Trump Targets Migrants amid Human

Trafficking Allegation

by Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris / April 16th, 2025

Donald Trump has launched an aggressive campaign that targets Latino migrants – particularly Venezuelans – as scapegoats in a broader geopolitical agenda. Bolstered through a controversial alliance with the Salvadoran president, Trump has overseen mass deportations, detentions in Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, and invoked 18th-century war powers to justify these actions.

Trump’s brutal attacks on the working class have been supplemented by the systematic demonization of immigrants – many of whom are themselves working class. During his electoral campaign, Trump not only promised large-scale deportations but, pandering to a far-right base, vilified migrants to unprecedented degrees.

In his 2015 campaign, Trump vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. And upon returning to the presidency in 2025, Trump again promised to round up millions in what he boasted would be the largest deportation operation in US history.

However, as the record shows, immigrant deportations are, unfortunately, a bipartisan project. Contrary to Trump’s grandiose rhetoric, once in office for his first term, he deported less than one million rather than the 11 million he claimed would be expelled. That was less than the 1.6 million evicted by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama in a his first 4 years in office. While Democrat Joe Biden still holds the record for the most deportations in a year, Trump is determined to beat it.

To this end, Trump and his ultra-conservative Project 2025 confederates would like to end birthright citizenship, which would disproportionately affect nearly 65 million Latinos in the US. Arbitrary arrests, deportations, and the revocation of documentation – even for legal residents – are escalating daily, with Latino immigrants being the primary target in operations rife with racial profiling.

Trump is also trying to terminate the Humanitarian Parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), although the revocation has been halted pending legal proceedings.​ Ironically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a vocal advocate for Cuban immigrants, now spearheads policies stripping them of legal protection.

Trump’s Fictional Gang Scare

Trump’s demonization of migrants affords him a patina of populism by falsely posing as a supporter of US workers erroneously threatened by aliens. Of course, Elon Musk’s buddy is no friend of the working class.

There is another more deeply political underpinning to Trump’s campaign related to Venezuela. Trump has falsely accused some Venezuelan migrants of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang on the flimsiest of reasons such as a tattoo in support of a football club. Thus immigrants, especially from Venezuela, are conflated with criminality. In fact, studies show US immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than the native-born.

In a highly redacted document, the US designated the Tren de Aragua to be a “transnational criminal organization” (TCO) in December 2024. This came after the Venezuelan government largely dismantled the gang in September 2023 at Tocorón Penitentiary, demonstrating the government’s antagonistic relationship to the gang. But its existence was being politically weaponized by the US.

On his first day in office, Trump initiated the process of designating the gang as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), legally making it a crime to provide it material support. In so doing, a circle of conflation was being constructed from migrant, to criminal, to gang member, and then the big leap to terrorist.

The final link in the circle of conflation was Trump’s invocation on March 15 of the Alien Enemies Act accusing the Venezuelan government of an “invasion” of the US by the Tren de Aragua.

A media campaign – spearheaded by Trump in concert with far-right Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and US senators like Ted Cruz– has propagated the myth of a Venezuelan government-backed Tren de Aragua cartel flooding the US with criminals. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has described this as “the biggest lie ever told about our country.”  To wit, El Pais verified the gang is “without the capacity to be a national security problem” in the US. The New York Times demonstrated that the Tren de Aragua is “not invading America.” And Trump’s own US Intelligence Community assessment concluded that the gang was not acting on the Venezuelan government’s orders.

Alien Enemies Act

 Trump’s invocation of the Alien and Enemies Act serves dual purposes. It is a legal pretext to justify mass expulsions. At the same time, it is a salvo in Washington’s renewed “maximum pressure” regime-change campaign against Caracas.

The application of the Alien Enemies Act for deporting individuals based on alleged gang affiliations is unprecedented and has raised legal and ethical concerns. While being adjudicated in the courts, the archaic 1789 war-time legislation is being used to target Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, even though the US is not at war with these countries…at least not officially. Nevertheless, some have been sent to detention facilities like the notorious internment camp in Guantánamo Bay.

The administration’s lack of transparency regarding deportation criteria has been staggering, as has its blatant disregard for due process. Many deportees were detained without evidence, arrest warrants, or probable cause – let alone justification for imprisonment.

The degrading treatment of detainees in Guantánamo has drawn wide condemnation as has the administration’s obsessive drive to deport Latinos – whether undocumented, temporary, or permanent.

Migrants Vanish into Trump’s Offshore Prison

Trump is also shipping Venezuelan migrants and lesser numbers of Salvadorians to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a so-called “Terrorism Confinement Centre,” where conditions are subhuman. No visitation, recreation, or education are allowed at the extremely overcrowded facility. Lack of medical care and abuse are rampart, with reports of over 300 deaths in custody, some showing clear signs of violence.

