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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) A judge demands that the government provide details of its effort to return a wrongly deported man.
By Alan Feuer reporting from the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., April 16, 2025
A federal judge scolded the Trump administration on Tuesday for dragging its feet in complying with a Supreme Court order that directed the White House to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to a prison in El Salvador last month.
“To date nothing has been done,” the judge, Paula Xinis, told a lawyer for the Justice Department. “Nothing.”
The stern words came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland, where Judge Xinis said that she intended to force Trump officials to answer questions — both in writing and in depositions — about what they had done so far to get the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, out of the prison.
Noting that every passing day was another that Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, suffered harm in Salvadoran custody, the judge set up a fast schedule for officials to provide documents and sit for depositions.
“We’re going to move,” she said. “There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding.”
The hearing came only one day after President Trump said at an Oval Office news conference that he was powerless in seeking Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, sitting beside Mr. Trump, said he had no intention of releasing the man.
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal worker the Trump administration accused of being a member of the violent street gang MS-13, has emerged in recent days as yet another flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s aggressive plans to deport immigrants the government has deemed to be criminals, even if there is little evidence to support its claims.
It has also become the latest test of the White House’s willingness to defy court orders and potentially shatter the traditional, but increasingly fragile, balance of power between the executive and judicial branches.
Three courts, including the Supreme Court, have now ruled that the White House is required to take at least some steps toward freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia from a notorious Salvadoran prison, known as CECOT, where he was sent with scores of other migrants on March 15.
Until this week, the Trump administration had acknowledged that he had been inadvertently deported in violation of a previous court order that prohibited him from being sent to El Salvador. On Tuesday, however, top officials, including Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s chief domestic policy adviser, changed course, suddenly declaring that the deportation had been purposeful and legal.
During the hearing, Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, clearly signaled that she wanted to get to the bottom of the administration’s obfuscations and delays. She couched her decision to compel Trump officials to reveal what they had done behind the scenes as a first step toward figuring out if the administration had been acting in bad faith and ignoring court orders.
In her initial order directing the White House to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, Judge Xinis found that the Trump administration had flown him out of the country “without notice, legal justification or due process.”
Moreover, she chided government officials for having made “a grievous error” by deporting him, adding that the White House, by then refusing to retrieve him from one of the most “inhumane and dangerous prisons in the world,” had exposed him to harm that “shocks the conscience.”
Days later, a federal appeals court agreed with her, likening Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States to an official kidnapping and expressing outrage that the Trump administration appeared to have simply abdicated any responsibility to rescue him.
“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” a member of the three-judge panel wrote. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”
When the Supreme Court weighed in, its decision was nuanced and somewhat ambiguous.
The justices endorsed Judge Xinis’s view that the administration needed to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return, but they stopped short of actually ordering it, indicating that even federal courts may not have the authority to require the executive branch to do such an action.
At one point in Tuesday’s hearing, Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the Justice Department, said that the administration agreed that it had to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release. But Mr. Ensign advanced a narrow definition of the word, suggesting that the White House could take an entirely passive posture in the matter.
“If Abrego Garcia presents himself at a port of entry,” Mr. Ensign told Judge Xinis, “we will facilitate his entry to the United States.”
Judge Xinis appeared to be skeptical that the White House could simply sit back and wait for someone else to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, pointing out that the word “facilitate” required a more proactive stance.
“Defendants therefore remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” she wrote in an order filed shortly after the hearing ended.
A Salvadoran citizen, Mr. Abrego Garcia was thrust into the national spotlight last month when his family sued the government, claiming he had been wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 along with scores of other Salvadoran men and Venezuelans.
He came to the United States illegally in 2011 and eight years later was arrested while looking for work at a Home Depot in Maryland. An immigration judge initially ordered his deportation, but ultimately determined that he should not be sent back to his homeland because he might face persecution there.
The ruling, known as a “withholding from removal” order, meant that he could stay in the United States with a measure of legal protection.
Last month, however, Mr. Abrego Garcia was suddenly pulled over by federal immigration agents who accused him of being a member of MS-13 and inaccurately told him that his protected status had changed. Within three days, he was on a plane with other migrants to CECOT, which is known for its human rights violations.
In her written order, Judge Xinis said that she would allow Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to make 15 requests for documents and depose as many as six administration officials.
She also said that the lawyers were “entitled to explore the lawful basis — if any — for Abrego Garcia’s continued detention in CECOT, including who authorized his initial placement there and who presently authorizes his continued confinement.”
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2) Trump Threatens Harvard’s Tax Status, Escalating Billion-Dollar Pressure Campaign
Harvard has rejected an effort by the White House to exert more control over its programs. Federal law prohibits the president from telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations.
By Tyler Pager, Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Reporting from Washington, April 15, 2025
A dispute between Harvard University and President Trump has put billions of dollars in grants at stake. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed his administration’s demands for a series of policy changes, a dramatic escalation in the feud between the president and the nation’s richest and oldest university.
The threat came a day after the Trump administration halted more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard because the university rejected changes to its hiring and admissions practices and curriculum. Mr. Trump decided to ratchet up his pressure campaign after watching news coverage of Harvard’s resistance on Monday night, according to a person with knowledge of the president’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
White House officials said Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service would make its decision about Harvard’s tax-exempt status independently, but the president has made clear in private that he has no intention of backing down from the fight with the university.
Losing its tax-exempt status could over time cost Harvard billions of dollars.
It’s the latest turn in a battle between Mr. Trump and academia more broadly, in which the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from various colleges and universities, ostensibly as a way to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. Trump officials have suggested that schools like Harvard have been hotbeds of antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.
Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations, and it is unclear whether the agency would actually move forward with an investigation. A spokeswoman for the I.R.S. declined to comment.
“Selective persecution of your political adversaries through the tax system is the stuff of dictatorship,” said Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard. “This is unconscionable and wrong but a continuation of trends we have seen in President Trump’s approach both to universities and to tax enforcement.”
Officials at Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
Organizations have to apply to become tax-exempt. The I.R.S. will conduct audits and in some cases revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status if, for example, the I.R.S. finds that the group is engaging in too much political or commercial activity. Entities can appeal such a decision in court or enter into a settlement to try to preserve their status, former I.R.S. officials said.
John Koskinen, a former I.R.S. commissioner, said that it was unlikely that the I.R.S. could successfully revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, given its array of research and teaching functions. Still, having to litigate the question in court could be its own form of intimidation for Harvard.
“The chances of getting the I.R.S. to actually revoke the 501(c)(3) status of a major university is almost nonexistent,” Mr. Koskinen said, referring to a tax-exempt category of organizations. “The problem is you’re causing people to spend a lot of time and money responding and defending their actions.”
Because of its exempt status, Harvard for the most part does not have to pay taxes, though Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax bill instituted a tax on large university endowments that Republicans now want to substantially increase.
Moreover, donations to the research university are tax deductible. That helps draw gigantic donations from ultrawealthy donors who want to choose how to spend their earnings rather than give their money to the federal government. Some prominent Republican donors, like the billionaires John Paulson and Ken Griffin, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Harvard.
Tax-exempt organizations have long been a political minefield for the I.R.S. During the Obama administration, Republican lawmakers accused the agency of unfairly targeting conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, though a watchdog later concluded that the agency had improperly scrutinized both conservative and liberal organizations.
“Economists have extensively studied and documented that tax deductible charitable contributions have a massive effect on support for universities,” Mr. Summers said. “Removal of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status, which won’t happen because we are a nation of laws, would, if it did happen, devastate progress in medical and scientific research, maintenance of American and Western values, opportunity for the next generation of Americans and an important magnet for the United States in the world.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to turn the I.R.S. into a political tool, upending longstanding protections of sensitive taxpayer information by pushing the I.R.S. to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport undocumented immigrants.
Administration officials have also dramatically cut the I.R.S. work force and moved to install Billy Long, a former Republican congressman with little background in tax, beyond promoting a fraud-ridden tax credit, to lead the historically apolitical agency. Nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats and liberal causes are bracing for the I.R.S. to scrutinize their tax-exempt status under the Trump administration.
Last week, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter demanding changes at the university and routine progress reports on how they were being put in place, in order to continue to “maintain” the financial relationship with the government. Harvard rejected the demand.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in a statement to the university on Monday.
The Trump administration responded by instituting a funding freeze of more than $2 billion, though details of the funds were unclear. Harvard receives some $9 billion in federal funding, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand the funding loss, with an endowment of more than $50 billion. By contrast, Columbia University, which has a far smaller endowment, settled with the Trump administration when it was pressed to make changes to its policies and programs.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, deferred questions about Harvard’s tax-exempt status to the I.R.S.
“All the president is asking: Don’t break federal law, and then you can have your federal funding,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “I think the president is also begging a good question. More than $2 billion out the door to Harvard when they have a more than $50 billion endowment: Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already? And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.”
Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting
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3) Columbia Vows to Reject Any Trump Deal That Erodes Its Independence
A message from the university’s acting president said that talks with the Trump administration were continuing as the White House is seeking to place the school under judicial oversight.
