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Repression

Historic Lawsuit Filed Challenging Trump’s Attack On Free Speech

March 16, 2025 Amandla Thomas-Johnson, Popular Resistance. , , , , , , ,
A Cornell professor and two graduate students are suing the Trump administration for violating the First Amendment as it seeks to deport international students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza under the guise of protecting national security. Trump’s salvo of executive orders targeting what amounts to student thought crimes means the Cornell scholars “now fear government retaliation for engaging in constitutionally protected expression critical of U.S. foreign policy and supportive of Palestinian human rights,” according to the lawsuit, filed Saturday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District.

Columbia Student Workers Rally Against Expulsions And Arrests

March 16, 2025 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. , , , , , ,
It’s been an intense and infuriating couple of weeks at Columbia University. Students expelled. Visas revoked. $400 million in funding held hostage by the federal government. An escalation, when Mahmoud Khalil was told his green card was suspended before being arrested by government agents from the lobby of his apartment building in the middle of the night. And most recently, Thursday night, the announcement that 22 students and recent graduates had been suspended, expelled, or had their diplomas revoked. One of the expelled students is Grant Miner, the president of the Student Workers of Columbia.

Columbia University Expels Student Protesters, Fires Union President

March 15, 2025 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. , , , , , ,
On Thursday, Columbia University issued suspensions, expulsions, and temporary degree revocations to a number of students connected to the April 2024 occupation of the school’s Hamilton Hall. The announcement from the University Judicial Board came on the same day as a campus ICE raid, with Department of Homeland Security agents executing search warrants on two Columbia University residences. “I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) in two university residences tonight,” Interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrong told students and staff in an email.

Professor At Center Of Columbia University Deportation Scandal Is Former Israeli Spy

March 12, 2025 Alan MacLeod, MintPress News. , , , ,
The professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official, MintPress News can reveal. 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.

How Pro-Palestine Student Activists Are Fighting Increasing Repression

March 12, 2025 Sam Carliner, Waging Nonviolence. , , , , ,
The student movement for Palestine is once again in the news following reports that ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration appears to be delivering on its promise to go after foreign students who participate in the movement for Palestine. Trump has already passed several executive orders as part of this McCarthyist attack on universities. The outrage against Khalil’s detention is clear. In just over a day, a petition calling for Khalil’s release has been sent over 2.3 million times.

Columbia University’s Nazi Tradition

March 10, 2025 David Swanson, World Beyond War. , , , , , , , ,
According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient — Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.'” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and its universities.”

State Department To Use AI To Revoke Visas Of Students Who ‘Appear Pro-Hamas’

March 8, 2025 Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com. , , , , , ,
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-driven effort to revoke the visas of foreigners in the US who “appear pro-Hamas” in a crackdown targeting pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Axios reported on Thursday. The report said the effort will involve AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students in the US on visas that will look for “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.” The language in the report suggests that any foreign students who attend pro-Palestine demonstrations or express sympathy for Palestinians online could be swept up in the crackdown since opponents of the Israeli siege on Gaza or US military support for Israel are often labeled “pro-Hamas.”

Columbia University Cracks Down On Pro-Palestine Student Activists

March 8, 2025 News Desk, The Cradle. , , , , , , ,
Students at Columbia University who expressed opposition to the US–Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are being investigated by a secretive disciplinary body known as the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), which is targeting anyone involved in activities ranging from sharing social media posts supporting Palestinians to participating in “unauthorized” protests. Drop Site News reports that Columbia requires students under investigation for “discrimination based on their speech” to sign a non-disclosure agreement to access unredacted evidence against them, effectively blocking public discussion of the accusations and process.

Minnesota Movement For Divestment From Israel Resists Repression

March 6, 2025 Fight Back! News. , , , , , ,
Minneapolis, MN — On Saturday, March 1, more than 60 Twin Cities community members gathered to attend a “State Board of Divestment” speak-out event hosted by the Minnesota Anti-War Committee in a Minneapolis community center. Minnesota’s State Board of Investment (SBI), a large public fund managed by state officials Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, State Auditor Julie Blaha, and Secretary of State Steve Simon. It currently invests approximately $5.4 billion in apartheid Israel, Israeli companies, weapons manufacturers that sell to Israel’s military, and other companies that prop up Israel’s apartheid system.

Campus Police Using Israeli Spy Tech To Crack Down On Students

February 25, 2025 Tara Goodarzi, Truthout. , , , , , ,
In the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump announced he would be “fighting anti-Semitism” on college campuses by prosecuting and revoking visas for certain students deemed to be “Hamas sympathizers.” In a fact sheet accompanying an executive order with “measures to combat anti-Semitism,” Trump threatens students: “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” The order itself states that the Department of Education will seek to familiarize institutions of higher education with these goals, so that universities may “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead … to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”

Yves Engler: ‘I’m Being Charged For Responding To Anti-Palestinian Hate’

February 24, 2025 Yves Engler, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , , , ,
Tomorrow, the Montreal police will arrest me for posting to social media against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Today, I received a phone call from a Montreal police officer by the last name of Crivello. She asked me to come to a downtown police station where I will be charged for harassment and indecent communication. Crivello said a complaint was submitted against me months ago by a legal firm on behalf of racist media personality Dahlia Kurtz. Crivello said I had described Kurtz as a “genocide” supporter and “fascist” on Twitter. Guilty as charged.

Princeton Students Go To Trial Nearly A Year After Gaza Encampment

February 13, 2025 Sam Carliner, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
Nearly one whole year after students at Princeton University held an encampment on their campus in solidarity with Gaza, 12 students and one postdoctoral fellow will head to trial. In a statement released by Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD) — the main organization behind Princeton’s Gaza solidarity encampment — organizers claim that the trial date “arose from a dangerous process of intimidation and coercion.” The trial is scheduled for April 14-16 and the students face charges of “defiant trespass” for briefly holding a building occupation at Clio Hall, home of the Princeton Graduate School’s administrative offices.

Chris Hedges Report: Arab Regimes And The Betrayal Of Palestine

February 7, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
Farah El-Sharif, writer, academic and Visiting Scholar at Stanford, is uncompromisingly blunt in her assessment of the Middle East. The decades of repression faced by an entire people have produced a fragmented society—culturally and through colonially imposed borders. To help understand why the Muslim world is so broken, corrupt and full of contradictions, El Sherif joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. “The systemic repression that Muslim communities worldwide experience is inextricably linked to the interventionist, expansionist, supremacist American-Israeli Western project,” El Sharif says.

Columbia Students Sue University For Attacks On Pro-Palestine Activism

February 4, 2025 Kavitha Chekuru, Drop Site. , , , , , ,
Three students from Columbia University filed a lawsuit on Monday morning against the school administration for their suspensions related to their pro-Palestine activism on campus. Among the claims in the complaint, the students state that the university violated its own policies during the disciplinary process, that the university targeted the students for their views, and that it violated New York’s landlord tenant laws when it evicted the students from university housing. “The university just pulled out all the roadblocks and threw out its rule book in an attempt to punish and silence the plaintiffs however they could,” James Carlson, an attorney representing the students, told Drop Site News.

The Encampment Movement Leads The Way Under Trump

February 3, 2025 Ethan Eblaghie, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
On January 20, Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States. As the country reels from his inauguration and the sweeping executive orders of his first week in office, American progressives are left grappling with the implications of a new Trump Administration, and how our organizing projects might come under renewed assault by a hard right Republican trifecta that controls both houses of Congress and is well positioned to enact its legislative agenda. Many organizations are rightfully concerned about the repression and lawfare that Trump’s return to the White House threatens.
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