United States | News & Politics

In other immigration news, The Washington Post is reporting the IRS is close to agreeing to a deal to give addresses and other personal information about suspected undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. One former IRS official told the Post, “It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes.”

In other related news, DHS has shut down three internal watchdog agencies that advocated for immigrants, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27411689

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cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/37793533

Millions of unmoored and undocumented people are being punished at an accelerated pace for the crime of having enriched the wealthiest country on Earth

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The Marine Corps is in the process of taking a family readiness program away from paid civilians and placing its responsibilities in the hands of Marines, a service spokesperson confirmed to Military.com on Thursday.

The Unit, Personal and Family Readiness Program, or UPFRP, was originally developed in 2007 to keep up with constant deployments during the Global War on Terrorism, according to a service message from 2018, and was designed to provide support for service members and their families during the deployments and other challenges that come with military life.

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Hill Air Force Base in Utah has closed one of its two day care centers, harming quality of life for some service members, civilian employees and their families following hiring freezes ordered by President Donald Trump's administration.

Earlier this month, Military.com first reported that Hill -- the service's second-largest base by population and size -- had begun warning certain families that it would likely have to close one of its child development centers, or CDCs, due to a lack of staffing exacerbated, in part, by Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk's push to trim the size of the federal workforce.

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Veterans who were fired from the federal workforce in the wave of the Trump administration job cuts called their dismissals a betrayal of their service to the nation in uniform and in the civil service, according to a report from the Disabled American Veterans service organization. In video statements released Monday by the DAV, nine of the more than 80 veterans -- some of them disabled and some from the veterans community at large -- said in response to the DAV's "Protect Veterans" campaign, an effort to showcase the plight of fired veterans, that they were blindsided by their terminations, which have been directed by billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

On Friday night, President Trump issued a memo directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to punish law firms and lawyers that file what the administration views as frivolous or unreasonable lawsuits against the federal government. The memo is widely seen as a way to target immigration lawyers. Former Justice Department official Vanita Gupta said the memo “attacks the very foundations of our legal system by threatening and intimidating litigants who aim to hold our government accountable to the law and the Constitution.”

The new book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by The New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich chronicles an ongoing campaign by the wealthy and powerful to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which in 1964 established bedrock protections against spurious defamation and libel cases in the U.S. legal system. By “subject[ing] people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process,” those who can afford to pay for expensive and threatening defamation lawsuits can silence any public criticism and suppress others’ rights to free speech, says Enrich. “It has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind.”

A federal judge on Friday blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting Jeanette Vizguerra, a well-known immigrant rights activist and mother of four, who was detained in Denver last Monday. U.S. Judge Nina Wang’s order also prevents federal authorities from transferring Vizguerra out of Colorado and gave the government a deadline of today to demonstrate why Vizguerra should not be released.

The University of Pennsylvania is the latest school to be targeted by the Trump administration, which announced it’s suspending $175 million in federal funding to the Ivy League university as a penalty for allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

We speak with the Brennan Center’s Faiza Patel, who warns the Trump administration is ramping up efforts to target international students and other visitors and immigrants to the United States over pro-Palestinian speech. The State Department has reportedly launched a new effort using artificial intelligence to help identify and revoke visas for people the government deems to be supporting U.S.-designated terrorist groups, based primarily on the individuals’ social media accounts. “Foreign students are running scared,” says Patel. She also notes that while “AI-driven sounds really fancy,” the process is more likely to be a basic keyword search prone to “rudimentary mistakes.”

In more news about Columbia, a judge has transferred Mahmoud Khalil’s case to New Jersey, where it will be overseen by President Biden-appointed Judge Michael Farbiarz. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman cleared the way for Khalil to stay in the U.S. and challenge his arrest and the Trump administration’s attempts to deport him for protesting for Palestinian rights while he was a student at Columbia. Khalil is a permanent U.S. resident. He was arrested in Manhattan but detained in New Jersey when his lawyers filed suit. He was subsequently transferred to an ICE jail in Jena, Louisiana.

The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to target free speech on college campuses and one doctoral student at Cornell University who was involved in pro-Palastinian protests on campus now finds himself targeted for deportation once again. Momodou Taal is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University who is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the Gambia. He was suspended twice last year for joining a demonstration calling on Cornell to divest from Israel and faced deportation until massive protests pressured Cornell to allow him to reenroll, thereby extending his visa. Earlier this month, Taal, along with two U.S. citizens, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s executive orders that target foreign nationals who it claims are national security threats. “I believed I was going to be a target eventually,” says Taal.

An Indian academic pursuing research in the United States has been detained by immigration authorities, sparking concerns over academic freedom and political targeting. Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, was taken into custody outside his home in Virginia by masked agents.

Suri is an Indian national and a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University’s Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service. His academic research focused on peacebuilding and state-building in conflict zones, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon says Columbia University is on track to regain its federal funding after the Ivy League institution yielded to the Trump administration’s demands on Friday. The demands include banning face masks on campus, hiring 36 new security officers with greater power to arrest and crack down on students and appointing a “senior vice provost” to oversee the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies. Students say they will continue to fight for Palestinian rights and for Columbia to divest from Israel, but free speech experts are sounding the alarm. “We have no idea what comes next, but groveling before a bully, we all know, just encourages the bully,” says Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27638455

The Intercept Briefing March 24 2025, 6:00 a.m.

"“Anything that shows solidarity of Palestine is being mischaracterized quite erroneously as antisemitism. That’s the way in which they are trying to get us to stop speaking about Palestine,” says Momodou Taal, a Cornell University graduate student and activist now facing deportation after challenging the Trump administration in court.

The risks of political speech have escalated dramatically for international students like Taal. He spoke to The Intercept Briefing yesterday, underscoring the chilling reality he and his peers now face. “It’s not just that you might get kicked out of school or suspended,” says Taal, “but you are threatened with deportation and ICE custody now. That’s what’s at stake here.” "