovation and delivering a high-quality postsecondary education,” she said in a statement.
The Trump administration has cast its campaign against elite institutions as a fight against antisemitism, along with an effort to root out diversity initiatives. Critics have said the push is more of an attempt to impose Mr. Trump’s political agenda on the nation’s schools.
Still, the president’s crusade against diversity programs has already affected accrediting bodies. Last month, the American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring.
Mr. Trump also signed executive orders to encourage the use of artificial intelligence in schools, promote private-sector partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, and increase the number of apprenticeships in skilled trade jobs. Another order instructed his administration to make it more difficult for universities to obscure details of foreign funding.
Two other orders focused on student discipline, which has been a political flashpoint for the past decade.
One order was to ensure that disciplinary policies were not based on D.E.I. policies. Another restricts the use of the so-called disparate impact rule, which civil rights groups have long said is an important tool for showing discrimination against minorities.
Tough disciplinary tactics, like suspensions, can help teachers manage classrooms by removing disruptive students. But they can also hurt students who are already struggling by forcing them to miss critical lessons. Black students have historically been disciplined more harshly than white students, an issue that has been crucial to progressive education activists and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Under President Barack Obama, school districts were told that if certain groups of students were disciplined more often than other groups, it could be considered a violation of federal civil rights law. Mr. Trump rescinded that order during his first term, but it was reinstated under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump’s order calls for new federal guidance on discipline in local schools.
Dana Goldstein contributed reporting.
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8) The FBI And Other Law Enforcement Agencies Raided Multiple Homes In Michigan.
By Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, April 24, 2025
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/fbi-and-police-raid-homes-of-palestine-activists-in-michigan/
FBI agents and police outside a home in Michigan (Photo via Instagram)
On the morning of April 23, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan.
According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.
TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led movement calling for divestment from Israel, said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid.
“We call into question the aggressive nature of this morning’s raids of activists’ homes, which follows the recent misuse of prosecutorial power in Michigan and throughout our country against pro-Palestinian activists,” said CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid in a statement. “In any other context, such minor infractions would be handled by local law enforcement or referred to local, elected prosecutors—not escalated to federal intervention. This disproportionate response further fuels the perception that Muslim and Arab students, and those who stand in solidarity with them, are being treated overly hostile by law enforcement compared to those who commit harm toward American Muslims.”
Growing crackdown in Michigan, across nation
A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nessel introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protesters involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment.
An investigation by The Guardian revealed that members University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nessel to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns.
After the regents called for action, Nessel took the cases over from local District Attorney Eli Savit, an extremely rare move, as local prosecutors typically handle such charges.
“The University of Michigan’s alleged frustration with local prosecutors stems from a November campus sit-in at which Ann Arbor police arrested a group of 40 protesters,” explains The Guardian investigation. “[Savit had] announced in May that his office would dismiss 36 cases and recommend four for diversion programs where they faced a light punishment.”
“That incensed U-M’s pro-Israel regents and police department because they wanted swifter, tougher charges, according to sources with knowledge of the process..,” it continues. “They then asked Nessel to take the cases and university police sent warrant requests to her office.”
Earlier this month, federal immigration agents detained and interrogated attorney Amir Makled, who is representing one of the targeted students.
Makled, who was returning from a trip to the Dominican Republic with his family, was questioned for 90 minutes, but refused to hand his phone over to the agents.
“The purpose of searching my phone doesn’t have anything to do with terrorism, there’s only a chilling effect, and it’s done to be intimidating, in my opinion, for the causes that I was engaging in,” Makled told NPR after the incident. “I’m standing up for students. I’m standing up for immigrants and political dissenters. And I think this was a way to try to dissuade me from taking on these types of cases.”
The mounting repression in Michigan comes amid a wider, nationwide crackdown on the Palestine movement from the Trump administration.
In recent weeks, the government has revoked hundreds, possibly thousands, of student visas, many from individuals who have protested against the genocide in Gaza or criticized Israel publicly.
This week Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) Jim McGovern (D-MA), Troy Carter (D-LA), and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) traveled to an immigration facility in Louisiana to meet with Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who are both facing deportation proceedings over their support for Gaza.
“We can’t stand by while the Trump Administration violates free speech and unlawfully detains people with no due process,” tweeted Pressley.
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9) The F.B.I. arrested a Wisconsin judge, Patel says, accusing her of helping an immigrant avoid detention.
