Author Who Trump Attacked and Banned Gets Final Word
‘Revenge is his number one motivation’: how Trump is waging war on the media
On Tuesday 4 March, Donald Trump stood in the House of Representatives to issue a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first of his second term.
Near the beginning of what was to be a marathon address, the president declared: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”
What Trump did not mention was that less than three weeks earlier he had barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, because the news agency refused to use his preferred nomenclature for the Gulf of Mexico. He did not mention that he was waging lawsuits against ABC and CBS, nor that the man he appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission had ordered a flurry of investigations into NBC News, NPR and PBS.
The president ignored entirely what has become an all out attack on the media and other institutions, something that media experts have described as a “broad, systematic assault” on free speech, a vendetta that threatens “the essential fundamental freedoms of a democracy”.
Since that speech the situation has only got worse. The anti-media rhetoric has ramped up from Trump officials, Trump has suggested some media groups should be “illegal”, funding has been cut from organisations like Voice of America and last week the White House lambasted journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic magazine for breaking a scoop about national security lapses on a Signal messaging app.
“Revenge is Trump’s number one motivation for anything in this second term of office, and he believes he has been treated unfairly by the media, and he is going to strike out against those in the media who he considers his enemies,” said Bill Press, a longtime liberal political commentator and host of The Bill Press Pod.
“He’s going in the direction of really curtailing the freedom of the press, following the pattern of every autocrat ever on the planet: they need to shut down a free and independent press in order to get away with their unlimited use of power.”
Trump was critical of the media in his first term. But as Press pointed out, that was more verbal attacks: the never-ending accusations of “fake news”, the encouragement of anti-CNN chants at rallies. Two months into Trump’s second term, he has already taken it further. Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news agencies which is relied upon by thousands of news outlets, remains banned from the Oval Office and Air Force one: the president angered by the agency’s refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico.
Trump is suing the owner of CBS News for $10bn, alleging the channel selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which the network denies, and the Des Moines Register newspaper, which he accuses of “election interference” over a poll from before the election that showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa.
The FCC investigations, led by the hardline Trump appointee and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, are ongoing, while in February Trump ejected a HuffPost reporter from the press pool – which refers to a rotating group of reporters allowed close access to the White House – and denied reporters from the news agency Reuters access to a cabinet meeting.
At various times Trump and rightwing groups have accused each of the outlets of bias or of presenting negative coverage of his presidency. By contrast, the White House has allowed rightwing news outlets, including Real America’s Voice and Blaze Media and Newsmax, to be included in the press pool.
“It’s designed to shut down criticism, and I think that the danger of that is that there is this effort to make it look like everyone approves of the government and of the Trump administration,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, a non-profit which seeks to preserve and advance first amendment freedom rights.
“It’s a threat to the ability of the of the press to critically cover the president, but perhaps more importantly, the function of the press is to inform the public about the workings of government, and allow the public to decide whether or not it wants to vote for these people again, or whether it approves. And so it’s more than just its effect on the media, its effect on the general public.”
In recent days the Trump administration’s attack-the-media playbook has been on show in the way senior officials have sought to discredit Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic who was invited into a secret Signal group where a coming US attack on Yemen’s Houthi militia was being discussed.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and Trump himself have criticized Goldberg: Waltz described him as “the bottom scum of journalists”, while Trump called the reporting “a witch-hunt” and described the Atlantic as a “failed magazine”.
Trump has also appeared to flirt with using law enforcement to target the media, including a speech to federal law enforcement officials in March. “As the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” Trump said.
He disparaged certain lawyers and non-profits, before later adding: “The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and MSDNC, and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, they’ll write whatever they say.”
Trump continued: “It’s totally illegal what they do,” adding: “I just hope you can all watch for it, but it’s totally illegal.”
The war on free speech has not just been limited to the media. Trump’s efforts have increasingly also focussed on areas including education, law and charitable organizations, as the government seeks to bring key aspects of society into line.
“You have to look at this as part of a broad, systematic assault that the president and his administration have been waging since he returned to office on every other power center that impacts politics in any way,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a watchdog group.
“All the sort of liberal, civil society institutions: big law firms, universities, the government itself, the courts and the press have come under fire, and as part of that, we have this really unprecedented multifront attack on media institutions.”
