Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.
She writes:
Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?
The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.
The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.
Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.
Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)
The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.
As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.
It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability?
It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.
Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.
Trump is following through on his frequent threats to punish anyone who crossed him in the past. He recently ordered his compliant Attorney General to investigate two men who were critical of him during his first term. Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, wrote about the tyrannical nature of this action and about Pam Bondi’s willingness to do whatever he wants.
Donald Trump’s presidential payback tour rages on, and now it’s personal. It’s one thing to target multi-billion dollar law firms, universities, and media outlets for organizational retribution; those efforts, aimed at stifling and punishing any criticism or dissent, are reprehensible in their own right. But now Trump is going after individual private citizens, using the might of the Executive Branch to potentially throw his detractors in prison.
In a pair of official proclamations – rendered no less unhinged by the use of official fonts and White House letterhead – Trump identifies two targets who worked in the federal government during his first tenure and dared to speak out publicly against him. First: Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from 2018 to 2020 and made headlines when he publicly contradicted Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. For this act of heretical truth-telling, Trump labels Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor” – whatever the hell that means – who poses grave “risks” to the American public.
And then there’s Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official who publicly criticized the President in an anonymous book and various media appearances. Taylor, like Krebs, purportedly poses “risks” to the United States, is a “bad-faith actor” (though apparently not a significant one like Krebs) and “stoked dissension” with his public commentary.
Are you scared? Don’t you fear the “risks” posed by these two monsters?
True to the form he has displayed when going after disfavored law firms, Trump hits below the belt. The President orders security clearances stripped not only from Krebs and Taylor but also from everyone who works with them (Krebs at a private cybersecurity firm, Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania). He’s punishing his targets – plus their employers and colleagues, First Amendment freedom of association be darned.
It gets worse. In a separate set of orders, Trump directed the Attorney General to open criminal investigations of Krebs and Taylor. Notably absent from the orders is any plausible notion that either might have committed a federal crime. This hardly needs to be said, but it’s not a federal crime to be a “bad-faith actor,” to “stoke dissension,” or even to be a “wise guy,” as Trump called Krebs from the Oval Office.
The next move is Pam Bondi’s – and we know how this will go.
Any reasonable, ethical attorney general would follow the bedrock principle that a prosecutor must have “predication” – some kernel of fact on which to believe a crime might have been committed – to open a criminal investigation. The bar is low, but it serves the vital purpose of preventing precisely the baseless retributive inquests that Trump has now ordered up. In observance of this foundational precept, even Bill Barr – the subject of sharp criticism in my first book, Hatchet Man – generally ignored Trump’s public pleas for the arrests of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others. Like the exhausted parent of an unruly toddler, Barr would mostly sit back and let the tantrum pass.
Don’t count on Bondi taking the same course of passive resistance to the President. She has already shown her true colors, and they’re whatever shade Trump pleases. For example, despite the distinct possibility of criminality by top administration officials around the Signal scandal, the AG refused even to investigate. Instead, she decreed – after zero inquiry, with zero evidence – that information about military attack plans was somehow not classified, and that nobody had acted recklessly. Case closed, no inquiry needed.
Bondi no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. She’s in the bag for Trump. The question now is whether she’ll cross the line that even Barr, her crooked predecessor, would not, and use the Justice Department’s staggering investigative power as an offensive weapon.
Even if DOJ investigates but concludes it cannot bring a criminal charge, the threat to Krebs and Taylor is real. Any criminal inquiry takes an enormous toll on its subject; subpoenas fly, friends and colleagues get pulled into the grand jury, phones get seized and searched, legal costs mount, professional reputations suffer, personal ties fray. Ask anyone who has been investigated by the Justice Department but not indicted. They’ll tell you it’s a nightmare.
If Bondi does somehow convince a grand jury to indict somebody for something, Trump has unwittingly handed both Krebs and Taylor a potent defense: selective prosecution, which applies where an individual has been singled out for improper purposes. Exhibit A (for the defense): Trump’s own grand proclamations, which openly confess to his personal and political motives for ordering a Justice Department inquiry. Selective prosecution defenses rarely succeed, often because prosecutors typically don’t commit their improper motives to paper. But this would be the rare case where the evidence is so plain – it’s on White House letterhead, signed by the President – that a judge could hardly overlook it.