By Devlin Barrett, a reporter covering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, April 25, 2025
F.B.I. Director Kash Patel said on Friday that agents had arrested a county judge in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration enforcement. A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals confirmed the arrest of a sitting judge, a major escalation in the Trump administration’s battle with local authorities over deportations.
The bureau arrested Judge Hannah Dugan on suspicion that she “intentionally misdirected federal agents away from” an immigrant being pursued by federal authorities, Mr. Patel wrote on social media. He later deleted the post for reasons that were not immediately clear. An F.B.I. spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brady McCarron, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals, confirmed that the judge had been arrested by F.B.I. agents on Friday morning. The charging document against the judge was not immediately available in federal court records.
The case appears to stem from an incident last week in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came to the courthouse seeking to apprehend an immigrant who had a misdemeanor case before Judge Dugan.
The F.B.I. has been investigating whether the judge directed the defendant and his lawyer to exit her courtroom out a side door and hallway while the immigration agents were elsewhere in the building, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has reported.
The chief judge in Milwaukee County, Carl Ashley, said in a statement that Judge Dugan’s caseload would be handled by another jurist in the courthouse and declined to comment further.
The Trump administration has vowed to investigate and prosecute local officials who do not assist federal immigration enforcement efforts, denouncing what they call “sanctuary cities” for not doing more to assist federal apprehensions and deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.
The Milwaukee case involves a frequent flashpoint in that debate, when immigration agents try to arrest undocumented immigrants who are appearing in state court. Local authorities often chafe at such efforts, arguing they endanger public safety if people dealing with relatively minor legal issues feel it is unsafe to enter courthouses.
In the first Trump administration, a local Massachusetts judge was indicted by the Justice Department on charges of obstructing immigration authorities. The charges were dropped after the judge agreed to refer herself to potential judicial discipline.
That case also involved allegations that a judge allowed a defendant being sought by I.C.E. agents to leave the building via a back door in order to avoid detention. The Massachusetts Judicial Conduct Commission has filed formal disciplinary charges against Judge Shelley Joseph. She has denied wrongdoing.
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10) Lawyers, in an updated suit, seek the return of migrants deported under the Alien Enemies Act.
By Alan Feuer, April 25, 2025
Over the past two weeks, immigration lawyers, scrambling from courthouse to courthouse, have secured provisional orders in five states stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.
Judges have been harsh in appraising how the White House has used the powerful statute. “Cows have better treatment now under the law,” a federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday.
But at least so far, the one thing the lawyers have not managed to do is protect another — and harder to reach — group of Venezuelan migrants: about 140 men who are already in El Salvador, having been deported there under the act more than a month ago.
Early Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union took another shot at seeking due process for those men. Lawyers for the group filed an updated version of a lawsuit they brought against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15, the first that challenged his invocation of the law.
This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge in Washington not to stop the men from being sent to El Salvador, but rather to help them return to U.S. soil.
When the A.C.L.U. filed its initial version of the suit, in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge James E. Boasberg issued an immediate order telling the administration to hold off sending any planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act and to turn around any flights that were already in the air.
But that never happened. The administration’s inaction ultimately resulted in a threat by Judge Boasberg to begin a contempt investigation into whether Trump officials violated his original instructions — and now the updated lawsuit.
Altogether, the A.C.L.U. has filed at least seven lawsuits in seven federal courts across the country, challenging Mr. Trump’s proclamation on March 14 invoking the Alien Enemies Act as one of the central tools of his aggressive deportation agenda.
The suits have homed in on two different but related legal issues.
One is a significant procedural question: whether the Trump administration has provided migrants whom officials have asserted are subject to removal under the law with sufficient time and opportunity to challenge their deportations in court.
In a court filing unsealed on Thursday in an A.C.L.U. case in Texas, a top federal immigration official said that the administration had decided that “a reasonable amount of time” for migrants to express their desire to challenge deportations could be as little as 12 hours. The official said that migrants could have at least another day to file their challenges in court.
The other issue the A.C.L.U. has been exploring is more substantive: whether the White House should be allowed to use the act at all against the Venezuelan migrants. The act, which was passed in 1798, is supposed to be invoked only in times of declared war or military invasion against members of a hostile foreign nation.
Trump officials have repeatedly argued that the Venezuelans they are trying to deport are members of a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua and that their presence in the United States amounts to an invasion supported by the Venezuelan government. But that view has been rejected not only by some U.S. intelligence officials, but also by an increasing number of judges considering the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuits.
