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) Paramilitary Fighters Flee Sudan’s Capital, a Major Shift in Civil War
In dramatic scenes that appear to mark a turning point in nearly two years of civil war, Sudan’s military is driving fighters of its rival, the Rapid Support Forces, out of Khartoum.
By Declan Walsh, Reporting from Khartoum, March 26, 2025
“The fighting has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced more than 13 million, sending nearly four million fleeing to neighboring countries — amounting to the world’s largest displacement crisis. Refugees have told of fleeing rapes, massacres and starvation.”
Sudanese army soldiers moved through the recently captured areas of central Khartoum, on Tuesday. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Paramilitary fighters with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces began withdrawing from the battle-torn capital of Khartoum in large numbers on Wednesday, fleeing a city they had occupied since a ruinous war broke out nearly two years ago.
The capture of the city by Sudan’s military marks a dramatic turning point in what is currently Africa’s largest war. The Rapid Support Forces, known as the R.S.F., is likely to withdraw to its stronghold in Darfur, in the west of the country, according to analysts.
Surveillance drone footage circulated by Sudan’s military showed hundreds of R.S.F. fighters crossing a dam on the Nile at Jebel Aulia, south of the capital — their last remaining escape route.
Brig. Gen. Nabil Abdullah, a military spokesman, said the military had captured a major R.S.F. camp near the dam. “This was their last remaining camp in Khartoum,” he said. “A few remnants remain in pockets here and there. They will soon be destroyed.”
The two generals who lead Sudan’s military and the Rapid Support Forces, once allies, went to war nearly two years ago over a dispute about a plan for the R.S.F. paramilitary troops to be absorbed by the military.
The fighting has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced more than 13 million, sending nearly four million fleeing to neighboring countries — amounting to the world’s largest displacement crisis. Refugees have told of fleeing rapes, massacres and starvation.
Videos posted to social media showed civilians celebrating as Sudanese military forces arrived into the south of Khartoum, hours after the paramilitaries had fled.
In Kalakla, 10 miles south of the city center, civilians poured onto the streets, whooping and cheering, to hail Sudanese military forces who arrived on motorbikes.
Similar scenes unfolded in other neighborhoods closer to the center of the city as military forces advanced, videos verified by The New York Times showed.
The sudden withdrawal comes five days after the army captured the presidential palace in central Khartoum, a key symbolic and strategic victory that signaled a momentous change in the direction of the war.
Since then, the army has steadily seized control of the capital, taking control of the devastated city center before moving toward the international airport.
Pockets of R.S.F. fighters continued to resist the military’s advance. As Times reporters walked through the deserted city center on Tuesday, explosions and bursts of gunfire rang out from sporadic fighting a few streets away.
But on Wednesday morning, the army declared that it had seized control of the airport, which is littered with the ruins of passengers jets abandoned in April 2023, at the start of the war. On Wednesday afternoon, soldiers posed on the runway for television cameras before an abandoned plane.
The last concentration of R.S.F. fighters in the capital appeared to be in the southern and western part of Omdurman, on the west bank of the Nile. The army controls the northern half of Omdurman, and army controlled areas have received sporadic shellfire from R.S.F. positions in recent years.
Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting.
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2) U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries
A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by The Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs.
By Stephanie Nolen, Stephanie Nolen covers global health, March 26, 2025
A young woman receiving a vaccine shot in Sudan last year. Credit...AFP, via Getty Images
The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.
The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.
Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.
The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually.
The cover letter details the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. after the cuts, with most of its funding eliminated, and only 869 of more than 6,000 employees still on active duty.
In all, the administration has decided to continue 898 U.S.A.I.D. awards and to end 5,341, the letter says. It says the remaining programs are worth up to $78 billion. But only $8.3 billion of that is unobligated funds — money still available to disburse. Because that amount covers awards that run several years into the future, the figure suggests a massive reduction in the $40 billion that U.S.A.I.D. used to spend annually.
A spokesperson for the State Department, which now runs what is left of U.S.A.I.D., confirmed the terminations on the list were accurate and said that “each award terminated was reviewed individually for alignment with agency and administration priorities, and terminations were executed where Secretary Rubio determined the award was inconsistent with the national interest or agency policy priorities.”
The memo to Congress presents the plan for foreign assistance as a unilateral decision. However because spending on individual health programs such as H.I.V. or vaccination is congressionally allocated, it is not clear that the administration has legal power to end those programs. This issue is currently being litigated in multiple court challenges.
Among the programs terminated is funding for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which conducts surveillance for diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans, including bird flu, in 49 countries. Some major programs to track and fight malaria, one of the world’s top killers of children, have also been ended.
Dr. Austin Demby, the health minister of Sierra Leone, which relies on Gavi’s support to help purchase vaccines, said he was “shocked and perturbed” by the decision to terminate U.S. funding and warned that the ramifications would be felt worldwide.
