Harvard University Announces It Won’t Surrender to Trump

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.

Donald Trump plans to send as many people as he can to megaprisons in El Salvador.

In a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump was asked how many “illegal criminals” he plans to export to El Salvador.

“As many as possible,” the president responded. “As many as we can get out of our country that were allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders.… We have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous.… We have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers.”

But the majority of the more than 200 immigrants he’s already sent to El Salvador were not murderers or drug dealers. They were ordinary people without criminal records, victim to the Trump administration’s baseless lies about their pasts.

Andry Hernandez Romero was a makeup artist who loved to do theater, Jerce Reyes Barrios was a soccer player whose innocent tattoo was flagged as a Tren de Aragua gang symbol by the Department of Homeland Security, Alirio Guillermo was a food delivery driver in Utah without a criminal record. They are now being held at the  Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a megaprison notorious for human rights abuses.

Trump and Bukele’s meeting comes as the White House claims it is not obligated to return Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was illegally deported to El Salvador, despite the Supreme Court ordering it facilitate his return.

The Supreme Court also ruled that the government must give enough notice to immigrant detainees to dispute their deportation, but the Trump administration clearly doesn’t care.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that another 10 migrants had been deported to El Salvador. Meanwhile, the president continues his threats to deport U.S. citizens to the megaprison.

“The alliance between @POTUS and President @nayibbukele has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere,” Rubio wrote in a post on X. It’s a terrifying indication that the president plans to deport as many people as he can, and Bukele, who has jailed 1 percent of his own people, will happily do the same to anybody Trump sends his way.

Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his unconstitutional threat to deport U.S. citizens to foreign gulags.

During a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has already struck a $6 million deal to detain noncitizens the U.S. government alleges are gang members, Trump once again raised his desire to deport anyone, regardless of citizenship.

“I’d like to go a step further, I mean, I say, I said it to Pam [Bondi]—I don’t know what the laws are, we always have to obey the laws—but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies in the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people, to get ’em out of the country, but you’ll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steph—” Trump said, referring to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who was standing just feet away.

Is Trump’s plot to exile U.S. citizens legal? Of course it isn’t.

“No law allows a federal court to sentence a defendant to serve their sentence overseas. Nor is there any statute that allows the president to unilaterally remove a U.S. citizen to another country at a whim,” wrote Matt Ford for The New Republic Monday.

But the Trump administration has confirmed that it is looking into the legality of the president’s idea, a question that has apparently landed on the desk of his attorney general.

While Trump has claimed that it would be cheaper to incarcerate individuals abroad, the president also asked Bukele to “please” begin construction on new facilities and even offered to help foot the bill.

“I’d do something; yeah we’d help ’em out,” Trump said. “They’re great facilities, very strong facilities. They don’t play games.”

During Trump’s meeting with Bukele, the Salvadoran president balked at requests to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador’s notorious prison, after the Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration comply with a request to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.

Miller chimed in with his own completely made-up story about the ruling and claimed that the high court had unanimously ruled in favor of Trump—it hadn’t, and there was no indication that the ruling was unanimous. The Supreme Court simply asked a lower court to clarify its order, “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

In a filing Sunday, the Department of Justice argued that the federal courts could not compel the executive branch to conduct foreign affairs, and therefore any responsibility to help Abrego Garcia was limited to removing “any domestic obstacles.”

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, is flippantly refusing to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after the Maryland resident was mistakenly deported.

During a press conference with Donald Trump in the White House Monday, a reporter asked Bukele if he planned to return Garcia, who is being held in the country’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison accused of human rights abuses. Bukele responded by calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist.

“How can I return him today? I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said.

Another reporter suggested that Bukele could release Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, inside the country, to which the Salvadoran leader was incredulous.

“We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen,” Bukele replied.

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and the father of a disabled child, has not been found by any court to be a “terrorist” or member of any criminal gang like MS-13, despite the accusations of the Trump administration and Bukele’s assertions. Even the government has admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.”