On Tuesday, for example, during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein blasted Mr. Trump’s use of the statute, saying it was “contrary to law.”
Several times, Judge Hellerstein, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said he believed that Mr. Trump was using the law in inappropriate ways. He noted in particular that the law did not authorize the government “to hire a jail in a foreign country where people could be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment not allowable in the United States jails.”
When Tiberius Davis, a lawyer for the Justice Department took issue with that view, Judge Hellerstein shot him down.
“Your Honor, respectfully, once they’ve already been removed, they’re not in United States custody,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s El Salvador. They’re a separate foreign sovereign.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Judge Hellerstein said.
Another judge, Charlotte N. Sweeney, issued a ruling this week in Federal District Court in Denver determining that Mr. Trump’s proclamation had improperly stretched the meaning of terms like “war” and “invasion” in a way that ran counter to the actual text of the Alien Enemies Act.
“Because the act’s ‘text and history’ use these terms ‘to refer to military actions indicative of an actual or impending war’ — not ‘mass illegal migration’ or ‘criminal activities’ — the act cannot sustain the proclamation,” she wrote.
While the Supreme Court has not weighed in yet on the broad issue of whether the White House is using the statute properly, the court has made a decision on the procedural question of whether Trump officials have given migrants subject to the law due process.
Deciding they had not, the justices ruled in an order on April 7 that the Venezuelan migrants must be warned in advance if the government intends to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act so they can challenge them in court, but only in the places where they were being detained. The justices have not yet laid out their vision of how much — or what type of — warning the migrants should receive.
Still, the A.C.L.U. is using that ruling in its updated lawsuit filed in Washington in tandem with a second Supreme Court decision handed down in a different deportation case. In that decision, the justices determined that the White House had to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody after officials wrongfully deported him last month in violation of an earlier court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country.
Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. have sought in essence to merge both of these rulings into a single tool to demand not only that the Trump administration provide the nearly 140 Venezuelans in Salvadoran custody with some way of challenging their circumstances, but also that officials take active steps toward securing their release, since they were not previously given the opportunity to do so.
The lawyers have argued, moreover, that it is appropriate to challenge the deportations in front of Judge Boasberg in Washington even though that is not where the men are currently being held. They say that Washington is the proper venue for legal actions when prisoners are in custody overseas.
But even if this strategy is successful, it could be difficult to force the administration to actually take steps to get the men released from Salvadoran custody.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, for example, remains in El Salvador two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to help secure his freedom.
Jonah E. Bromwich and Mattathias Schwartz contributed reporting.
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11) Trump’s draft budget ends a Narcan program and other programs to fight addiction.
By Jan Hoffman, who covers addiction, April 25, 2025
The opioid overdose reversal medication commercially known as Narcan saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is routinely praised by public health experts for contributing to the continuing drop in opioid-related deaths. But the Trump administration plans to terminate a $56 million annual grant program that distributes doses and trains emergency responders in communities across the country to administer them, according to a draft budget proposal.
In the document, which outlines details of the drastic reorganization and shrinking planned for the Department of Health and Human Services, the grant is among many addiction prevention and treatment programs to be zeroed out.
States and local governments have other resources for obtaining doses of Narcan, which is also known by its generic name, naloxone. One of the main sources, a program of block grants for states to use to pay for various measures to combat opioid addiction, does not appear to have been cut.
But addiction specialists are worried about the symbolic as well as practical implications of shutting down a federal grant designated specifically for naloxone training and distribution.
“Reducing the funding for naloxone and overdose prevention sends the message that we would rather people who use drugs die than get the support they need and deserve,” said Dr. Melody Glenn, an addiction medicine physician and assistant professor at the University of Arizona, who monitors such programs along the state’s southern border.
Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House’s drug policy office responded to requests for comment.
Although budget decisions are not finalized and could be adjusted, Dr. Glenn and others see the fact that the Trump administration has not even opened applications for new grants as another indication that the programs may be eliminated.
Other addiction-related grants on the chopping block include those offering treatment for pregnant and postpartum women; peer support programs typically run by people who are in recovery; a program called the “youth prevention and recovery initiative”; and programs that develop pain management protocols for emergency departments in lieu of opioids.
The federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long shown a passionate interest in addressing the drug crisis and has been outspoken about his own recovery from heroin addiction. The proposed elimination of addiction programs seems at odds with that goal. Last year, Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign produced a documentary that outlined federally supported pathways out of addiction.