“This is not just a bureaucratic decision, there are children’s lives at stake, global health security will be at stake,” he said. “Supporting Gavi in Sierra Leone is not just a Sierra Leone issue, it’s something the region, the world, benefits from.”
In addition to trying to reach all children with routine immunizations, Sierra Leone is currently battling an mpox outbreak, for which Gavi has provided both vaccines and critical support to deliver them, he said.
“We hope the U.S. government will continue to be the global leader it always been — putting money in Gavi is not an expenditure, it’s an investment,” Dr. Demby said
Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago. The United States contributes 13 percent of its budget.
The terminated grant to Gavi was worth $2.6 billion through 2030. Gavi was counting on a pledge made last year by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for its next funding cycle.
New vaccines with the promise to save millions of lives in low-income countries, such as one to protect children from severe malaria and another to protect teenage girls against the virus that causes cervical cancer, have recently become available, and Gavi was expanding the portfolio of support it could give those countries.
The loss of U.S. funds will set back the organization’s ability to continue to provide its basic range of services — such as immunization for measles and polio — to a growing population of children in the poorest countries, let alone expand to include new vaccines.
By Gavi’s own estimate, the loss of U.S. support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result.
The U.S. has been among the top donors to the organization since its creation, and became the largest during the Covid-19 pandemic. While European countries have historically provided significant funding, many are now reducing foreign aid spending as they grapple with the change in U.S. policy on Ukraine and the U.S. demand that they increase their defense spending. Japan, another major Gavi donor, is struggling with a depreciating currency.
Dr. Sania Nishtar, Gavi’s chief executive, said that she hoped the Trump administration would reconsider the decision to end its support. Gavi’s work keeps people everywhere, including Americans, safe, she said. In addition to protecting individual children, vaccination reduces the possibility of large outbreaks. The organization maintains global stockpiles for vaccines against diseases such as Ebola and cholera, deploying them in rapid response efforts for epidemics.
Gavi’s structure requires countries to pay part of the cost of vaccines, with their share growing as income levels rise; middle-income countries are weaned from support.
The memo says that 869 U.S.A.I.D. personnel were working as of last Friday, while 3,848 were on administrative leave and 1,602 are in the process of being laid off. Of 300 probationary employees who were initially fired, 270 have returned to work following a court order prohibiting their dismissal.
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3) 10,000 Federal Health Dept. Workers to Be Laid Off
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a major restructuring of the department, which now employs about 82,000 people.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Christina Jewett, March 27, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, is reorganizing the Health and Human Services Department. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a layoff of 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department, as part of a broad reorganization designed to bring communications and other functions directly under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The layoffs are a drastic reduction in personnel for the sprawling health department, which now employs about 82,000 people and touches the lives of every American through its oversight of medical care, food and drugs. Together with previous layoffs and departures, the move will bring the department down to about 62,000 employees, the agency said.
The restructuring will include creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. “We’re going to do more with less,” Mr. Kennedy said, even as he acknowledged it would be “a painful period for H.H.S.”
The 28 divisions of the health agency will be consolidated into 15 new divisions, according to a statement issued by the department. Mr. Kennedy announced the changes in a YouTube video. The staff cuts, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, are being made in line with President Trump’s order to implement the Department of Government Efficiency’s shrinking of the federal work force.
Mr. Kennedy said rates of chronic disease rose under the Biden administration even as the government grew. He pitched the changes as a way to refocus the agency on Americans’ health, but did not outline any specifics on how he would mediate rates of diabetes, heart disease or any other condition.
The reorganization will cut 3,500 jobs from the Food and Drug Administration, which approves and oversees the safety of a vast swath of the medications and consumer products people eat and rely on for well-being, according to an H.H.S. fact sheet. The cuts are said to be administrative, but some of the roles support research and monitoring of the safety and purity of food and drugs, as well as travel planning for inspectors who investigate overseas food and drug facilities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also have its work force cut by about 2,400 employees, and will narrow its focus to “preparing for and responding to epidemics and outbreaks,” the fact sheet said. The C.D.C. also does work on H.I.V./AIDS, tobacco control, maternal health and the distribution of vaccines for children. The National Institutes of Health will lose 1,200 staff members, and the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid is expected to lose 300.
All of those agencies have campuses outside of Washington and tend to operate under their own authority, and Mr. Kennedy has been at odds with all of them. Mr. Kennedy assailed them, and other parts of the department, in his video.
“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” he claimed. “H.H.S. has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 I.T. departments and dozens of procurement offices and nine H.R. departments. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other. They’re mainly operating in silos.
The plan also includes collapsing 10 regional H.H.S. offices into five.