The Trump administration struck a deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, paying $6 million to detain 238 Venezuelans branded “foreign terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Bukele boasted about the financial benefits of the arrangement. His Ocio Cero (zero leisure) prison labour program will, he said, contribute to the economic self-sustainability of the prison system, which critics say is tantamount to human trafficking.

Trump and Bukele both falsely claim to have no power to bring back a mistakenly deported Salvadoran legal immigrant. Kilmar Armando Abrego García is now held at CECOT, even though a US judge ordered his return and despite the US Supreme Court’s ruling to do so. Instead, Trump and Bukele declared their intention to expand the scheme. Trump floated deporting even US citizens to CECOT, with Bukele responding: “Yeah, we’ve got space.”

BPR (Bloque de Resistencia y Rebeldía Popular), a Salvadoran human rights organization denounced the Trump-Bukele pact as “arbitrary and dehumanizing,” violating international law and making El Salvador complicit in Trump’s criminalizing immigration policies. They demanded the Supreme Court nullify the detentions, arguing they violate constitutional protections against foreign judicial overreach.

Venezuela’s government has also taken action. Attorney General Tarek Williams Saab petitioned El Salvador’s Supreme Court for habeas corpus relief for detained Venezuelans. President Maduro condemned the deportations as kidnappings and sought intervention from the U.N. by contacting Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

President Maduro has vowed to fight for the repatriation of every wrongfully detained Venezuelan. This struggle must be joined by the international solidarity movement, demanding the immediate release of all unjustly imprisoned migrantsFacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Francisco Dominguez is the national secretary of the UK-based Venezuela Solidarity Campaign,  Roger D. Harris is with the Task Force on the Americas, the US Peace Council, and the Venezuela Solidarity Network, based in North America. Read other articles by Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris.

Trump Revived the Law Used to Intern Japanese Americans, and SCOTUS Let Him

This week the Supreme Court left the door open for Trump to continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.

By Camilo Pérez-Bustillo ,

Truthout

April 9, 2025

An ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations unit initiates a raid to apprehend immigrants without any legal status and who may be deportable in Riverside, California, on August 12, 2015.Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The Supreme Court made two key initial procedural rulings on Monday in cases related to the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to grease the wheels of mass detention and mass deportation primarily through outsourcing to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison, which is known worldwide for its flagrant human rights abuses.

In its procedural ruling on Trump v. J.G.G., the court upheld the Trump administration’s rhetorical reliance on the Alien Enemies Act to justify the transfers but required it to comport with the barest minimums of constitutional “due process” through individualized habeas corpus proceedings in largely hostile courts closer to the location of the detention centers where those targeted by the act are likely being held. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion was simultaneously outrageous and perfunctory, and procedural challenges are likely to continue.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned what will come to be recognized as a historic 17-page dissent, expressing the arguments and sounding the warnings that should have served as a basis for the court’s ruling. Speaking as the court’s only Puerto Rican and first Latina member, Sotomayor offered a lament for how the Supreme Court has squandered its voice at this crucial historical moment. There is poetry latent in her scathing critique of the court’s limitations. At one moment in her dissent, she argued:

The Government takes the position that, even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it has sent them.The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.

The J.G.G. decision revives both the notorious Korematsu case, which upheld the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act (AEA), upon which their internment was based. The Supreme Court’s initial procedural ruling this week legitimized the AEA through the back door, without addressing any of the pressing substantive issues raised by its current weaponization by the Trump administration, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her own dissent in concurrence with Sotomayor.

Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man who is a legal U.S. resident, is a Salvadoran immigrant with no criminal record and no gang membership, who was “accidentally” deported to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. In the past, he fled from systematic persecution in El Salvador by the kinds of gang members he is now surrounded by in detention. The Trump administration has conceded that his “deportation” to El Salvador was the product of an “administrative error.” Yet at the same time it has continued to insist that it has neither the power nor the inclination to return him to the U.S., despite this grievous, potentially life-threatening mistake.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday breathed artificial life into one of the court’s most notorious decisions in the 1944 Korematsu case, which upheld the legality of the mass detention of over 120,000 people of Japanese origin in the U.S in response to Pearl Harbor. In so doing, the court has exercised what can only be described as a new kind of zombie jurisprudence, while leaving key threshold questions utterly and deliberately unexamined. This is evidently the Supreme Court’s way of ducking, for now, a more fundamental clash with the Trump administration’s increasingly evident intent to undermine judicial control and even review of its most dangerous policies.