The grants were awarded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the federal health department that would itself be eliminated under the draft budget proposal, though some of its programs would continue under a new entity, the Administration for a Healthy America.
In 2024, recipients of the naloxone grants, including cities, tribes and nonprofit groups, trained 66,000 police officers, fire fighters and emergency medical responders, and distributed over 282,500 naloxone kits, according to a spokesman for the substance abuse agency.
“Narcan has been kind of a godsend as far as opioid epidemics are concerned, and we are certainly are in the middle of one now with fentanyl,” said Donald McNamara, who oversees naloxone procurement and training for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We need this funding source because it’s saving lives every day.”
Matthew Cushman, a fire department paramedic in Raytown, Mo., said that through the naloxone grant program, he had trained thousands of police officers, firefighters and emergency medical responders throughout Kansas City and western rural areas. The program provides trainees with pouches of naloxone to administer in the field plus “leave behind” kits with information about detox and treatment clinics.
In 2023, federal figures started to show that national opioid deaths were finally declining, progress that many public health experts attribute in some measure to wider availability of the drug, which the Food and Drug Administration approved for over-the-counter sales that year.
Tennessee reports that between 2017 and 2024, 103,000 lives saved were directly attributable to naloxone. In Kentucky, which trains and supplies emergency medical workers in 68 rural communities, a health department spokeswoman noted that in 2023, overdose fatalities dropped by nearly 10 percent.
And though the focus of the Trump administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy is weighted toward border policing and drug prosecutions, its priorities, released in an official statement this month, include the goal of expanding access to “lifesaving opioid overdose reversal medications like naloxone.”
“They immediately reference how much they want to support first responders and naloxone distribution,” said Rachel Winograd, director of the addiction science team at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who oversees the state’s federally funded naloxone program. “Juxtaposing those statements of support with the proposed eliminations is extremely confusing.”
Mr. Cushman, the paramedic in Missouri, said that ending the naloxone grant program would not only cut off a source of the medication to emergency responders but would also stop classes that do significantly more than teach how to administer it.
His cited the insights offered by his co-instructor, Ray Rath, who is in recovery from heroin and is a certified peer support counselor. In training sessions, Mr. Rath recounts how, after a nasal spray of Narcan yanked him back from a heroin overdose, he found himself on the ground, looking up at police officers and emergency medical responders. They were snickering.
“Ah this junkie again, he’s just going to kill himself; we’re out here for no reason,” he recalled them saying.
Mr. Rath said he speaks with trainees about how the individuals they revive are “people that have an illness.”
“And once we start treating them like people, they feel like people,” he continued. “They feel cared about, and they want to make a change.”
He estimated that during the years he used opioids, naloxone revived him from overdoses at least 10 times. He has been in recovery for five years, a training instructor for the last three. He also works in homeless encampments in Kansas, offering services to people who use drugs. The back of his T-shirt reads: “Hope Dealer.”
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12) Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns
Israel developed new artificial intelligence tools to gain an advantage in the war. The technologies have sometimes led to fatal consequences.
By Sheera Frenkel and Natan Odenheimer, April 25, 2025
Sheera Frenkel reported from San Francisco and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.
In late 2023, Israel was aiming to assassinate Ibrahim Biari, a top Hamas commander in the northern Gaza Strip who had helped plan the Oct. 7 massacres. But Israeli intelligence could not find Mr. Biari, who they believed was hidden in the network of tunnels underneath Gaza.
So Israeli officers turned to a new military technology infused with artificial intelligence, three Israeli and American officials briefed on the events said. The technology was developed a decade earlier but had not been used in battle. Finding Mr. Biari provided new incentive to improve the tool, so engineers in Israel’s Unit 8200, the country’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, soon integrated A.I. into it, the people said.
Shortly thereafter, Israel listened to Mr. Biari’s calls and tested the A.I. audio tool, which gave an approximate location for where he was making his calls. Using that information, Israel ordered airstrikes to target the area on Oct. 31, 2023, killing Mr. Biari. More than 125 civilians also died in the attack, according to Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor.
The audio tool was just one example of how Israel has used the war in Gaza to rapidly test and deploy A.I.-backed military technologies to a degree that had not been seen before, according to interviews with nine American and Israeli defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the work is confidential.
In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said.
Many of these efforts were a partnership between enlisted soldiers in Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers who work at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, three people with knowledge of the technologies said. Unit 8200 set up what became known as “The Studio,” an innovation hub and place to match experts with A.I. projects, the people said.