Dr. Robert Califf, the F.D.A. administrator during the Biden administration, said his team worked with staff to drum up support for an 8,000 person reorganization to change how its divisions for food and facility inspections operate. Given how morale-crushing the second Trump administration has been for the department, with many staff members laid off on the false premise that their performance was subpar, the effort could be all the more challenging.
“If you are coming to work sick to your stomach, as Russell Vought said he wanted them to,” he said, referring to the head of the Office of Management and Budget, “then people are not going to be able to collaborate as well. They’ll be suspicious of each other, right?”
Mr. Califf said such a sudden and massive reduction in staff and reorganization could also disrupt services and safety oversight that the public relies on.
Mr. Kennedy also suggested in the video that the changes would help his team get more access to data, a prospect that has been fraught, given Mr. Kennedy’s long history of manipulating figures to advance arguments about the harm of vaccines that have widely been deemed safe.
“In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary’s office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Mr. Kennedy said the new division, the Administration for a Healthy America, would combine a number of agencies focused on substance abuse treatment and chemical safety, as well as the agency that administers courts that handle federal claims over vaccine injuries.
“We’re going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American taxpayer and the American patient,” Mr. Kennedy said. “These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing H.H.S. employees who actually yearn to make America healthy.”
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4) Judge Orders U.S. to Stop Attempts to Deport Columbia Undergraduate
The administration has been seeking to arrest and deport Yunseo Chung, who immigrated from South Korea as a child, after she participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
By Santul Nerkar and Jonah E. Bromwich, March 25, 2025
Yunseo Chung moved to the United States with her family from South Korea when she was 7 years old and was valedictorian of her high school. Credit...CLEAR
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport a 21-year old Columbia University student who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The administration began seeking to arrest the student, Yunseo Chung, this month, according to a lawsuit filed by Ms. Chung’s lawyers.
The judge, Naomi Buchwald, said during a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday that “nothing in the record” indicated that Ms. Chung posed a danger to the community or a “foreign-policy risk” or had communicated with terrorist organizations.
Ms. Chung is a legal permanent resident. She was not a prominent participant in demonstrations on Columbia’s campus; she was arrested along with several other students this month at a protest at Barnard College, the Manhattan university’s sister school.
A high school valedictorian who moved to the United States from South Korea when she was 7, she has not been detained by federal agents, and her lawyers have declined to comment on her whereabouts.
Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer for Ms. Chung and co-director of CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York, said at a news conference after the hearing that his client “remained a resident of the Southern District of New York” and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not been able to find her. During the hearing, he said that she was “keeping up with her coursework.”
Ms. Chung expressed her relief at the judge’s ruling in a statement on Tuesday evening. “After the constant dread in the back of my mind over the past few weeks, this decision feels like a million pounds off of my chest. I feel like I could fly,” she said, adding that she was grateful to her legal team, as well we professors, students and staff members at Columbia who she said “have given me strength at every turn.”
The Trump administration has cited a rarely used legal statute to justify its mission to detain and deport Ms. Chung. The government argues that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy goal of stopping the spread of antisemitism.
Judge Buchwald’s order said that if the government were to try and detain Ms. Chung under the basis of a different statute, it must “provide sufficient advance notice” to her and her attorneys.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had offered the same rationale it is using in the Chung case after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of a Columbia master’s program who is detained in Louisiana.
Mr. Khalil was arrested before his lawyers were able to petition a judge in his defense. Ms. Chung, by contrast, sued while she was still free, and Judge Buchwald moved swiftly on Tuesday without explicitly mentioning the Khalil case.
“No trips to Louisiana here,” Judge Buchwald said, and barred transferring Ms. Chung away from the Southern District of New York.
Mr. Kassem said that the court had done the “just and fair thing,” and that the government was trying to silence pro-Palestinian activism.
“She’s a college junior doing what generations of college students before have done, which is speak up and protest,” Mr. Kassem said.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Monday that Ms. Chung’s conduct had been “concerning” and mentioned her arrest by the New York Police Department at what it called a “pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College.” She was issued a desk appearance ticket on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing governmental administration and released.
The statement said that ICE would “investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.” They did not immediately respond to a request to provide evidence that Ms. Chung had supported Hamas, and press representatives for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Judge Buchwald’s decision.
ICE officials tried hard to arrest the 21-year-old, according to her lawsuit. Federal agents visited her parents’ home, texted Ms. Chung directly and, after federal prosecutors became involved, searched two residences on the Columbia University campus.
The search warrants, which were included in court filings, cited a criminal law that targets those who shelter noncitizens present in the United States illegally.
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5) New York County Clerk Blocks Texas Court Filing Against Doctor Over Abortion Pills
The showdown catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level.
By Pam Belluck, March 27, 2025
Pam Belluck has covered reproductive health for over a decade.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks to a crowd of anti-abortion supporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Credit...Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
A New York county clerk on Thursday blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a New York doctor for prescribing and sending abortion pills to a Texas woman.
