Trump's deportations disciplining Pro-Palestinian immigrants continue and the State Department refuses to rule out deporting naturalized U.S. citizens. Katie Halper discusses this development with Eric Lee, an immigration lawyer, and Momodou Taal, a Cornell student whose visa was revoked, forcing him to self-deport.
Video: State Dept. Spokesperson Tammy Bruce won't rule out exiling US citizens
Momodou Taal on Pro-Palestine protest crackdowns & Zionism's losing ideological battle
Eric Lee on illegal deportations - "free speech in the U.S. threatens foreign policy abroad"
Yale Law fires Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi, accused of terrorism by AI tools
Ukrainian socialist jailed for criticizing government
Momodou Taal is a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University, specializing in conceptualizations of sovereignty with a particular focus on West Africa. Momodou is the host of the Malcolm Effect podcast, a show dedicated to political education.
Eric Lee is an immigration lawyer & federal litigator who served as lead counsel in Dep't of State v. Muñoz & argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2024. He's represented numerous students & visa holders facing discipline for pro-Palestinian & socialist speech.
The polish people seem to be done with Ukraine. They're fed up. They've been inundated with millions of Ukrainian refuges and Polish soldiers are fighting and dying on the front lines against Russia.
In Canada, controversy erupted last week when the Advocate's Society, a national organization of 6,000 judges and lawyers from across Canada, revoked a speaking invitation to Syrian refugee Tareq Hadhad.
Hadhad, who is now a well-known entrepreneur in Canada, had been invited to deliver the keynote speech at the Advocate's Society's annual black-tie gala in June.
The Advocate's Society promotes itself as an organization that is committed to 'strong, independent and courageous' advocacy.
So why did the Society revoke its speaking invitation to Tareq Hadhad? Because, on one single occasion, Hadhad referred to Israel's war on Palestinians as a "genocide".
In so doing, Hadhad simply echoed the assessment of major, Western human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
One prominent lawyer who led the charge to de-platform Hadhad is Jonathan Lisus, a well-heeled corporate litigator whose clients include the State of Israel. Lisus is a partner in the Bay Street law firm of Lax O'Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP.
In this report, Dimitri Lascaris breaks down Lisus's spurious arguments against Tareq Hadhad. He also comments upon the Advocate's Society's shameless capitulation to Zionist pressure.
At the conclusion of his commentary, Lascaris challenges Lisus and the President of the Advocate's Society, Daryl Cruz, to a debate over the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.
KH: Much like the situation in Gaza ‘starts on October 7’ for lots of people, what's happening in Yemen just ‘starts with the Houthis blocking ships’ and being ‘bad men’ and ‘terrorists.’ But why does Saudi Arabia, with U.S. support, want to destroy Yemen? And why did the U.N. give them permission to do so?
Mick: The Yemenis had done nothing to anybody other than the fact that [in 2011 the president] had been pushed aside and the assistant Hadi had been put in power with a program of introducing neoliberalism and facilitating Western investment and plunder. They wanted to raze the place blind and get control of Yemeni assets and resources.
Yemen was one of the most self-sufficient food countries on the planet. And Hadi manufactured loans from the likes of the IMF and the World Bank with a view to changing how they did agriculture so that they would produce food for export instead of for themselves. And it was a disaster. Before long, people actually found themselves short of food. And they said no to this.
KH: What do you think of the way that the Houthis [Ansar Allah] are portrayed as terrorists, given that, as you pointed out, they're actually the ones following the law when it comes to genocide?
Clare: Isn't it amazing? It's deliberately portrayed as marginal and as terrorist. But in actual fact, this government is one of very few internationally which is fulfilling its responsibility under the Geneva Convention, which says that the obligation on all signatories is not just to not commit genocide yourself, but to actively prevent and punish those who do. And the Houthi-led government in Yemen is one of the few doing that. Their actions are directly targeted at interfering with international shipping, which is on its way to enable genocide.
Meanwhile, the Israelis are targeting civilians and deliberately killing ordinary people and they're the ones enabled by the West but the Houthis are the ones who are demonized as terrorists. They've been incredibly restrained, they did not attack the ships when the ceasefire was in place and they only resumed the action when the ceasefire was broken with the implementation of the mass starvation again and targeted killing of civilians by the Israelis.
The Houthis clearly have the support of their people. We were on a march of over a million people. It happens every Friday. People come out, and bear in mind that these are now the victims of American bombings. every night, to say ‘we stand with Palestine.’
We had a meeting with the former prime minister. And he said, ‘look, it's very simple for us. We are not going to stand by. When children are being murdered and starved, we have an obligation to do something and we are going to do it.’ For us, that's heroism. That's not terrorism.