By Troy Closson, April 15, 2025
Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, issued a statement late Monday, hours after the president of Harvard offered a defiant response to demands from the Trump administration. Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The New York Times
Columbia University, which has faced criticism for not striking a more defiant stand against efforts by the Trump administration to set its agenda, showed signs late Monday of adopting a tougher tone. In a note sent to the campus, the acting president pledged that the school would not allow the federal government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.”
The message came less than 12 hours after Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s demands, prompting federal officials to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the school. The letter was sent to students and faculty members as Columbia has endured intense fire for what critics regard as White House appeasement.
Until now, Columbia had largely avoided public criticism of the administration and its campaign against universities. In her first public statement, in March, Claire Shipman, Columbia’s new acting president, acknowledged that the university faced “a precarious moment,” but she did not directly mention federal officials or their cancellation of about $400 million in grants and contracts to the school.
And when Ms. Shipman’s predecessor, Katrina Armstrong, revealed an agreement regarding major demands from the government — including placing the university’s Middle Eastern studies department under new oversight and creating a security force empowered to make arrests — she did not critique the administration’s interference in higher education.
Addressing the prevalent anxiety among international students — hundreds of whom across the United States have been abruptly stripped of their ability to stay in the country — Ms. Shipman wrote that she was following the government’s actions “with great concern” and directed foreign students to a new need-based hardship fund.
Columbia’s response came as the Trump administration has discussed seeking a consent decree in which a federal judge would enforce any deal reached with the university. Ms. Shipman did not explicitly address the possibility of such a measure but said that no agreement had been reached with the federal government and that discussions were ongoing, including over how to address concerns about discrimination and harassment on campus and how to restore a federal partnership that “supports our vital research mission.”
“Some of the government’s requests have aligned with policies and practices that we believe are important to advancing our mission,” said Ms. Shipman, who was a co-chair of the university’s board of trustees before being appointed acting president last month.
Still, she added: “Other ideas, including overly prescriptive requests about our governance, how we conduct our presidential search process and how specifically to address viewpoint diversity issues are not subject to negotiation.”
A spokeswoman for the federal Education Department, whose officials have been involved in negotiations with Columbia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the last three months, the Trump administration has taken aim at some of the nation’s most prominent schools as it moves to eradicate what it says is rampant antisemitism on campuses, including Columbia’s, along with what it calls unfair diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across higher education.
Federal agencies have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for research at several universities, including Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern. Some Columbia faculty members have argued that the school’s response to the government’s demands has undermined its central principles and academic freedom.
The federal government demanded an extraordinary set of changes at Harvard in a letter last week, including that the university share all its hiring data with the Trump administration, place certain departments under an external audit and immediately shut down any programming related to D.E.I.
As Harvard’s president rejected the administration’s ultimatum, Ms. Shipman told her campus that “our institution may decide at any point, on its own, to make difficult decisions that are in Columbia’s best interests.”
Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, said that he appreciated that Ms. Shipman’s letter seemed to include a “commitment to some principles that I think we are all glad to hear are in fact principles.”
But to him, “the main thing that stood out” was that school leaders were “clearly affirming how much time they’re talking to Donald Trump’s federal government when they don’t seem to be spending very much time talking to their own faculty.”
“That was a problem all of last year,” he said. “And it doesn’t get us anywhere good.”
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, where at least $210 million in federal grants and contracts are at risk, acknowledged in a recent interview with The New York Times that some universities might have to concede “in order to protect people.”
But he added that they also needed “to speak up under those circumstances,” even if to express regret over a compromise.
“I do wish I had heard that from Columbia,” Mr. Eisgruber said. “You may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that. You need to admit and you need to say to your community and to Americans, ‘Hey, there’s something really fundamental that has been lost here.’”
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4) Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head
The New York Times obtained autopsy reports for 14 of the 15 people killed in a March 23 attack on an ambulance and fire truck.
By Vivian Yee, Bilal Shbair and Christoph Koettl, April 15, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza.
Members of the Palestine Red Crescent and other emergency services carrying the bodies of fellow rescuers killed by Israeli forces in March. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The paramedics and rescue workers killed in an Israeli shooting in Gaza last month died mainly from gunshots to the head or chest, while others had shrapnel injuries or other wounds, according to autopsy reports obtained by The New York Times.
Israeli troops had fired on ambulances and a fire truck sent by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Civil Defense, according to witness accounts, video and audio of the March 23 attack.
Israel acknowledged carrying out the attack, which killed 15 men: 14 rescue workers and a United Nations employee who drove by after the others were shot. Israeli soldiers buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, fire truck and a U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.
The Israeli military has offered shifting explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles and said, without providing evidence, that some of the dead men had been Hamas operatives. Israel’s military said it was investigating the killing.
The episode drew international condemnation, and experts described it as a war crime.
The autopsies were carried out between April 1 and April 5, according to the reports, after a team of aid workers recovered the men’s bodies from southern Gaza. The Times reviewed autopsy results for all the men except the U.N. employee. They were performed by Dr. Ahmad Dhair, the head of the Gazan health ministry’s forensic medicine unit.
Dr. Arne Stray-Pedersen, a forensic pathologist at Oslo University Hospital in Norway, who had been in Gaza earlier in March to train doctors in forensic medicine, reviewed photos of the autopsies and consulted with Dr. Dhair to write a summary report.
The 14 men were wearing either their Red Crescent or Civil Defense uniforms, in part or in whole, at the time of death, the autopsy reports said. Video of part of the attack shows that when Israeli troops began shooting at them, a few of the paramedics had exited their vehicles and were clearly visible in their uniforms, with reflective bands across the back, arms and legs that shone brightly in the lights of the ambulances.
The autopsy reports said 11 of the men had gunshot wounds, including at least six who were shot in their chests or backs and four who were shot in the head. Most had been shot multiple times.
One man had several shrapnel wounds in his chest and abdomen; two others had injuries that the autopsy reports said were “consistent” with shrapnel, possibly related to an explosion. While sustained gunfire can be heard on the video and in audio recordings of part of the attack, it is unclear whether there was an additional blast that might have caused such injuries.
Several of the bodies were missing limbs or other body parts, the reports said. One man’s body was severed from the pelvis down, his autopsy report said.
The bodies were all partly or severely decomposed, according to the autopsy reports and photos. That made it challenging to draw additional conclusions, including whether the men had been shot at close range or from farther away, Dr. Stray-Pedersen said in an interview.
After examining the first few bodies in late March, Dr. Dhair had told The Times and other news outlets that one victim had marks and bruises on his wrists suggesting that his hands had been tied. Dr. Dhair cautioned that further investigation was needed to determine whether that was the case.
The autopsy reports do not mention whether any of the men had been tied up.
A Red Crescent spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, had also said that one paramedic was found with his hands and feet tied. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Dr. Stray-Pedersen began consulting on the autopsies after the Gazan health ministry sought help from NORWAC, a Norwegian aid group, a draft of the summary report says. He said in an interview that he and Dr. Dhair will continue to analyze the results before issuing a final report.
“I am specifically looking at any possible patterns, if all of them were killed in the same manner or if some have any additional wounds,” Dr. Stray-Pedersen said.
In its initial statement after the attack, the Israeli military said that the men had been “advancing suspiciously” without their lights. It backtracked on that assertion after the release of the video, which showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.
The Israeli military’s first account also said that nine of those killed had been operatives for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. It later revised that count, saying that six of them were Hamas operatives.
It has said it will not comment further until its investigation is complete.
Abubakr Abdelbagi and Naziha Baassiri contributed reporting.
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5) Maryland Senator Heads to El Salvador to Check on Man Deported From His State
Senator Chris Van Hollen said he would press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and imprisoned.
By Robert Jimison, April 16, 2025
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he was traveling to El Salvador in response to President Nayib Bukele’s decision to not return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, is on his way to El Salvador on Wednesday to press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and remains imprisoned in his native country despite a federal court order calling for his return to the United States.
Mr. Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States last month in what immigration officials have since acknowledged was an error. Although the Supreme Court has instructed the government to facilitate his return, both U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have so far refused to comply.
Mr. Van Hollen said he hoped to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia at the maximum security prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, about an hour outside the country’s capital. The senator also said he hoped to talk to Salvadoran officials about securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
“Following his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a statement before his departure. “It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release.”
The trip comes shortly after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador traveled to Washington, D.C., this week for a meeting with Mr. Trump. Mr. Van Hollen had requested a meeting with Mr. Bukele during the visit, but received no response.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had appeared side-by-side in the Oval Office, with Mr. Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.
Mr. Van Hollen said he was disturbed by those remarks and decided to travel to El Salvador himself.
“The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home,” he said in a video posted to social media before boarding his flight.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration stuck to its position, continuing to defy a court order that American officials “facilitate” his return. Asked about the case, Attorney General Pam Bondi declared Mr. Abrego Garcia would not be repatriated unless the president of El Salvador decided to return him. Even if that happened, she said, the U.S. would immediately deport him again to another country.
“President Bukele said he was not sending him back,” Bondi said. “That’s the end of the story.” She added Mr. Abrego Garcia is “from El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador and that’s where the president plans on keeping him.”