Yet even as Israel raced to develop the A.I. arsenal, deployment of the technologies sometimes led to mistaken identifications and arrests, as well as civilian deaths, the Israeli and American officials said. Some officials have struggled with the ethical implications of the A.I. tools, which could result in increased surveillance and other civilian killings.
No other nation has been as active as Israel in experimenting with A.I. tools in real-time battles, European and American defense officials said, giving a preview of how such technologies may be used in future wars — and how they might also go awry.
“The urgent need to cope with the crisis accelerated innovation, much of it A.I.-powered,” said Hadas Lorber, the head of the Institute for Applied Research in Responsible A.I. at Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology and a former senior director at the Israeli National Security Council. “It led to game-changing technologies on the battlefield and advantages that proved critical in combat.”
But the technologies “also raise serious ethical questions,” Ms. Lorber said. She warned that A.I. needs checks and balances, adding that humans should make the final decisions.
A spokeswoman for Israel’s military said she could not comment on specific technologies because of their “confidential nature.” Israel “is committed to the lawful and responsible use of data technology tools,” she said, adding that the military was investigating the strike on Mr. Biari and was “unable to provide any further information until the investigation is complete.”
Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. Google said it has “employees who do reserve duty in various countries around the world. The work those employees do as reservists is not connected to Google.”
Israel previously used conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon to experiment with and advance tech tools for its military, such as drones, phone hacking tools and the Iron Dome defense system, which can help intercept short-range ballistic missiles.
After Hamas launched cross-border attacks into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, A.I. technologies were quickly cleared for deployment, four Israeli officials said. That led to the cooperation between Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers in “The Studio” to swiftly develop new A.I. capabilities, they said.
Avi Hasson, the chief executive of Startup Nation Central, an Israeli nonprofit that connects investors with companies, said reservists from Meta, Google and Microsoft had become crucial in driving innovation in drones and data integration.
“Reservists brought know-how and access to key technologies that weren’t available in the military,” he said.
Israel’s military soon used A.I. to enhance its drone fleet. Aviv Shapira, founder and chief executive of XTEND, a software and drone company that works with the Israeli military, said A.I.-powered algorithms were used to build drones to lock on and track targets from a distance.
“In the past, homing capabilities relied on zeroing in on to an image of the target,” he said. “Now A.I. can recognize and track the object itself — may it be a moving car, or a person — with deadly precision.”
Mr. Shapira said his main clients, the Israeli military and the U.S. Department of Defense, were aware of A.I.’s ethical implications in warfare and discussed responsible use of the technology.
One tool developed by “The Studio” was an Arabic-language A.I. model known as a large language model, three Israeli officers familiar with the program said. (The large language model was earlier reported by Plus 972, an Israeli-Palestinian news site.)
Developers previously struggled to create such a model because of a dearth of Arabic-language data to train the technology. When such data was available, it was mostly in standard written Arabic, which is more formal than the dozens of dialects used in spoken Arabic.
The Israeli military did not have that problem, the three officers said. The country had decades of intercepted text messages, transcribed phone calls and posts scraped from social media in spoken Arabic dialects. So Israeli officers created the large language model in the first few months of the war and built a chatbot to run queries in Arabic. They merged the tool with multimedia databases, allowing analysts to run complex searches across images and videos, four Israeli officials said.
When Israel assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, the chatbot analyzed the responses across the Arabic-speaking world, three Israeli officers said. The technology differentiated among different dialects in Lebanon to gauge public reaction, helping Israel to assess if there was public pressure for a counterstrike.
At times, the chatbot could not identify some modern slang terms and words that were transliterated from English to Arabic, two officers said. That required Israeli intelligence officers with expertise in different dialects to review and correct its work, one of the officers said.
The chatbot also sometimes provided wrong answers — for instance, returning photos of pipes instead of guns — two Israeli intelligence officers said. Even so, the A.I. tool significantly accelerated research and analysis, they said.
At temporary checkpoints set up between the northern and southern Gaza Strip, Israel also began equipping cameras after the Oct. 7 attacks with the ability to scan and send high-resolution images of Palestinians to an A.I.-backed facial recognition program.
This system, too, sometimes had trouble identifying people whose faces were obscured. That led to arrests and interrogations of Palestinians who were mistakenly flagged by the facial recognition system, two Israeli intelligence officers said.