Trump has long made a habit of threatening his opponents with criminal prosecution through social media posts and by spontaneous outbursts from the lectern. Until now, it was mostly bluster, a public form of scream therapy for the capricious commander-in-chief. But now it’s in writing, from the president to the attorney general, who typically jumps to attention to serve whatever suits the boss, prosecutorial standards be darned. Trump’s dark fantasies are coming to life.
Elie Honig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8.5 years and as the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice at the Office of Attorney General for the State of New Jersey for 5.5 years. He is currently a legal Analyst for CNN and Executive Director at Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities
Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of the mega-bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, will speak at Wellesley College on April 15 at Wellesley College at 4 p.m. in the Jewett Arts Center. Admission is free.
Please mark the date on your calendar. She is speaking in a lecture series that I endowed several years ago. The lecture will be available eventually on the archive website of the College.
The book, which was a sensation upon its publication for its depiction of life under the mullahs, has recently been made into a film.
This review of the film was published by The Atlantic and written by Arash Azizi. At present, the film can be seen only at film festivals.
He wrote:
The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.
Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.
Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.
Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.
When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.
More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”
The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.
In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.
The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.
The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.
In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.
The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.
In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.
Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)
The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”
This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.
The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.
In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…
It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.
As a native Texan and a graduate of the Houston Independent School District, I join my fellow Texans in demanding that the state fund its public schools.
Governor Abbott received millions of dollars from out-of-state billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man in all Pennsylvania, to defeat anti-voucher rural Republicans, who put their constituents first. Abbott makes no pretense: he wants vouchers to subsidize the 10 percent in private schools. He doesn’t care about the students in public schools.
Ninety percent of the students in Texas attend public schools. Yet hard-hearted Governor Greg Abbott wants the legislature to pass vouchers, which will be used overwhelmingly by students already enrolled in private schools. I don’t think Governor Abbott has ever visited a public school but he has paid visits to many Christian schools.
Vouchers are welfare for the affluent. They don’t improve achievement for those who use them, nor do they improve achievement for those who don’t.
Most of the children in public schools are Black and Brown. Most of the legislators are White. Is there a clue in that asymmetry?
Would it be too much to ask the legislators to think of the state’s future? It is in the public schools.
Join the rally on Saturday April 5 at the State Capitol.
Dear Superintendents and Trustees,
Save Texas Schools, a non-partisan coalition of parents, students, teachers/school staff and community partners, has stood for funding Texas public schools as well as reforming our testing and accountability systems since 2009. In 2011, we brought 13,000 people to the Texas State Capitol when schools were threatened with a $10 billion reduction in funding. Our actions helped cause the state to significantly reduce those cuts and eventually restore funding in 2013.
Texas is currently facing an even worse crisis in public school funding. With no increase in the basic allotment to account for inflation in 2021 and 2023, public school funding has been reduced by $10 billion in real dollars, or approximately $1,300 per student. With the end of ESSER funding, which helped districts get through the past several years, the majority of school districts statewide are facing significant deficits this year and next. The current funding proposal put forward in HB2 is not nearly enough to cover current gaps and future inflation, as well as possible federal funding cuts.
We believe that the legislature has more than enough to bring funding back to 2019 levels, given the amount of unspent funds that should have gone to public schools in 2021 and 2023 that are sitting in the state’s coffers. Getting back to 2019 levels would mean adding $1,300 per student to the basic allotment. Many education groups around the state, including Raise Your Hand Texas and Fund Schools First, a school district and business coalition in North Texas, are saying the same thing.
We would like to ask two things . . .
1. Join the call for an increase to the basic allotment of $1,300 per student. Texas school funding is a complicated subject, but a simple and straightforward message can galvanize parents, teachers and community members.
2. Encourage your stakeholders to join the Save Texas Schools rally at the Texas State Capitol on Saturday, April 5th. Thousands of Texans will be there to say NO! to underfunding and private school vouchers and YES! to testing and accountability reform. We have already held one rally on a cold and rainy Saturday in February with 1,200 people coming out (click here for a rally video). We believe that, at this crucial moment, we can impact school funding during this time of crisis.