With Congress in a two-week recess, Representatives Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California also planned to make a visit to El Salvador, according to two people familiar with their plans who discussed them on the condition of anonymity because they were not yet final.
The two wrote on Tuesday to Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, requesting an official congressional delegation be sent to the nation to conduct a “welfare check” on Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Mr. Frost and Mr. Garcia also said more oversight was needed given Mr. Trump’s remarks this week that he wanted to send “homegrown criminals” including American citizens to the prison where he is being held, which is known for human rights violations.
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6) Two Protesters at Marjorie Taylor Greene Town Hall Are Subdued With Stun Guns
Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.
By Maya C. Miller, Reporting from Acworth, Ga., Published April 15, 2025, Updated April 16, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-protesters.html
Protesters booed and shouted at the Georgia representative, prompting police to forcibly remove several people. Three were arrested, two of whom were subdued with stun guns. Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times
A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters.
Ms. Greene, a Republican firebrand and loyal ally of President Trump, had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her. As her supporters stood and clapped, several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as Andrew Russell Nelms of Atlanta, and dragged him out of the room.
“I can’t breathe!” Mr. Nelms shouted, interjecting with expletives as he was told to put his arms behind his back. The police then used a stun gun on him twice.
Back inside the room, Ms. Greene was unfazed as she greeted attendees at the event, in Acworth, Ga., northwest of Atlanta. She thanked the officers, drawing applause from the crowd of about 150 people.
“If you want to shout and chant, we will have you removed just like that man was thrown out,” she said. “We will not tolerate it!”
Minutes later, as Ms. Greene started to play a video of former President Barack Obama discussing the national debt, police forcibly removed and used a stun gun on a second man, identified later as Johnny Keith Williams of Dallas, Ga., who had stood up and started to heckle.
Over the next hour, as Ms. Greene trumpeted the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government and played clips of herself railing against witnesses in committee hearings, police officers escorted at least six people from the room, according to a spokesman for the Acworth Police Department. Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.
In between disruptions at the event, Ms. Greene applauded the Trump administration’s deportation efforts and praised Congress for passing the Laken Riley Act, a measure that requires the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes. Ms. Greene crowed about the DOGE team’s push to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. Instead of taking questions directly from the audience, she read and answered prescreened questions from a slide deck.
“Why is M.T.G. supporting Musk and DOGE and the slashing of Medicaid, Social Security offices, libraries and more?” read one question from a person identified only as Sarah. “This is outrageous.”
“Well, Sarah, unfortunately, you’re being brainwashed by the news that you’re watching,” Ms. Greene replied, to whoops and cheers from the crowd.
Mike Binns, a constituent who was escorted from the room after he yelled at Ms. Greene, said the event felt more like a “political rally” than a town hall.
Outside, several hundred protesters lined the street, waving signs that bore phrases such as “Pro America, Anti Trump” and “Resist!”
Asked if she thought using stun guns on protesters at the event was an appropriate response, Ms. Greene reiterated her praise for the law enforcement officials.
“You know who was out of line? The protesters,” Ms. Greene said. “There was a place designated outside for the protesters because we support their First Amendment rights.”
Sean Keenan contributed reporting.
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7) America, This Is an Old and Brutal Tyranny
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, April 16, 2025
Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Trump administration believes it can send anyone it wants, without due process or future legal recourse, to rot in a foreign prison.
It has argued as much in court. Lawyers for the Justice Department have asserted the president’s supposedly “inherent” authority to remove foreign nationals from the United States, and the White House is openly defying a court order to facilitate the return of an immigrant living in Maryland and sent, accidentally, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The immigrant in question, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is Salvadoran, has lived in the United States since 2011 and was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019. He was detained last month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, accused of membership in MS-13 — a Salvadoran gang — and in short order was removed to El Salvador without so much as a hearing.
His family sued the government and, soon after, a Federal District Court judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to American shores. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in a unanimous ruling that also affirmed the Constitution’s clear guarantees of due process of law.
But the Trump administration won’t budge. Justice Department lawyers deny that the government has any responsibility to get Abrego Garcia home and insist that his removal wasn’t a mistake, although they won’t share the information that might support this claim on the grounds that it is sensitive and thus classified.
The White House has also taken this position outside of the courtroom. On Monday, during a state visit by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele — the administration’s enthusiastic partner in the rendition of immigrants abroad — Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” a tacit assertion that President Trump can ignore court orders requiring Abrego Garcia’s release. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was “not up to us” whether Abrego Garcia was returned, and Bukele himself said that “I’m not going to do it,” after incredulously asking how he was supposed to “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. For his part, Trump rejected calls to bring Abrego Garcia home and raised the possibility of sending “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador, even urging Bukele to construct new prisons for the people Trump hopes to exile there.
More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.”
The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history. At the same time, while contemplating these removals, I am struck by the degree to which they aren’t completely foreign to the American experience.
Here, I’m thinking of the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States. “The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free Black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, Northerner or Southerner,” explains the historian Carol Wilson in “Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865.”
Kidnapping of this sort was illegal in most of the states where it took place, but as Wilson notes it was still pervasive, “partly because of the potential for great profits from a successful kidnapping and sale of a free Black into slavery” and in part because “the racism of the majority of American whites rendered it unlikely that kidnappers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
We see both dynamics in the most famous kidnapping case of the era, that of Solomon Northup — dramatized in the 2013 film version of his book, “12 Years a Slave” — a free Black New York man who was seized under false pretenses, drugged and sold south to Louisiana, where he labored as a slave for more than a decade before he could secure the assistance necessary to win his freedom.
It goes almost without saying that it was slavery that made free Black people so vulnerable to kidnapping. As one abolitionist newspaper, The African Observer, noted in 1827, “Where a traffic in slaves is thus actively carried on, and sanctioned by existing laws, those colored persons who are legally free must necessarily hold their freedom by very precarious tenure.” The racial nature of slavery in the United States tied bondage and servitude to skin color. To be Black meant that you could be a slave regardless of whether you were.
It did not help the situation that ceaseless industrial demand for cotton made enslaved people extremely valuable. “By the 1850s,” writes Wilson, “slave prices had soared, with good field hands usually bringing at least a thousand dollars, and some artisans selling for more than twice that amount.”
“As long as slaves brought a good price on the market,” she continues, “there would be people unscrupulous enough to make money in this manner.”
It was not just the market but the lack of full legal status in many of the states where they lived that made Black Americans vulnerable to kidnappers. As the historian Kate Masur shows in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” a number of Northern states adopted laws restricting civil and legal rights for their Black citizens. In 1807, for example, Ohio adopted laws that required free Black settlers to register in county courts (for a fee, of course) and obtain a guarantee of good behavior from at least two white landowners. The same laws also forbade them from testifying in cases, civil or criminal, in which one party was white, severely limiting their ability to defend their most basic rights, as Masur writes, “to enforce contracts, secure wages, or obtain justice in criminal cases.” This, too, was tied to slavery and to what it seemed to imply about anyone of African descent.
What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge?
Beyond the obvious parallels and similarities, the example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life. The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.
Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with.
You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society. This was true of the slave system, where the large majority of people lived in conditions of servitude; it was true of the Jim Crow South, where economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement were the rule for Black and white Americans; and it will be true of our time for as long as we continue on the current path.
As of this writing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance, but about half approve of his handling of immigration and support his program of deportations. It is hard to know exactly what this means. Americans might believe the White House when it says that the only people affected by the immigration crackdown are people who have broken the law in one way or another — criminals who don’t deserve our sympathy. Americans might be unmoved by the fact that unauthorized entry is only a civil offense, or that most of the people renditioned by the administration have not been convicted of any crime.
Any American who looks at the president’s actions and nods his head in approval is sacrificing his freedom whether he realizes it or not. To allow Trump the authority to seize and disappear immigrants at will is to close the curtain on democracy for citizens, too. You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others.
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8) Israel Threatens Further Escalation in Gaza War
The United Nations warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was likely at its worst since the conflict began and that the population was again on the brink of famine.
By Lara Jakes, April 16, 2025
Lara Jakes writes frequently about Israel’s war against Hamas.
Inspecting the site of a strike in Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Wednesday. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
Israel’s defense minister warned on Wednesday that the war in Gaza would soon escalate with “tremendous force” and an extended humanitarian blockade if Hamas did not quickly release hostages amid stalled cease-fire negotiations.
The blunt and detailed statement by the minister, Israel Katz, came as a growing list of former Israeli security officials accused the government of prolonging the war at the expense of the surviving hostages who remain in Gaza.
At the same time, the United Nations warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was likely at its worst since the conflict began in October 2023, and that the population was once again on the brink of famine.
Mr. Katz said Israeli troops would remain in the territory in Gaza that the military had seized last month after the collapse of a six-week cease-fire. During the truce, Hamas freed about 30 living hostages and returned the bodies of eight others.
He said the Israeli military would use “tremendous force, from the air, land and sea” to destroy Hamas bunkers both above and below ground, and keep up the evacuations of Gazans who again are being forced to leave their homes to escape the strikes. Already, hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents have been displaced.
