On Saturday, April 5 we will convene an Emergency National March on Washington D.Cto call for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and demand an end to the genocide in Palestine and the deportation campaign against students. The demonstration will be more than an act of protest; it is a pivotal moment to stand against the racist billionaire agenda of the Trump administration that alongside Israel is attempting to fully complete the genocide of the Palestinian people, while wreaking havoc on the people of the US who stand against genocide and the repeal of our civil liberties at home. The time to organize and consolidate a force to struggle against Trump's slew of anti-working class executive orders, the deportation assaults on immigrant students & communities, the reeling back of LGBTQ+ and women's rights, and more is right now! We must stay organized and we must stay in the streets for our rights and for the total liberation of Palestine. See you in DC!
🗓️ April 5 🕐 1 PM
📍 Washington DC
➡️ To buy bus tickets or register a bus transportation hub, visit marchforpalestine.org/bus
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FIGHT GENOCIDE!
DEFEND STUDENTS!
National Mass Mobilization to Fight Back Against
Trump and Musk
Saturday, April 5, 2025
1:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Civic Center Plaza
335 McAllister Street
San Francisco
Join INDIVISIBLE SF, our friends at 50501, and many other organizations for a national Mass Mobilization on April 5.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. San Francisco is fighting back!
They're taking everything they can get their hands on—our health care, our data, our jobs, our services—and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.
On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!
This mass mobilization day is our message to the world that we do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies. Alongside Americans across the country, we are marching, rallying, and protesting to demand a stop the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country.
A core principle behind all Hands Off! events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.
Check out handsoff2025.com for more information.
HandsOff Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
Indivisible Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/764736/
Source:: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
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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) The top F.D.A. vaccine official resigns, citing Kennedy’s ‘misinformation and lies.’
By Christina Jewett, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland, March 28, 2025
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”
Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.
His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.
Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.
And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring “gold-standard science” to the federal government.
An H.H.S. spokesman said in a statement Friday night that Dr. Marks had no place at the F.D.A. if he was not committed to transparency.
In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy’s tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.
Dr. Marks wrote that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores” through the widespread availability of vaccines.
Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.
“I did everything I possibly could for this administration to work with them in an effort to restore confidence in vaccines,” Dr. Marks said in the interview. “It became clear that’s not what they wanted.”
Leaving the F.D.A., Dr. Marks added, was a “weight lifted from me, because I was in an environment where it was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”
Ellen V. Sigal, founder of the advocacy group Friends of Cancer Research and a close ally of Dr. Marks’s, said his “leadership has been instrumental in driving medical innovation and ensuring that lifesaving treatments reach patients who need them most.” His departure, she said, “will create a significant void.”
Dr. Marks steered the F.D.A.’s vaccine program during the tumultuous years of the coronavirus pandemic, guiding the agency and its outside advisers through a number of decisions about the kind of evidence needed to grant emergency authorization for the vaccines produced under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, which Dr. Marks helped start up.
In June 2022, he pleaded with a committee of outside experts to consider the danger the virus posed to children younger than 5; the panel voted later that day to recommend vaccines for that age group.
“We have to be careful that we don’t become numb to the number of pediatric deaths because of the overwhelming number of older deaths here,” Dr. Marks said at the time.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert from Baylor College of Medicine, said he had spoken with Dr. Marks regularly during the pandemic. “He was extraordinarily committed to using science to help the American people,” he said. “He was one of the heroes of the pandemic, so I’m sorry to see him go.”
Dr. Marks was viewed skeptically by some at the F.D.A., including former members of his own vaccine team. The two most senior regulators in the agency’s vaccine office resigned in 2021 in part because of a Biden administration effort to expedite the licensing of Pfizer’s coronavirus shot and the authorization of Covid booster shots.
While Mr. Kennedy has been pressing for more study of vaccine injuries, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said such research had already been a priority for decades.
“I fear this is a way to emphasize vaccine injuries in a way that’s completely disproportionate to what the real risk is,” he said.
Dr. Marks clearly shared those concerns. In his letter, he expressed a desire that damage caused by the current administration be limited.
“My hope,” he wrote, “is that during the coming years, the unprecedented assault on scientific truth that has adversely impacted public health in our nation comes to an end so that the citizens of our country can fully benefit from the breadth of advances in medical science.”
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2) How Colleges Are Cracking Down on Students Now
Colleges are using surveillance videos and search warrants to investigate students involved in pro-Palestinian protests. Experts say it’s a new frontier in campus security that could threaten civil liberties.
By Isabelle Taft, March 29, 2025
At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, someone splattered red paint on a statue honoring Benjamin Franklin, the school’s founder.
Within hours, campus workers washed it off. But the university was eager to find the culprit.
A pro-Palestinian group had claimed responsibility on social media. The university examined footage and identified a student’s cellphone number using data from the campus Wi-Fi near the statue at the time it was vandalized. Campus police obtained a search warrant for T-Mobile’s call records for the phone, and later a warrant to seize the phone itself.
On Oct. 18 at 6 a.m., armed campus and city police appeared at the off-campus home of a student believed to be the phone’s owner. A neighbor said they shined lights into her bedroom window, holding guns. Then they entered the student’s apartment and seized his phone, according to a police filing.
Months later, the student has not been charged with any crime.
The Penn investigation, which remains open, is one of several across the country in which universities have turned to more sophisticated technology and shows of police force to investigate student vandalism and other property crimes related to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. (The student who had his phone seized did not respond to an interview request.)
The warrants were first reported by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper, which filed a lawsuit after police did not initially file the warrants with a local court.
Much of it happened even before President Trump returned to office. Since then, he has made clear he will use his power to force universities to take a hard line on protests. His administration has warned 60 universities that they could face penalties from investigations into antisemitism, and has also begun seeking to deport protesters. At least nine current or former students and one professor who were legally in the United States with visas or green cards have already been targeted, with at least one student being detained on the street by officials in plainclothes.
And it pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia University, telling the school that it would not discuss restoring the money unless, among other things, campus security agents were given “full law enforcement authority” to arrest students. In response, the university said it had hired 36 “special officers” with that authority.
Civil rights lawyers and legal experts said the moves were a fundamental shift in the way universities respond to student disciplinary cases. While arrests and searches are already often within the authority of many campus police agencies, recent tactics go beyond what has been the standard for campus security officers, said Farhang Heydari, an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt University.
Historically, Mr. Heydari said, campus police have tended to operate with discretion on matters that could affect students’ futures, in some cases not strictly enforcing the law. Campus officers might look the other way on matters like underage drinking, for example.
If they enforced every law strictly, “everyone would be expelled, no one would be admitted to the bar or whatever,” he said, adding, “That would be horrible for the university.”
A ‘Fundamental Shift’
The widespread protests and tent encampments of spring 2024 have subsided, but pro-Palestinian demonstrations have continued, often peacefully but sometimes including acts of vandalism. Under pressure from federal officials and community members alike, many universities have moved to embrace tougher and more sophisticated security tactics to quell protest activity.
Some experts worry the tactics could endanger free speech and civil liberties, particularly in cases where students have had their property seized even though they have not been connected or charged with crimes.
“It really does just seem to be an expansion in law enforcement power that maybe didn’t exist 20, 25 years ago,” said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates civil liberties protections online.