Since taking power on January 20, the Trump administration has engaged in an all-out assault on First Amendment rights and due process. It is attacking judges in the U.S. that have issued rulings that cite serious constitutional concerns. It has embarked on a sweeping campaign to force colleges and universities to hand over private records of students that have engaged in protests against the U.S.-facilitated Israeli war against the Palestinians of Gaza. It announced a sweeping program to deport students because of their activism, including those with Legal Permanent Residency status, or Green Cards—as in the case of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil.
The position of this administration is that the First Amendment does not really apply to criticism of Israel or of Zionism. Trump’s administration is trying to circumvent the Constitution and to criminalize clearly protected speech in the service of a genocidal government whose weapons and political support overwhelmingly come from the U.S.
The tactics the Trump administration is employing are firmly in line with a longstanding German policy of putting support for Israel, no matter how heinous its crimes, above the basic free speech rights of its citizens. At the heart of Germany’s policies is a doctrine referred to as Staatsräson, or Reason of State. In Germany it is official policy that the defense of the Israeli state is a non-negotiable principle of the nation.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Alexander Gorski, a Berlin-based criminal defense and migration lawyer, speaks with Jeremy Scahill about out how Germany has weaponized the concept of antisemitism to stifle dissent and to suppress speech. Gorski, who is representing defendants in high-profile deportation cases in Germany, is a partner with the European Legal Support Center.
The professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official, MintPress News can reveal.
Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), was abducted by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday for his role in organizing protests last year against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Khalil’s dean, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.
Before entering academia, Dr. Yarhi-Milo served as an officer and an intelligence analyst with the Israeli Defense Forces. Given that she was recruited into the intelligence services because of her ability to speak Arabic fluently, her job likely entailed surveilling the Arab population.
After leaving the world of intelligence, she worked for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. While there, she met and married her husband, Israel’s official United Nations spokesperson.
Although she is now an academic, she has never left the world of international security, making the subject her area of expertise. She has made a point of trying to lift women’s voices in the field. One of these was the then-U.S. Director of National Security, Avril Haines, whom she spoke with in 2023. But even though Khalil was a student in her school, she had nothing to say about his arrest. Indeed, rather than speak out on the issue (as activists have demanded), she instead chose this week to invite Naftali Bennett, prime minister of Israel from 2021 to 2022, to speak at Columbia. Students protesting Tuesday’s event were condemned by university authorities for “harassing” Yarhi-Milo. (more...)
"ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come." –President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/gfuPd0tskf
With academics leaving the US, funding cuts looming over universities for alleged failures to combat antisemitism, and foreign students facing deportation for pro-Palestinian activism, the Trump administration’s policies are being felt at colleges across the United States. What’s behind the fixation on universities and what will be its long term impact on higher education in the US?
In this episode: Marci Shore, Professor of History, Yale University
For decades, the Canadian government has held more than a million pages of war-criminal investigation files secret, citing privacy laws and international agreements with foreign countries. Many Canadian organizations, including Jewish ones, have lobbied—unsuccessfully—for the government to release the names, which include many suspected Nazis.
It turns out, the names were already public. Jared McBride, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently led his students on a class project that discovered more than a thousand pages of historic Royal Canadian Mounted Police war crimes files—all freely available online.
These typed and handwritten files from the 1980s show suspects' names, locations, case numbers, alleged crimes, and the results of the Mounties' investigations, including collaboration with Israel, Germany and Soviet authorities. They appear to match the still-secret parts of Canada's official 1986 Deschênes Commission of Inquiry's records on alleged or actual Nazi war criminals who got into the country.
Not knowing about these publicly available documents, Jewish groups and some media outlets still have lawsuits pending to force Library and Archives Canada to release its war crimes holdings. But, as the UCLA students found out, the archives already released the RCMP documents five years ago. And nobody did anything with them—until now.
On today's episode of The CJN Daily, Jared McBride joins to to unpack what, and how, he and his students uncovered in this breakthrough moment for national justice.
In this exclusive interview filmed in New York, journalist and commentator Katie Halper discusses Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza following a brief ceasefire, questioning whether any real progress was made. She also unpacks Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activism—especially on college campuses—where students and activists are facing arrests, suspensions, and even deportations.
Halper examines the broader implications for free speech in the US, the role of ICE in targeting political dissidents, and the complicity of university administrations. She also delves into the growing divide within Jewish political activism, contrasting groups like Jewish Voice for Peace with the emboldened far-right Zionist movement. Finally, she assesses Trump’s claims of being a ‘President of Peace’ amid ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and the deepening political divide in the US.
He became Canada's first Muslim chief human rights commissioner. But even before he began his role, the attacks started and they were relentless. Now he's hitting back at the people and organisations that perpetuated a campaign of slander and vitriol against him. I sat down with Birju Dattani and his lawyer Alexi Wood to discuss their case and the possible ripple effects and precedent it could set.