These measures aim to “bring about the release of all the hostages,” Mr. Katz said, while carving out a path to defeat Hamas later.
“If Hamas persists in its refusal, the activity will expand and move to the next stages,” Mr. Katz said.
An American proposal, introduced last month by the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff, would require Hamas to release some living hostages without guarantees from Israel that it would permanently end the war — something Hamas has been demanding.
Hamas has rejected the U.S. plan as well as demands that it disarm as part of an eventual settlement.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said on Wednesday that the group was ready to negotiate a settlement that would lead to the end of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
“Whatever illusions Netanyahu promotes to his people to prolong the war are paid for by everyone, especially their prisoners,” Mr. Naim wrote on social media, referring to the hostages held by the armed group.
But frustration is mounting against Hamas in Gaza, where Palestinians have increasingly taken to the streets to demand that the group give up control of the enclave so the war can end. Such protests were once rare, as they risked violent retribution by Hamas.
On Wednesday, crowds of Palestinians gathered in the city of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, chanting anti-Hamas slogans and calling for an end to the war.
Israelis are also increasingly arguing that their leaders should reach a deal with Hamas to bring home the remaining hostages — even if that means ending the war. Critics of the government say the ramped-up war is putting the remaining hostages in greater peril.
On Wednesday, hundreds of former senior Israeli police officials joined a group of nearly 1,000 active-duty and reserve forces who had earlier called for a negotiated agreement to free the hostages immediately.
And U.N. officials said time was running out for the nearly two million Gazans who depend on foreign aid for survival.
The aid that was delivered to Gaza during the cease-fire that ended last month has “practically run out,” said John Whyte, the acting deputy director of the Gaza operations for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians.
“We are facing once again the prospect of famine,” Mr. Whyte warned on Tuesday.
Separately, the main U.N. agency for humanitarian affairs said that Israel’s intensified military operations, aid blockade, evacuation orders and disruption of health care “are driving what is likely the worst humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.” It cited vast food and water insecurity and attacks on hospitals that have disrupted “an already decimated health system.”
Mr. Katz said that while the Israeli military would continue to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, he also called for “creating an infrastructure for distribution through civil society later on.”
That prompted an immediate backlash from rival officials in Israel’s government who accused him of giving into Hamas, which has some control of how food is distributed in the territory.
“Cutting off aid is one of the main levers of pressure on Hamas, and returning it before Hamas gets on its knees and releases all of our hostages would be a historic mistake,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, said on social media.
Mr. Katz said his comments were being distorted by “those who try to mislead.”
“Israel’s policy is clear and no humanitarian aid is about to enter Gaza," he said in a follow-up statement.
Gabby Sobelman, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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9) What Is Tax-Exempt Status and Can the I.R.S. Revoke It From Harvard?
The university, like many colleges and charities, is exempt from federal income and property taxes, saving it billions of dollars. President Trump has questioned whether it should enjoy that status.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and John Yoon, April 17, 2025
President Trump has called for the I.R.S. to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Harvard, like many American colleges and charities, enjoys a federal tax exemption, a status granted by the Internal Revenue Service that allows the wealthy Ivy League university to forgo paying perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxes.
The I.R.S. is now weighing whether to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, according to three people familiar with the matter, as the Trump administration demands that the university make changes to its hiring, admissions and curriculum policies.
President Trump has called publicly for Harvard to pay taxes, and his administration cut $2.2 billion in federal funding to the university after it refused to submit to the administration’s pressure campaign.
Here’s what to know about tax-exempt status:
What is tax-exempt status?
Tax-exempt status allows an organization not to pay federal income and property taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which means that donations to the institution are tax-deductible.
Eligible organizations include those whose purpose is “charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition and preventing cruelty to children or animals,” according to the I.R.S.
The I.R.S. places a number of restrictions on any organization claiming tax-exempt status. Under the Internal Revenue Code, none of the organization’s earnings can go to a private shareholder or individual; the organization is limited in its ability to influence legislation and it cannot participate in a campaign or support political candidates.
Why do Harvard and other universities claim it?
Simply put, tax-exempt status saves money and can boost credibility. It can also help attract wealthy individuals seeking to donate large sums.
Institutions must apply to the I.R.S. for tax exemption, and a vast majority of universities do so, according to the Association of American Universities. This is because of their educational purpose, which “the federal government has long recognized as fundamental to fostering the productive and civic capacities of citizens,” the association says.
Can the I.R.S. revoke tax-exempt status?
The I.R.S. determines which organizations meet the criteria for tax-exempt status. The agency has at times revoked tax-exempt status, including after audits that found political or commercial activities that violated the terms of eligibility.
In the past, the I.R.S. has challenged the tax exemptions of educational and other institutions under both Republican and Democratic administrations, according to Gowri Krishna, a professor at Fordham University School of Law who specializes in nonprofit law.
In one well-known example, Bob Jones University in South Carolina, a fundamentalist Christian institution that had banned interracial dating, lost its tax-exempt status over its discriminatory policies in a case that the Supreme Court ruled on in 1983. The university had claimed that the I.R.S. had violated its religious liberty. The university lifted the ban in 2000, and said in 2017 that it had regained its tax-exempt status.
But it is rare for the I.R.S. to revoke the tax-exempt status of an educational institution. Tax laws also provide organizations the right to appeal an adverse decision by the agency.
The agency says that it receives complaints claiming abuse of tax-exempt status every year from the public, members of Congress, state and federal government agencies and internal sources. But federal law bars the president or other senior officials of the executive branch from directly or indirectly requesting that the I.R.S. investigate or audit specific organizations.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that the I.R.S. began scrutinizing Harvard before the president’s public call for Harvard to pay taxes.
In a statement, Harvard said that there was no legal basis for rescinding its tax status. Any attempt to take away Harvard’s tax exemption would be likely to face a legal challenge, which tax and legal experts expect would be successful.
“Harvard would argue there’s a violation of its free speech and academic freedom,” Ms. Krishna said. “I think it would be highly, highly unlikely that the government would win.”
What would happen if Harvard lost its tax-exempt status?
Harvard has said that losing its tax exemption would result in the reduction of financial aid for students, the abandonment of important medical research and the loss of other opportunities for innovation.
Bloomberg News estimated in an analysis that Harvard’s tax benefits totaled at least $465 million in 2023. The university also indirectly benefits from the tax deduction that its donors receive from making contributions. In the 2024 fiscal year, Harvard reported that it had collected more than $525 million in donations that could be used immediately.
Rescinding Harvard’s tax exemption would also have “grave consequences” for higher education in general, the university said.
And an attempt to change Harvard’s tax-exempt status amid its dispute with the Trump administration would amount to a severe breach of the independence of the I.R.S., which was established to be insulated from political pressure.
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10) Trump’s Threats Force Institutions to Choose: Cut a Deal or Fight Back
In a hint of a shift in strategy, some of the country’s most powerful institutions have started choosing to resist.
By Luke Broadwater, Reporting from Washington, April 16, 2025
President Trump has succeeded in wrenching enormous concessions through threats, lawsuits and coercion. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
As President Trump flexes his power over universities, law firms, media companies and more, some of the country’s most powerful institutions have faced a choice, to cut a deal with the White House or fight back.
In recent weeks, an increasing number are choosing to do battle with the president.
Harvard University refused this week to cave to what its president called “assertions of power, unmoored from the law.” More than 500 law firms have thrown their support behind some of their embattled peers as Mr. Trump seeks retribution against lawyers who represented or helped his political foes. The country’s oldest news wire fought Mr. Trump in court after it was banned from the Oval Office.
The new face of resistance is not like the one of Mr. Trump’s first term, when officials who opposed his agenda from inside the government tried to establish guardrails to prevent some of the president’s more radical ideas.
Now the fight is out in the open. The guardrails are gone, in large part because Mr. Trump demands loyalty from everyone around him. With almost no opposing voices inside the White House, the president’s campaign against the institutions of government, society and law have been more intense and have played out faster than they did during his first term.
And while Mr. Trump has succeeded in wrenching enormous concessions through threats, lawsuits and coercion — and he has shown no signs of stopping — there are hints of a shift in strategy among some of his targets.
Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said a buzz began building among the faculty as Mr. Trump turned his focus to the university in recent weeks.
“It was probably the main topic of conversation,” Mr. Tribe said. “When will the university finally stand up? When will the endowment, which is supposed to be there partly for extreme emergencies, be part of what Harvard looks to in order to basically reinforce its spine?”
The initial response by some organizations to Mr. Trump’s political assault was to try to appease the president. Several elite law firms decided to settle with the White House in order to maintain their ability to do work with the government. Columbia University relented in the face of the president’s threat to cancel $400 million in federal support.
The “flood the zone” strategy inside the White House has left many Democrats and others opposed to Mr. Trump’s policies resigned to the fact that they control few centers of power with which to fight back.
Harvard’s decision to reject the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum could embolden other universities across the country to push back. The erstwhile leader of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, called on other institutions to “follow suit” after Harvard.