Trump has been aided in this endeavor by the owners of some media organizations. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and owner of the Washington Post, pulled an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris during the campaign and recently overhauled the newspaper’s opinion pages.
Amazon donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, and Bezos’ space company Blue Origin competes for federal government contracts. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, also blocked the newspaper from endorsing Harris, while Mark Zuckerberg dismantled Facebook’s factchecking network after Trump won the presidency. (Like Bezos, Zuckerberg donated to, and attended, Trump’s inauguration.)
“What makes the situation so worrying is that for the last several years, Donald Trump himself and the leading lights of the rightwing media and political movement: from Tucker Carlson to Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, have cited as their exemplar Viktor Orbán of Hungary. That’s what they want to accomplish,” Gertz said.
“And what Orbán did with the press was squeeze different media corporation owners until they agreed to either make their press more palatable to him, or sell their outlets to someone who would. I think that is basically, by their own admission, what the Trump administration is trying to bring about in this country.
“I think the hope is that we have more guardrails than Hungary did to prevent that from happening. But it’s unnerving that the president of the United States is trying to follow in those footsteps.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...ia-attacks
New York Times denounces Trump’s ‘intimidation tactics’ against reporters
The New York Times on Monday denounced “intimidation tactics” by President Donald Trump against its reporters after days in which the administration assailed the newspaper’s reporting on Elon Musk and the Defense Department.
The newspaper said in a post on X — the platform owned by Musk — that Trump’s approach has “never caused us to back down from our mission of holding powerful people to account, regardless of which party is in office.” Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and their colleagues “have an unrivaled record of covering this and prior administrations fully and fairly,” the Times said.
It was responding to Trump’s Sunday night Truth Social post that specifically criticized the Times’ Haberman, whose name was misspelled by the president as “Hagerman,” and Baker, along with Baker’s wife, New Yorker writer Susan Glasser.
“There’s something really wrong with these people, and their SICK, DERANGED EDITORS,” Trump wrote. “They did everything in their power to help rig the Election against me. How did that work out???”
Trump has been known to publicly attack news organizations or specific journalists; not all of them choose to respond and engage.
Explaining its decision to defend its reporters, the Times said people shouldn’t lose sight of Trump and his administration’s real goal as they intensify their efforts to crack down on the free press, spokesman Charles Stadtlander said.
“The administration wants to make it more difficult for reporters to bring to light important information that the president would rather stay secret,” he said. “And they want to undermine public confidence in journalists who ask difficult questions and publish uncomfortable truths.”
In criticizing Baker, Trump said he has written “many of the long and boring Fake News hit pieces against me.”
Haberman was among five bylines on a story released late Thursday that said the billionaire Musk was to receive a briefing on the military’s top-secret plans if a war broke out with China. The newspaper said it would represent a potential conflict of interest for Musk, who is helping the administration in government cost-cutting moves and has financial interests in China.
The Defense Department furiously denounced the story, calling the Times “a propaganda machine that should immediately retract their lies.”
The newspaper stood by its story and later reported that the meeting was called off after the Times reported it was about to happen. While Trump also said it was a “fake story,” he made clear that Musk should not be given access to the information.
Haberman is the author of the 2022 book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”
https://apnews.com/article/trump-reporte...5f386b4b6e
The Atlantic Editor Is ‘Not Intimidated’ by Trump Administration’s Tactics Over Signal Text Scandal
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is not worried about any potential retaliation by the Trump Administration after he published messages that were sent to him as part of a Signal group chat about “imminent war plans” in Yemen.
“I don’t get bullied. I’m not worried about that. They’re obviously being very, very silly there,” Goldberg told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There’s a playbook that — and you know this as a journalist, I’m not the only journalist to be the target of these kind of attacks — when they do something wrong, they go on the attack and they attack the messenger.”
The strange part of the story, the editor noted, is that “I didn’t really actually do anything. I’d like to claim that I was some bold investigative reporter here. All I did was answer a message request from Mike Waltz on Signal, and then the rest of it just came on my phone.”
“So even if I had those terrible character traits that they ascribe to me, all I did was simply print what they said. So I don’t think the tactic is working. Sometimes it works, sometimes people get intimidated. We at The Atlantic are not intimidated by this nonsense. We’re going to keep reporting the truth as we see it. And I just think it’s kind of silly deflection,” Goldberg explained.