Universities have defended their tactics, saying they are necessary to protect students’ safety and combat discrimination. At Penn, the university said the apartment search was necessary to maintain order and safety.
“Unfortunately, a small group of individuals, some of whom may be students, continue to take disruptive and at times illegal actions against the university community,” the school said in a statement.
“They continue to flout policies and laws that they do not think apply to them, and then blame their own institution when they encounter consequences,” the university added. “Laws must be enforced uniformly and fairly and are not designed to be waived when they do not suit a particular viewpoint.”
The New York Times reviewed documents in seven vandalism cases that involved search warrants to investigate student protesters. One has resulted in criminal charges.
In one episode involving campus graffiti in November, a dozen law enforcement officers searched the family home of two George Mason University students who are sisters.
Authorities said they found Hamas and Hezbollah flags and other materials displaying anti-American rhetoric and an expression indicating “Death to America,” as well as four weapons and ammunition. But the authorities indicated that the materials and guns belonged to other family members living at the home, according to court filings.
The two women were barred from campus, but no charges have been filed.
In an open letter to George Mason authorities, 100 faculty, students, politicians and political groups protested the decision to bar the students.
The university’s president, Dr. Gregory Washington, said the search findings suggested that “something potentially more nefarious” was going on, according to an email he wrote to faculty obtained by The Times through a public records request. He also said the university was actively collaborating with “a number of three-letter agencies aimed at keeping our campus and quite frankly our country safe.”
Dr. Washington also posted a public letter, and the university said it would have no additional comments on the case.
In a statement it said that, in general, “when it becomes necessary for the university to bar a student from entering campus, or impose an interim suspension on a student organization, such actions are taken carefully, with cause, and as precautions to preserve the safety of the university community environment.”
Concerns About Privacy
At Penn, following a public outcry about the search, a committee review found that the police had behaved professionally. But the review raised questions about how such a search might cause “discomfort and even fear.”
University police have sometimes cited social media posts to justify their warrant requests. But the posts are constitutionally protected speech, said Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group. He said the tactics could chill free expression.
Most students involved in surveillance cases were reluctant to talk about their experiences. Many students involved in protests have had their identities exposed or faced harassment.
“I’ve been doing legal work related to the right to protest for over 35 years, and I haven’t seen this kind of thing on college campuses,” said Rachel Lederman, senior counsel with the Center for Protest Law & Litigation.
Ms. Lederman represents, Laaila Irshad, a third-year undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who had her cellphone seized by campus police. Ms. Irshad is asking a court to quash a warrant that led to the seizure. Almost six months after it was taken, it has not been returned and she has not been charged with a crime.
In an email, Ms. Irshad said she felt “incredibly exposed” at the thought that the police could review all of the data on the phone, dating back to when she was in fifth grade.
“Everything is open to them from my random messages with friends to my Google searches about health issues to my political musings to my super intimate messages with family,” she wrote.
A university spokesman said the warrant was related to an ongoing vandalism investigation, but would not describe the vandalism itself.
At least one warrant has led to a criminal case. At Indiana University Bloomington, a life-size sculpture of a former university president was vandalized with red paint on the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
After reviewing security footage, the university police obtained warrants to search a student’s car and cellphone. The investigator found photos of the statue covered in paint, and the student was charged with two counts of criminal mischief.
Warrants but No Charges
In several cases, students have not been charged with wrongdoing as a result of the warrants.
In September, three officers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, arrived at the dorm room of Laura Saavedra Forero, a senior who had regularly participated in protests. Ms. Saavedra Forero’s lawyer, Jaelyn Miller, said she believed police officers targeted her client because she uses a wheelchair that made her easier to identify than other students.
They obtained a search warrant for her cellphone and everything on it, arguing it most likely contained evidence about vandalism related to a protest. The university said the warrant was related to vandalism of 10 campus buildings on Sept. 19, but declined to answer additional questions
“It’s very odd, for a low-level misdemeanor like the graffiti vandalism,” Ms. Miller said, “for U.N.C. to seek a search warrant against its own student, not because that student committed a crime, but purely because that student attended a protest and filmed at that protest.”
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
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3) Targeting of Tufts Student for Deportation Stuns Friends and Teachers
The Trump administration said she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Her friends and lawyers say all she did was co-author an essay critical of the war in Gaza.
By Anemona Hartocollis, March 29, 2025
Rumeysa Ozturk in 2021. Credit...Associated Press
On March 9, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, sent an anxious text message to Najiba Akbar, the university’s former Muslim chaplain, with whom she had become close.
“I recently learned that someone added all my information to a doxxing website called Canary Mission because of the op-ed published last March,” Ms. Ozturk wrote. She was trying to figure out what to do about it.
The website published her résumé and a picture of her in a red head scarf, and claimed that she had “engaged in anti-Israel activism.” It also linked to an opinion essay she had written with three other students in the Tufts student newspaper, critical of the university for not sanctioning Israel over the war in Gaza.
Ms. Ozturk had never struck the chaplain as the activist type, or the face of a movement. She was more of an introvert, the kind of person who liked to be helpful and would stay late after activities at the university’s Interfaith Center to help clean up.
So Ms. Akbar was shocked this week when she heard that the government had revoked Ms. Ozturk’s visa.
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations had concluded that Ms. Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” according to a statement from homeland security.
At a news conference this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about her detention. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Her friends and professors said that characterization did not square with what they knew of Ms. Ozturk. “It doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Ms. Akbar said. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”
Ms. Ozturk is one of many international students whom the government is seeking to deport after President Trump promised to combat antisemitism on campus and punish student protesters for misbehaving. Her detention suggests that the government is casting a wide net, finding not just prominent protesters who pushed limits and broke rules, but also apparently some who were more quietly involved.
The American Civil Liberties Union signed onto the case Friday and filed court papers demanding her release from custody, arguing that detaining her is a violation of her First Amendment rights, which extend to noncitizens on American soil.
“Rumeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others,” the complaint said. Her lawyers filed the complaint in federal court in Boston, naming as defendants President Trump; Mr. Rubio; Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and immigration officials.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled that she could not be moved out of the country until the court rules again.
Ms. Ozturk has not been charged with any crime, and her friends are at a loss to understand how the law-abiding, introspective student they know matches the portrait of a political activist being presented by the government.
“She doesn’t drive, but if she were to drive she wouldn’t even have a parking ticket,” Reyyan Bilge, a psychology professor at Northeastern, said. “That’s the kind of person we’re talking about.”
Her friends also say that they had never seen any signs that Ms. Ozturk was antisemitic.
“This is not fighting antisemitism; it’s hurting your cause as well,” said Dr. Bilge, who taught Ms. Ozturk at Istanbul Sehir University in Turkey. Dr. Bilge wrote a recommendation for Ms. Ozturk for the Fulbright scholarship that brought her to the United States. She received her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.
A surveillance camera captured Ms. Ozturk’s arrest on Tuesday evening. It has received millions of views and stirred widespread outrage on social media. The video shows federal agents in plainclothes and face masks surrounding her on the sidewalk. They take her phone and her backpack, handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked car.
Ms. Ozturk was talking on her cellphone to her mother in Turkey when the ICE agents surrounded her, Dr. Bilge said, adding, “She told her mom to call her best friend” in Boston.
