US scholars sue Trump over crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters
Two graduate students and a professor at Cornell University have filed a lawsuit in New York, seeking a nationwide injunction blocking the enforcement of two presidential orders that threaten to deport or jail those who advocate for Palestinian rights.
Momodou Taal, a British Gambian citizen and a PhD student at Cornell, is one of the plaintiffs.
“The US government claims to be zealous about free speech – except when it comes to Palestine,” he said in a statement.
“We’ve been here before: McCarthyism to Civil Rights to Vietnam, times when this country has deviated from its stated commitments to free speech. This is another generational moment, another hour of reckoning. Why is there a Palestine exception?”
The first of the executive orders, numbered 1416, directs the government to step up immigration screening to prevent the entry of individuals who may pose a “threat” to the US, while the second, numbered 14188, calls for the use of all available tools “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence”.
UN experts slam ‘disproportionate’ arrests of pro-Palestinian students in US
US campuses including Columbia University in New York were rocked by student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks, drawing accusations of anti-Semitism.
Immigration officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of protests at Columbia, on the weekend of March 9-10 after US President Donald Trump pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.
The White House later said authorities had supplied a list of other Columbia students who officers were seeking to deport over their alleged participation in protests.
“These actions are disproportionate, unnecessary, and discriminatory and will only lead to more trauma and polarisation negatively impacting the learning environment within university campuses,” a group of United Nations-appointed experts said in a statement.
“These actions create a chilling effect on the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association,” they added.
The independent experts, appointed by the UN to report on rights issues, urged US authorities “to cease repression and retaliation, including in the form of arbitrary detention of US lawful permanent residents, and removal of international students who have participated in university protests”.
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