A rally flyer is attached and more information is available at www.savetxschools.org. We also have bus transportation coming from many parts of the state. Information and registration is available on the website.
Thank you for all you do for the children and families of Texas, especially in these difficult times!
Allen Weeks, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Below are photographs I took when I participated in the Save Our Schools rally in 2013. The kids were wonderful, as were the marching bands and parents. Will the legislature listen this time? These wonderful youngsters are our future. We must not let them down.
Allan Weeks and I, February 23, 2013, Austin, Texas
Michael C. Bender reports in The New York Times that the Trump administration is threatening to cancel funding from schools that refuse to eliminate programs or courses that teach DEI. The administration has turned civil rights enforcement upside down and inside out. For decades, civil rights law meant protection of racial minorities and women, who were often targets of discrimination, exclusion, or unfair treatment. This administration worries most about the rights of white students.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon clearly doesn’t know that federal law prohibits any federal official from interfering with or trying to influence curriculum.
“20 USC 1232a: Prohibition against Federal control of education. Text contains those laws in effect on April 2, 2025
§1232a. Prohibition against Federal control of education
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.
What Secretary McMahon proposes is illegal.
Bender writes:
The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.
The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.
At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.
“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”
More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.
“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.
It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.
The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
ICE has become the American Gestapo. They are snatching foreign students on American campuses and whisking them away, often to undisclosed locations, with no hearings, no due process.
The latest snatch-and-grab occurred yesterday at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
The Trump administration’s campaign against pro-Palestinian activists reached the Boston area Tuesday evening when an international PhD student at Tufts was arrested by masked federal immigration agents on a residential street and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana, according to federal immigration records and the student’s attorney.
Plainclothes officers handcuffed Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish nationalin the US on a student visa, and loaded her into an unmarked SUV with tinted windows as she pleaded for explanations, according to video of the arrest. She was transferred to Louisiana despite a federal judge ordering US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday night not to remove Ozturk from Massachusetts without prior notice.
The precise timing of Ozturk’s transfer to Louisiana and the issuance of the judge’s order was unclear.
It was also unclear why the government targeted Ozturk, who is doctoral candidate at Tufts department of child study and human development. She had voiced support for the pro-Palestinian movement at Tufts, but was not known as a prominent leader. Her lawyer said she is not aware of any charges against her.
“I don’t understand why it took the government nearly 24 hours to let me know her whereabouts,” her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said. ”Why she was transferred to Louisiana despite the court’s order is beyond me. Rumeysa should immediately be brought back to Massachusetts, released, and allowed to return to complete her PhD program.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security asserted Ozturk “engaged in support of Hamas,” a US-designated terror group behind the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that led to Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, but did not provide evidence of that claim.
“A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the spokesperson said.
A screen grab from a video shows Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, in white coat, being approached by federal immigration authorities before being detained on Tuesday, March 25 in Somerville.
Ozturk is the latest international student arrested by the Trump administration, which has vowed to deport non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists whom it accuses of engaging in antisemitic or illegal protests. That campaign is part of Trump’s wider crackdown on elite universities, including funding cuts, bans on diversity programs, and investigations over schools’ alleged inaction on antisemitism.
Earlier in March, Trump’s antisemitism task force canceled $400 million of federal funding for Columbia University. The administration also arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and Algerian citizen who was a leader of the school’s pro-Palestinian movement. Officials are trying to deport him, too, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared his continued presence in the United States was detrimental to US foreign policy.
Ozturk’s lawyer said information about her client was recently added to Canary Mission, a website that compiles information about pro-Palestinian students and professors, and which activists say has led to harassment and doxxing. The website noted Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper last year criticizing the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement,urging Tufts to “end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination.”
Pro-Palestinian activists and free speech advocates have decried the arrests as unconstitutional repression of political speech.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell called the footage of the arrest “disturbing.”