Israel also used A.I. to sift through data amassed by intelligence officials on Hamas members. Before the war, Israel built a machine-learning algorithm — code-named “Lavender” — that could quickly sort data to hunt for low-level militants. It was trained on a database of confirmed Hamas members and meant to predict who else might be part of the group. Though the system’s predictions were imperfect, Israel used it at the start of the war in Gaza to help choose attack targets.
Few goals loomed larger than finding and eliminating Hamas’s senior leadership. Near the top of the list was Mr. Biari, the Hamas commander who Israeli officials believed played a central role in planning the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel’s military intelligence quickly intercepted Mr. Biari’s calls with other Hamas members but could not pinpoint his location. So they turned to the A.I.-backed audio tool, which analyzed different sounds, such as sonic bombs and airstrikes.
After deducing an approximate location for where Mr. Biari was placing his calls, Israeli military officials were warned that the area, which included several apartment complexes, was densely populated, two intelligence officers said. An airstrike would need to target several buildings to ensure Mr. Biari was assassinated, they said. The operation was greenlit.
Since then, Israeli intelligence has also used the audio tool alongside maps and photos of Gaza’s underground tunnel maze to locate hostages. Over time, the tool was refined to more precisely find individuals, two Israeli officers said.
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13) Israel Acknowledges Second Deadly Attack on Aid Workers in Gaza
In a rare apology to the United Nations, Israel said its forces had struck a U.N. compound in Gaza with tank fire. A Bulgarian aid worker was killed.
By Farnaz Fassihi, April 24, 2025
The impact of a projectile is visible in the wall of the U.N. guesthouse hit by Israeli tank fire on March 19. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Israel’s military admitted on Thursday that its forces had attacked a United Nations guesthouse in Gaza with tank fire last month, killing a staff member.
The attack in the Deir al Balah area on March 19 killed one U.N. staff member, a Bulgarian, and wounded six others. It prompted Secretary General António Guterres to withdraw a third of the U.N.’s international staff from Gaza out of safety concerns, at a time of dire need for the two million Palestinians living in the enclave.
It was the second time in about a week that Israel has admitted that its forces wrongfully opened fire on aid workers in the Gaza Strip, rare acknowledgments in a conflict that the United Nations says has proved deadlier for its workers than any other in its history.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the March 19 attack. Its mission to the U.N. said an initial investigation had “found no connection to the I.D.F.,” using an abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces, and accused Hamas members of taking shelter at U.N. compounds.
But in a statement on Thursday, the Israeli military issued an apology to the United Nations.
“The I.D.F. regrets this serious incident and continues to conduct thorough review processes to draw operational lessons and evaluate additional measures to prevent such events in the future,” the statement said.
An Israeli investigation found that the U.N. building was attacked “due to assessed enemy presence and was not identified by the forces as a U.N. facility,” according to the statement. It said that further investigations would be conducted in the coming days.
A U.N. spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said the location of the U.N. compound that was attacked — as well as the locations of all U.N. structures in Gaza — was known to the Israeli military.
“This incident and the investigation — there has been more cooperation and transparency on their side than we’ve had on these types of incidents since the beginning of this conflict,” Mr. Dujarric said. But he said it was not enough.
“We need to have accountability not just for this incident,” he said, “but we need to have accountability and transparency for all of the other times we have seen U.N. colleagues killed in Gaza and U.N. infrastructure attacked.”
The United Nations identified the Bulgarian killed in the attack as Marin Valev Marinov, 51. It described him as a seasoned mariner and vessel master who joined the U.N. in 2016 as a maritime inspector working in Yemen for one year before going to Gaza.
At least 285 U.N. staff members have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, which began with the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The United Nations has said that Israel has repeatedly struck its facilities in Gaza, including schools, shelters and marked vehicles.
In late March, Israeli forces opened fire on a convoy of ambulances and fire trucks traveling with their emergency lights on in the Rafah area of southern Gaza. At least one U.N. vehicle marked with the emblem was also targeted. A video obtained by The New York Times of the incident captured almost five minutes of near-continuous gunfire.
The bodies of 15 humanitarian workers — from the Palestine Red Crescent Society and Palestinian Civil Defense and the U.N. — were discovered in a mass grave together with the crushed ambulances, fire trucks and a U.N. vehicle. An autopsy report showed that most of the victims had been killed by multiple gun shots, some to the head and chest.
Israel initially said its forces had opened fire on the ambulances because their lights were off and they were approaching suspiciously. It has also maintained that there were members of Hamas among the convoy, without providing evidence.