“The independent report’s conclusions were clear: Mr. Dattani is not now and never has been antisemitic, “ says Alexi Wood, founding Partner at St. Lawrence and Barristers PC, and Mr. Dattani’s legal counsel. “While freedom of expression is an essential foundation of our democracy, there are limits. It is unlawful to state things that are not true as fact, to lower the reputation of others.”
“It is dangerous to assert that academic research, being critical of a government, attending protests, and simply having a Muslim name are reasons for suspicion,” says Birju Dattani. “Through these defamation and libel lawsuits, I am sending a message: those who use their platforms to spew hate and spread misinformation must face recourse for their actions, which have real life consequences.”
CIJA’s significant level of interaction with incumbents may indicate notable political influence
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is a Zionist lobby group that has a stated priority of “strengthening the Canada-Israel Friendship.” It has aimed to do so in several ways, including lobbying MPs and taking them on fully paid trips to Israel.
I’ve published several articles on CIJA’s activities since 2022, including a list of the 10 MPs most lobbied by CIJA and a breakdown of MPs CIJA has taken to Israel.
This article is intended to provide readers with a better understanding of how CIJA has interacted with incumbents running in the ongoing federal election.
In order to do so, I took the following steps:
I narrowed down ridings to ones where an incumbent is running by using the Canadian Elections Tracker website;
I searched each of these incumbents’ names in the public Registry of Lobbyists to see how many times CIJA has lobbied them and/or their staff, if at all, since 2008 (which is as far back as you can go in the online registry);
I searched each of these incumbents’ names in the public registry at the ethics commissioner’s website to see if they had been taken on at least one trip to Israel by CIJA since 2007 (which is as far back as the registry goes online), and if so, what its/their value was;
I then created the graphs and crunched the numbers that you’ll see below. (more...)
A wave of lawsuits filed by Israeli plaintiffs against pro-Palestinian American citizens, advocacy groups, and media outlets is paving the way for the AIPAC-backed “nonprofit killer bill” to take effect. The claims—largely unsubstantiated—appear designed to justify what critics say could amount to a near-total shutdown of political expression around the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
On Monday, the latest in a series of legal actions targeted the prominent New York-based activist group Within Our Lifetime, as well as the Columbia University chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. According to plaintiff Shlomi Ziv, the groups were allegedly funded by Hamas.
Ziv, who was previously held captive in Gaza and worked as a security guard on October 7, 2023, claims that his captors told him they were financing student groups at Columbia. The accusation is based entirely on hearsay. Still, the lawsuit’s intent appears clearly aimed at dismantling the student movement at Columbia.
The complaint even names Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident and pro-Palestine activist now in detention, who is facing deportation under an order from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Khalil’s alleged offense: exercising his First Amendment rights. Despite pro-Israel organizations accusing him of supporting Hamas, the most the Canary Mission—a group notorious for doxxing and smearing college students—could produce was a video showing Khalil standing near someone chanting, “From the river to the sea.” (more...)
Princeton has become the latest university to be targeted by the Trump administration, as the federal government pauses dozens of federal grants to the school. The news comes after the Trump administration threatened to cut off more than $8.7 billion to Harvard and earlier suspended $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania and $400 million to Columbia University. In all cases, the Trump administration has claimed to be fighting antisemitism, citing the schools' responses to student-led campus protests in solidarity with Gaza. "It's time for us to step back … and think more critically about how we run our universities," says former Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, who says students from abroad, even those with green cards and U.S. citizenship, are now "terrified" of being swept up in the Trump administration's crackdown. "It feels like a kind of racial and ethnic cleansing that is happening on our campuses."
“This is about Palestine and this is not about Palestine,” said New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice director Amy Torres at a recent rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil. “This is about this administration. . . going after every single one of us.”
While political prisoner and Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil remains in ICE detention in Louisiana, his lawyers are fighting for his freedom in New Jersey. On Friday, March 28 they were in Newark to argue for Khalil’s upcoming immigration hearing to take place in New Jersey, rather than Louisiana where a judge is more likely to go along with the Trump administration’s political persecution of Khalil.
While Khalil’s legal team advocated for him in the district courthouse, hundreds of supporters rallied outside chanting, “We want justice, you say how? Release Mahmoud right now!” and “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation!” While Newark has seen plenty of pro-Palestine protests since the liberation struggle drew national attention in the aftermath of October 7, they have rarely drawn the numbers that the rally to free Mahmoud Khalil did.
The turnout was, in part, bolstered by the presence of immigrant rights organizations which have for years been leading a dynamic movement against ICE detention in New Jersey. Throughout the crowd, people held signs provided by the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ), the state’s largest immigration coalition. Several speakers representing immigrant rights organizations — including NJAIJ Executive Director, Amy Torres — spoke about how attacks on the Palestine movement and attacks on immigrants are connected.