“Based on what we now know, it is alarming that the federal administration chose to ambush and detain her, apparently targeting a law-abiding individual because of her political views. This isn’t public safety. It’s intimidation that will, and should, be closely scrutinized in court,” Campbell said.
Ozturk’s arrest took place slightly after 5 p.m. Tuesday on Mason Street in Somerville near Tufts, according to a resident who witnessed the arrest and spoke with the Globe on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the government, as well as security camera footage obtained by the Globe.
While walking his dog, the witness said, he saw a woman screaming outside a house. Half a dozen officers in plainclothes and wearing masks surrounded her, he said. As they handcuffed her, she cried and said, “OK, OK, but I’m a student,” he recalled.
Then they placed her in an unmarked SUV with tinted windows….
Reyyan Bilge, an assistant teaching professor in psychology at Northeastern University, told the Globe she has known Ozturk for more than a decade since Bilge taught Ozturk at Şehir University in Istanbul. Ozturk came to the United States to get her master’s degree at Columbia as a Fulbright scholar, Bilge said.
She graduated in 2020 from the developmental psychology program at Columbia Teacher’s College, according to a 2021 social media post by the school.
Bilge described Ozturk as soft-spoken andkind. “If you were to actually have a chat with her for about five minutes, you would understand how kind and how decent a person she is,” she said….
Tufts University president Sunil Kumar disclosed the arrest in a campus-wide message Tuesday night.
The university “had no pre-knowledge” of the arrest, he said, and Tufts did not share information with authorities, adding that the location of the arrest was not affiliated with the university.
The university was told Ozturk’svisa status was “terminated,” Kumar said in the email.
“We realize that tonight’s news will be distressing to some members of our community, particularly the members of our international community,” he said.
In a three-page order issued Tuesday, federal Judge Indira Talwani ordered ICE to submit a written explanation for relocating Ozturk and notify the court 48 hours before any effort takes place to allow the judge time to review the added information.
Ozturk’s lawyer filed a habeas petition in court on Tuesday asking for her release. Talwani also directed ICE officials to respond to the petition by Friday.
All of Ozturk’s family is in Turkey, and she only has friends here in the United States, Bilge said.
Bilge said Ozturk would never say anything to hurt anyone. “She’s not antisemitic,” Bilge said. But like many other Muslims, Bilge said, Ozturk is concerned about the human rights of Palestinian people. “But that’s freedom of speech,” Bilge said. “That’s just being human.”
On Wednesday evening, more than 2,000 people rallied insupport ofOzturk at a park near Powder House Square and the Tufts campus. Among them were students from Tufts and Harvard, as well as residents from the surrounding neighborhoods. Some wore keffiyehs, a patterned scarf associated with Palestinian nationalism. Others wore yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcap. “Stand up, fight back!” they chanted.
Peter Greene, veteran teacher, master writer, the voice of wisdom and experience, sets the record straight about the purpose of the U.S. Department of Education. Contrary to what wrestling-entrepreneur Linda McMahon (Trump’s Secretary of Education) says, the Department was not created to raise test scores. The Department was created to promote equal access to educational opportunity. That equalization of resources has not yet been achieved, but Trump intends to abolish the goal altogether. In his thinking, everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike him, who was born into wealth and privilege.
Peter Greene writes:
The official assault on the Department of Education has begun.
If it seems like there’s an awful lot more talking around this compared to, say, the gutting of the IRS or USAID, that may be because the regime doesn’t have the legal authority to do the stuff that they are saying they want to do. The executive order is itself pretty weak sauce– “the secretary is to investigate a way to form a way to do stuff provided it’s legal.” And that apparently involves sitting down in front of every camera and microphone and trying to make a case.
A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department’s actual purpose.
Likewise, it’s a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the “failed public policy” of “the centralization of American education.” But the Department wasn’t meant–or built–to centralize US education.
The department’s job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level.
The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel– “Don’t call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state.” For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.
Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform.
So if the department’s mission is not to create central organization and coordination, then what is it?
I’d argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights.
The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.
And it was all created to very carefully not usurp the power of the states. When Trump says he’ll return control of education to the states, he’s speaking bunk, because the control of education has always remained with the states– for better or worse.