On Sunday, the Israeli military said “several professional failures” had led to attack, and it dismissed a deputy commander for the unit responsible for the killings.
The Geneva Conventions, the laws that govern conduct in conflict zones, protect humanitarian workers and medical workers. The U.N.’s chief human rights director has said that Israel’s killing of the medics raises questions about whether its military committed “war crimes.”
Mr. Dujarric said on Wednesday that once again, the U.N. was calling for all parties in the war “to fully comply with international humanitarian law — and that includes for us the protection, obviously, of civilians, but also the protection of U.N. and humanitarian staff.”
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14) My Oscar for ‘No Other Land’ Didn’t Protect Me From Violence
By Hamdan Ballal, April 25, 2025
Mr. Ballal’s film “No Other Land” won the 2024 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
On March 2, I won an Academy Award for best documentary for a film I co-directed, “No Other Land.” It’s hard to put into words how that moment felt. It was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
Three weeks later, I was brutally attacked in my home and arrested. In an instant, it was as if the Oscars had never happened, as if the award didn’t mean anything.
I come from Susiya, a small village on the southern edge of the West Bank. We are but a few dozen families. Our main livelihood is shepherding. Our life is simple. Our homes are simple. The main thing that steals our time is the near-daily violence and harassment of the settlers and the Israeli Army enforcing the occupation. Los Angeles and the Oscars were of an entirely different world from the one I know: I was struck by the enormous buildings, the rushing cars, the wealth all around me. And suddenly there we were, me and my three other co-directors, on one of the world’s most important stages, accepting the award.
Our stories, our communities and our voices were in the spotlight. Our struggle and our suffering were on display, and the world was watching — and supporting us. For years, we have been desperately trying to make our names and our struggle known. Now we had succeeded beyond anything any of us could have ever imagined.
When they called our names and the name of our movie flashed on the screen, I lost myself. I couldn’t feel my hands. I knew there were people all around me, but I couldn’t see them. I walked to the stage, following my feet, but my mind was completely blank.
We made our movie in order to bring attention to the situation where I live, to try to bring change to our communities, but when I was attacked, I realized that we were still trapped in the same grinding loop of violence and subjugation.
March 24 was a typical Ramadan evening. The sun was setting as my family sat down to break our fast. Then my neighbor called: Settlers were attacking. I ran to document the moment, but when I saw the crowd grow, I worried about my family and quickly returned home. Soon I saw a settler and two soldiers coming down the hill toward me. I shouted to my wife to keep our three young children — 7, 5 and 1½ years old — inside, with the door closed. I told her not to open the door, no matter what she heard.
I recognized the men coming toward us. They met me outside the door of my home and started beating and cursing me, mocking me as the “Oscar-winning filmmaker.” I felt guns bashing my ribs. Someone punched me in the head from behind. I fell to the ground. I was kicked and spat on. I felt immense pain and fear. I could hear my wife and kids screaming and crying, calling for me and telling the men to go away. It was the worst moment of my life. My wife and I both thought I would be killed. We feared what would happen to my family if I died.
It is difficult for me to write about this moment now. After I was beaten, I was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into an army jeep. For hours I lay blindfolded on the ground on what I later learned was an army base, fearing that I would be held for a long time and beaten again and again. I was released a day later.
The attack on me and my community was brutal. It received large amounts of press coverage, but it is not unique in any way. Just a few days later, dozens of settlers, many of them masked, attacked Jinba, a village nearby. Five people were hospitalized, and more than 20 were arrested. Later the army raided the village and ransacked homes, the mosque and the school. In Susiya alone, from the beginning of the year to the March 24 attack, local activists recorded more than 45 incidents with settlers or soldiers. Across our region, Masafer Yatta, that number is much higher.
I want you to know our land does not know only violence. There are dozens of small, pastoral Palestinian villages that make up this region. The landscape here is beautiful and wide. Year after year, we plant the land and graze our sheep in the fields. Our mornings start with a cup of tea drunk at sunrise while the flocks enjoy the dew that is still fresh on the grass. The day continues with tending the land, caring for the animals, milking the sheep and goats and preparing the food and goods from our labor. The whole family and the whole village are involved in this daily work together, helping and supporting one another.
But with this near-daily violence, we feel on the precipice of losing everything. When we are unable to shepherd and farm because of constantly encroaching settlements and ever more aggressive settlers and soldiers, we lose our income, our source of food, our traditions and our way of life. Fear is a constant, from morning to night. Our energies are consumed by keeping ourselves and our children safe.