Key unresolved questions include whether the Alien Enemies Act is itself constitutional or not, whether it should be for the first time activated in peacetime — not against the citizens of a country with which the U.S is at war, but against a criminal gang and its alleged members, whom the administration has deemed “terrorists” and is depriving of due process rights in the name of “national security.” Sound familiar? El Salvador’s megaprison is, for these purposes, in effect the new Guantánamo (or another equivalent “black site”), while the U.S base on illegally occupied Cuban territory continues to gear up for increased occupancy.

The Supreme Court’s majority also failed to place limits on invocations of expansive executive power along these lines, which might for example include additional executive orders that seek to expand the targets of the Alien Enemies Act — or equivalent provisions — beyond their current focus (alleged Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua gang) to other groups whom the president wishes to repress. Many more executive orders may be signed with even lesser transparency, and ever larger potential reach.

This implicit slippery slope effect is already evident in what has unfolded with those hundreds of young men — primarily Venezuelan, but also of Salvadoran origin — on the three “deportation” flights on March 15 that laid the groundwork for both of Monday’s Supreme Court cases. No evidence has been made public that confirms that any of these young men are or were ever members of the Tren de Aragua gang or its Salvadoran equivalents, and most do not have criminal records anywhere.

Most of those currently detained in hellish conditions in El Salvador have committed no recognizable offense, except that they were primarily young Venezuelan men who could be targeted in the dark of night — “taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons” in Sotomayor’s words — because Donald Trump and Marco Rubio said so.

As Justice Sotomayor has eloquently argued, there is in fact no material force in place that prevents the Trump administration from extending the logic of its current sweeps against alleged Venezuelan or Salvadoran gang members — or holders of green cards or student visas like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk whose speech offends the Trump administration’s sensibilities — to others, including U.S. citizens. This is especially true under an administration that is actively seeking to redefine and restrict birthright citizenship and voting rights, and that has been acting in bad faith in cases like these, seeking to both undermine and elude judicial review of its arbitrary actions.

“The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law,” Sotomayor wrote in her disssent. “That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”

And yet cases like this also remind us that Sotomayor’s faith may be misplaced. Many have forgotten cases like those of Paul Robeson or W.E.B DuBois during the McCarthy era — or later Muhammad Ali — whose passports were confiscated and whose right to travel outside the U.S. was nullified for supposed “disloyalties” equivalent to those weaponized today by Rubio, at Trump’s behest.

Poets tend to be better at cultivating such memories. Bertolt Brecht once asked himself, amid his own forced exile from Nazi Germany, “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”

A writer whose work carries on this spirit of resistance today is the poet Martín Espada (honored with the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021), whose extraordinary new book A Jailbreak of Sparrows is rooted in the revolutionary rhythms of the liberation struggles of Puerto Rico. Espada’s poetry is also imbued with his background as a lawyer, and like Sotomayor, is grounded in his upbringing in New York’s Puerto Rican community, as part of the same generation. Sotomayor has written eloquently about how these origins decisively shaped her experiences and approach as a student, lawyer, and ultimately federal judge and Supreme Court Justice.

Espada reminds us in concrete lyrical detail how Trump’s dehumanization of migrants through the rhetoric of “invasion” laid the groundwork for the El Paso Massacre in August 2018 and for police killings like that of Mario González in Alameda, California, in April 2021. He also reminds us of the human costs of the McCarthyist persecution of dissidents both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland through the cases of renowned poets such as Juan Antonio Corretjer and William Carlos Williams.

Espada tells us too, in the book’s stunning title poem, about how U.S. Thunderbolt fighter planes sought to bomb into submission the Puerto Rican mountain town of Utuado — his father’s and grandmother’s birthplace — in the wake of the October 30, 1950, pro-independence uprising led by the island’s nacionalistas:


In towns with names that fly, Jayuya, Arecibo, Naranjito, Utuado, they lined up

against the walls, fingers woven behind their heads, bayonets sniffing their ribs,

taken by trucks to jails with names that stop the tongue: La Princesa in a land

where the princess waves from a float, Oso Blanco in a land without white bears.

The poet who knew the room of stone returned with a face of stone. The poet new

to the room of stone scribbled on stone whatever the voices bellowed in his ear.