The federal mission was to make the field more level, to provide guardrails to keep the states playing fair with all students, to make sure that students had the best possible access to the education they were promised.
Trump has promised that none of the grant programs or college loan programs would be cut (and you can take a Trump promise to the… well, somewhere) but if all the money is still going to keep flowing, then what would the loss of the department really mean?
For one thing, the pieces that aren’t there any more. The Office of Civil Rights is now gutted and repurposed to care only about violations of white christianist rights. The National Center of Education Statistics was the source of any data about how education was working out (much of it junk, some of it not). The threat of turning grants into unregulated block grants, or being withheld from schools that dare to vaccinate or recognize diversity or keep naughty books in the library.
So the money will still flow, but the purpose will no longer be to level the playing field. It will not be about making sure every child gets the education they’re entitled to– or rather, it will rest on the MAGA foundation, the assumption that some people deserve less than others.
That’s what the loss of the department means– a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us?
As I read this frightening post by Thom Hartmann, I was reminded of the many times in first term that he longed for protestors or suspects to be roughed up. He spoke to police officers in New York and urged them not to be so gentle when they apprehended suspects. He encouraged his audience to beat up troublemakers and send him their legal bills. He has a strange love of violence, though he himself dodged the draft five times.
Hartmann describes the freedom of ICE to arrest and detain anyone without a warrant, without any due process. Where is this going?
Imagine stepping off a plane in the United States, fully expecting to enter the country without issue, only to be surrounded by armed agents, handcuffed, and thrown into a freezing detention center. No trial. No lawyer. No contact with the outside world.
In Trump’s America, you are no longer guaranteed your rights or freedom—because now, it takes nothing more than an ICE agent’s “suspicion” to make you disappear.
This isn’t a mistake. It’s part of an expanding system of cruelty, where ICE—once an agency tasked with immigration enforcement—is now operating like an unchecked police force, targeting legal residents, visitors, and even US citizens with impunity.
People who follow every rule, complete all the required paperwork, and obey every regulation are still finding themselves locked away, held in horrific conditions, and stripped of their rights—all based on the whims of an agent who doesn’t even need evidence to justify an arrest.
A U.S. citizen from Chicago was among 22 people recently subjected to unlawful arrests and detention by ICE. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that during Trump’s first term, immigration authorities asked to hold approximately 600 likely citizens and actually deported about 70 likely citizens.
But now, in part because of the Laken Riley Act, it’s getting worse. Forty-two Democrats in the House and fourteen in the Senate voted to pass this execrable GOP bill last month; it was named after a young woman murdered by an undocumented alien whose story was relentlessly promoted by Fox “News” and other rightwing hate media.
That law, recently signed by Trump, says that ICE now has the authority to detain anybody — anybody — for an indefinite period of time — no time limit whatsoever — if an ICE agent simply says that he or she “suspects” the person is in the country illegally or without documentation.
Fabian Schmidt, a German-born engineer, has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, legally working, paying taxes, and contributing to his community. None of that mattered when he returned home from a trip abroad. As soon as he landed at Logan Airport in Boston, ICE agents pulled him aside. His green card renewal was “flagged” for some unknown reason—no explanation, no opportunity to clarify, just a red mark in a government system.
That was all it took. ICE stripped him of his clothes, subjected him to hours of aggressive questioning, and locked him in a detention center. They threw him into an ice-cold shower and left him shivering on the concrete floor, humiliated and terrified.
For days, his mother, Astrid, desperately tried to find him. She called ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and any agency that might give her an answer. They either ignored her or outright lied, claiming they had no record of her son. When she finally learned where he was, Fabian was barely holding himself together. “They treat us like animals,” he told her.
And why was he there? Because of a supposed “bureaucratic error.” ICE used a minor paperwork issue as an excuse to detain a legal resident of the United States without due process, a tactic that’s becoming frighteningly common.
For Jessica Brösche, a German tattoo artist, her visit to the United States was supposed to be brief—just a trip to see friends and enjoy the country. She had a valid passport, a return ticket, and legal permission to enter under the Visa Waiver Program. Yet, ICE decided that she might try to work while visiting, a baseless assumption that required no proof and no justification.