In Masafer Yatta our lives are suffocated by aggression. We all fear that our village is the next to be dismantled, our people expelled.
On the day of the attack, alongside the fear, I felt something else I didn’t expect: heartbreak. My heart was broken from the disappointment. From the sense of failure. From the powerlessness. Three weeks earlier, on the Oscar stage, I had a taste of power and possibility. But even though our movie received global recognition, I felt I had failed — we had failed — in our attempt to make life better here. To convince the world something needed to change. My life is still at the mercy of the settlers and the occupation. My community is still suffering from unending violence. Our movie won an Oscar, but our lives are no better than before.
There is no law to turn to here and no government that will protect us, no international law and no international bodies that are pushing to stop this violence. And yet, in spite of all this and in spite of what I’ve been through and my community has experienced, there are still some bits of hope that remain from what I saw and felt at the Oscars and over the past year presenting our movie around the world.
The press attention that the attack in Susiya received because of our Oscar victory was unlike anything we experienced before. The messages and voices of support around the world have been overwhelming. I know that there are thousands and thousands of people who now know my name and my story, who know my community’s name and our story and who stand with us and support us. Don’t turn away now.
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15) We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention. What We Saw Was a Warning to Us All.
By Edward J. Markey, Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, April 25, 2025
Mr. Markey is the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Mr. McGovern is the representative for Massachusetts’ Second Congressional District. Ms. Pressley is the representative for Massachusetts’ Seventh Congressional District.
Photo illustration by The New York Times
A young woman walked casually down a public street only to find herself suddenly surrounded by masked law enforcement officers in plain clothes. Without explanation — and in the absence of criminal charges and any due process — she was forced into a waiting vehicle and vanished into the labyrinth of the state security system.
Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re recounting what happened to the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Mass., last month. But no: That was the September 2020 abduction of the political activist Maria Kolesnikova in the capital of Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is home to one of the most repressive governments in the world.
Disappearances like Ms. Kolesnikova’s are disturbingly common under authoritarian regimes where dissent is quashed and the rule of law is more fiction than fact. That a similar scene would unfold in Somerville in March 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s revived immigration crackdown should send a chill down the spine of every American.
We visited Ms. Ozturk earlier this week at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, La., operated by the for-profit company Geo Secure Services, contracted by the federal government. It’s part of the network of ICE facilities in Louisiana that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as a “black hole” — hard to reach and isolated, making visits from lawyers and family members prohibitively difficult and expensive.
What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Ozturk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause. She was walking to an Iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held.
When we met Ms. Ozturk in Basile, she told us she feared for her life when she was taken off the streets of her neighborhood, not knowing who had grabbed her or where they were taking her. She said that at each step of her transit — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to Louisiana — her repeated requests to contact her lawyer were denied. Inside the detention center, she was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations. She suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication. Despite all this — and despite being far away from her loved ones — we were struck by her unwavering spirit.
Why did the Trump administration target her? By all accounts, it’s because she was one of the authors of an opinion essay for The Tufts Daily criticizing her university’s response to resolutions that the Tufts student senate passed regarding Israel and Gaza.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is repression. This is authoritarianism.
The Trump administration is working overtime to silence dissent and terrorize immigrant communities. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, it has openly violated the most fundamental protections of our Constitution. Freedom of speech and of the press and the right to due process are not suggestions in this country; they are fundamental rights. They apply to citizens, permanent residents and individuals like Ms. Ozturk, regardless of her political beliefs.
The First Amendment has protected the voices of Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul and Martin Luther King Jr., and it must protect Ms. Ozturk’s, too. Indeed, when dissent becomes a challenge to those in power, it is all the more essential to safeguard. When protected speech becomes a reason for rounding up an international student who came here legally, it’s clear that our immigration laws are being abused.
The United States has long stood on a bedrock of due process — enshrined in the Fifth and 14th Amendments, which guard against exactly this kind of arbitrary state violence. But the Trump administration has acted as if constitutional rights are expendable when the target is an immigrant, a Muslim or someone who dares to criticize the government.
Make no mistake: Ms. Ozturk’s case is not an isolated one. This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations. Each case chips away at the rule of law. Each one makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed. And each one brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.
When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly.
We call on the Department of Homeland Security to release Ms. Ozturk immediately, drop any proceedings against her and begin an investigation into the appalling conditions at the Basile detention center. We urge our Republican colleagues in Congress to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law. And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight. The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.
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