There were already some rumblings of resistance in recent weeks, with the mass “Hands Off” protests in cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, have also drawn significant crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
“Those rallies have built momentum by just showing that there are lots of people who don’t like what he is doing,” said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor who has urged the university’s administration to resist the demands. “Even though Trump is kind of picking people and individuals and institutions off one by one, for everyone to just see, ‘Oh, we all think what’s happening is wrong,’ is important.”
Leah Greenberg, a founder of the progressive group Indivisible, which helped organize the Hands Off rallies, said momentum had been building for months as outrage grew, from activists in the streets to the halls of elite institutions.
Harvard’s stance is “crucial and important,” Ms. Greenberg said. “I say that as someone who doesn’t spend a ton of time praising Harvard,” she added. “There was a sense that American society is folding to Trump’s will. Saying, ‘Oh, hell no, we aren’t,’ it’s helpful for a lot of people.”
At Harvard, hundreds, including Mr. Bowie, rallied to call on the school to stand up to the Trump administration’s demands, while hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to condemn Mr. Trump’s attempt to remake higher education.
At Yale, nearly 1,000 faculty members signed a letter calling on their leaders to resist Mr. Trump’s demands. And the president of M.I.T. spoke out against the Trump administration’s treatment of its international students.
The Trump administration has argued that its goal in going after elite universities is to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses. But its demands are much broader, including audits of staff members to prevent Harvard from considering racial diversity in hiring decisions and audits of the student body’s ideological views.
The administration also demanded that the university reduce the “power” on campus held by certain students, faculty members and administrators.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that Harvard “has not taken the president or the administration’s demands seriously.”
“Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already?” she asked. “And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.”
Refusing the demands came with a cost. Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.
And then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations.
Much of federal funding for universities is for student aid and research. Harvard revamped its website to emphasize the importance of its research, highlighting its work aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease and combating chronic absenteeism in schools.
Mr. Tribe said he had heard colleagues worry about how the funding cuts could affect their research, but not as much as they were concerned about the larger principle at stake.
“I know people at the medical school and elsewhere who are cheering what Harvard did,” Mr. Tribe said, “although they are at the same time grieving for the likelihood that their clinics will end up being closed and that the lifesaving research they’re doing will either be discontinued or put on indefinite hold.”
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11) White House Eyes Overhaul of Federal Housing Aid to the Poor
The Trump administration has considered sharply curtailing vouchers as part of its budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, April 17, 2025
"Years after leaving government, though, Mr. Vought specifically proposed a full end to the Section 8 voucher program. At his conservative nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 called vouchers supplied to low-income tenants a “hook for implementing the left’s fair housing agenda,” faulting the government for focusing on racial equity."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/housing-aid-hud-federal-budget.html
The expected cuts to rental assistance reflect President Trump’s broader desire to shrink the footprint of government and its reach into Americans’ lives. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The White House is considering deep cuts to federal housing programs, including a sweeping overhaul of aid to low-income families, in a reconfiguration that could jeopardize millions of Americans’ continued access to rental assistance funds.
The potential changes primarily concern federal housing vouchers, including those more commonly known as Section 8. The aid generally helps the poorest tenants cover the monthly costs of apartments, town homes and single-family residences.
Administration officials recently discussed cutting or canceling out the vouchers and other rental assistance programs and potentially replacing them with a more limited system of housing grants, perhaps sent to states, according to three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential discussions. The overhaul would be included in President Trump’s new budget, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.
The exact design and cost of the retooled program is unclear, and any such change is likely to require approval from Congress, as White House budgets on their own do not carry the force of law.
But people familiar with the administration’s thinking said the expected overhaul would most likely amount to more than just a technical change, resulting in fewer federal dollars for low-income families on top of additional cuts planned for the rest of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On Thursday, the Trump administration took the first steps toward potentially selling the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
Federal voucher programs currently provide assistance to about 2.3 million low-income families, according to the government’s estimates, who enroll through their local public-housing authorities. The aid is part of a broader universe of rental assistance programs that are set to exceed $54 billion this fiscal year. But the annual demand for these subsidies is far greater than the available funds, creating a sizable wait list as rents are rising nationally.
“If there were a cut to the voucher program, essentially, you would see a decrease to the number of families that are served by the program,” said Eric Oberdorfer, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, an advocacy group.
At the moment, he added, only one in four families eligible for vouchers are able to obtain them because of funding constraints. A federal cut would put public-housing agencies in a position in which “they would need to make difficult decisions” and in some cases stop providing benefits, Mr. Oberdorfer said.
Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office, said in a statement that “no final funding decisions have been made.”
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, previously endorsed an end to the federal voucher program. He wrote in 2022 that the Section 8 program in particular “brings with it crime, decreased property values, and results in dependency and subsidized irresponsibility.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on the budget. Appearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, Scott Turner, the housing secretary, told senators that he believed the goal of the voucher program was to “get people into self sustainability,” not “a lifetime on subsidies.”
The expected cuts to rental assistance reflect Mr. Trump’s broader desire to shrink the footprint of government and its reach into Americans’ lives, a project that includes sharp reductions to federal antipoverty programs viewed as too generous or wasteful.
The aggressive campaign has already resulted in the president and his top aides — including the tech billionaire Elon Musk — shuttering entire agencies, freezing billions of dollars and dismissing thousands of civil employees, moves that have enraged Democrats and led to a series of court challenges.
The full scope of Mr. Trump’s vision stands to become clearer once he submits his budget to Congress this spring, reflecting his priorities for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The proposal is expected to guide Republican lawmakers as they look for ways to pay for the party’s costly ambitions to reduce taxes on people and corporations.
Many agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, could lose funds ranging into the billions of dollars, according to those familiar with the White House blueprint, who cautioned that it remained unfinished.
The cuts to housing programs come in addition to an exodus of the agency’s work force. As of last week, about 2,300 employees opted to accept an offer for “deferred resignation” and leave their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Agency workers had until Friday to decide whether to take the offer, the second they have received, rather than risk being fired by the Trump administration. The department later confirmed the details of the departures, cautioning that they had not been finalized.
The White House also plans to dismantle a key office in the housing agency that helps communities recover from deadly natural disasters, a move that could slow much-needed emergency aid. Separately, Mr. Trump issued an executive order last month eliminating a decades-old, governmentwide commission meant to coordinate the federal response to homelessness.
A potential overhaul of the housing agency comes on the heels of a congressional deal to fund the government through September that increased some housing spending yet did not keep pace with rising rents and the growing demand for federal aid. The funding gap could result in about 32,000 voucher recipients soon losing access to federal housing aid, according to Democrats’ estimates, on top of additional cuts once funding runs out in a pandemic-era program that expanded voucher availability.
Many of the foundational changes the White House contemplates for the housing department are consistent with cuts that the president and Mr. Vought, his returning budget chief, previously endorsed. In the final budget of Mr. Trump’s first term, the two men proposed a roughly $8.6 billion reduction at the housing agency, though they did not propose to eliminate vouchers entirely.
Years after leaving government, though, Mr. Vought specifically proposed a full end to the Section 8 voucher program. At his conservative nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 called vouchers supplied to low-income tenants a “hook for implementing the left’s fair housing agenda,” faulting the government for focusing on racial equity.
Mr. Vought previously served as a key author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the Trump presidency, which similarly endorsed a sweeping overhaul to federal housing spending. Ben Carson, who led the Department of Housing and Urban Development during Mr. Trump’s first term, wrote in a chapter about the agency that it needed to explore significant reforms to the voucher program, such as work requirements on recipients and limits to how long they could collect housing aid.
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12) He Wanted Peace in the Middle East. ICE Wants to Deport Him.
Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested at a citizenship interview in Vermont. He had spent a decade trying to understand the conflict that shaped his life, his supporters say.
By Ana Ley, Sharon Otterman and Anvee Bhutani, Published April 16, 2025, Updated April 17, 2025
“'Palestine will be free for everybody,' he said, through a megaphone to applause, 'For Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. No more apartheid, no more genocide.'”
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, addressed pro-Palestinian demonstrators in November 2023. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
As Columbia University’s student protest movement careened toward the center of the nation’s political discourse last year, one of its most ardent leaders suddenly fell quiet.
Mohsen Mahdawi had been a key organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but he said he walked away from that role in March 2024 — well before the rallies reached a fever pitch as students set up encampments and broke into a campus building.
A fissure had been growing. By the fall of 2024 it had widened: Parts of the movement were becoming more radical, and some students were distributing fliers during a campus demonstration glorifying violent resistance. Mr. Mahdawi, meanwhile, was approaching Israeli students, hoping to find middle ground in the divisive Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, for decades, had unleashed horrors on both sides and in his own life.
He told friends that he was being sidelined in part because he wanted to engage in dialogue with supporters of Israel, a stance many pro-Palestinian activists reject.
His calls for compassion did not protect him from President Trump’s widening dragnet against pro-Palestinian student organizers on campus.
At an appointment to obtain U.S. citizenship on Monday in Vermont, Mr. Mahdawi, who is expected to graduate next month from Columbia, was taken into custody by immigration police.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, asserted in a memo justifying Mr. Mahdawi’s arrest that his activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.”
Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, Mr. Mahdawi, 34, witnessed violence that included seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier. But rather than calling for vengeance, since immigrating to the United States in 2014, he has delivered more than 100 lectures at churches, synagogues and colleges extolling empathy as the key to a resolution in the Middle East. He is a practicing Buddhist, he said.
“The human being is not an enemy,” a slide from one of his presentations reads. “The enemy is fear, segregation and ignorance.”
This portrait of Mr. Mahdawi and his journey from the West Bank to New England — and then to the center stage of demonstrations after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war on Gaza — is based on interviews with more than a dozen friends, professors and mentors. It also draws from lectures he has given that are posted online and earlier interviews with The New York Times.
Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy regulations. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department, whose officials declined to comment.
David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, met Mr. Mahdawi at a retreat last summer that brought together activists and scholars trying to achieve a new approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They stayed in touch.
“This is a person who stands for precisely the values we want to raise up at this moment of such starkness and such blindness and such division and polarization,” said Mr. Myers, who formerly led the New Israel Fund, a philanthropic organization for progressive Jewish people. “This person constitutes a bridge, and we’ve torn that bridge down instead of embracing it.”
An evolution begins
Mr. Mahdawi’s great-grandparents lived near the Mediterranean Sea on land that is now in Israel. Along with thousands of other Palestinians, they fled the area in advance of Jewish forces, ending up in the Al-Far’a refugee camp in the West Bank, he explained in a March 2024 lecture he delivered to a class in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Three generations later, Mr. Mahdawi was born there in September 1990.
He often felt “at the mercy of 18-year-old Israeli soldiers about whether you can leave or not,” Mr. Mahdawi told the Valley News in Vermont, in one of several local newspaper features that have been written about his life.
After he turned 7, his life became a mounting series of traumas. His mother left that year, and his father remarried. A year later, his younger brother died after suffering from paralysis related to an untreated fever as a toddler.
After the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, Mr. Mahdawi and his best friend, Hemida, decided they would try to throw rocks at Israeli tanks in their camp, as other Palestinian boys were doing. An Israeli soldier shot at them, fatally striking Hemida, about 12, in the chest, he said.
One day, as he sought solace from the chaos of war, Mr. Mahdawi sat with his favorite uncle under an olive tree that shaded the graves of his younger brother and best friend.
While many young men were turning to militancy, his only escape would be through an education, his uncle told him.
“Hope is your only way moving forward,” he recalled his uncle saying in the 2024 Santa Barbara lecture.
Mr. Mahdawi followed the advice. He had always done well in school, but after his uncle was also killed in the Intifada, he deepened his resolve to excel academically.
At 18, he enrolled at Birzeit University in the West Bank, two hours from the camp, to study computer science and engineering. He became active in campus politics and was elected to the student council.
One day outside class, Mr. Mahdawi met the woman who would become his wife — an American student named Meagan Dechen. (Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.) They fell in love while he gave her lessons in Arabic. When she returned home, he took dramatic steps to get a visa to join her, including sneaking over the barrier wall built to separate the West Bank from Israel to get to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, he said.
Peace through understanding
Mr. Mahdawi made it to America in 2014, and the two settled in Vermont’s Upper Valley, near Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where his wife was a medical student. They married, but two years later, they divorced. He got his green card in 2015 and took a variety of jobs, including as a bank teller. Then, in 2018, he enrolled at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania to study computer science, while organizing events on subjects like storytelling to inspire peace, the local paper reported.
He transferred three years later to Columbia, where he began to study philosophy on a full scholarship, family friends said, with the goal of going on to a graduate degree in law or diplomacy.
In the fall of 2023, wanting to give voice to Palestinians on campus in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he became a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement on Columbia’s campus. He founded a Palestinian student union with Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow demonstrator who has also been detained by immigration officials and accused of undermining the U.S. foreign policy goal of halting antisemitism.
The demonstrations he helped lead brought together a wide spectrum of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Some Jewish students complained that they felt threatened by the slogans that were chanted, including “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” which they saw as a call to genocide. Mr. Mahdawi tried to explain what the slogan meant to him.
“Palestine will be free for everybody,” he said, through a megaphone to applause, “For Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. No more apartheid, no more genocide.”
When a demonstrator cursed Jewish people, amid a heated atmosphere of protesters and counterprotesters accusing each other of supporting genocide, Mr. Mahdawi reacted strongly.
“I said to him, shame on you,” he recounted in December 2023 in an interview with The New York Times. “And about 400 students who were present, they repeated after me. ‘Shame on him, shame on him three times.’ So it was a clear statement that we do not tolerate antisemitism.”
Aharon Dardik, 24, an Israeli American junior at Columbia double-majoring in philosophy and computer science, said that he and Mr. Mahdawi collaborated on a proposal more than 65 pages long that they felt would promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“Mohsen spoke of a future where Jews and Palestinians alike were able to live freely and equally,” said Mr. Dardik, who considers Mr. Mahdawi a good friend, and who earlier this month was part of a group of Jewish students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest Mr. Khalil’s detention.
Caught in the middle
Like Mr. Khalil, Mr. Mahdawi was always unmasked at protests, and his openness made him a target. Vans circled the campus with Mr. Mahdawi’s face plastered on LED screens, labeling him an antisemite.
The Canary Mission, a hard-line pro-Israel group, compiled an exhaustive online dossier cataloging his activism, with screenshots of his social media pages and selective quotes from his speeches on campus and media interviews. They cite one in which he says, “We were accused by the administration that we are calling for genocide, while the administration itself is ignoring the current genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Shame on you, Columbia!” In another example taken from a newspaper interview, they quote him saying, “Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation.”
The group claims that he wrote a poem in 2013 praising a Palestinian terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, who committed a 1978 attack in Israel. They also cite a mournful social media post in 2024 he wrote about one of his cousins, whom they called a Hamas fighter killed by Israel. Mostly, though, they condemned him for supporting divestment from Israel and what they called the “pro-Hamas” protest movement more generally.
Mr. Mahdawi empathized with Hamas as well as Israelis. This left him criticized by both sides. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview. “This is for me the path moving forward.”
Professor Myers praised Mr. Mahdawi as a “person of dignity, integrity and courage” and criticized the effort of right-wing Jewish groups to attack him and get him deported.
“If you want to find a way to not only dislike someone, but brand them an antisemite, I’m sure there’s always some way you can do so, but what you’re doing is engaging in an act of moral blindness,” Professor Myers said.
Over the past year, Mr. Mahdawi stepped back from leadership of the pro-Palestinian movement he helped found on campus, which had become increasingly hard-line in its rhetoric.
David Bisno, a friend in Vermont who talked to Mr. Mahdawi every few days, confirmed that he quit showing up. “He said, ‘I can’t have anything more to do with this,’” Mr. Bisno said.
But he supported the encampment that formed last April, praising it as a peaceful effort in media interviews. He continued calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
As protests and counterprotests caused chaos on campus, he worked with Professor Jean E. Krasno, Mr. Dardik and other students on a project they called “the Peace Initiative for Israel/Palestine.” Their goal was to work out how this idealistic vision they had for the region might actually function in practice.
“When he’s on campus, he meets with Jewish students, Israeli students and other international students to build a kind of consensus, to share ideas,” Dr. Krasno, a lecturer in the political science department, said. “He is working on a peace process. That is what is so ironic about it. It is just the complete opposite of what the government is painting him as.”
Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who has been involved in the protest movement, said that she was frustrated by the Trump administration’s targeting of Mr. Mahdawi. “There is no perfect Palestinian to people who do not see us as human in the first place,” she said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Mahdawi had been in hiding, worried about being picked up by immigration police after Mr. Khalil’s detention. He reached out to Columbia for help, asking to be moved to on-campus housing, which he thought would be safer. It didn’t happen. An extreme pro-Israel group, Betar, warned on social media that he was next.
But he was determined to go to his citizenship appointment in Vermont, even though he feared it was a trap. He alerted Vermont’s senators and representative in case things went wrong, and before the appointment, gathered in a nearby hotel breakfast room with a few friends, his lawyer, and a state lawmaker, Becca White.
They quizzed him on the Constitution, prepping him for the test they were hoping would be real. They also hugged him, just in case.
Don Foster, a retired foreign service officer who has been friends with Mr. Mahdawi for a decade, said the mood was subdued.
“One thing that gave me hope in that meeting Monday morning with him was I heard him tell Becca not to worry,” he said. “Because since he had been studying meditation, he was going to use his time in prison to meditate and make heaven for himself there.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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13) Israel Strikes Area With Tent Camps for Displaced Gazans
The attack on the Mawasi area of southern Gaza killed at least a dozen people, according to the emergency rescue service in the territory. Israel did not confirm the location of the attack.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 17, 2025
Inspecting damage at the site of an Israeli strike in an area of tent camps for displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza on Thursday. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Israel bombarded an area in southern Gaza with large tent encampments for Palestinians displaced by the war and killed at least a dozen people, including children, the Civil Defense emergency rescue service in the territory said on Thursday.
The strike was part of the latest round of attacks on Gaza that killed more than 20 people overnight between Wednesday and Thursday, according to Palestinian officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants in death tolls.
One of the strikes hit the coastal area of Mawasi near the city of Khan Younis, an area largely designated by the Israeli military as a “humanitarian zone” where tens of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering in tents.
In video distributed by wire agencies, the strike appeared to ignite a fire that burned some tents and rescue workers attempted to douse the flames in the wake of the strike on Mawasi before driving off with the dead and wounded.
Atef al-Hout, the director of the Nasser hospital, said in a telephone interview that the bodies of at least 14 people had arrived at the medical facility overnight on Thursday, including seven children. Most were believed to have been killed in the strike on Mawasi, he said.
Four other people with serious shrapnel injuries arrived at a separate medical facility, the Kuwaiti field hospital near Khan Younis, shortly after midnight on Thursday following the bombardment, said Suhaib al-Hamss, the facility’s director.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel ignited the war in October 2023, Israel has repeatedly ordered Gazans to head for Mawasi, creating sprawling tent encampments. While many Gazans hoped they would be safe in the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone, Israel has occasionally struck there, citing activity by militants.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Mawasi attack and did not confirm the location of the strike.
Mustafa Abutaha, an English teacher sheltering in Mawasi, said he hoped Hamas reached a deal with Israel as soon as possible to end the war. Otherwise, he said, he feared Israel would fully take over Gaza.
“Every day there’s bombardment, nonstop,” said Mr. Abutaha, reached by phone. “We live in terrible conditions, and the saddest thing is that people have almost gotten used to it.”
Israel has vowed to intensify its attacks in Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to lay down its weapons and to release the hostages seized by the armed group in the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people, saw about 250 taken hostage and touched off the war.
In January, Israel and Hamas signed a cease-fire that mediators hoped would lead to an end to the war. Thirty hostages and about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners were freed before Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed military assault in Gaza, citing a deadlock in talks to secure the next steps of the deal.
The Israeli offensive came as Palestinians face what the United Nations has said could be the worst humanitarian crisis since the war began. More than 400,000 people have been displaced by the renewed fighting, many after returning to their homes for the first time in months.
Since early March, Israel has blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave, barring shipments of medicine and food. Israeli officials have argued they allowed in sufficient supplies during the cease-fire but that Hamas has diverted some of the aid for its own purposes.
Many Israelis remain deeply anxious over the fate of the dozens of hostages still held by Hamas and allied groups. About 59 of the captives seized in the Oct. 7 attack are still in the enclave, more than half of them now presumed dead.
Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas in addition to freeing the hostages. But many Israelis say their government cannot do both at once and should agree to terms to free the captives — even if it means ending the war with Hamas’s rule intact.
International mediators — including from the Trump administration — have sought to broker a new deal between Israel and Hamas to restore the cease-fire and free the remaining hostages. But neither side has yet to compromise on their seemingly irreconcilable demands.
Hamas has blamed Israel for the ongoing war, arguing that the group is ready to free all the hostages as part of a deal to end it. But ordinary Gazans are increasingly denouncing the armed group for refusing to compromise to end the fighting.
Thousands of Palestinians have joined protests against Hamas’s control over the past few weeks, calling for the group to leave power and for an end to the war. Public expressions of dissent under Hamas’s repressive rule have been rare because of the high price of speaking out in Gaza, where rights groups say opponents have been regularly jailed and tortured.
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14) A Maryland senator met with the wrongly deported man in El Salvador.
By Robert Jimison, who covers Congress, traveled with Senator Chris Van Hollen to El Salvador, April 17, 2025
Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday night that he had met in San Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador last month has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate and fueled a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts.
Mr. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared a photo of the two men speaking on Thursday evening, hours after the senator had been denied entry to the prison where Mr. Abrego Garcia was being held.
The unexpected meeting took place at a hotel in San Salvador, according to photos shared by the senator’s office late Thursday. In the images, Mr. Abrego Garcia was dressed in plainclothes and sat for a conversation with Mr. Van Hollen. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said on social media that Mr. Abrego Garcia would remain in his country’s custody.
The photos shared by Mr. Van Hollen and others posted by Mr. Bukele were the first public glimpses of Mr. Abrego Garcia since his deportation in March, which the Trump administration admitted in court was an error. The Supreme Court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return, but a federal judge overseeing the case has scolded the government for doing “nothing” to comply.
“Our purpose today was very straightforward,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview on Thursday, before the meeting with Mr. Abrego Garcia. “It was simply to be able to go see if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is doing OK. I mean, nobody has heard anything about his condition since he was illegally abducted from the United States. He is totally beyond reach.”
Mr. Van Hollen had initially been stopped by the Salvadoran military officials when he tried to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia, and described the encounter as a blockade intended to thwart his visit to the prison. Human rights advocates have documented overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons and reports of torture.
“This was a very sort of simple humanitarian request,” Mr. Van Hollen said soon after the stop.
The photos of Mr. Van Hollen’s meeting with Mr. Abrego Garcia conveyed a very different atmosphere from scenes of the crowded prison, with the two sitting together at a table in a dining area near lush greenery and greeting each other on the polished floor of the hotel lobby.
Mr. Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation, a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.
In his post, Mr. Van Hollen said he had called Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, who has publicly pleaded for his return, after the meeting “to pass along his message of love.”
Mr. Van Hollen’s visit underscored a broader Democratic effort to spotlight the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, placing his detention at the center of their efforts to challenge the Trump administration’s approach. News of Mr. Van Hollen’s meeting Thursday evening had not deterred other Democratic lawmakers who had said they, too, intended to travel to the country to advocate for his release.
“This is an example of the much bigger challenge, no doubt about it,” Mr. Van Hollen said of the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland under an immigration judge’s order that granted him protections from deportation. “Because my view is when you start picking on the most vulnerable people, and you push and push and push, and you get away with it, then you take the next bite.”
In exchange for El Salvador’s detention of the deported immigrants, Mr. Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the U.S. government.
In a social media post on Thursday after Mr. Van Hollen’s visit with Mr. Abrego Garcia, Mr. Bukele said that “now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
A spokeswoman for the presidency of El Salvador, Wendy Ramos, did not respond to requests for comment.
At the White House on Thursday afternoon, when asked by a reporter whether he would move to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States, Mr. Trump said, “Well, I’m not involved.”
“You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the D.O.J.,” he said, referring to the Justice Department.
Beyond seeking assurances of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s safety, Mr. Van Hollen’s trip has brought additional attention to the case. Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation and imprisonment have become the most prominent example for both advocates and critics of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration.
For many Democrats, Mr. Van Hollen’s stand represented a defense of human rights and legal access. For conservatives, it was a misguided gesture of sympathy for a man who, as the White House has repeatedly noted, had entered the U.S. illegally.
“It’s appalling and sad that Senator Van Hollen and the Democrats applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
She was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Ms. Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, though statistics show immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.
Mr. Van Hollen acknowledged Ms. Morin’s tragic death and reaffirmed his commitment to combating gang violence, which he said was a rare point of agreement with Salvadoran officials during his meetings this week. But he rejected the equivalence implied by Trump officials.
“My argument here all along in this is that he just requires due process,” Mr. Van Hollen said of Mr. Abrego Garcia. “My argument is not that I claim to know all the facts here. My whole argument is we have a court where the whole purpose of having a hearing was for people to present their evidence.”
Annie Correal contributed reporting.
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15) Trump Opens a Huge Marine Protected Zone to Commercial Fishing
The president said the move was aimed at making the United States the world’s “dominant seafood leader.”
By Rebecca Dzombak and Lisa Friedman, April 17, 2025
Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, about halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, part of a national monument. Credit...Ian Shive/United States Fish and Wildlife Service
President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales.
Mr. Trump issued an executive order opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which lies some 750 miles west of Hawaii. President George W. Bush established the monument in 2009 and President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014 to its current area of nearly 500,000 square miles.
A second executive order directed the Commerce Department to loosen regulations that “overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries.” It also asks the Interior Department to conduct a review of all marine monuments and issue recommendations about any that should be opened to commercial fishing.
“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The marine monument, a chain of islands and atolls amid more than 160 seamounts, is a trove of marine biodiversity. Environmentalists said opening the area to commercial fishing would pose a serious threat to the area’s fragile ecosystems.
Mr. Trump, accompanied in the Oval Office by a fisherman from American Samoa and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, the territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives, said his predecessors had deprived Pacific island communities of “fertile grounds.”
“It’s so horrible and so stupid,” Mr. Trump said. “You’re talking about a massive ocean and they’re forced to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good.” He was referring to the time it takes fishermen to travel from their home islands to fishing grounds outside the protected area.
“Thank you, President Trump,” Ms. Radewagen, a Republican, said in a statement on Thursday. “This sensible proclamation is important to the stability and future of American Samoa’s economy, but it also is fantastic news for U.S. food security.”
Ms. Radewagen in January sent a letter to Mr. Trump calling for fishing to be reopened around the monument. The economy of American Samoa depends heavily on fishing, particularly tuna.
