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Cal State San Marcos students, faculty walk out in protest of CSU system – NewsBreak
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Students and faculty at Cal State San Marcos walked out of classes Monday morning to protest the management of the California State University system.
Trump Targets Columbian Student Yunseo Chung
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Moustafa Bayoumi
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The Trump administration is now targeting Yunseo Chung, a lawful permanent resident of the USA and a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, for her constitutionally protected speech. You could be next.
Chung is a junior at Columbia University. She was the valedictorian at her high school, has lived in the United States since she was 7 years old, and is an academically gifted student. She was one of hundreds of Columbia students who protested Israel's brutality in Gaza, considered a genocide by many scholars of genocide, international human right organizations, and ordinary people everywhere.
Chung was not a leader of the Columbia protests nor was she an identifiable face of the protests. She was a student, like hundreds of others (including those leading the protests), who was expressing a political opinion. For that reason, the Trump administration has informed her that, with no due process, her lawful permanent resident status was being "revoked." Now, they're attempting to deport this 21-year-old student who, even according to the government, has committed no crime. She's basically gone into hiding from the government thugs who are looking for her in unmarked vans. What kind of country have we become?
Lawyers at CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York, are suing the government to stop her deportation. The Feds searched her Columbia University dorm, looking for Chung, and were ready to charge anyone who helped her evade this blatantly political arrest by ICE agents with the crime of "harboring."
The Trump administration wants all these cases to get as much publicity as possible. The administration seems to believe that a message is being sent. They're going after a gifted 21-year-old student who had the audacity to participate in political protest. By targeting her, the administration must believe they're looking tough (though it's only in the way that punching down could ever be considered "tough"). Moreover, they appear to be trying to intimidate others into censoring their own speech. The Trump administration wants to scare people into silence.
But we should take away at least two lessons from this latest outrage. One: they are targeting people like Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Ranjani Srinivasan, Momodou Taal, Rasha Alawieh, and now Yunseo Chung. Notice anything? The targeting of people of color by this white supremacist administration has never been clearer.
Two: the idea that these actions will scare people into their silence will, I'm certain, backfire. The American people are seeing more than ever the lawless nature of this government. Such actions by the Trump administration should and will bring more people to the realization that governments lie to them and that this government must be opposed, if only out of direct self-interest of being able to have a political opinion in this country. That's what's now at stake.
Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation
Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Immigration agents visited residences looking for her.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/nyregion/columbia-student-ice-suit-yunseo-chung.html?smid=nytcore-ios-…
Yunseo Chung, wearing a red sweater and gold necklace and earbuds, smiles.
Yunseo Chung moved to the United States with her family from South Korea when she was 7 years old and was valedictorian of her high school. Credit…CLEAR
Jonah E. Bromwich.pngHamed Aleaziz.png
By Jonah E. Bromwich and Hamed Aleaziz
Published March 24, 2025
Updated March 25, 2025, 8:01 a.m. ET
A 21-year-old Columbia University student who has lived in the United States since she was a child sued President Trump and other high-ranking administration officials on Monday after immigration officials tried to arrest and deport her.
The student, Yunseo Chung, is a legal permanent resident and junior who has participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school. The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism.
Administration officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, cited the same rationale in explaining the arrest this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of the university and permanent resident who is being held in Louisiana.
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Read the lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of illegally targeting a second Columbia student for deportation.
Unlike Mr. Khalil, Ms. Chung does not appear to have been a prominent figure in the demonstrations that shook the school last year. But she was one of several students arrested this year in connection with a protest at Barnard College.
Ms. Chung, a high school valedictorian who moved to the United States with her family from South Korea when she was 7, has not been detained by ICE. She remains in the country, but her lawyers would not comment on her whereabouts.
Her lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan shows the extensive, if so far unsuccessful, efforts by U.S. immigration officials to arrest her. Agents historically prefer to pick up immigrants in jail or prisons. Other types of arrests are more difficult, often requiring hours of research, surveillance and other investigative resources.
But federal agents believed that those efforts were merited in the case of Ms. Chung, according to her lawyers at CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials visited several residences, called for help from federal prosecutors and searched Ms. Chung’s university housing on March 13.