At the beginning of the exchange, he disputed Mike Waltz’s assertion that Goldberg’s number was somehow “sucked” into his phone. “Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” Goldberg said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about there. You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone.”
“He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true,” he added. “I understand why he’s doing it, but you know, this has become a somewhat farcical situation. There’s no subterfuge here. My number was in his phone. He mistakenly added me to the group chat. There we go.”
The messages were inadvertently sent to Goldberg in the days before the U.S. launched an air and naval attack in Yemen. The strikes were made “in an effort to open international shipping lanes in the Red Sea that the Houthis have disrupted for months with their own attacks,” The New York Times reported on March 15, the day the strikes took place.
A total of 18 people were on the group chat, including Waltz and JD Vance, who noted at the time that he believed the strikes were a “mistake.”
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices,” the vice president wrote.
Both Welker and Goldberg noted that it appeared Vance was openly disagreeing with Trump’s stance on the attacks. “I read it as very fraught, because what JD Vance is saying in the group chat, which included, as you know, much of the Cabinet, much of the president’s Cabinet, he’s saying the president doesn’t even understand what he’s doing here,” Goldberg explained.
“So I found that remarkable, obviously, given that JD Vance has tried very hard to make sure that he’s 100% aligned with what Trump says,” he concluded.
https://www.thewrap.com/trump-signal-gro...timidated/
Trump targets lawyers who he says file 'frivolous' lawsuits against his administration
A new memo from President Donald Trump that authorized the attorney general and the homeland security secretary to sanction law firms that file lawsuits they deem “frivolous" is a major escalation of his intensifying assault on law firms, legal experts and former Justice Department officials told NBC News.
The presidential memorandum, “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” also ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to recommend revoking attorneys’ security clearances or terminating law firms' federal contracts if she deems their lawsuits against the administration "unreasonable" or "vexatious."
The memo, which was issued Saturday, follows executive orders against three firms: Covington & Burling, which provided pro bono legal services to former special counsel Jack Smith, who indicted Trump multiple times; Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and worked with an opposition research firm that compiled a discredited dossier against Trump; and Paul Weiss, where a former firm partner, Mark Pomerantz, tried to build a criminal case against Trump while he was working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office several years ago.
The executive orders suspended the security clearances of the firms’ employees and barred them from some federal buildings, steps that would make it difficult for them to represent clients.
Most important, the orders said the federal contracts of the law firms' clients should be reviewed, as well. Brad Karp, the Paul Weiss chair who was criticized for striking a deal with Trump last week, cited that threat in a message to employees that leaked soon after he sent it.
"The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm," Karp wrote. "In particular, it threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers."
Trump ally Steve Bannon said last week that Trump's goal is to bankrupt the firms the administration perceives as enemies.
“He’s going to put those law firms out of business,” Bannon said. “What we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you.”
A group of 22 civil rights organizations — including the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union — condemned the new memorandum in a statement. They contended that it was intended to “chill dissent, avoid accountability, and weaponize the government to attack opponents of this administration and its lawless actions.”
White House officials defended the move.
“President Trump is delivering on his promise to ensure the judicial system is no longer weaponized against the American people. President Trump’s only retribution is success and historic achievements for the American people,” assistant White House press secretary Taylor Rogers said in a statement to news organizations.
David Laufman, a former head of the Justice Department's counterintelligence section who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, called the use of executive branch power to intimidate law firms and lawyers unprecedented.
“If anyone, in any previous White House in the modern era, had ever hatched such an authoritarian plan to silence and punish the legal profession, the Attorney General and White House Counsel would have quietly intervened and the plan quickly would have been shelved,” he said by text message.
Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A former senior Justice Department official called the move autocratic.
“The president does not appreciate how an adversarial legal system works and the role of an impartial judge in that process,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because of concerns about retaliation.
“That is the best way to expose weak evidence and flawed arguments," he added. "The president rejects that system in favor of one in which he wins and his adversaries lose and are punished. That is not justice; that is autocracy.”
Legal experts also accused Trump of hypocrisy, noting that his own lawyers have violated Rule 11 of the federal rules of civil procedure, which bar lawyers from making false or frivolous claims in court.