The unprecedented move catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights.
The dispute is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court, pitting Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a shield law that is intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.
New York is one of eight states that have enacted “telemedicine abortion shield laws” after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022. The laws prevent officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or from responding to subpoenas and other legal actions — a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in such cases.
The action by the New York county clerk is the first time that an abortion shield law has been used.
This case involves Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide abortion pills to patients across the country. In December, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, accusing her of sending abortion pills to a Texas woman, in violation of the state’s ban.
Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers did not respond to the lawsuit and did not show up for a court hearing last month in Texas. Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court issued a default judgment, ordering Dr. Carpenter to pay a penalty of $113,000 and to stop sending abortion medication to Texas.
On Thursday, citing New York’s shield law, the acting clerk of Ulster County in Kingston, N.Y., Taylor Bruck, said he would not grant Texas’ motion seeking to enforce the Collin County order. He also refused to allow Texas to file a summons that sought to force Dr. Carpenter to pay the penalty and comply with the Texas ruling.
“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Mr. Bruck said in a statement. “Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.”
New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had previously sent guidance to courts and officials throughout the state, directing them to follow the shield law and indicating how they could comply and which specific actions were prohibited.
“I commend the Ulster County Clerk for doing what is right,” Ms. James said in a statement. “New York’s shield law was created to protect patients and providers from out-of-state anti-choice attacks, and we will not allow anyone to undermine health care providers’ ability to deliver necessary care to their patients. My office will always defend New York’s medical professionals and the people they serve.”
The Texas attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that a likely next step would be for Texas to file a challenge to the shield law in a state or federal court in New York.
Texas was the first state with an abortion ban to initiate legal action against abortion providers in states with shield laws. In January, the first criminal charges against a shield-law abortion provider were filed in a second state, Louisiana. In that case, a state grand jury issued a criminal indictment, also against Dr. Carpenter, accusing her of violating Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban by sending pills to that state.
Last month, Louisiana officials issued an extradition order for Dr. Carpenter, which was immediately rebuffed by New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul.
“I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana — not now, not ever,” Ms. Hochul said then.
Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers have not commented about either the Texas or Louisiana case. The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization Dr. Carpenter co-founded, has issued statements in response to the cases. “Shield laws are essential in safeguarding and enabling abortion care regardless of a patient’s ZIP code or ability to pay,” the coalition has said. “They are fundamental to ensuring everyone can access reproductive health care as a human right.”
Telemedicine abortion shield laws have become a key strategy for supporters of abortion rights. Under these laws, which have been in use since summer 2023, health care providers in states where abortion is legal have been sending more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions.
The Texas lawsuit accuses Dr. Carpenter of providing a 20-year-old woman with the two medications used in a standard abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol. Typically used up through 12 weeks into pregnancy, mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for pregnancies to develop, and misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes contractions similar to a miscarriage.
According to a complaint filed by the Texas attorney general’s office, the woman, who had been nine weeks pregnant, asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room in July “because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding.” The man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage,” the suit said, and he went back to their home in Collin County, where he “discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.”
In the Collin County court hearing last month, Ernest C. Garcia, chief of the administrative law division in the attorney general’s office, said that the man “then filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.”
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6) Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government
An executive order signed by the president would cancel collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers, the largest federal employees union said. The union was preparing legal action.
By Tyler Pager, Reporting from Washington, March 28, 2025
President Trump moved to end collective bargaining at agencies including the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, State, Treasury and Energy. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump instructed a broad swath of government agencies on Thursday to end collective bargaining with federal unions, a major escalation in his effort to assert more control over the federal work force.
Mr. Trump framed the order as critical to protect national security. But it targets agencies across the government, including the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, State, Treasury and Energy, most of the Justice Department, and parts of the Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, estimated that the order would strip labor protections from hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and said it was preparing legal action.
“This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement. “Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”
Unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government to put it more directly under his control. They have repeatedly sued over his blizzard of executive actions, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.
To claim authority to cancel the union contracts under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, Mr. Trump expanded the list of agencies exempt from provisions of laws governing federal labor relations for national security reasons. In doing so, he adopted an expansive view of national security, one that encompasses agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.
The American Federation of Government Employees said Mr. Trump’s order was illegal.
After Mr. Trump signed the order, the affected agencies filed a lawsuit on Thursday in Texas against the unions representing federal employees, seeking to rescind their collective bargaining agreements.
The government argued that the agreements “significantly constrain” the executive branch and hinder the president’s “efforts to protect the United States from foreign and domestic threats.” In the filing, the government contended that the Biden administration extended the labor agreements for five years shortly after Mr. Trump won the election in November. The government also raised concerns about the contracts’ return-to-work policies.