Her lawyer was not able to find her or to communicate with her for nearly 24 hours after she was detained, according to court papers. In the meantime, the documents say, she was without her asthma medication and suffered an asthma attack while en route to a detention center in Louisiana.
Another of her Turkish professors, Mehmet Fatih Uslu, recalled that her undergraduate thesis was impressive and reflected a sensitive nature. It focused on the representation of death in children’s literature.
“The idea that she would support any form of violence is utterly inconceivable,” he said. “Allegations linking her to Hamas are entirely unfounded and absurd.”
The group that cited her opinion essay, Canary Mission, says its goal is to document “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” But pro-Palestinian students say it has exposed their personal information online so they can be harassed. The group does not list employees or its funding sources on its website, and it did not immediately return a request for comment.
ICE said in a statement that it was not working with tips from Canary Mission.
Friends said they did not really know how Ms. Ozturk came to co-write the essay. They suggested she might have been motivated by her interest in the welfare of children. She was studying child development. “She loves children,” Dr. Bilge said. “She cares deeply about children’s rights, women’s rights, animal rights — plant rights!”
The opinion essay says that “credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
It says the Tufts administration has been “wholly inadequate and dismissive of” demands that the university divest from Israel and acknowledge a genocide of Palestinians.
Ms. Akbar, the former chaplain, said Ms. Ozturk had been wanting to organize an event about how children are affected by violence, and how to support them through it. “I think she was inspired by Gaza, and wanted to broaden it out to Ukraine” and other countries, she said.
Dr. Bilge was having the Ramadan predawn meal with her family at around 5 a.m. when she found out about Ms. Ozturk’s detention. She recalled her phone being filled with messages of people reaching out to her, from both the United States and Turkey, asking if she had heard the news.
“Thinking ‘Rumeysa’ and ‘being detained’ within the same sentence, same paragraph, it was unbelievable,” she said.
Dr. Bilge said that before this week, she was not aware of the essay. But she said she would have fully supported it because the tone of the writing was “peaceful” and “grounded in the values of academic inquiry.”
She said that friends of hers abroad were already reconsidering whether to cancel trips for conferences in the United States. “Why would you go through that stress of thinking you could be detained at any point?” she said.
Ang Li contributed reporting.
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4) In Myanmar, Aftershocks and Military Airstrikes Terrorize Residents
New tremors rattled survivors of Friday’s earthquake, which killed more than 1,600 people, while the government continued its bombing campaign elsewhere in the country.
By Sui-Lee Wee, Reporting from Bangkok, March 30, 2025
Searching through the rubble on Sunday at a Buddhist monastery building in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, that collapsed in Friday’s earthquake. Credit...Aung Shine Oo/Associated Press
Myo Zaw and his team of volunteer rescue workers were the first to arrive at the site where a three-story house had collapsed in Mandalay, a little after 8 p.m. on Saturday. They were digging through the rubble with their bare hands when they heard the voice of a girl.
It was faint but clear. “Help me, I’m here,” she said.
It took them three or four hours to pull out the 12-year-old, who had survived despite the house toppling around her. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, there was only silence as the rescuers continued to work in nearly 100-degree heat. They eventually unearthed three bodies: the girl’s mother and her grandparents.
“Sadly, I fear we will find more bodies than survivors,” Mr. Myo Zaw said. “The heat in Mandalay is intense, causing rapid decomposition. In some cases, we locate the bodies only because of the smell.”
Time is running short in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city with about 1.5 million people, which is near the epicenter of Friday’s devastating earthquake. In one neighborhood in Mandalay, countless buildings were reduced to rubble, satellite images showed.
Across the country, over 1,600 people were confirmed dead, as of Saturday night, and over 3,000 injured in the worst earthquake to hit Myanmar in more than a century. Many fear that the number of people who can be rescued will dwindle after Monday evening, the crucial 72-hour mark after which experts say the chances of survival drop sharply.
Even as volunteer rescuers scoured the ruins of homes, monasteries and mosques, and hospitals overflowed with patients, aftershocks — including a strong one on Sunday — kept residents on edge. Several buildings in Mandalay that had survived Friday’s powerful earthquake toppled on Sunday.
And the military made clear it would not stop a brutal bombing campaign in a civil war that has ravaged the country despite the urgent need for relief efforts, with reports of an airstrike on Sunday afternoon in Pakokku Township in Magway Region in the country’s northwest that killed two women and injured seven others.
How the military government and its commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, an already deeply unpopular leader who ousted a civilian government four years ago, respond in the coming days and weeks could determine the junta’s hold on power. The military government has already lost ground to rebels in the civil war, which had left nearly 20 million of the country’s roughly 54 million people in need of shelter and food even before the quake, according to United Nations officials.
In the early hours after the earthquake, a lack of machinery and personnel severely hampered rescue operations. But the arrival of Chinese rescue teams with heavy equipment on Saturday night has given volunteers a glimmer of hope.
On Sunday, volunteers rescued 29 people from a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay and recovered eight bodies, according to Soe Paing, a rescue worker from the Myanmar fire service department. He said the help from the Chinese had sped up the work.
“Right now, we believe around 90 people are still trapped inside,” he said, “and we are doing everything we can to get them out alive.”
Later in the day, an aftershock struck Mandalay, sending residents into the streets, screaming in fear.
Many are confronting an uncertain future, rationing food and wondering how they can get by without any power and scarce water. Volunteers asked for more body bags for the corpses that they are pulling out by the hour. Many have said that the army has done little to help.
Aid from other countries has also begun arriving, but questions remain about how the Myanmar Army would distribute the much-needed relief. At least half a dozen nations, including India, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore and Thailand, have sent teams and supplies. Some of the aid, such as a group from Singapore and supplies from India, has gone to Naypyidaw, the capital, where the military’s generals live and which was less affected than Mandalay.
“They have a long track record of using aid as a weapon,” Scot Marciel, the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from 2016 to 2020, said of the military government. “I would think that they would try to use it to funnel aid to their supporters and prevent it from getting to people in the areas controlled by the resistance. I don’t have faith in them that they would do the right thing.”
Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the spokesman for the rebel Karen National Union, said the group welcomed the support of foreign countries but warned them to be “aware of the nature of the military in our country.”
He pointed out that the military had not refrained from attacks even after the earthquake, saying: “They might use the money for the war. We worry about this issue.”
Control of Myanmar is now divided between the military regime, which governs the urban areas, and the ethnic armies, which hold the borderlands. Since the 2021 coup, Sagaing — another region that has been hit hard by the earthquake — has also emerged as a center of resistance and is home to a patchwork of rebel groups. (Internet access has been cut off in Sagaing, making it difficult to get reports from there.)
An hour after Friday’s earthquake, a military paramotor, or motor-powered paraglider, dropped bombs in Chaung Oo village in Sagaing, said Phyu Win, a resident. “People were already terrified from the quake, and with the chaos, it was impossible to take cover in bomb shelters,” she said.
The army’s airplanes have continued to fly overhead since the earthquake. “The junta has no interest in helping people,” Ms. Phyu Win said. “They only want to kill.”
At one point last year, the rebels had advanced close to Mandalay, which was seen by many to be a potential tipping point in the war.