“Yes this is about Palestine, and also this is not about Palestine,” Torres said in a speech to the crowd. “This is about this administration taking the issue that they believe is the least sympathetic and making an example out of the people that they arrest so that they can dehumanize the issue, they can dehumanize the actors, they can dehumanize the people standing up as a means of going after every single one of us.” (more...)
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has announced the launch of “Global 195”, a worldwide legal coalition dedicated to holding accountable Israeli and dual national individuals alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Speaking to Palestine Deep Dive, ICJP UK Director Tayab Ali says, “There shouldn’t be a safe space for them anywhere in the world where they can go without fearing prosecution.”
The former international head of Doctors Without Borders is speaking out after New York University canceled her presentation, saying some of her slides could be viewed as "anti-governmental" and "antisemitic" because they mentioned the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid and deaths of humanitarian workers in Israel's war on Gaza. Dr. Joanne Liu, a Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, was scheduled to speak at NYU, her alma mater, on March 19 and had been invited almost a year ago to discuss the challenges of humanitarian crises. Censoring speech is "killing the essence of what the university is about," says Liu. "I truly and strongly believe that universities are the temple of knowledge."
"Rather than silence dissent, the government's actions have only emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in Palestine, and beyond," says CUNY CLEAR attorney Mudassar Toppa.
Last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated that he had already signed about 300 letters to revoke visas from students and other visitors to the United States.
“I don’t know actually if it’s primarily student visas,” he told reporters “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.”
He said he would not be revealing the criteria by which the administration was selecting people for deportation.
“We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people,” said Rubio.
“The administration is deliberately opaque about the criteria they are using to select its targets for deportation in order to sow panic among international students and stifle advocacy for Palestinian human rights and liberation,” Mudassar Toppa, a staff attorney from CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at CUNY School of Law, told Mondoweiss.
“The administration hopes that the chaos and uncertainty behind how this policy is being implemented will silence the voices of non-citizen students who advocate for a free Palestine and encourage them to voluntarily leave the country to avoid the specter of being abducted, detained, and deported,” he continued. “As we’ve seen, rather than silence dissent, the government’s actions have only emboldened voices demanding that basic rights be respected here, in Palestine, and beyond.” (more...)
Columbia students are banding together as ICE and the NYPD target Palestine activism. "[Columbia] is willing to give the Trump administration whatever it wants," one student tells Mondoweiss. "But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep pushing too."
Hundreds of Columbia students gathered frantically on Tuesday, March 25 in a cathedral near campus for an emergency union meeting, debating how to respond against what they described as the university administration’s “concessions to fascism.”
The uproar ignited on March 9, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate and student activist Mahmoud Khalil at his home without a judicial warrant. Federal authorities claimed to revoke Khalil’s green card from his involvement in pro-Palestine campus protests since Israel’s war on Gaza.
Columbia has yet to issue a public statement addressing the arrest in a university-owned residential building or clarifying whether it had prior knowledge, fueling speculation among students about the university’s collaboration with law enforcement.
From the back of the cathedral, a student’s voice cut through the noise: “We are confused about what has happened but it’s clear that the administration has made certain decisions without our consultation.”
Returning from spring break, the student described the campus as unrecognizable. “We need to know: Will we still have the same academic freedom we had two weeks ago?”
The space swelled with a mix of fear, anger, and grief—not just for Khalil, now held in a Louisiana detention center as his lawyers race against time to prevent his deportation before his wife gives birth next month, but for others caught in the widening crackdown. (more...)
Columbia students discuss how their university betrayed Mahmoud Khalil who was kidnapped by ICE, and betrayed academic freedom by capitulating to the Trump Administration. Then Cornell University Ph.D student Momodou Taal, who is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia, talks about attempting to sue Trump and his decision to leave the United States. And Momodou's lawyer Eric Lee joins to talk about the crackdown on pro Palestinian speech.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has triggered a global crackdown on dissent, with Western governments not only enabling the atrocities but also waging war on human rights and free speech.
Join a special live episode of Dispatches with Rania Khalek as Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, unpacks the ongoing genocide, the fascist assault on pro-Palestine voices across US campuses, and the unprecedented erosion of international law.
In his “Discourse on Colonialism”, Aime Cesaire observes that fascism is colonialism applied at home. We should therefore not be surprised at the creeping fascism in the U.S. (and some other Western countries) where rights are being trampled on behalf of the oppressive foreign…
The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the surrender of US lawmakers and established institutions to the demands of a foreign country's omnipotent lobbying apparatus, and the consequences for everyone else.