But even though the Supreme Court has ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., the Trump administration has stalled and refused, hiding behind semantics and technicalities. And with the backing of a dictator like Bukele, the White House seems content to let an innocent immigrant languish in a gulag.

Donald Trump went back to blaming basics Monday to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, less than a day after Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year: He’s blaming the leader of the country that got bombed—and Joe Biden!

A Russian double-tap missile strike on Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, Sunday reportedly killed 34 people, including two children, and injured 117 others.

In a post on Truth Social Monday morning, Trump presented his own spin on the deadly attack, and seemed particularly anxious to deflect blame from himself and Putin.

“The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine,” Trump wrote. “I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening. President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP.”

Trump has repeatedly attempted to wash his hands of his unwavering support for Putin during his first term in the White House and his lack of assistance for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, which emboldened Moscow and weakened Kyiv, making way for Russia to launch its deadly multiyear ground offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s continued rhetoric now serves to normalize Russian aggression and put the onus on anyone else for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In his post Monday, Trump blamed the president of the country that was attacked and his old standby, Biden.

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened,” Trump continued. “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”

Trump continues to harp on the past, despite claiming to have actively seized the helm on negotiations on behalf of Russia and Ukraine. When asked about the deadly attack on civilians, on Air Force One Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d been told it was “a mistake.” Notably, Putin’s name did not appear in his post about the attack.

Crucially, Trump isn’t actually working to get the war to stop—he’s simply trying to make a buck. Trump’s so-called peace talks have splintered into a range of tangents in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Belgium. Meanwhile, in Washington, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have been working on a dense rare-earth minerals contract, which Trump has made clear is a necessary feature of any U.S.-brokered peace talks as a way of paying the U.S. back for military aid that he didn’t even approve.

Some critics posit that running multiple channels of negotiations is a tactic Moscow hopes will buy it more time—which they seem to believe is on their side, according to CNN.

The Department of Homeland Security had no evidence linking a Tufts University international student to terrorism or antisemitism—but ICE agents kidnapped her anyway.

A few days before Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student attending Tufts University, was detained by masked immigrations and customs enforcement agents last month, a memo from the State Department concluded that she had not engaged in antisemitic activities or made any statements in support of terrorism, The Washington Post reported Monday. 

Along with the lack of evidence against the 30-year-old Ph.D. student, the State Department noted that Öztürk’s name was not associated with any terrorism-related information across U.S. databases. The department recommended that her F-1 student visa not be revoked.

Öztürk was originally targeted by the Department of Homeland Security because she co-authored an op-ed last spring urging Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A memo from a DHS official obtained by the Post claims that Öztürk engaged in “anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”

The DHS justified her detainment under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the deportation of any noncitizen who engages in activities that could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” like writing for the school paper, apparently.  

A video of Öztürk’s kidnapping outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, showed her being taken away by masked ICE agents and escorted into a gray SUV, a disturbing visual representative of Trump’s crackdown on legal immigrants’ civil liberties. Her arrest sparked outrage and criticism across the country, and is part of a larger assault from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the rights of international students. Since Trump took office in January, more than 600 international students have had their visas revoked.

Öztürk has since been detained at a Louisiana detention facility, where she’s described the conditions as “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.” Despite the lack of evidence against her, she could still be deported solely under Rubio’s discretion, without the need for justification, under a different section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Her federal court hearing is scheduled for Monday in Vermont.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may have given up the game on Donald Trump’s tariffs, and members of the administration are seriously pissed.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that smartphones, computers, and other tech devices would be exempt from the steep tariffs on Chinese products announced earlier this month that reached a whopping 145 percent.

During an appearance on ABC News’s This Week Sunday morning, Lutnick confirmed that tariffs on certain electronics had been suspended—but only temporarily.

“So you’re saying that the big tariffs on things like smartphones and laptops, iPhones—all those iPhones built in China—that those tariffs are temporarily off, but they’re going to be coming right back on in another form in a month or so?” asked host Jonathan Karl. “Or what—what are you saying?”

“Correct, that—that’s right. That’s right,” Lutnick replied. “Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to re-shore, to be built in America.”

Lutnick added that those products would be “included in the semiconductor tariffs that are coming, and the pharmaceuticals are coming. Those two areas are coming in the next month or two.”

“So this is not like a permanent sort of exemption. [Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries. These are things that are national security, that we need to be made in America,” Lutnick said.

Just hours later, Fox News’s senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino reported that Lutnick’s apparent break with the White House had ruffled some feathers.

“There is significant division inside the @WhiteHouse over @howardlutnick’s comments on the temporary nature of the tariff exemptions, an apparent 180 from where the world thought the trade negotiations were going, sources tell me,” Gasparino wrote.

“Of course the only opinion that really matters in the president’s but I am told plenty of people really believe he is ‘off message’ of trying to create a trade regime that involves negotiations even with China and actions that don’t roil the markets including the all important bond market,” he added, noting that the story was still developing.

Lutnick was already one of the least well-liked members of Trump’s inner circle, having defeated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the ideas war to impose the president’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs. Those within the administration seriously doubt he believes everything he spouts about Trump’s maximalist tariff policy.

In a post later Sunday afternoon, Trump claimed that there were exemptions in his trade war. “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” he wrote on Truth Social.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller confirmed that electronics would still be subject to the 20 percent tariff that Trump had imposed on China, for failing to address fentanyl trafficking.

Trump’s apparent tariff rollback continued to roil the stock market Monday, as experts fretted over a trend of rapid de-dollarization in the market.

The European Commission is issuing burner phones to officials traveling to the United States amid fears of espionage in Trump’s America.

It’s the kind of security measure typically saved for trips to China or the Ukraine, where the fear of IT surveillance is high. But three European Commissioners will test out burner phones and basic laptops at International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told the Financial Times.

The move from the European Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, marks a new era of American-European relations, which have all but dissipated since Donald Trump took office in January. Last month, he slapped Europe with 20 percent tariffs, which he later reduced to 10 percent for 90 days. He has falsely claimed the EU was formed solely to “create a unified force against” the United States, he abandoned Ukraine in the face of Russia, and he threatened to withdraw American security guarantees to the continent altogether—single-handedly dismantling an alliance that has shaped the global order since Word War II, and simultaneously embracing Vladimir Putin’s alliance.

“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the Financial Times.

The Commission did not confirm the issuing of burner phones to the Financial Times, but it did say that all EU officials traveling to the U.S. were told to turn off their phones and hide them in “special sleeves” at the border amid a rise in phone seizures from border agents in recent weeks. A number of tourists and visiting academics have been turned away for having criticism of the White House on their phone.

More than half of Europeans now consider Trump an “enemy of Europe,” according to a survey conducted across nine European countries last month. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they thought Trump “acted like a dictator,” and only one in 10 respondents believed they could rely on American security and defense if armed conflict arises in the near future, yet another indication of dwindling trust in Trump’s America.

Donald Trump worked himself into a frenzy after watching CBS’s 60 Minutes
on Sunday, calling for the network to be penalized in a Truth Social post. 

“They should lose their license! Hopefully, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as headed by its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior,” Trump posted. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s Trump’s latest complaint about CBS, which he is already suing in a $20 billion defamation suit, claiming that the network deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look better before last year’s election. The FCC is also investigating the network over Harris’s interview.

Trump’s latest tantrum is over two segments on the show Sunday. The first was an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which correspondent Scott Pelley traveled to the site of a Russian attack earlier this month that killed nine children. The second was a report from Greenland by correspondent Jon Wertheim on how people in the Danish territory are receiving Trump’s threats to take over the island.  

The president is trying to intimidate news networks that produce even the slightest bit of critical coverage against him, threatening lawsuits and FCC action. He has also threatened other news outlets, such as ABC and NBC, with ABC even capitulating with a legal settlement before Trump took office. In a presidential term already full of abuses of power, hopefully the free press in America continues to report critically of the Trump administration, otherwise they’ll be paving the way for autocracy.