Other Republicans said the orders allowed for responsible commercial fishing that would be an economic boon for Americans in Hawaii and the Pacific territories.
“Our fellow Americans in the Indo-Pacific region rely on commercial fishing for their economic stability and their future,” said Representative Bruce Westerman, the Arkansas Republican who leads of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
He said greater access to fishing grounds would be a “monumental new economic opportunity.”
The executive order on the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument said that existing measures, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, would sufficiently protect the area’s resources, species and habitats.
Environmental activists said the Trump administration’s claims that those laws were sufficient to protect marine life were false. They questioned the legality of Mr. Trump’s proclamation opening the monument and said they intended to sue to stop it.
“This is a gift to industrial fishing fleets and a slap in the face to science and the generations of Pacific Islanders who have long called for greater protection of these sacred waters,” said Maxx Phillips, director for Hawaii and Pacific Islands at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit organization.
Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a research organization, said opening marine monuments to industrial fishing “sets a dangerous precedent that our public lands and waters are for sale to the highest bidder.”
Mr. Villagomez noted that the United States controlled nearly five million square miles of ocean and said, “there is room for us to have the world’s best managed fisheries and networks of marine protection, safeguarding the most threatened, iconic and special places in our ocean.”
Robert H. Richmond, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, pushed back on the idea that opening the monument would help the fishing industry and said there was strong data showing that large protected areas actually enhanced fishing. That’s because they provide a safe area free from vessels where fish can accumulate, grow and be in higher density where spawning is more successful.
“What they are really are bank accounts where fish are the principal,” Dr. Richmond said, “and their reproductive output is the interest.”
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16 U.S. Strikes on Yemeni Port Kill Dozens, Houthis Say
President Trump has vowed that the Iran-backed Houthi militia will be “completely annihilated.” But forceful American strikes do not seem to have deterred the Yemeni fighters.
By Aaron Boxerman and Vivian Nereim, April 18, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Vivian Nereim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The latest round of U.S. airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has killed dozens of people in bombardments targeting a port in the country’s northwest, the Houthis said on Friday.
The strikes late on Thursday were part of an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against the Yemeni militia. The Houthis have been attacking ships in the nearby Red Sea, and firing rockets and drones at Israel in a campaign that it says is in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
The American bombardment targeted the port of Ras Isa, a major fuel depot in the Houthi-controlled province of Hudaydah. At least 74 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded, said Anees al-Asbahi, spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry. The toll could not be independently verified.
President Trump has expanded efforts by the Biden administration to degrade the Houthis, vowing that they will be “completely annihilated.” Since entering office, Mr. Trump has also tightened U.S. sanctions against the group and re-designated the militia as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
But the increasingly forceful American strikes on the Houthis have yet to deter them from carrying out further attacks. Instead, the Houthis have said that they would welcome a conflict with the United States, their declared enemy.
Experts have also warned that attacking ports like Ras Isa could worsen the already dire conditions in Yemen. The United Nations has described the humanitarian crisis in the country as the world’s largest, with about 80 percent of the population in need of essential aid.
The Houthis began their attacks on Israel and on ships in the Red Sea after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel. Most of the Houthi projectiles have been intercepted by Israeli air defenses, though a drone attack in July killed a man in Tel Aviv.
The militia briefly stopped firing rockets at Israel during a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas this year. But after Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed offensive in Gaza, the Houthis resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israeli territory.
Just a few hours after the American strikes, early on Friday morning, Houthi militants fired another ballistic missile at Israel. Air-raid sirens blared across the country’s heartland, instructing many Israelis to head to bomb shelters. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
But the increasingly forceful American strikes on the Houthis have yet to deter them from carrying out further attacks. Instead, the Houthis have said that they would welcome a conflict with the United States, their declared enemy.
Experts have also warned that attacking ports like Ras Isa could worsen the already dire conditions in Yemen. The United Nations has described the humanitarian crisis in the country as the world’s largest, with about 80 percent of the population in need of essential aid.
The Houthis began their attacks on Israel and on ships in the Red Sea after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel. Most of the Houthi projectiles have been intercepted by Israeli air defenses, though a drone attack in July killed a man in Tel Aviv.
The militia briefly stopped firing rockets at Israel during a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas this year. But after Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed offensive in Gaza, the Houthis resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israeli territory.
Just a few hours after the American strikes, early on Friday morning, Houthi militants fired another ballistic missile at Israel. Air-raid sirens blared across the country’s heartland, instructing many Israelis to head to bomb shelters. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The American military said that it had targeted Ras Isa because shipments of fuel were still flowing into the port in defiance of American sanctions, allowing funds to flow into the Houthi coffers.
“U.S. forces took action to eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue,” the American military’s Central Command said. “This strike was not intended to harm the people of Yemen, who rightly want to throw off the yoke of Houthi subjugation and live peacefully.”
Hudaydah’s ports are also the main conduit by which fuel, food and aid enter impoverished northern Yemen, where more than 20 million people live.
In the past, the United Nations and humanitarian groups have condemned the targeting of the port as damaging vital civilian infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia and its allies similarly cited the need to degrade the Houthis when the militia tried to take over Hudaydah during their nearly decade-long war against the group.
Back then, the United States and other countries pressed the Saudis to stop, fearing a humanitarian disaster. A United Nations-mediated agreement halted the fighting around the city in 2018.
Israeli fighter jets have also bombed Yemen multiple times since the Houthis began attacking Israel in late 2023, at times flying over 1,000 miles to strike ports and power stations in Houthi-controlled territory.
The Houthis have vowed to continue attacking until Israel ends its military offensive in Gaza.
Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting from Al Mukalla, Yemen.
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17) Columbia Activists Are Being Detained. Protesters Demand Answers.
Demonstrators rallied on Columbia’s campus and marched in Manhattan, three days after Mohsen Mahdawi was detained by immigration officials after arriving for a U.S. citizenship appointment.
By Anvee Bhutani and Kaja Andric, April 17, 2025
Protesters at Columbia University on Thursday called for answers about the detention of two organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
ers took to the streets of New York City and to the campus of Columbia University on Thursday to protest the federal detention of organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and what they regard as an assault on higher education.
The protesters demanded answers about the fate of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinians who had been involved in campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza.
Mr. Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident, was detained on March 8 at his New York City apartment, was sent briefly to a New Jersey detention center and has since been held at a facility in Jena, La. Mr. Mahdawi, who is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies, was detained by immigration officials on Monday after arriving for an appointment in Vermont that he thought was a step toward becoming a U.S. citizen.
Thursday’s protest at Columbia, with about 300 demonstrators, rang with chants of “Free Mohsen, free them all — every fascist state will fall,” accompanied by the beat of drums. Organizers handed out medical masks to help students shield their identities, along with fliers promoting a planned student strike.
Demonstrators criticized Columbia’s leadership for failing to more aggressively challenge demands by the Trump administration over what the White House described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The federal government last month cut about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia.
Faculty members turned out in solidarity, condemning what they said was a growing authoritarian crackdown on universities by the Trump administration.
Joseph Howley, a professor in Columbia’s classics department and an outspoken critic of the detentions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, wore a red shirt that read, “Jews say ICE off our campus.”
Nearby, Kathryn Pope, a Columbia librarian, wore a “Hands Off Our Students” pin affixed to her jacket.
“I’m here for the students, especially our international students,” she said. “Columbia shouldn’t give in to the Trump administration. It should fight back.”
The university this week appeared to be adopting a tougher tone, with a note from the acting president pledging that the school would not allow the federal government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.”
Columbia’s philosophy department registered its “horror and dismay” over the detention of Mr. Mahdawi, a green card holder for the past 10 years, in a statement on its website. The department emphasized that Mr. Mahdawi had been “accused of no crime” and called on the university “to assist by all means, including through the provision of material and legal resources, any Columbia student targeted or detained — and seemingly only for having exercised their right to the free and peaceful expression of political opinion.”
After the midday rally at Columbia, some demonstrators headed south, where other protesters convened at Washington Square Park before marching to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.
At Washington Square, Amelia Moranska, an international student studying forensic psychology at John Jay College, said she showed up because “we heard that they were actually going to stand up for international students.”
Ms. Moranska, who comes from Malta, said the events of recent weeks had left her feeling unsafe.
“It’s suffocating being here right now, as an international student,” she said, turning around and staring at the Washington Arch.
Ms. Moranska said she had wanted to stay in the United States but had decided to pursue a master’s degree in Athens at Mediterranean College.
Irena Grudzinska Gross, who has taught history and literature at Princeton University, said she came to the United States after participating in student protests in Poland in 1968.
“I was persecuted, in that I was kicked out of university,” she said. “I didn’t see the future for myself.”
Even though hundreds of people were at the protest, she thought there should be more.
“When I hear the call, I’m marching,” Ms. Grudzinska Gross said.
Many of the marchers were professors who stopped walking at each red light, waiting until the light turned green to continue. They kept mostly to the sidewalks and chanted: “Higher education under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back.”
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