Experts say the earthquake could change the trajectory of the civil war. The National Unity Government, the shadow government in exile, has called for a two-week pause in fighting, but it does not speak for the multiple rebel groups and ethnic armies fighting government forces. The powerful Arakan Army, which has won control of large parts of Rakhine State in Myanmar, could exploit this moment to wrest the south of the country away from the junta.
Much will also depend on how General Min Aung Hlaing and his military view this moment.
“Their backs are to the wall and they can’t cope,” Khin Zaw Win, a political analyst and director of the Tampadipa Institute, a research group in Yangon, said of the military leaders. “We have come to the point where the military will be forced to relent.”
Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group, called the earthquake “a moment of jeopardy for Min Aung Hlaing.”
“It’s really a critical moment for him, his legacy, but also his current regime,” Mr. Horsey said. “He doesn’t exactly know how this is going to play out — it’s difficult to guess — but he knows that there will be huge political aftershocks.”
Verena Hölzl contributed reporting from Bangkok.
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5) Will Religion’s Remarkable Winning Streak at the Supreme Court Continue?
The court, which has been receptive to claims from religious groups, particularly Christian ones, will hear three major cases in the coming weeks.
By Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, March 30, 2025
A person delivering remarks in support of the use of L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive storybooks in schools during an education board meeting in Rockville, Md., in 2023. The Supreme Court will hear a case involving religious objections to such books this month. Credit...Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock
It has been almost three years since the Supreme Court last heard arguments in a case that turned on one of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, a curious lull in what had been a signature project for the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: to bolster the place of faith in public life.
The hiatus is over. In the space of a month this spring, the court will hear three important religion cases. The first one, to be argued Monday, asks whether a Catholic charity in Wisconsin should receive a tax exemption. In April, the court will consider whether a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma is constitutional and whether parents with religious objections to the curriculum in Maryland schools may withdraw their children from classes.
Taken together, the three cases will test the limits of the court’s assertive vision of religious liberty, which has been one of its distinctive commitments for more than a decade.
Since 2012, when the court unanimously ruled that religious groups were often exempt from employment discrimination laws, the pro-religion side has won all but one of the 16 signed decisions in argued cases that concerned the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion.
“Religious liberty has been on a winning streak at the Supreme Court since 2012,” said Eric Rassbach, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the plaintiffs in two of the three cases to be argued this spring. “It isn’t yet on par with freedom of speech, but it is getting a lot closer.”
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh expressed satisfaction with the general trend in remarks at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in September. Asked to identify “some of the big themes of the court’s religious liberty cases in recent years,” he said, “We’ve made, in my view, correct and important strides” in “recognizing the constitutional protection of religious equality and religious liberty.”
Not everyone is happy with the general trend or where it seems to be heading.
“This spring’s trio of religion cases threatens nothing less than to raze foundational structures of American law and life,” said Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale, adding that the court has been steadily moving the protection of free exercise to center stage while relegating the concerns about government entanglement with religion to the wings. The two education cases, Professor Driver said, are particularly fraught.
“The Supreme Court this term could quite plausibly destroy the American public school as we have known it for the last several decades,” he said. “Of course, many conservatives will regard that destruction not as a vice, but a virtue.”
There has been one exception to religion’s winning streak at the court in the last decade: the justices’ rejection in 2018 of a challenge to the first Trump administration’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.
That is telling, said Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “The law used to bend over backwards to protect religious minorities,” she said. “Now it’s Christians, and oftentimes conservative Christians, who are repeatedly being favored by Supreme Court rulings.”
The court has ruled in recent years that state programs supporting private schools in Maine and Montana must allow parents to choose religious ones, a boon to Christian schools. On April 30, the court will hear arguments on a variation on that question, but with an important twist.
The new case asks whether Oklahoma must use government money to pay for a religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa and dedicated to infusing its curriculum with Catholic teaching.
The schools in the earlier cases were private. Under Oklahoma law, charter schools are public.
“It would be a sea change to allow public schools, or any schools that are directly funded with tax dollars, to be religious schools,” Ms. Laser said. “You’re talking about your neighborhood school becoming a Sunday school.”
Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, a Republican, opposed the religious charter school, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against it, saying it violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion and the state Constitution’s ban on spending public money to support religious institutions.
In its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the school argued that it is like the ones in the cases from Maine and Montana.
St. Isidore “hopes to offer another educational option for Oklahomans, and no student will be compelled to attend St. Isidore,” the brief said. “Rather, the school will receive students, and state funding, only through the private choices of families.”
Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, No. 24-394, “almost just comes down to an issue of characterization.”
“Is a charter school a public school with private management, or is it a private school with public funding?” he asked.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case but has not said why. She is a former law professor at Notre Dame, whose religious liberty clinic represents the charter school, and is close friends with Nicole Garnett, a professor there who has assisted St. Isidore.
A second case involving schools, Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297, will be argued on April 22 and asks whether the Constitution gives parents of public school students the right to have their children excused from classroom discussion of storybooks featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters and themes.
Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, introduced the storybooks in the fall of 2022. For most of that academic year, school administrators gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused from those sessions. But in the spring of 2023 the school system announced that it would no longer give parents notice or let them opt out of the classes.
The school system’s lawyers told the justices opt-out requests were hard to administer, led to high student absenteeism and stigmatized and isolated students who believed the books represented them.
Several parents, including Muslims and Roman Catholics, sued, saying the new policy burdened their religious rights.
Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford and a former federal appeals court judge who filed a brief supporting the parents, said the curriculum was an assault on religious freedom.
“The underlying issue here is whether public schools should be used as an instrument of ideological persuasion,” he said. “These textbooks are for teaching reading, and to my mind it’s highly objectionable that in choosing which books to teach for reading they don’t choose them on the basis of their literary or grammatical or other value but rather because they’re trying to undermine parental beliefs.”
Professor Driver, who filed a brief supporting the school system, saw it differently. “A decision enabling parents to flyspeck public schools’ curricular decisions would bring the American educational system to a grinding halt,” he said.
The third case, Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, No. 24-154, to be argued Wednesday, asks whether Wisconsin was free to deny a tax exemption to a Catholic charity on the grounds that its activities were not primarily religious.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that because the charity does not “attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith nor supply any religious materials to program participants or employees,” its work does not qualify for the exemption. Another strike against the charity, the court said, was that it did not limit employment or its services on the basis of religion.
A dissenting justice said the majority had been wrong to “answer theological questions well beyond the judiciary’s purview.”
If history is a reliable guide, the arguments from the charter school, the charity and the parents will receive a friendly reception at the court.
A 2021 study of religion rulings in argued cases since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court in 2005 found that the nature of its rulings had changed from those issued by the courts led by Chief Justices Earl Warren, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.
The study, conducted by Lee Epstein, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago, found that the Roberts court ruled in favor of religious people and groups over 83 percent of the time, compared to about 50 percent of the time for other courts since 1953.
“In most of these cases, the winning religion was a mainstream Christian organization, whereas in the past pro-religion outcomes more frequently favored minority or marginal religious organizations,” they wrote.
The study considered cases that turned on the First Amendment’s religion clauses, but religion has also figured in other cases. In 2023, for instance, the court unanimously ruled in favor of a postal worker who refused to work on his Sabbath under an employment discrimination law. That same year, it split 6-to-3 in favor of a web designer who did not want to create sites for same-sex weddings under the First Amendment’s free speech clause.