The executive order is the latest step in Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging effort to drastically overhaul the federal bureaucracy, which he has assigned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to oversee. Mr. Musk said in an interview that aired Thursday on Fox News that he was trying to reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion, and to cut $4 billion every day.
Federal workers are already bracing for major new cuts. Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the Education Department last week, and on Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, announced that he was laying off 10,000 employees as part of a broad reorganization.
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7) A Video From Tufts Captures the Fear and Aggression in Trump’s Crackdown
The tactics on display in the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk were not new — plainclothes officers, faces obscured — but as ICE actions ramp up, scrutiny may increase.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/us/politics/tufts-ice-crackdown.html
Rumeysa Ozturk in 2021. Ms. Ozturk was detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration has also used to try to deport other students and academics with some form of legal status. Credit...Associated Press
The security video looked like a scene from an undercover sting operation against a 30-year-old Turkish graduate student in her white coat and backpack.
Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down a street in Somerville, Mass., on Tuesday when she was surrounded by federal agents wearing dark sweatshirts, some of their faces obscured by black masks. As they pulled off her backpack and handcuffed her, the terrified student let out a cry. One officer explained, “We’re the police.”
As the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts, critics say tourists, foreign students and other legal immigrants are being subjected to aggressive arrest tactics usually reserved for criminal suspects. They have been swarmed by teams of masked agents in masks, zip-tied and bundled into unmarked vehicles.
The tactics are not particularly new. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to answer questions about tactics on Thursday, but former officials said federal immigration agents do wear street clothes to avoid giving away their presence before an arrest. They also can wear face coverings to avoid being singled out and doxxed online.
Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, said that plainclothes ICE agents have long been allowed to detain undocumented immigrants, though they are required to show their badges when making such arrests.
What is shifting are the targets — immigrants with valid visas and legal status. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, supporters say she appears to have merely been a co-author of an editorial in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel.
“I think it’s a First Amendment violation,” Ms. Fleischaker said. “ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action. That’s not why you enforce.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said investigators with Homeland Security and ICE “found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. A visa is a privilege, not a right.” She did not offer evidence or details of that support.
Ms. Ozturk’s arrest this week is only the latest, and most public. In February, federal agents in bulky hoodies, who did not appear to have badges hanging from their necks, raided a taco truck in Memphis and arrested three undocumented Mexican workers.
A lawyer in New Britain, Conn., said he had been giving a Polish client a ride home from court last month when his car was boxed in by several pickup trucks and S.U.V.s. Federal agents in black ski masks leaped out, accused his client of overstaying a visa and arrested him for deportation, he said.
“I don’t know why they needed such a show of force,” said Adrian Baron, the lawyer. “It came off to me like political theater, a lot of overkill.”
In New York City, the wife of a pro-Palestinian protest leader frantically asked for the name of an agent arresting her husband, Mahmoud Khalil. She was told, “We don’t give our name.” The agents declined to say which agency they were with, and told Mr. Khalil’s wife only that her husband was being taken into immigration custody in downtown Manhattan.
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said the images of masked immigration agents ricocheting around social media resembled the authoritarian governments that so many immigrants fled to come to the United States.
“I just can’t believe this is something our country is doing now,” she said.
Yet far from trying to downplay the aggressive tactics, the White House and immigration officials have celebrated them by trying to turn images of enforcement into deportation memes.
On Thursday, the White House posted a cartoon image of a handcuffed woman crying, an apparent mockery of a detainee who ICE officials said was a fentanyl trafficker arrested in Philadelphia. Last month, the administration put out what it called an “A.S.M.R. video” — a popular online video form that uses subtle sounds to stimulate pleasure — of people being shackled for a deportation flight.
It is increasingly difficult to determine which federal agents are conducting immigration arrests. President Trump has directed myriad federal agencies to assist ICE, including the Bureau of Prisons, the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The recent operations are reminiscent of those that took place in Portland, Ore., in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, when officers in tactical gear that street demonstrators did not recognize pulled protesters into unmarked vans and whisked them away. The videos of those tactics contributed to anger in the city — Oregon’s governor called it a “blatant abuse of power” — and led to a dramatic expansion in the protests that summer around Portland’s federal courthouse.
Enforcement operations by plainclothes agents are most likely to be increasingly visible under Mr. Trump. While the Biden administration directed ICE agents to only prioritize undocumented immigrants who posed a threat to national security, the Trump administration has ordered agents to target all of the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States — as well as students with legal visas who “create a ruckus for us,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it on Thursday.
Ms. Ozturk was detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration has also used to try to deport other students and academics with some form of legal status. The measure says that the secretary of state can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States is deemed a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he would target students who participated in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Investigators from a branch of ICE that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers, known as Homeland Security Investigations, have for weeks scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, officials have said. The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the State Department. Mr. Rubio then invoked the authority and authorized such arrests.