Just “suspicion.” That was enough to detain her indefinitely.
Once inside, the nightmare deepened. They threw her into a cell with no bed and no access to legal assistance. For eight straight days, they kept her in solitary confinement. The lights never dimmed, and the sounds of other detainees screaming in despair echoed through the walls. She started hallucinating, her grip on reality slipping. Desperate to feel something, anything real, she punched the walls until her knuckles bled.
Meanwhile, her best friend, Amelia, searched frantically for her. ICE refused to confirm her location or even acknowledge that they had detained her. No charges, no trial, no legal recourse—just silence.
Jessica’s case isn’t unique. People who follow all immigration rules are being detained under vague suspicions, often disappearing into a bureaucratic black hole. And once they’re inside the system, their rights mean nothing.
Consider Jasmine Mooney, the actor who starred in the American Pie franchise anda Canadian businesswoman who played by the rules. She secured a job offer, completed all visa paperwork, and followed every U.S. immigration law to the letter. But that didn’t stop ICE from shackling her, chaining her wrists, ankles, and waist as if she were a violent offender.
For days, she was trapped in a brutal private, for-profit detention facility, laying on the bare floor with nothing but a crinkled foil sheet for warmth. Then, in the dead of night, ICE dragged her from her cell, bound her in chains again, and forced her onto a bus with dozens of other women. They drove for hours, denying them food, water, or bathroom breaks. By the time she arrived at another facility, she had been awake for 24 hours and was too weak to stand.
To this day, ICE refuses to explain why she was detained. And why would they? They don’t have to. The agency operates with absolute power, detaining people for as long as they want, answering to no one.
Moody tells her horrifying story to The Guardian, writing:
“I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet. …
“There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.”
These aren’t isolated cases. ICE has transformed itself into an authoritarian force that detains people indefinitely on suspicion alone. No evidence? No trial? No problem.
And the for-profit prison industry that’s holding many if not most of them has no incentive to help these people; the more they detail and the longer they stay, the more money the prison companies make (which they then share as campaign donations with Republican politicians).
ICE agents don’t need proof. They only need the power to act—and Trump has given it to them.
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Please open the link to continue reading this important post.
In the U.S., the law requires due process and a presumption of innocence. The Trump administration bypassed the rule of law so they could create the illusion of a crackdown on dangerous immigrants.
The Miami Herald said:
The day after he was arrested while working at a restaurant in Texas, Mervin Jose Yamarte Fernandez climbed out of a plane in shackles in El Salvador, bound for the largest mega-prison in Latin America. His sister, Jare, recognized him in a video shared on social media. As masked guards shaved detainees’ heads and led them into cells at the maximum-security complex,
Yamarte Fernandez turned his gaze slowly to the camera. “He was asking for help. And that help didn’t come from the lips. It came from the soul,” said Jare, who asked to be identified by her nickname because she fears for her family’s safety and who added her brother has no previous criminal record. “You know when someone has their soul broken.”
Yamarte Fernandez, 29, is among 238 Venezuelans the Trump administration accused of being gang members without providing public evidence and sent over the weekend to El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, a prison about 45 miles from the capital designed to hold up to 40,000 people as part of a crackdown on gangs. They will be jailed for at least one year, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X, following a deal brokered between the two countries in February.
His sister identified him in a video shared on social media by the Salvadoran government. “He shouldn’t be imprisoned in El Salvador, let alone in a dangerous prison like the one where the Mara Salvatruchas are held,” his sister told the Miami Herald.
“These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American people,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
But families of three men who appear to have been deported and imprisoned in El Salvador told the Miami Herald that their relatives have no gang affiliation – and two said their relatives had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. One has been previously accused by the U.S. government of ties to the feared Tren de Aragua gang, but his family denies any connection.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to Miami Herald questions about what criteria was used to select detainees sent to El Salvador, what the plan is for detainees incarcerated abroad, and whether the government had defied a federal judge’s orders to send them there.
Diane Ravitch's blog 