The rate of pro-religion rulings from the Roberts court has risen since the study was conducted, to 86 percent, Professor Epstein found. If the court rules in favor of religious claims in all three of the pending cases, the rate will rise again, to 88 percent.
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6) What We Know About Talks for a Renewed Gaza Cease-Fire
Hamas said it had accepted a proposal for a new cease-fire, which would see some hostages released from captivity in Gaza. But details were elusive.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Published March 30, 2025, Updated March 31, 2025
Visiting the graves of relatives in Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel and Hamas both signaled over the weekend that efforts for a renewed cease-fire in Gaza were underway, less than two weeks after the breakdown of a temporary truce and the resumption of Israel’s air and ground campaign against the militant group in the enclave.
Hamas said on Saturday that it had accepted a proposal for a new cease-fire, which would see some hostages released from captivity in Gaza. Israel said it, too, had received a proposal via third-party mediators and had responded with a counterproposal in coordination with the United States.
“The military pressure is working,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday in remarks at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting, adding that Israel was “suddenly seeing cracks” in Hamas’s position.
Since Israel resumed attacks on the Gaza Strip on March 18, over 900 people have been killed, the enclave’s health ministry said on Saturday. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Neither side published details of the proposal or the counterproposal, but an official briefed on the talks suggested that they broadly echoed previous proposals floated in recent weeks. While there was no indication that a breakthrough was imminent, the public statements suggested that after weeks of fruitless negotiations, contacts over a deal were proceeding even as the war continued.
On Sunday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said it had recovered the bodies of eight emergency medical technicians, five Civil Defense personnel and a United Nations employee in Rafah in southern Gaza. The medical organization said it had lost contact with nine of its crew members more than a week ago after they were directly fired upon by Israeli forces.
The Israeli military said in a statement late Sunday that its forces had opened fire on March 23 at several vehicles that had been “advancing suspiciously” toward the troops without headlights or emergency signals and without prior coordination.
The military added that an initial assessment had determined that the forces had eliminated a Hamas operative and eight other “terrorists,” without explaining any connection to the emergency and rescue crew members who were killed. The Times could not independently verify the claims of either side.
What did Hamas say?
Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official and negotiator, said in a speech on Saturday that his group had received a proposal two days earlier from Egyptian and Qatari mediators for a renewed cease-fire, adding that Hamas had “responded positively and approved it.”
He did not detail the terms, but recent negotiations, including an unusual round of direct talks between U.S. and Hamas officials, had focused on securing the release of Edan Alexander, the only Israeli American hostage still believed to be alive, as well as the bodies of four other Israeli Americans.
That was a nonstarter for Israel, which had demanded the release of 10 or 11 living hostages for a seven-week extension of the temporary cease-fire, based on an earlier proposal it attributed to the White House Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
What did Israel say?
After Mr. al-Hayya’s speech on Saturday, Mr. Netanyahu said he had held a series of consultations on Friday after receiving the proposal, according to a statement from his office. Israel had sent a counterproposal to mediators a few hours earlier, the statement added.
The official briefed on the talks, who was speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate diplomacy, said that Israel still sought the release of 10 living hostages for any resumption of the cease-fire and that Egypt was behind the latest proposal.
Up to 24 living hostages remain in Gaza, according to Israel, along with the remains of another 35 people. They were among the roughly 250 people taken captive during the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 that ignited the war.
What are the main sticking points?
Beyond agreeing on the numbers of hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be released, any renewed cease-fire will most likely be elusive so long as the two sides remain at odds over more fundamental issues — including irreconcilable demands about the future of Gaza.
Mr. al-Hayya said Hamas was committed to reaching an agreement that would guarantee a permanent cease-fire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, general terms that the sides had already agreed upon to extend the truce that ultimately collapsed.
“We do not want anything new,” Mr. al-Hayya said on Saturday. “We want to respect what was signed, what the guarantors guaranteed, and what the international community approved.”
Israel has conditioned ending the war on Hamas laying down its arms and relinquishing rule in Gaza. Mr. al-Hayya said the group’s “weapons of resistance” were a “red line” as long as Israel occupies Palestinian land.
What has changed?
Israel and Hamas have each blamed the other for the collapse of the first phase of the cease-fire that came into effect in mid-January.
But both are now facing heightened pressure to renew the truce.
When the first phase of the cease-fire expired in early March, Israel halted the entry of all commercial goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza, worsening conditions for an already exhausted population in a bid to force Hamas into accepting a temporary extension of the cease-fire instead of negotiating a permanent one.
More than 50,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and much of the enclave is in ruins.
Protests have since broken out against Hamas in Gaza. An activist in the protest movement said he was worried that Hamas may accept another temporary cease-fire so that its security forces can come out of hiding and crack down on the protesters without fear of being attacked by Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu has also come under domestic pressure. Many Israelis have accused him of failing to prioritize the hostages and prolonging the war in Gaza to keep far-right members of his ruling coalition on board to ensure his political survival.
“We are committed to bringing the hostages home,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday, rejecting the popular criticism. “The combination of military pressure and diplomatic pressure is the only thing that will bring the hostages back,” he added.
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7) Major layoffs begin at health agencies that track disease and regulate food.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Christina Jewett and Apoorva Mandavilli, April 1, 2025
Hundreds of federal health workers, including doctors in senior leadership positions, began hearing early Tuesday morning that they are losing their jobs, part of a vast restructuring that will winnow down the agencies charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he is shrinking his department by 10,000 employees. Some senior leaders based in the Washington, D.C., area received notices that they were being reassigned to Indian Health Service territories, a tactic to force people out, employees said, because it would entail moving to other parts of the country.
Combined with previous departures, the layoffs will reduce the department from 82,000 to 62,000 employees. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Notices began arriving at 5 a.m., workers said, affecting offices responsible for everything from global health to medical devices to communications. Some knew the layoffs were coming; at the department headquarters in Washington, officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told Friday that their offices were being eliminated, according to employees.
Others were caught off guard. At the Food and Drug Administration, senior leaders were pushed out and offices focused on food, drug and medical device policy were hit with deep staff reductions amounting to about 3,500 agency staff members. Some workers said that they discovered they were fired when they attempted to scan their badge to get into the building early Tuesday.
The top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was offered a job with a regional office of the Indian Health Service that includes Alaska, according to Mitch Zeller, his predecessor at the division. Other staff who oversee veterinary medicine and coordinate the complex work of reviewing new drug applications that can run for thousands of pages were let go.
Some leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including Kayla Laserson, who led the global health center, received similar notices of reassignment or were placed on administrative leave. At the agency, the reorganization, with cuts totaling 2,400, seemed aimed at narrowing its focus to infectious diseases. Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental problems were cut.
Employees laid off at the agency included those studying injuries, asthma, lead poisoning, smoking and radiation damage, as well as those that assess the health effects of extreme heat and wildfires.
But some infectious disease teams were also laid off. A group focused on improving access to vaccines among underserved communities was cut, as was a group of global health researchers who were working on preventing mother to child transmission of H.I.V.