When an immigrant does lose legal status, including the loss of a student visa, Ms. Fleischaker, the former ICE official, said the immigration agency will typically send a letter informing the individual that he or she is now in the country illegally and give him or her a limited amount of time to leave, instead of immediately detaining the individual on the sidewalk.
“She didn’t even know she was out of status,” Ms. Fleischaker said of Ms. Ozturk. “This is not a person that we would normally use at-large enforcement against. At-large enforcement takes a lot of preparation and a lot of resources to go conduct at-large arrests.”
John Fabbricatore, a former director of ICE’s Denver field office, said that what agents wear during an arrest is a deliberate tactical decision.
Agents might wear clearly marked tactical vests and go in with guns drawn if they want to make a visible show of strength. But they put on street clothes — what Mr. Fabbricatore called “soft cover” — so as not to give away their presence before an arrest, or to avoid public blowback.
“As soon as people see ICE branding, they get in the way, they start protesting,” he said.
Mr. Fabbricatore said agents began wearing neck gaiters and masks during Mr. Trump’s first term in response to being publicly identified. He said critics had protested outside his own home, and that some agents were concerned their families could become targets.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, said it was “not ideal” for immigration agents to wear masks during arrests or to obscure their identities as federal agents, in part because they could be mistaken for criminals themselves.
“It’s not normal in ICE operations that you’re wearing a mask,” he said. “But I understand why. I think there’s absolutely a threat to the officers and their privacy and their families.”
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8) What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters
The Trump administration is looking to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States, citing national security. Critics say that violates free speech protections.
By Kate Selig, Published March 27, 2025, Updated March 28, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil speaking at Columbia University last spring. He helped lead high-profile protests at the school against Israel’s war in Gaza. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
The Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.
The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on his plane on Thursday night that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of possibly more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily. He did not specify how many of those people had taken part in campus protests or acted to support Palestinians but said “there’s a lot of them now.”
Immigration officials are known to have pursued at least nine people in apparent connection to this effort since the start of March.
The detentions and efforts to deport people who are in the country legally reflect an escalation of the administration’s efforts to restrict immigration, as it also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.
Here is what we know about the college detentions.
Who is being targeted?
The nine people who have been pursued and, in some cases, detained by federal officials include current and former students and professors. Most of them have publicly expressed pro-Palestinian views. Some have green cards, making them lawful permanent residents. Others have student visas, which allows foreign nationals to enter the United States for full-time study.
The extent of their involvement in pro-Palestinian advocacy varies. Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who is believed to be the first to be taken into custody, helped lead high-profile protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. He was sent to a detention center in Louisiana.
The administration has also targeted students who have been less involved. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen and graduate student at Tufts University, was taken into federal custody on Tuesday. She had drawn the attention of a right-wing group that claims to combat antisemitism on college campuses and publicizes its findings online after helping write an opinion piece in the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said investigators with that agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement “found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. A visa is a privilege, not a right.” She did not offer evidence or details of that support.
A video of Ms. Ozturk’s detention, showing plainclothes agents from the Homeland Security Department detaining her as she was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends, has circulated widely online. “This video should shake everyone to their core,” her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said in a statement on Wednesday. Ms. Ozturk is being held in Louisiana.
As it scrutinizes people living in the United States, investigators for ICE have been searching videos, online posts and news clippings of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. The government also appears to be getting information from private organizations.
Who else has the government sought to deport?
Several other students and academics have been detained or are being sought.
· Ranjani Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient from India who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning at Columbia, fled to Canada after immigration authorities revoked her student visa.
· Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student and legal permanent resident from South Korea, has been targeted for deportation by immigration agents. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to halt its efforts.
· Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student from the West Bank who had been involved in the protests at Columbia, was taken into custody by immigration agents after overstaying a student visa that was terminated in 2022.
· Momodou Taal, a dual citizen of Gambia and Britain pursuing a doctorate in Africana studies at Cornell, was ordered to surrender to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A prominent pro-Palestinian voice on campus, Mr. Taal had previously filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him.
· Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, was detained at his home. He is married to a Palestinian American woman whose father is a former adviser to a deceased Hamas leader. A federal judge has temporarily blocked Mr. Suri’s deportation. He is “awaiting his court date” in Alexandria, La., according to his lawyer.
· Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite holding a valid visa. She was detained upon returning from a trip abroad to Lebanon, her home country, and expelled in possible defiance of a court order. A lawyer representing a member of Dr. Alawieh’s family has vowed to continue fighting.
Are these detentions and deportations legal?
The Trump administration has justified the actions by citing a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which grants the secretary of state broad authority to expel foreigners deemed to pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States.