The former senior Justice Department official said Trump’s legal claims that Joe Biden had won key swing states in 2020 by submitting fraudulent ballots “utterly failed to meet the Rule 11 standards that Trump cited in his memorandum.”
Last year, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Sidney Powell and other Trump lawyers who were ordered to pay $150,000 in sanctions for filing a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results in Michigan. Powell also pleaded guilty in Georgia to state criminal charges relating to her efforts to overturn Trump’s loss there.
A senior lawyer at a law firm that has sued the administration said the stakes are clear.
“He’s chilling the very sector of society that stands between Trump and tyranny," the lawyer said. "Lawyers file lawsuits and they get rulings that adjudicate whether what the administration has done is constitutional or not. And that’s our system of government.
“I don’t think the gravity of this can be overstated,” added the lawyer, a former federal prosecutor. “Law firms like this are a check. And if no one is bringing things to the courts, nothing will be stopped.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice...rcna197698
Trump Orders Firing of Prosecutor Investigating One of His Donors
A Los Angeles-based federal prosecutor was reportedly fired Friday on instruction of the White House, with sources saying that it was likely due to his part in a case involving one of Trump’s top donors.
Citing several sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Los Angeles Times reports that prosecutor Adam Schleifer was fired Friday morning at around 11 a.m. via an email that read “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump.”
Carley Palmer, a former Los Angeles federal prosecutor, told the outlet that Schleifer received his termination from a “one line email and it came from a White House staff account.”
His former colleagues helped him pack up his office belongings swiftly after the email came through.
Sources also noted that Schleifer’s boss, acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Joseph T. McNally, was not involved with the decision.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The White House, in coordination with the Department of Justice, has dismissed more than 50 U.S. Attorney and Deputies in the past few weeks. The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it.”
The Times’ sources also said that they suspect Schleifer’s termination was caused in part by one case in particular: a probe of Andrew Wiederhorn, the former CEO of restaurant operator Fat Brands Inc. which owns fast-food chains like Fatburger and Johnny Rockets.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Wiederhorn was indicted by a grand jury last May on “federal charges alleging a scheme to conceal $47 million in distributions he received in the form of shareholder loans” from the IRS and other appropriate bodies. The former CEO pleaded not guilty.
Citing Federal Election Commission records, the Times reports that Wiederhorn donated “approximately $40,000” to the Republican National Committee and Trump political action committees since 2023.
Meanwhile, Schleifer has reportedly made several public remarks criticizing President Donald Trump. In one 2020 tweet, the prosecutor wrote: “It’s hard to imagine a President doing more to demoralize line prosecutors, law-enforcement partners, and faith in rule of law than he already has.”
The president has been on a tear against the federal judiciary, criticizing judges and firing prosecutors left and right for what he claims is political bias and weaponization of the legal system.
In a February Truth Social post Trump slammed the Department of Justice and announced: “Over the past four years, the Department of Justice has been politicized like never before.
“Therefore, I have instructed the termination of ALL remaining ‘Biden Era’ U.S. Attorneys. We must ‘clean house’ IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence. America’s Golden Age must have a fair Justice System - THAT BEGINS TODAY!”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-orders-...ccounter=1
‘Chilling effect on free speech’: Trump wants green card applicants already legally in the US to hand over social media profiles
The Trump administration’s proposal to vet social media profiles of green card applicants already legally in the U.S. has been condemned in initial public feedback as an attack on free speech.
Visa applicants living abroad already have to share their social media handles with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but the proposal under President Donald Trump would expand the policy to those already legally in the country who are applying for permanent residency or seeking asylum.
USCIS said the vetting of social media accounts is necessary for “the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The agency also said it was necessary to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.”
“In a review of information collected for admission and benefit decisions, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) identified the need to collect social media identifiers (‘handles’) and associated social media platform names from applicants to enable and help inform identity verification, national security and public safety screening, and vetting, and related inspections,” the agency announced on March 5.
The agency is collecting feedback from the public on the proposal until May 5, the majority of which are overwhelmingly opposed at the time of writing.
“So the US is heading for authoritarian now,” an anonymous commenter said. “Anything that the current administration doesn’t like means bad. Pure ideology means total destruction. This is a violation to the First Amendment.”
“Chilling Effect on Free Speech: The fear of government scrutiny of online expression will undoubtedly stifle free speech,” another comment read. “This is particularly concerning for individuals from countries with different political climates, who may fear the misinterpretation of their online activity.”