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The involvement of federal prosecutors was particularly notable. According to Ms. Chung’s lawsuit, agents apparently seeking her searched two residences on the Columbia campus with warrants that cited a criminal law known as the harboring statute, aimed at those who give shelter to noncitizens present in the United States illegally.
That signaled that the searches were related to a broader criminal investigation by federal prosecutors into Columbia University. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has said that the school is under investigation “for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus.”
Operating under the aegis of a federal investigation could signal a new tactic. ICE officers and agents often are unable to arrest their targets because they don’t answer the door, and an administrative warrant does not provide agents access to a home.
The Trump administration has prioritized the detention of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, particularly those who are not legal residents. They have sought the arrest of Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies at Cornell University, and Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia University student who left the country for Canada after learning that her student visa had been revoked.
But the attempted arrest of Ms. Chung, like the detention of Mr. Khalil, appears to be part of a new front in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — targeting immigrants who are farther along in their paths to citizenship.
In their lawsuit, Ms. Chung’s lawyers asked that a judge bar the government from taking enforcement action against Ms. Chung or from detaining her, transferring her to another location or removing her from the United States. They also asked the judge to bar the government from targeting any noncitizen for deportation based on constitutionally protected speech and pro-Palestinian advocacy.
One of Ms. Chung’s lawyers, Naz Ahmad, said that the administration’s “efforts to punish and suppress speech it disagrees with smack of McCarthyism.”
“Like many thousands of students nationwide, Yunseo raised her voice against what is happening in Gaza and in support of fellow students facing unfair discipline,” said Ms. Ahmad, a co-director of CLEAR. “It can’t be the case that a straight-A student who has lived here most of her life can be whisked away and potentially deported, all because she dares to speak up.”
A senior press representative for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Ms. Chung had “engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by N.Y.P.D. during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College. She is being sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws.”
The statement added that Ms. Chung would have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge and said that ICE would “investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.”
Press representatives for the secretary of state and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Chung, who majors in English and gender studies, has participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations since last year. Her lawyers say that she did not speak to reporters, negotiate on behalf of student demonstrators, or in any other way take a leadership position.
She was, however, accused by the university of joining other students in posting fliers that pictured members of the board of trustees with the phrase “wanted for complicity in genocide.” According to the lawsuit, the school did not find that Ms. Chung had violated any of its “applicable policies.”
The dizzying sequence of events that appears to have prompted ICE agents to show up at her house appears to have begun this month.
On March 5, Ms. Chung protested outside a Barnard College building where pro-Palestinian student demonstrators were holding a sit-in. She was arrested by police officers, given a desk appearance ticket on the misdemeanor charge of obstructing governmental administration and released.
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Uniformed police gather outside a protest site at Barnard College..webp
Ms. Chung was arrested in a protest at Barnard College. The Trump administration has prioritized the detention of students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.Credit…Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
Four days later — and the day after Mr. Khalil was arrested — immigration officials appeared at the home of Ms. Chung’s parents.
Around that time, according to the lawsuit, someone identifying herself as “Audrey with the police” texted Ms. Chung. When a lawyer for Ms. Chung called the number, the woman said that she was an agent with ICE, that the State Department was free to revoke Ms. Chung’s residency status and that there was an administrative warrant for her arrest.
At the same time, Columbia University’s public safety office emailed Ms. Chung to inform her that the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan had been in touch, repeating that ICE officials were seeking Ms. Chung’s arrest.
On March 10, Perry Carbone, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor’s office, told Ms. Ahmad, Ms. Chung’s attorney, that the secretary of state, Mr. Rubio, had revoked Ms. Chung’s visa. Ms. Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Carbone responded that Mr. Rubio had “revoked that” as well.
The conversation echoed an exchange between Mr. Khalil’s lawyers and the immigration agents who arrested him and who did not initially appear to be aware of his residency status.
After his arrest, Mr. Khalil was swiftly transferred, first to New Jersey and ultimately to Louisiana, where he has been detained since. The statute that the Trump administration used to justify his detention and Ms. Chung’s potential deportation says that the secretary of state can move against noncitizens whose presence he has reasonable grounds to believe threatens the country’s foreign policy agenda. Homeland security officials have since added other allegations against Mr. Khalil.