But legal experts question whether the actions of the targeted students meet this threshold. Lawful permanent residents are also protected by the Constitution, including free speech and due process rights, which could set up a major legal challenge. Lawyers for those whose student visas have been revoked have similarly challenged the administration on constitutional grounds.
In some cases, the administration has also cited lower-level offenses to justify deportation efforts. The government has added new accusations against Mr. Khalil, saying that he withheld information about his membership in organizations, including a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, when applying for permanent residency. One of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers dismissed these new claims as “patently weak.”
Will more students be targeted?
Administration officials have signaled that these detentions and deportations reflect the beginning of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters. President Trump called Mr. Khalil’s case the first of “many to come.”
Reporting was contributed by Edward Wong, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Tyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz.
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9) Israel Launches Airstrikes Near Beirut For First Time Since Cease-fire
The attack in the southern outskirts of the Lebanese capital, an area where Hezbollah holds sway, followed rocket fire toward northern Israel.
By Euan Ward and Aaron Boxerman, March 28, 2025
Euan Ward reported from Beirut and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.
The Israeli military launched airstrikes in the southern outskirts of Beirut on Friday for the first time since a U.S.-brokered cease-fire came into effect in November, shattering months of tense calm in the Lebanese capital and stoking fears of a further escalation.
The bombardment came after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory earlier in the day, setting off air-raid sirens in three communities near the border. The Israeli military subsequently ordered residents of the densely populated Hadath neighborhood of Dahiya, an area on the southern edges of Beirut, to evacuate from the vicinity of a building there.
Less than two hours later, the airstrikes began.
The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones, but did not explicitly blame the Lebanese militant group for the rocket fire earlier in the day. Hezbollah denied any involvement in the attack on Israel and said it remained committed to the cease-fire.
But this was the second such exchange of fire in less than a week, prompting fears that the truce between Israel and Hezbollah could unravel. At least three people were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Lebanese military said it was investigating who had fired the rockets. Hezbollah, which is struggling to recover from the devastating 14-month conflict with Israel, has little desire to risk reigniting a conflict, according to experts.
But Palestinian armed groups like Hamas also maintain a sizable presence in Lebanon, operating mostly from decades-old refugee camps. During the war in Gaza, these groups have intermittently launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel.
After the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack ignited the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally. After nearly a year of low-level violence, the fighting escalated into full-scale war and an Israeli ground invasion before the two sides agreed to a cease-fire.
It marked Lebanon’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.
Despite the truce, Israeli forces have regularly attacked in southern and eastern Lebanon, leading Hezbollah to accuse Israel of breaking the cease-fire. But Dahiya, which is traditionally a bastion of support for Hezbollah, had not been targeted since the cease-fire went into effect.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said that the country was determined to “strongly enforce” the cease-fire, which obligated the Lebanese government to prevent militant groups from attacking Israel from its territory.
“The equation has changed,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We will not allow firing at our communities — not even a trickle.”
After the Israeli military issued the evacuation warnings, surveillance drones began to whir above Beirut and gunfire erupted in the Dahiya as residents attempted to alert neighbors to an imminent Israeli strike. The Lebanese authorities also ordered all schools in the area to close, and parents rushed to collect screaming children. Students who spoke to The New York Times reported being ordered by teachers to move away from the windows, and said their classmates broke down in fear.
The pandemonium was reminiscent of the most intense days of the war, when Israeli airstrikes pounded Beirut’s southern outskirts on a near daily basis.
“People are panicking,” said Elie Hachem, the director of the St. Therese hospital, about 600 meters from the targeted building. “I can hear cars honking like crazy outside on the street.”
The hospital, which had been badly damaged in the war, was left unscathed by the strike, but casualties soon began arriving into the emergency room, said Mr. Hachem.
Air-raid sirens warning of incoming rocket fire had rung out earlier on Friday in northern Israel, including in the city of Kiryat Shmona. The Israeli military later said one of the projectiles was intercepted and another fell inside Lebanese territory.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, ordered the country’s security forces to arrest those responsible for the rocket fire, calling it “irresponsible” and a threat to “Lebanon’s stability and security,” according to a statement.
The Lebanese government is distinct from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia and political party that wielded enormous influence in Lebanon before the war. The new government has pledged to bring all weapons under the state’s control — including Hezbollah’s — but it remains unclear exactly when and how they will do that.
The U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, called for restraint, warning that a “a return to wider conflict in Lebanon would be devastating.”
Hwaida Saad and Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting from Beirut.
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10) They Loved Their Teslas. Now They’re Too Embarrassed to Drive Them.
Fury at Elon Musk emerges as vandalism, protest and buyer’s remorse.