Out of the 143 comments, 29 mentioned a violation of free speech. “This policy undermines the fundamental values that make America a beacon of freedom, including free speech, privacy, and human rights,” another person wrote.
The proposal follows the detention of green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, labeled “pro-Hamas” by the Trump administration, and the deportation of Brown University doctor, Rasha Alawieh, a H1-B visa holder. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials inspected the kidney medic’s phone and determined she followed the religious teachings of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. They also claimed she “openly admitted” attending his funeral while in Lebanon.
Civil rights groups have raised concerns that the policy proposal would disproportionately impact critics of Israel and the U.S. government’s handling of the conflict.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Intercept. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
McCaw added that he also worried that people’s activity would be continuously monitored on social media even if they became U.S. citizens.
The new proposal comes as the Internal Revenue Service is close to an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to allow officials to use confidential tax data to confirm names and addresses of people they suspect are in the country illegally, according to the Washington Post.
ICE could submit names of suspected illegal immigrants to the IRS so the agency can cross-reference on confidential taxpayer databases, according to insiders. The agreement has “alarmed” career IRS officials who fear it risks abusing a privacy law intended to build criminal cases, “not enforce criminal penalties,” the newspaper reports.
As well as mass deportations, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has turned its attention to green card and visa holders in recent weeks.
Earlier this month Fabian Schmidt, a 34-year-old German electrical engineer, who has held a green card since 2008, was arrested and detained at Boston Logan International Airport.
And a Milwaukee mother who is a permanent U.S resident and lived here since she was eight-months old was deported to Laos, a country she’d never been to previously, after agreeing to a plea deal over cannabis charges.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chilling-effe...13309.html
Here are the international students and faculty known to be targeted by ICE
The Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students and faculty who have voiced support for the Palestinian cause has escalated, with universities across the country seeing students either arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or having their visas revoked.
At least eight international students and professors, all of whom have had green cards or student visas, have been targeted by ICE, beginning at Columbia University and proceeding to schools including Georgetown University, Cornell University and the University of Alabama.
That number, however, could be a tiny fraction of the actual count after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday the State Department has revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students.
The federal government has pulled out a rarely used law that says the secretary of State can deport a noncitizen who threatens U.S. foreign policy, though only an immigration judge can take away a green card. The use of that obscure law is being challenged in court.
Here are the highest-profile cases among the Trump administration’s crackdown on college campuses:
Mahmoud Khalil
The first and so far most prominent target was Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment who graduated in December.
Khalil, a green card holder, was detained March 8 at an apartment building owned by Columbia.
The government originally argued he threatened the foreign policy of the country, but later added that Khalil did not disclose he worked for certain organizations, such as the United Nations’s Palestinian refugee agency, known as UNWRA, on his application to become a permanent resident.
“The additional charges the government filed last week are completely meritless. They show that the government has no case whatsoever on this bogus charge that his presence in the U.S. would have adverse foreign policy consequences,” said Marc Van Der Hout, whose firm is representing Khalil. “This case is purely about First Amendment protected activity and speech, and U.S. citizens and permanent residents alike are free to say what they wish about what is going on in the world.”
Khalil was transferred to Louisiana, making it difficult for his lawyers to contact him as they try to get him released, as his wife, a U.S. citizen, is set to give birth next month.
A hearing in the case is set for Friday.
Trump has repeatedly cheered Khalil’s arrest as the first “of many to come.”
“If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” he said on social media.
Alireza Doroudi
University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has a student visa, was arrested March 25.
“The University of Alabama recently learned that a doctoral student has been detained off campus by federal immigration authorities. Federal privacy laws limit what can be shared about an individual student,” the university said.
It is not clear what the Iranian national is charged with or where he was taken. It is also unknown if he was part of the pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
“Our fears have come to pass. Donald Trump, Tom Homan and ICE have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community,” the University of Alabama College Democrats said in a statement.
Rumeysa Ozturk
Tufts University Ph.D. candidate Rumeysa Ozturk, a green card holder, was also detained March 25 by ICE, with footage of her plainclothes arrest quickly going viral on social media.
A judge ruled Ozturk, a Turkish national, is to stay in the country for now, and her lawyers say she was taken to Louisiana.