H.I.V. prevention was a big target overall. Jonathan Mermin, director of the center for H.I.V. and sexually transmitted diseases, was placed on administrative leave. The Trump administration had been weighing moving the C.D.C.’s division of H.I.V. prevention to a different agency within the health department. But on Tuesday, teams leading H.I.V. surveillance and research within that division were laid off. It was unclear whether some of those functions would be recreated elsewhere.
At the National Institutes of Health, several directors of institutes were given notices of reassignment to Indian Health Service territories, and were told that they would need to report back on Wednesday on whether they would accept the move.
Among them were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Shannon Zenk, who leads the National Institute of Nursing Research.
Communications offices were hit particularly hard across agencies including N.I.H., C.D.C. and F.D.A. Renate Myles, the communications director at the National Institutes of Health, received a notice of reassignment. Mr. Kennedy, who promised “radical transparency,” has said he wants to consolidate communications under his purview.
The H.H.S. “is centralizing communications across the department to ensure a more coordinated and effective response to public health challenges, ultimately benefiting the American taxpayer,” Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary for the department, said in an email on Friday.
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8) The U.S. says a Maryland man was deported because of an ‘administrative error.’
By Ali Watkins and Alan Feuer
A Maryland man who was in the United States legally was deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there because of an “administrative error,” Trump administration officials said in a court filing on Monday, adding that American courts lacked the jurisdiction to have him released.
The man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, had lived in the United States under protected legal status since October 2019. His wife and 5-year-old child are both U.S. citizens.
On March 12, Mr. Abrego Garcia was stopped by immigration agents who told him inaccurately that his status had changed, according to court documents. Mr. Abrego Garcia had “withholding from removal” status, which means he was the subject of a deportation order but was allowed to stay in the United States because of the likelihood that he could be harmed if he returned to El Salvador.
Three days later, Mr. Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, and he is now being held in its sprawling Terrorism Confinement Center, a so-called mega prison known as CECOT. In the court filing, Trump administration officials said there was nothing they could do to correct the error, given that Mr. Abrego Garcia is no longer in U.S. custody. His deportation was first reported by The Atlantic.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s inadvertent deportation is the latest twist in a pitched battle between immigration lawyers and the White House over the administration’s efforts to deport migrants to El Salvador under both traditional and highly unorthodox procedures.
Mr. Abrego Garcia was placed on one of three flights to El Salvador on March 15 as the Trump administration was hastily ramping up its efforts to use a rarely invoked wartime statute, known as the Alien Enemies Act, to deport scores of Venezuelan immigrants accused of being members of the street gang Tren de Aragua.
Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under the authority of the act, administration officials have said. But the third — the one on which Mr. Abrego Garcia was traveling — was supposed to have been transporting only migrants with formal removal orders signed by a judge.
The Trump administration now admits that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal was an “administrative error.” Moreover, Justice Department lawyers said in court papers that there was little they could do get him back from El Salvador, and have urged the judge overseeing the case to reject his family’s petition to bring him home, arguing that the White House cannot force the Salvadoran government to release him and that U.S. federal courts have no jurisdiction to order his release.
While Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case is separate from those of the Venezuelans who are challenging the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, it raises some similar issues. Lawyers for the Venezuelans have persistently argued that their clients have had no opportunity to challenge accusations that they are gang members, and several have ended up in the same Salvadoran prison without any way of protesting their plight or returning to the United States.
Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency tried to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia in March 2019, according to court documents. During those proceedings, they claimed a confidential informant had told them that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a high-ranking member of MS-13, the violent Salvadoran criminal gang.
Mr. Abrego Garcia appealed the claims that he was a danger to the community and filed a petition for asylum. He was granted “withholding from removal” status in October 2019 by an immigration judge, which protected him from being deported to El Salvador. That status was active — and ICE agents were aware of it — when Mr. Abrego Garcia was placed on a deportation flight last month, according to court documents.
In a post on X, Vice President JD Vance defended the deportation, claiming Mr. Abrego Garcia was “a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife and relatives filed their civil suit against the Trump administration on his behalf last month, asking the U.S. government to halt its payments to El Salvador for holding deportees until Mr. Abrego Garcia was returned.
In Monday’s court filing, administration officials balked at that request, claiming the U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to order such actions and saying Mr. Abrego Garcia’s plight should not stand in the way of the Trump administration’s greater foreign policy goals.
The plaintiffs’ “request would harm the public interest by preventing the executive from implementing a unified course of conduct for the United States’ foreign affairs,” three Justice Department and immigration officials wrote in the filing. “They have made no showing that the removal of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was something other than an administrative error.”
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9) Congress Wrote a Deportation Law to Be Used ‘Sparingly.’ Trump Has Other Ideas.
A crackdown targeting foreign students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians conflicts with free-speech protections that lawmakers added in 1990.
By Charlie Savage, April 1, 2025
Charlie Savage writes about presidential power and legal policy.
The Trump administration is asserting that it has broad power under a 1952 law to kick out foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. That statute says the secretary of state can deem noncitizens deportable for foreign policy reasons, and the secretary, Marco Rubio, made clear recently that he had already used it to cancel hundreds of student visas.
“It might be more than 300 at this point,” Mr. Rubio said last week. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
But that expansive conception of power appears to conflict with a key limit Congress added nearly four decades after the law passed. Lawmakers explained that the modification, which is recorded elsewhere in federal statute books, means the law may be used “only in unusual circumstances” and “sparingly” if the problem stems from foreigners’ exercise of free speech.
Lawmakers also gave two examples of when deporting someone under the 1952 law over speech would still be legitimate. Both scenarios, laid out in a report explaining the 1990 bill that enacted the restriction, were highly exceptional.
The first was if a particular foreigner’s mere presence in the United States would somehow violate a treaty. The other was if it “could result in imminent harm to the lives or property” of Americans abroad, like when allowing the former shah of Iran to come to the United States in 1979 led to a riot at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a hostage crisis.
The additional guardrails raise questions over what rights foreign students are entitled to and underscore the Trump administration’s far-ranging interpretation of its authority in aggressively moving to deport those who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza. The executive branch has broad discretion to deny visas to applicants while they are abroad. But once noncitizens are on American soil, they are protected by the Constitution, which includes the rights to free speech and due process.
The administration’s policy began in March with the detention of Mahmoud Kahlil, a former Columbia University graduate student who served as a spokesman for campus protesters and who had a green card allowing for permanent residency. Afterward, Mr. Trump declared on social media that it was “the first arrest of many to come.”
Other arrests of foreign students whose visas were abruptly canceled have started to emerge. One, captured on video last week, went viral: Immigration officers, in plain clothes and masked, descend on Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student from Turkey, on a street in Somerville, Mass. She is promptly whisked into an S.U.V. and driven off.
Ms. Ozturk had co-written an opinion essay in a student newspaper accusing Israel of genocide, but to date there has been no public accusation that she did anything else. In his remarks last week commenting on Ms. Ozturk’s arrest, Mr. Rubio laid out a wide-ranging standard for how he is using the law to deport foreign students who have criticized Israel.
He said he intended to deport all foreign students who “participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.” The wording suggested that people need not have personally behaved in a disruptive fashion to be targeted if other like-minded people had been unruly.