By John Leland, March 28, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/nyregion/tesla-backlash-divestment.html
Protests at Tesla dealerships in New York City have become a regular occurrence since the election. Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters
On the Lower East Side of Manhattan this month, two men spray-painted a red swastika on a parked Tesla Cybertruck. In the borough’s meatpacking district, six people sat on the floor of a Tesla showroom and refused to leave, chanting “Elon Musk is unelected, democracy must be protected” before being arrested. In Albany, lawmakers called for New York State’s pension fund to unload its 3.5 million shares of Tesla stock.
And in Harlem, Fred Brathwaite, a visual artist and hip-hop pioneer who goes by Fab 5 Freddy, decided it was time to part ways with his Tesla Model 3, which he bought in 2019. His reasons were unrelated to the car’s performance. “It’s really looking like you’re wearing a red MAGA hat driving this car,” he said.
New Yorkers once embraced Teslas as that rare signifier of liberal green virtue that actually had some giddyap under the hood — an anti-S.U.V. that didn’t drive like a cup of herbal tea. But now, as the cars are being overshadowed by their company’s leader, that embrace is shading toward regret, like a what-was-I-thinking haircut in an old class photo.
For Mr. Brathwaite, who loved his Tesla for the technology, not least the kicking stereo system, the turning point came when he watched the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, thrust his arm out in a way that struck many as mirroring a Nazi salute.
“That was insanity to me,” Mr. Brathwaite said. “And then I see people calling it the ‘Swasticar.’” Driving his once-beloved Tesla these days, he said, “I feel like I’m lugging around all that negative baggage.”
So he’s going to unload it.
He’s not alone. Tesla owners nationwide are trading in their vehicles at record rates, said Jessica Caldwell, assistant vice president of insights at Edmunds, which tracks new and used car sales. At the same time, she added, online interest in shopping for a Tesla has hit its lowest point since 2022.
Kara Li, an art historian in Brooklyn Heights, feels lucky to have traded in her family Tesla during the summer, before the backlash gathered too much momentum.
She described her Tesla years almost like a relationship that went sour: It’s not me, it’s you.
When she first got the car in 2018, she said, it came with an implied understanding that both brand and driver were “concerned about emissions and fossil fuels and the future of our planet.” But as the years went on, she said, “it became more focused on the cult of Elon Musk. That was not something that appealed to us or that we wanted to be associated with.”
So they traded in their Tesla for an electric Ford.
New York is not historically a car town, but the weekly demonstrations at Tesla showrooms in the meatpacking district and in Brooklyn have been some of the biggest and most visible in the country, and have led to 15 arrests for civil disobedience, said Alice Hu, an organizer at Planet Over Profit, one of the groups behind the Manhattan demonstrations.
She said she expected this Saturday’s “Tesla Takedown” protest to be the largest yet, as demonstrators gather at more than 200 of the company’s 277 dealerships in the United States, and more in Europe.
All have contributed to a turbulent season for Tesla and its investors. Vehicles have been set on fire or vandalized with slices of American cheese, sales of the once-hot cars have slumped and the company’s stock price has fallen by almost 50 percent since mid-December. In one bad day this month, Mr. Musk’s net worth dropped by $29 billion.
Last week, Tesla announced a recall of nearly every Cybertruck because of a problem with an exterior trim panel. The recall was the eighth in the aesthetically divisive vehicle’s two and a half year existence.
Citing both political and financial objections, lawmakers in New York are pushing to unload Tesla stock from city and state pension funds.
“It started with ethics and transparency in his own practices, and what he’s doing with DOGE,” said Patricia Fahy, a Democratic state senator who drafted a letter urging the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, to divest the state’s 3.5 million shares of Tesla. “Then we saw his stock was plummeting.”
A spokesperson for Mr. DiNapoli said the state pension fund remained “committed to monitoring risk to our investments and engaging portfolio companies, including Tesla, to preserve and enhance the long-term value of our investments.”
In total, 25 senators signed the letter, all of them Democrats.
Justin Brannan, a City Council member from Brooklyn who is running for city comptroller, called for City Hall to sell off the $1.2 billion of Tesla stock in its pension funds, recalling the actions of previous comptrollers to divest from fossil fuel stocks. Mr. Musk, he said, was bad for democracy in general, and bad for New York specifically.
The city should not be “investing pension funds in a company owned and operated by someone who has New York City in its cross hairs,” Mr. Brannan said.
A spokesperson for Brad Lander, the current comptroller, who is running for mayor, said his office was “exploring all options, balancing our fiduciary duty to New York City pensioners and the longstanding concerns we’ve raised with Tesla about governance and management issues.”
Of course, not all remorseful Tesla owners are ready — or able — to give up their wheels. For those who aren’t, there is a gusher of blame-deflecting bumper magnets, each reflecting a different hue of anti-Musk sentiment. Perhaps this one, from Zazzle: “MAKE THIS CAR NOT EMBARRASSING AGAIN.”
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11) 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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12) 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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13) 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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14) 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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15) 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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