Ozturk was a co-author in an article run by the school newspaper that said Tufts needed to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
It is unclear what she is charged with; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement to multiple outlets that Ozturk was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” but did not give details of those actions.
Tufts said it had no prior knowledge the arrest was going to happen.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was among those who spoke out on the case after footage of it was widely shared. The video showed half a dozen masked agents surround Ozturk on the street, take her phone away as she screamed, handcuff her and usher her into a van.
“The video is really chilling, and this should matter to every single American,” Murphy said.
Yunseo Chung
Yunseo Chung, a green card holder and third-year student at Columbia University, preemptively got a judge to agree to temporarily stop deportation efforts by the Trump administration she found out authorities had a warrant for her arrest.
Chung, who was originally from South Korea and has been in the U.S. since she was 7, sued after she found the administration was trying to revoke her status.
She has been involved in pro-Palestinian protests but was not a leader in the efforts.
She was arrested at protests before, but Columbia exonerated her during disciplinary proceedings.
“Yunseo Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College. She is being sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws. Chung will have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge,” a senior Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said.
ICE agents apparently sought Chung at both her family’s home and her dorm. Her attorneys say she is still in the country, though they have declined to specify where.
“ICE’s shocking actions against Ms. Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech. The government’s repression has focused specifically on university students who speak out in solidarity with Palestinians and who are critical of the Israeli government’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza or the pro-Israeli policies of the U.S. government and other U.S. institutions,” her lawsuit filed March 24 reads.
Rasha Alawieh
Rasha Alawieh, an assistant professor from Brown University’s medical school, was deported the weekend of March 15 even after orders were given by a judge to keep her in the country.
Alawieh was deported to Lebanon, with Customs and Border Patrol saying the agents who deported her were not aware of the court order at the time.
“At no time would CBP not take a court order seriously or fail to abide by a court’s order,” court filings from the federal government said.
The deportation came when Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist, was trying to return to the U.S. from a trip to the Middle East, where DHS says she went to the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, “a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree. Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah.”
Alawieh’s original attorneys withdrew from the case, although they did not say why, and she has since had to acquire a new legal team.
Badar Khan Suri
Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University, was arrested by ICE in Arlington, Va., on March 17 and was told his visa was revoked.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” but she offered no further details of his activity.
A spokesperson for Georgetown said the school was “not aware” of any criminal activity by Suri and it has not been given a reason for the detention.
His attorney is arguing Suri is a target due to the Palestinian heritage of his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, as well as his critical views of Israel.
Ranjani Srinivasan
Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral student in urban planning at Columbia and an Indian national, had her student visa revoked March 5.
Srinivasan left the country before ICE could detain her in a move DHS has called “self-deporting.”
“The moment Mahmoud got arrested, it sent shockwaves across the Columbia community. He’s a green card holder,” she told Al Jazeera. “That’s when I realized I have no rights in this system at all. It was only a matter of time before they caught hold of me.”
DHS accused her of involvement in “in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization,” with little details on specifics.
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.
Momodou Taal
Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student from Cornell University, was asked to surrender to ICE and had his student visa taken away.
Taal has been very active in the pro-Palestinian movement and was suspended from the university last year over his activities. The school ended up reinstating him.
Taal gained notoriety on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, when he posted on the social platform X “colonised peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary” and “Glory to the resistance!”
He later told CNN that “clearly categorically I abhor the killing of all civilians no matter where they are and who does it” but felt it was “racist, Islamophobic that before I’m allowed to have a view on genocide, I have to condemn a terrorist organization.”
Taal filed a lawsuit against the government March 15, a day after his visa was revoked, challenging the executive orders the Trump administration is using to justify the crackdown on foreign students.
“And given how they went after Mahmoud, who has a similar fact pattern, I didn’t want to be a sitting duck for eventually myself or other international students. So, I found the lawsuit as a form of protection seeking national injunction to challenge the constitutionality of these executive orders,” Taal previously told The Hill.
A judge ruled against Taal in that case Thursday, saying the court does not have jurisdiction and the student did not establish “imminent or ongoing threat to their constitutional rights that could be appropriately remedied by the requested restraints. Any future harm alleged in their affidavits appears to be speculative and even moot because of the revocation of Taal’s visa.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5...a-alabama/
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