Congress enacted the original version of the law during the era of McCarthyism and widespread fear of Soviet Communist subversion. It empowered the secretary of state to deem deportable any noncitizen whose presence or activities in the United States the official reasonably believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
But with the Cold War ending, Congress modified the law for situations in which the perceived problem was a noncitizen’s beliefs, statements or associations. To use the deportation law in such circumstances, lawmakers raised the standard to cases in which a foreigner’s presence in the United States “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”
In a conference report, lawmakers also explained that they intended this new threshold to be interpreted as a “significantly higher” standard than the general rule.
Because the legal challenges over the Trump administration’s attempts to expel foreign students are still nascent, the government has yet to offer a detailed explanation of its reasoning in court filings.
But when Mr. Khalil was arrested, people with knowledge of the matter explained the rationale the administration had developed in internal deliberations.
The logic was this: The administration considered the campus protests against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to have been antisemitic and to have created a hostile environment for Jewish students. Allowing foreign citizens who participated in such protests to remain in the country would, therefore, undermine a U.S. foreign policy objective of combating antisemitism around the world.
There is little precedent to the legal fight erupting over the Trump administration’s move largely because, until now, the law had been used sparingly.
Since Congress enacted the 1990 provision, there have been some 11.7 million removal cases — and in only 15 of them was that provision invoked, a group of 150 immigration lawyers and legal scholars said in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on Friday in Mr. Khalil’s case. Just four of those cases resulted in people being ordered deported, they said.
The available data the scholars drew on did not identify who those people were or their specific circumstances, including whether any were lawful permanent residents, they said. They added: “It may well be that Mr. Khalil’s case is unprecedented in the history of this provision and in the history of the United States. At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare.”
There also appears to be only one case on record in which a federal district court judge has interpreted the 1952 law.
In 1996, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, President Trump’s sister, struck down the provision as unconstitutional. She said it was too vague for people to know what might render them deportable, and it gave too much unbounded power to the secretary of state. An appeals court later vacated her ruling for technical reasons, without analyzing the law’s constitutionality.
The case before Judge Barry involved a corrupt foreign official, not someone whose free-speech activities had made him a target, so her ruling did not turn on the restrictions Congress later added. But she scrutinized the modification anyway, and suggested that it may still be unconstitutionally vague despite a higher standard.
Given the unfolding wave of arrests, many other rulings assessing the law may soon join Judge Barry’s opinion. Immigration law experts, aware of the implications, warned that the power the Trump administration was claiming could go far beyond its foreign policy about Israel.
“The presence of Ukrainians who are critical of Russia, supporters of more security cooperation with Europe, and economists skeptical of tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, could all suddenly be considered adverse to U.S. foreign policy interests and subject to deportation based on the unilateral determination of the secretary of state,” they wrote. “This list has no end, and no meaningful limiting principles.”
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10) Professors Pushed Harvard to Resist Trump. Now Billions Are on the Line.
Harvard, the wealthiest school in the world, sought compromise amid pressure to do more to combat antisemitism. The Trump administration is examining its funding anyway.
By Vimal Patel, April 1, 2025
Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Mass. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The Trump administration has turned campaign promises to target universities into devastating action, pulling hundreds of millions in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
On Monday, the Trump administration went after Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, announcing that it would review about $9 billion in contracts and multiyear grants. It accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students and promoting “divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”
Harvard had been bracing for the development. In recent months, it had moved cautiously, seeking compromise and, critics said, cracking down on speech. The approach riled some who worried that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.
Though it remains unclear how much the university will actually lose, if anything, the move on Monday shows that the conciliatory approach hasn’t fended off its critics yet.
In the days leading up to the Trump administration’s announcement, faculty members called on the university instead to more forcefully defend itself and higher education more broadly. In a letter, more than 700 faculty members called for Harvard to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”
“As much as a body blow from the administration would hurt us, Harvard has the capacity to withstand the blow,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political science professor who circulated the letter.
But a lot of money could be in question, and the stakes at Harvard underscore the excruciating dilemma faced by leading universities and civic institutions, from law firms to nonprofits: Should they work to protect themselves, as many seem to be doing, or stand on principle?
“That every-man-for-themselves response is about to cost us our democracy,” said Dr. Levitsky, who studies authoritarian regimes.
As President Trump’s inauguration approached, Harvard hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with deep ties to Mr. Trump. On the first full day of the Trump presidency, the university announced it was adopting a highly debated definition of antisemitism — which labels certain criticisms of Israel, such as calling its existence racist, as antisemitic — a move encouraged by the new administration but slammed by free speech advocates.
As the spring went on, pro-Palestinian actions spurred campuswide messages, even as Harvard remained quiet when a former Israeli prime minister visited and joked about giving student hecklers pagers, said Ryan Enos, a Harvard political science professor. (The comment was an apparent reference to the exploding pagers Israel used to target Hezbollah last fall.)
Under pressure, Harvard recently suspended a partnership with a Palestinian university while agreeing to start a new partnership with an Israeli one.
Then last week, two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies were pushed out of their positions after a Jewish alumni group complained about programming, according to faculty members. To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.
“It’s pretty transparent what’s going on,” Dr. Enos said. “Harvard is trying to put on a posture that mollifies its critics.”
Many say Harvard’s actions make sense, given the money at stake. And to many on the right and even some on the left, Harvard’s recent actions are a correction.
Harvard has often been criticized by conservatives who say that left-leaning politics permeate the campus and make it hard for different views to be heard. For years, it has also become a target for conservatives who say efforts to make higher education more inclusive of racial minorities have been excessive. Harvard, along with the University of North Carolina, was drawn into a Supreme Court case over its consideration of race in admissions, for instance. It ultimately lost in the conservative-leaning court, leading to a national ban on race-conscious admissions.
Last year, amid pressure, Harvard’s largest division ended a requirement that job candidates submit statements about how they would contribute to diversity.
As the war in Gaza set off student protests and debate over university responses, some have pushed for the federal government to use its power, and its purse strings, to force additional change.
Others, like Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of the Harvard Medical School, have called the Trump administration’s attack on higher education “an existential threat.” But Dr. Flier said the assault was occurring in part because of higher education’s failure to take seriously the free expression concerns of conservatives and even political moderates.
He said that Harvard and other universities had tolerated behavior toward Jewish students that they would not have if it had been directed at other minorities and had generally created an unhealthy environment for the expression of heterodox views. Dr. Flier said Harvard had begun to address some of those issues — moving away from commenting on political issues, for example — before Mr. Trump took office.
“We were beginning to go in the right direction,” Dr. Flier said. “There was a vibe shift. And an awareness shift. And that all got shifted again by the Trump administration’s massive, uncalled-for, pretextual attacks.”
Bowing to federal pressure has not proved to be a solution, either.
Last week, Columbia’s interim president resigned — the second leader there to do so in a year — amid intense internal and external pressure over the Trump administration’s demands on the university.
Dylan Saba, a lawyer with Palestine Legal, noted that Columbia had fallen in line with many Republican demands before Mr. Trump took office and had taken an especially aggressive stance against pro-Palestinian activists, including denouncing scholars by name at a congressional hearing. It did not placate Mr. Trump and produced even more student activism, Mr. Saba said.
“In seeking a painless way out, they ended up producing a much bigger conflict,” he said.
Amid the speed and chaos of Mr. Trump’s assault on higher education, colleges have not figured out how to respond in a way that will satisfy their antagonists — if there is one. Some faculty members wonder whether the conciliatory approach has only emboldened critics.