But it all began with the words that were forbidden-

“La Ley de la Mordaza, the Law of the Muzzle years ago,confiscating the ink of presses that stamped the page with the words colonialism

and independence, empire and political prisoner, clapping handcuffs on anyone

who sang verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows. The flag of Puerto Rico,

fanning a grave in the heat or asleep in a closet between the sheets, would

now become the prosecutor’s proof, good for ten years in a room of stone”

Together the combined eloquence and depth of Sotomayor’s emerging jurisprudence of resistance and Espada’s life-long praxis of the poetry of liberation provide us with a basis for the kind of critical reflection and engagement we need, from below, in response to the onslaught that seeks to erode and nullify our rights, and the channels through which we express them. Today, on campuses and in communities throughout the country, it is words like those evoked by Espada and their equivalents — or those that resonate with Sotomayor’s warnings — that could lead to our targeting, as if we were “alien enemies.” Espada and Sotomayor, together, write for us.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is former executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; member of the leadership team at Witness at the Border; a fellow at the Institute for the Geography of Peace in Juárez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas, and at the University of Bergen, Norway’s, Global Research Programme on Inequality; co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s Task Force on the Americas; professor of law and ethnic studies at St. Mary’s College of California; visiting chair professor of human rights at National Taiwan University’s College of Law; and co-founder of the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement.

Are There Trump Internment Camps for Political Opponents in America’s Future?

by Bill Berkowitz / April 8th, 2025

Japanese Americans gather at Santa Anita Assembly Center in 1942 shortly before being shipped off to one of the 10 internment camps set up by the U.S. government in World War II.

Is there a Trump Internment Camp in your future?  In addition to scooping immigrants up off the streets and disappearing them, will the Trump administration start arresting and incarcerating its domestic political opponents? Will Trump Inc. partner up with Geo Group, the nation’s largest private prison company, that gave a million dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign? Imagine the manosphere humming with snatch-and-grab job opportunities for the now-pardoned January 6 insurrectionists?

Consider some recent developments: The abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was clearly detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University; a video of masked ICE agents — essentially secret police — near Boston stopping and arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, who is in the U.S. on a valid visa; the deportation of 250 purported Venezuelan gang members to a notorious gulag in El Salvador with no due process, in defiance of a federal court order that the plane deporting them turn around and come back to America.

Internment/Concentration Camps

The terms “internment camps” and “concentration camps” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have had distinct historical and functional differences. Internment Camps have been primarily used to detain specific groups considered security risks during wartime, and political opponents. During World War II, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were rooted from their homes and forcibly relocated to 10 hastily constructed camps. The interned lost their property, were isolated and suffered major deprivations.

Concentration Camps — also known as Death Camps — have generally been associated with mass detention, harsh conditions, forced labor, and extermination. Historically, they have been used to imprison perceived enemies of the state, political opponents, ethnic groups, or other marginalized populations.

The historian Roger Daniels, author of Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans, concluded that “scholars should abandon the term” Japanese internment and use the term concentration camp.

Setting the stage

During the 2024 presidential campaign Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” — rhetoric eerily reminiscent from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. On the campaign trail, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance escalated immigrant-bashing rhetoric with claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said he was looking “forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla.” He added that “Perhaps they would serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”

As people are being dragged off the streets across America, it is time to consider the revival of internment camps in this country not only for immigrants, but for Trump’s political opponents as well.

The U.S. used internment camps during World War II, and more recently for alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Justification for internment in these camps vary from military necessity, to national security, but the underlying function remains consistent: isolating and punishing perceived enemies of the state.

Alternet’s Alex Henderson recently reported on the possible reintroduction of detention camps to sequester opponents of Donald Trump. “Some fear that the U.S. could emulate the ‘illiberal democracy’ model of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where technically, there are still voting rights, but checks and balances are so eroded that the Fidesz Party is entrenched and dominant,” Henderson wrote. “Others fear an even more disturbing scenario in which the U.S. embraces an outright military dictatorship like Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet or Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. ‘El Generalísimo’.”

Journalist Christopher Mathias’ forthcoming book is called To Catch a Fascist. In a recent MSNBC op-ed, he noted that, “over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, … neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, [has] enter[ed] the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed.”

Mathias noted that in a conversation with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an ‘invasion’ of people who are ‘totally culturally incompatible’ with ‘western civilization.’ This purported ‘invasion,’ Vance said, will lead to a ‘civilizational suicide’ if it’s not stopped. It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and …Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers.”

Mathias interviewed Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, who told him that “Concentration camp regimes always need a group they can turn into outsiders by making its members seem so dangerous that the government needs to remove those people from society. You can’t typically do that without years — years! — of rhetoric demonizing them. Even with the Nazis, it took more than five years from Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany until the mass roundup of Jews as a group began with Kristallnacht in November 1938.”

Pitzer’s One Long Night, which looks at concentration camps from their origins in the late 19th century to modern-day detention facilities. Historically, these camps, across different countries and political ideologies, have been used as tools of oppression, control, and genocide. Concentration camps were used during the Spanish-Cuban war, by the British during the Boer War, Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags.

Terrorizing the opposition

Mathias noted that “In Myanmar in 2015, the regime allowed journalists to visit the camps where Rohingya Muslims were being detained. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, photographers were allowed into the National Stadium, where people were being detained and tortured. ