Trump Just Blew up Own Deportation Excuse With Columbia Student Arrest

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has broadly claimed that students who participated in protests opposing the genocide of Palestinians aided in the spread of antisemitism on college campuses, as a justification for the Trump administration revoking their visa status. 

But Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Monday at his citizenship interview in Vermont, strongly condemned antisemitism during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023.

During the interview, Mahdawi was asked about his experience hearing someone say, “Death to Jews” at a pro-Palestine walk-out  at Columbia a month after the massacre on October 7, which launched Israel’s catastrophic military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 50,000 people. 

“I was shocked, and I walked directly to the person, and I told him, ‘You don’t represent us because this is not something that we agree with,’” Mahdawi recounted. 

“And I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, ‘We here, are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong. What this guy has said is clearly antisemitic against Jews.… To be antisemitic is unjust, is unjust. And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” he said. 

Mahdawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank who said he’d seen his best friend killed by Israeli soldiers, was also president of the Columbia Buddhist Club and founder of the Palestinian Student Union. Mahdawi is a green card holder, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia graduate student who was arrested by ICE last month. On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Khalil could be deported because he had endangered U.S. foreign policy. 

Last week, in an op-ed for Fox News, Rubio invoked supposed antisemitism as a reason to crack down on student protesters. 

“In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel, some of these foreign student visitors engaged in antisemitic activities and intimidation of Americans, many who happened to be of the Jewish faith,” Rubio wrote. “These foreigners shut down college campuses for American citizens, harassed Jewish students, blocked highways, and stormed buildings.”

Despite Rubio’s claim that visa revocations targeted students engaged in “antisemitic activities,” the State Department has already admitted that some of its targets don’t fit the bill. 

Before Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed off the street by ICE agents, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity.

Kristi Noem is obsessed with being the face of Homeland Security, and it’s starting to annoy officials across White House agencies.

The Homeland Security secretary is known for her live tweeting of deportation raids and publicity stunts. She’s filmed videos while accompanying ICE on deportation raids in Arizona and on a helicopter ride with the Coast Guard. She often sports an ICE baseball cap, cowboy boots, a bullet-proof vest and always with a full blowout, fake eyelashes, and a $50,000 Rolex watch on her wrist—a desperate attempt to glamorize the White House’s mass deportation plan.

On her first day in office, Noem tweeted about a New York ICE raid (with a photo of herself of course) before the raid was even over, which hindered the element of surprise and pissed off ICE officials, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As the face of national security, Noem seemingly feels the need to be physically part of her department’s (often illegal) deportation efforts, or at least be the spokesperson for them. Following the unlawful deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, many of whom had no criminal record, Noem herself flew to the megaprison where they were being held to film a propaganda video.

“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said from the prison in a video posted on X. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

Her frequent travel means she is pretty much never at her office in Washington, D.C., “which has irritated many at DHS,” sources told the Journal. Her internal credibility is further weakened by the appointment of other officials like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, who control much of the deportation logistics. Noem reportedly can’t handle losing the spotlight in the office (where you’ll find framed photos of her on ICE ride-alongs).

“Noem has grown so distrustful of agency staff that she has started threatening and even administering polygraph tests to people suspected of leaking, including Trump appointees, according to officials familiar with the matter,” the Journal wrote.

Though DHS has deported more than 23,000 people since January under Noem’s leadership, the president is frustrated she’s nowhere near his goal of deporting one million people per year. Add him to the list of people pissed at Kristi Noem.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have been barnstorming the country, holding rallies against oligarchy and the Trump administration. They have drawn large crowds angry at Trump and the GOP, even in areas that strongly support Republicans, by calling out the influence of billionaires in American politics at the expense of everyone else. If their attacks keep landing, their rallies will only grow and build momentum for a long-overdue political revolution.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ignoring the obvious illegality of President Donald Trump’s outrageous request to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

During an interview Monday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked the attorney general whether Trump’s pitch to outsource the imprisonment of U.S. citizens was even legal.

“Now, the president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that megaprison, you know, people that push ladies into subways and hit old ladies with baseball bats to the head. Is that legal to do, is that something you’re allowed to do?” Watters asked.

“Well, Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us the directive to make America safe again,” Bondi replied. “These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows, we’re not gonna let ’em go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it!”

Bondi’s answer is lacking, well, an actual answer—probably because deporting U.S. citizens is not legal. Trump’s plan to exile Americans who are incarcerated to foreign countries not only violates multiple federal codes on the keeping of U.S. prisoners, it would also potentially violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Bondi’s canned answer came just hours after Trump said during a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had specifically asked her to look into the legality of sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador to be imprisoned. Trump made no mention of building additional prisons in the U.S., but said that the U.S. would be willing to financially support the construction of more prisons abroad.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Trump. Bondi must know that committing a “most heinous” crime does not actually disqualify citizens from their legal rights—but when faced with Trump’s despotic plot, the attorney general declined to offer an answer in accordance with U.S. law.

A Department of Homeland Security official on Monday compared Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant whom the Trump administration admitted it deported in error, to Osama bin Laden.

Speaking to Fox News, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Monday that “this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs, home in El Salvador,” referring to Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses.

“He was in our country illegally, he’s from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and oh, the media forgot to mention, he is an MS-13 gang member,” McLaughlin said. “The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, he’s just some Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father, and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”

Abrego Garcia is neither a terrorist nor a member of MS-13. In fact, an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that his life would be in danger if he were to return to El Salvador. In contrast, bin Laden co-founded Al Qaeda, responsible for several terrorist attacks around the world and thousands of deaths, including 2,996 people in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The fact that the Trump administration continues to lie and call Abrego Garcia a gang member and terrorist with no evidence to justify its defiance of a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate his return, is an egregious miscarriage of justice and slander of an innocent man. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of an autistic child. He deserves to return to the U.S., but the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit that it’s wrong.

Next on Donald Trump’s deportation list: “homegrown” criminals.

In a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump praised Bukele’s willingness to imprison the more than 200 immigrants the United States deported to El Salvador, the majority of whom have no criminal record.

The president then gave a terrifying glimpse at the next step in his plans for mass deportation.

“Homegrown criminals are next. Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, confirming that he wants to deport American citizens, a move that would violate the Constitution and test the courts more than ever before.

Trump and Bukele’s meeting comes just weeks after the U.S. deported more than 200 people to El Salvador who the administration claimed were criminals or members of Salvadoran gang MS-13.* In reality, most of them do not have criminal records, nor do they have any proven gang affiliation. They are now being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a megaprison notorious for human rights abuses.

As he joked with the man who is notorious for the mass imprisonment of his own people, Trump told Bukele CECOT isn’t big enough to hold everyone he plans to deport.

“You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough,” Trump told Bukele as the Oval Office erupted in laughter. On the same day, the president told reporters he plans to deport as many people as possible to El Salvador, where Bukele will welcome them with open arms.

*  This sentence has been updated with the correct origins of MS-13.

An immigration attorney was surprised to receive a notice from the Department of Homeland Security instructing an immediate departure from the United States that was addressed to her—not one of her clients—especially considering the fact that she is a U.S. citizen.

Nicole Micheroni received a notice, which appeared to be delivered by email from a Customs and Border Protection DHS account, alerting her that the “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole.”

Micheroni, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, is not in the United States on parole.

“If you do not depart the country immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States,” the notice warned.

Micheroni told NBC10 Boston that “at first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine.”

She noted that while the language was “very threatening” and the email looked “kind of like a sketchy spam email,” it was the real thing.

“It doesn’t look like an official government notice, but it is,” she said.

Micheroni told The Boston Globe that in the 12 years she’d been an immigration attorney, she had never seen immigration parole terminated by email.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University, told the Globe that the DHS had recently put out a wave of parole termination notices via email, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to get immigrants to self-deport.

In a statement to NBC10 Boston, the DHS said that “CBP used the known email addresses of the alien to send notifications. If a non-personal email—such as an American citizen contact—was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients. CBP is monitoring communications and will address any issues on a case-by-case basis.”

A senior DHS official said that it was possible that one of her clients had entered Micheroni’s information by mistake.

“I think it’s really scary this is going on,” Micheroni said. “I think it says they’re not being careful.”

Micheroni’s fears aren’t unfounded: It’s clear that the Trump administration is not being careful. The Trump administration is attempting to abandon a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month, due to an “administrative error.” And on Monday, Donald Trump revealed that he’d asked his attorney general to look into implementing his threat to banish U.S. citizens to foreign gulags—which is entirely illegal.

Despite a court order, Donald Trump is still refusing to allow journalists from the Associated Press into the White House press pool.

On Monday, the AP was barred from the White House to cover Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s meeting with Trump, and issued a statement saying, “Our journalists were blocked from the Oval Office today. We expect the White House to restore AP’s participation in the pool as of today, as provided in the injunction order.”

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the president couldn’t bar the AP from presidential events, saying, “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

Trump barred the AP in February from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news agency refused to adopt Trump’s unilateral name change of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” The AP responded by suing three administration officials on the grounds that the White House was violating the Constitution’s free press protections by trying to dictate the AP’s language.

The president’s refusal to allow the AP access to the White House on Monday escalates the matter further, as the organization would have to seek further redress in court. It’s the latest example of Trump’s attempts to intimidate and force media organizations to bend to his will, be it threatening legal action through the FCC or defamation lawsuits, or taking the unprecedented move of wresting control of the press pool away from the White House Correspondents’ Association.

The administration is already defying larger court orders, such as those against its immigration practices, with nothing seemingly compelling it to follow the law, creating a constitutional crisis. This move against the AP is a direct assault on the First Amendment, and, barring any sort of penalty against the Trump administration, is a major blow to free speech and freedom of the press in America.

An American university is finally standing up to Donald Trump’s egregious demands, amid a flurry of schools spinelessly bending to the president’s will in recent weeks.

Harvard University announced Monday it will not comply with the White House’s demands that it dismantle diversity programming and limit student protests, putting $9 billion in federal funding at risk.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” University President Alan Garber said in a statement.

On Friday, the university received a letter from the Department of Education detailing changes it deemed necessary to foster an “environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor,” worthy of maintaining a “financial relationship with the federal government.” The demands included discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, reforming its admissions process for international students, and dismantling programs with “egregious records of antisemitism,” among others. The letter came two weeks after three federal agencies announced a review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge,” Garber said in his statement.

Harvard’s audit is part of Trump’s larger crackdown on postsecondary institutions and academic freedom, from funding cuts to deporting international students and banning DEI initiatives.

A number of universities have crumbled under Trump’s pressure, and fast. Columbia University unfairly expelled students involved in pro-Palestine protests and agreed to policy changes in an attempt to regain about $400 million in funding. Ohio State University closed its DEI programs, the University of Iowa eliminated housing specifically designated for Black students, Latinx students, and LGBTQ students, and the University of Pennsylvania has erased any reference to DEI or affirmative action from its websites.

But the country’s oldest postsecondary institution, which has long been criticized for its questionable endowment investments and lack of diversity, is refusing to crumble—hopefully a catalyst for other universities to grow a spine and do the same.

The Trump administration used a citizenship interview as a pretext to arrest a Columbia University student of Palestinian descent.

Mohsen K. Mahdawi, a U.S. permanent resident who has lived in the country for 10 years, showed up to what he thought was his citizenship interview Monday at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont. Instead, he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has begun deportation proceedings.

The Columbia University student was a leader in the school’s protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Mahdawi was fearful of being deported, even before his friend, Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested last month by federal immigration agents.

Mahdawi was included on a list of students the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar gave to the Trump administration in the hopes that they would be deported. Betar and the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU also posted on social media multiple times about Mahdawi, tagging law enforcement agencies on each post.

After asking university officials to find him a safe place to live where he wouldn’t be detained by ICE, and receiving no response, Mahdawi went into hiding before receiving an email notifying him of a citizenship interview at the UCSIS office earlier this month. Mahdawi worried that it was a trap, and contacted his elected representatives in Vermont: Representative Becca Balint and Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch.

All three promised to remain on standby pending Mahdawi’s status after the interview, with Welch speaking to Mahdawi directly. In the end, it was a trap, and Mahdawi was detained with the same obscure immigration law used to detain Khalil and several other international students, including permanent residents: that their presence in the U.S. is a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi told The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”

It’s particularly cruel to claim to offer citizenship to an immigrant, only to use it as a ruse to deport them over free speech issues. Mahdawi has not been charged with a crime, and pending his attorneys’ habeas corpus petition, is now in ICE custody. For this administration, his crime appears to be being a Palestinian student who used his right to free speech.