Even for universities with sizable endowments, the financial hits the administration has promised could be painful. Harvard’s endowment is more than $50 billion. Johns Hopkins University, which also has a large endowment, recently announced it would cut more than 2,000 employees because of reduced federal funding.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this spring, Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote in communication to the campus that community members should “rest assured that Harvard is working hard to advocate for higher education in our nation’s capital and beyond.”
Harvard has been a longtime target of Republicans who want to take it down a notch. In the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, student groups released a statement holding Israel responsible for the assault. In response, Harvard’s president at the time, Claudine Gay, released a tepid statement denouncing the attack.
Amid pressure, she followed it with a stronger message, but Harvard was one of three colleges whose leaders were questioned by Congress in 2023 about their efforts to combat antisemitism. A month after a widely panned performance, Dr. Gay was out.
Ongoing protests, unrest and lawsuits have kept Harvard in the public eye, though they have quieted considerably since last spring. In the fall, pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a silent “study-in” in a library, and the university temporarily banned them from the space.
In lawsuits over the last year, Jewish students said that Harvard had allowed hatred and discrimination to go unchecked and that it still had a long way to go to fix endemic problems. They accused Harvard of ignoring antisemitism, by allowing chants like “from the river to the sea” and the showing of the film “Israelism,” a documentary critical of Israel.
This winter, Harvard was placed on a list of 10 universities the Trump administration was taking special interest in.
“The sharks circle when they smell blood in the water,” said Kenneth Roth, a former director of Human Rights Watch and a fellow at Harvard, who wants Harvard to fight better to allow robust debate and academic freedom.
The announcement on Monday did not make it clear what other steps the university would have to take to be in good standing with the federal government.
Some universities have been more vocal amid the federal onslaught. A Georgetown law dean responded forcefully earlier last month to Washington’s top prosecutor, a Trump loyalist, saying his efforts to control the university’s curriculum were unconstitutional. Brown’s president wrote recently that it would defend its academic freedom in the courts, if need be. And Princeton’s president recently condemned the attack on Columbia, calling it “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”
Other universities also appear to be taking a more cautious approach.
Last month, the University of California system announced it would end the use of diversity statements in hiring — a practice that had been under fire from conservatives for years. Michael V. Drake, the president, had told faculty leaders he didn’t want the system to be “the tallest nail” and stand out, according to Sean Malloy, a professor who was in the meeting. A spokesman for the system did not confirm the comment but did not dispute it, and said the meeting was meant to be confidential.
And Dartmouth College recently hired a former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee as its vice president and general counsel, to help “understand and navigate the legal landscape surrounding higher education,” President Sian Leah Beilock said in a statement.
Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said it was only rational for Harvard, or any university, to try to negotiate a solution with the Trump administration, given the arbitrary nature of Mr. Trump’s actions against higher education and the number of jobs on the line.
Professor Feldman, who has criticized Mr. Trump’s actions, said Harvard had acted responsibly, given the political climate.
“Sometimes people who are eager for the university to get up and make big statements have a slightly unrealistic conception of what the real-world effect of those statements would be,” he said.
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11) Cornell Student Who Faced Deportation Says He Has Left U.S.
Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student who had been suspended by the university after participating in pro-Palestinian protests, said he “took the decision to leave the United States.”
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, April 1, 2025
Mr. Taal said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel had come to his home and revoked his visa. Credit...Momodou Taal
A British-Gambian Ph.D. student at Cornell University who had faced possible deportation after participating in pro-Palestinian protests said on Monday that he had left the United States.
The student, Momodou Taal, who had been suspended by the university several times, including for participating in what it said was an unruly protest, is one of at least nine international students that the Trump administration has sought to remove from the country because of activities it calls antisemitic.
Mr. Taal had not been detained, unlike some of the other students, and had filed a suit attempting to block the legal proceedings against him.
In a statement on the social media platform X, Mr. Taal indicated that he had left the country. “I took the decision to leave the United States, free and with my head held high,” Mr. Taal wrote. He said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel had come to his home and revoked his visa. There was no immediate reply from the agency to a request for comment.
“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” he said in the statement. He warned that others were also at risk and renewed his support for Palestinians.
Mr. Taal had been one of the leaders of a tent protest on the campus lawn at Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., in which students urged the university to divest its holdings in companies that they said supported Israel’s military campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza. On Oct. 7, 2023, the day that Hamas attacked Israel and set off the war, he wrote online, “Glory to the Resistance.”
After returning to office in January, President Trump signed an executive order saying that the United States would use “all available and appropriate legal tools” to “remove” aliens who engage in “unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Last month, ICE personnel detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student. They have also sought others, including Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who moved to the United States from South Korea when she was 7.
Officials in the Trump administration have argued in several cases that a “visa is a privilege, not a right.” Civil rights advocates have called the deportation effort one of the biggest assaults on free speech in the United States in decades.
Mr. Taal, who holds joint British and Gambian citizenship, was in the United States on a student visa. He had been working toward a Ph.D. in Africana studies.
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12) Israel’s Military Strikes Near Beirut, Killing at Least 4
The attack on the outskirts of Lebanon’s capital was the second in less than a week, raising fears that a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah could unravel.
By Euan Ward and Yan Zhuang, Published March 31, 2025, Updated April 1, 2025
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/world/middleeast/israel-strike-lebanon-beirut.html
Israel launched airstrikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut on Tuesday for the second time in less than a week, killing at least four people and prompting fears that a fragile cease-fire could be unraveling.
The Israeli military said the strike, in the Dahiya area just south of Beirut, had targeted Hassan Ali Mahmoud Bdeir, a member of Hezbollah and Iran’s elite Quds Force, who had directed and assisted Hamas in planning a “significant and imminent” attack against Israel. It did not provide further details. Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the overnight strike.
The airstrikes, which came without an evacuation warning, killed at least four people and wounded several others, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said the attack was a “clear breach” of a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hezbollah that was agreed to in November. The truce halted Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades, but a recent uptick in violence and tension has stoked concerns of a creeping escalation.
Despite the truce, Israel has repeatedly attacked purported Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, while the militant group has so far refrained from responding. Experts say that Hezbollah, battered by the 14-month war with Israel, has little impetus to risk sparking another conflict while it struggles to recover.
But Palestinian armed groups like Hamas — a key ally of Hezbollah — also maintain a sizable presence in Lebanon, operating mostly from decades-old refugee camps. During the war in Gaza, these groups intermittently launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel.
“We expect the Lebanese government to act against the terrorist elements that operate from their territory,” Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said at a briefing on Tuesday. “We see cooperation between Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah on Lebanese soil.”
On Friday, the Israeli military also launched airstrikes in the Dahiya after telling residents in a densely populated neighborhood there to evacuate. It was the first time since the cease-fire that the Lebanese capital had been targeted. The attack came hours after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah denied any involvement in that attack on Israel and said that it remained committed to the cease-fire. The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones; it also attacked targets in southern Lebanon in response to the rocket fire, killing three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions in solidarity with Hamas after that group led an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. After nearly a year of low-level fighting, the violence escalated into full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, killing nearly 4,000 people and leaving swaths of Lebanon in ruins.
It was Lebanon’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since the country’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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