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Category: US campus protests

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  • Over 100 US university presidents sign letter decrying Trump administration

    Statement signed by Harvard, Princeton and Brown leaders denounces White House’s ‘undue government intrusion’

    More than 100 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence.

    The statement, published early on Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, comes weeks into the administration’s mounting campaign against higher education, and hours after Harvard University became the first school to sue the government over threats to its funding. Harvard is one of several institutions hit in recent weeks with huge funding cuts and demands they relinquish significant institutional autonomy.

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  • Denied, detained, deported: the most high-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown

    These are some of the people ensnared by the administration’s unprecedented measures to target people it believes oppose its agenda

    Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.

    Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.

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  • White House freezes funds for Cornell and Northwestern in latest crackdown

    Pauses come after Trump officials sent warning letters to 60 US universities for ‘failure to protect Jewish students’

    In early March, the Trump administration sent warning letters to 60 US universities it said were facing “potential enforcement actions” for what it described as “failure to protect Jewish students on campus” in the wake of widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last year.

    The president of Cornell University, which was on the list, responded with a defiant op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that universities, and their students, could weather debates and protests over the war in Gaza.

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  • Mahmoud Khalil says his arrest was part of ‘Columbia’s repression playbook’

    Green-card holder and activist led campus pro-Palestinian rallies and is now fighting Trump effort to deport him

    Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist who led campus pro-Palestinian rallies and is now resisting the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, has accused the university of laying “the groundwork for my abduction” and called on the student body to continue demonstrations and protests.

    Khalil, a green-card holder who is in custody in Louisiana as his case moves through the courts, was detained on 8 March. The Trump administration is seeking to deport him under a provision in federal immigration law that permits the state department to deport non-citizens considered to be a threat to US foreign policy.

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  • Why Trump’s brutal crackdown on free speech is unprecedented in the US

    Experts says rounding up protesters and taking control from universities goes beyond McCarthy’s witch-hunts

    Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would crack down against pro-Palestinian student protesters.

    Over the past few weeks, he has forcefully followed through.

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  • ‘Canary in the coalmine of totalitarianism’: how Columbia went from a home for Edward Said to a punching bag for Trump

    The university had a history of being a home for cutting-edge discourse on Palestine – until it capitulated to the administration’s demands

    Last week, Columbia University announced that it would cave to demands by the Trump administration and adopt sweeping measures against pro-Palestinian activity on campus, including new restrictions on protest and the takeover of an academic department from faculty control.

    The news sent shock waves across higher education institutions nationwide for what appeared a stunning capitulation to attacks on academic freedom and the independence of the department of Middle Eastern, south Asian and African studies, or Mesaas, which became a scapegoat for what the administration viewed as a pro-Palestinian climate on campus. It was also a remarkable turn of events for a university that had for years been a home for cutting-edge academic discourse on Palestine, beginning with the scholarship of Edward Said, a leading Palestinian intellectual.

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  • Tufts student detained by Ice may not be deported without court order, judge rules

    Rümeysa Öztürk was taken from street by masked, plainclothes officers in a Boston-area suburb on Tuesday

    A Tufts University student who was detained by US immigration authorities this week, in an arrest that caused widespread outrage, cannot be deported without a court order, a US judge ordered on Friday.

    Rümeysa Öztürk, 30, was detained by masked, plainclothes officers as she walked in a Boston-area suburb on Tuesday, an incident that was captured on surveillance footage that has since gone viral. Öztürk, who is being threatened with deportation to Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar and doctoral student in the US with a visa.

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