Mr. Rubio’s memo targeting Mr. Khalil also included Ms. Chung’s name, according to a person with knowledge of its contents.
In Ms. Chung’s lawsuit, her lawyers accused the government of obtaining warrants “under false pretenses,” suggesting that the search under the harboring statute was merely a pretext for an attempt to detain Ms. Chung and another student whom the suit did not name. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on the claims involving the office and Mr. Carbone.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region, with a focus on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area's federal and state courts.More about Jonah E. Bromwich
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy.More about Hamed Aleaziz
Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation
www.nytimes.com
Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Immigration agents visited residences looking for her.
The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists begun before Trump’s return to the White House is being expedited.
scheerpost.com/2025/03/24/chris-hedges-surrendering-to-authoritarianism/
Surrendering to Authoritarianism
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.
Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.
The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.
These institutions of privilege I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.
Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism graduated from Harvard.
Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.
“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.
“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:
"And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia which is the largest residential landlord in New York City as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all."
You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.
Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses in the case of Columbia three times to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.
Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.
The video shot by his wife on March 8 of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.
Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.
“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”
James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.
Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.
“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.
And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists begun before Trump’s return to the White House is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.
Chris Hedges: Surrendering to Authoritarianism
scheerpost.com
Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.
Trump’s assault on the rule of law: ‘the speed and intent is remarkable’ The US president is testing constitutional limits and challenging the courts to stop him. Who will blink first?
3/21/25
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Trump has faced little scrutiny from an obedient Congress, while the other branch of government, the judiciary, is being severely tested © Carolina Vargas/FT Montage/Bloomberg/Getty/Reuters
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Trump’s assault on the rule of law: ‘the speed and intent is remarkable’ on linkedin (opens in a new window) Save current progress 0% Edward Luce in Washington Published MAR 21 2025 970 Print this page Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world “He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Donald Trump posted last month, in a quip attributed to Napoleon. Trump has been acting on that maxim from day one. But over the past week his assault on the judiciary has intensified. Having been blocked from deporting more than 200 Venezuelan alleged gangsters, federal agents went ahead with the flights anyway. When the judge, James Boasberg, asked Department of Justice lawyers to explain that seeming disregard for the ruling, Trump called him a “radical left lunatic” and demanded his impeachment. His rhetoric is so out of the ordinary that John Roberts, US Supreme Court chief justice, felt obliged on Tuesday to point out that such threats were “not appropriate”, though he did not specify from whom. Whether Trump takes Roberts’s admonition seriously — he was quick to observe that he was not named — will soon be apparent. Yet his judicial showdown is only one of many “not appropriate” lunges at the US system’s jugular with a ferocity that has taken even pessimists by surprise. Among these are Trump’s declaration of war on universities — notably Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, with more in the pipeline; his purge of oversight officials and inspectors from the executive branch, including from the FBI and the Pentagon; and his bypassing of Congress’s fiscal monopoly by allowing his super-powered tsar, Elon Musk, to seize control of the state’s cash spigots and databases. In addition to throwing dozens of agencies into turmoil, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has also dismantled USAID and is targeting the Department of Education. The courts can barely keep up. Trump officials have stonewalled multiple court restraining orders, and he still plans to punish the “scum” who investigated him — a pledge he repeated earlier this month in a speech he gave inside the justice department. Protesters gather outside DC Central Detention Facility in Washington in late January. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with storming the Capitol in 2021 © Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images Trump’s moves, which started on day one with his pardoning of roughly 1,500 people jailed for storming Capitol Hill four years ago, and commuting the terms of the hardest core offenders, have ticked nearly every box on the scholarly checklist of democratic backsliding. But his alacrity has also cast the system’s defenders into disarray. “This is moving a lot faster than any of us anticipated,” says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard scholar and co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die. The capture of state institutions that took strongmen like Viktor Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan many years to accomplish, “Trump is trying to pull off in months”. Moreover, a hostile seizure of the key government organs has never been tried in a wealthy and established democracy like America, he says. “Trump’s speed and intent is remarkable. Even when they happen slowly, such all-out assaults are hard to stop.” Trump has been fortunate to start with an obedient Congress, America’s first branch of government. The release of the so-called “J6 hostages” set the tone. Since their aim had been to “hang Mike Pence”, Trump’s then vice-president, the message was stark. Only loyalty can buy you safety. The Republican-controlled Senate dutifully confirmed every Trump nominee, including several whose conduct and record would have caused their rapid ejection in any other era. The US now has, among others, a health secretary who doubts the efficacy of vaccines, an FBI director who has vowed lawfare on Trump’s enemies and a director of national intelligence accused of parroting Kremlin propaganda. Almost no Republicans objected when Trump stripped security protections from erstwhile officials, including Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, John Bolton, a former national security adviser, and Brian Hook, his ex-Iran envoy. The FBI says each are on an Iranian hit list. “It’s pure fear and cowardice,” says Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican Congressman who served on the committee that investigated the January 6 assault and who Trump has threatened with arrest. “I’ve lost friends and some family over it. A former [air force] co-pilot told me he was ashamed to have been in combat with me. But it’s outweighed by the fact that I can look at myself in the mirror.” I’ve lost friends and some family over [serving on a committee investigating the January 6 assault]. But it’s outweighed by the fact I can look at myself in the mirror Not once, meanwhile, has Congress called Musk to testify about the authority or actions of Doge. “Congress . . . has been disembowelled,” says Don Kettl, former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. “He can count on doing pretty much whatever he wants without resistance from Capitol Hill.” Though Musk’s tool is the chainsaw, not a scalpel, and his approval rating has plummeted, he knows where the power lies. Trump may have packed the “power ministries” of law enforcement, the military and intelligence with loyalists, but his boldest power grab is being spearheaded by Doge. “The takeover of the federal payments and personnel systems was a genius move,” says Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “Doge shows that you don’t need tanks in the street if your pension or grant has suddenly gone missing. If you can eliminate or control the entire government’s ability to hire and fire and issue payments and not issue payments, then you’ve done it. Who needs an army?” Trump’s legal targets have also been shrewdly chosen. One of Columbia’s graduates, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested earlier this month for allegedly aiding terrorists by organising protests where pro-Hamas literature was handed out. As a Muslim and an Arab, Khalil’s plight is unlikely to spark public outpourings. Yet as a green card holder, his defeat in court would give Trump licence to deport any permanent resident on whatever grounds he chose. US citizens would not be immune. In recent weeks, several arriving green card holders and tourists have been incarcerated for days on petty bureaucratic grounds. “Thought has gone into who to target first,” says Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. “If you read the executive orders and memos there is a lot of creative thinking in this White House and a determined legal machinery to see this through.” Demonstrators attend a protest in Times Square this month after the arrest by US immigration agents of Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University © Eduardo Munoz/Reuters Universities are no darlings of public affection. Having been the originators of progressive America’s speech orthodoxy, they are also on weaker ground to push back against Trump’s speech-policing agenda. A move by Trump to tax the Ivy League’s bulging endowments — something he is considering — would be popular with large swaths of America. “Higher education has made itself an attractive weak target for Trump to advance his loathsome and extra-lawful approach,” says Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and US Treasury secretary. “I fear Trump, in the authoritarian way, is looking for grounds to prosecute and chill institutions whose constituents oppose his methods and policies and where there is a strong capacity to communicate.” When Trump wants an institution closed, it happens fast. This past week, the Voice of America was dismantled after more than 80 years. Most of Radio Free Asia employees were suspended. National Public Radio is also in the White House’s sights. “I’m critical of universities and have tried not to add to the hyperventilation, but it’s important to note that almost anything can get worse,” Summers adds. “I did not envision two months ago the disregard for due process and savagery that we’re seeing.” Two questions keep recurring in Washington. How much further will Trump go? And why is there such little pushback from his opponents? On the first, there are plenty of shoes yet to drop. Trump has mostly confined his deportations to test cases, rather than sweeping communities up en masse as his supporters had hoped he might. “It turns out it’s not that easy to deport people,” says Kettl. “It can take several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents to track down one or two individuals.” Trump recently said he had the authority to use the US military for future round ups and is poised to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops on the southern border and on America’s streets. Insiders say that his purge of senior brass is still in its early stages. Trump’s oft-recited revenge plans against his enemies are yet to bear fruit, although his attorney-general, Pam Bondi, has become increasingly belligerent in her rhetoric against legal norms. Having only recently been confirmed, the FBI director Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, have yet to initiate any vengeful probes, though they are widely expected to do so soon. Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to address Congress earlier this month. Roberts has pointed out that threats to the judiciary are ‘not appropriate’ © Win McNamee/AFP/Getty Images Nor has Trump yet moved on the US Federal Reserve, which he has often mused about bringing under White House control. How hard Trump feels able to push will ultimately depend on how much resistance he meets. Democrats, chief executives and civic leaders are conspicuously betting that the courts will erect roadblocks. Yet the most fateful questions would likely be heard by the same Supreme Court that issued last year’s sweeping 6-3 ruling that granted Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. Before his congressional address this month, Trump told Roberts, “Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” Relying on judges is a mistake. Democrats . . . are overinvested in the law and underinvested in the information space The Democratic Party, lacking leadership and in a fractious mood, is perhaps investing the most faith in the law. But Trump’s appetite to play hardball keeps growing. In the past 10 days, he has stripped clearances and contracts from firms that have advised anyone on his enemies list. One such law firm, Perkins Coie, says it has suffered an exodus of corporate clients. Another, Paul Weiss, was reinstated only after agreeing to give his administration $40mn in pro bono advice. Dissenting judges, meanwhile, are branded as anti-national. “Relying on judges is a mistake,” says Brooks of Georgetown University. “Democrats . . . are overinvested in the law and underinvested in the information space.” Much like his trade tactics, Trump doubles or quadruples retaliatory threats whenever a judge pauses one of his actions. But he has not yet unequivocally refused to comply with an order. “It’s a game of chicken,” Brooks says. Trump’s alter ego, Musk, last month said that “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy”. The president’s closest observers, including some Republicans, agree there are few inner limits on what he might do. Trump is an irresistible force yet to meet an immovable object. “We have too much faith in what is ultimately a partisan process — the law,” says Moynihan of the University of Michigan. “People are hoping that Roberts and one other conservative will rule against the same party — Trump’s party — that put them on the court.” As others have remarked, however, hope is not a strategy — still less so against a figure as unbound as Trump.
Trump’s assault on the rule of law: ‘the speed and intent is remarkable’
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The US president is testing constitutional limits and challenging the courts to stop him. Who will blink first?www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-19/uc-eliminates-diversity-statement-requirement-faculty…
As Trump attacks DEI, UC bans ‘diversity statements’ in faculty hiring
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The decision ends a UC practice requiring job applicants to submit written testimonials about how they have worked to enhance diversity.www.slj.com/story/Federal-Judge-Rules-Colorado-District-Must-Return-Books-Shelves-Censorship-News…
Federal Judge Rules Colorado District Must Return Books to Shelves | Censorship News
www.slj.com
The judge ruled in favor of the ACLU of Colorado, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of two students in the Elizabeth School District; Texas bill that gives school boards authority over school librar…www.mprnews.org/story/2025/03/13/minnesota-sues-to-halt-dismantling-of-us-education-department?fb…
Minnesota, 21 other states sue to halt dismantling of U.S. Education Department
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The lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts argues dismantling the federal Department of Education is unconstitutional and usurps congressional authority. It seeks a court order to halt the sh…www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/columbia-university-funding-trump-demands
Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration
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Measures include empowering security officers to arrest people, and reassigning control of Middle East departmentwww.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cornell-student-protester-told-to-surrender-to-ice-as-he-asks-judge-to-…
Cornell student protester told to surrender to ICE as he asks judge to block deportation
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A Cornell graduate student who has been a prominent voice at pro-Palestinian protests — and who faced intense criticism for delaring “glory to the resistance!” after the deadly Hamas attack on I…www.politico.com/news/2025/03/10/usda-cancels-local-food-purchasing-for-schools-food-banks-002227…
USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks
www.politico.com
States have been notified that they will not receive 2025 funding for schools to buy food from nearby farms.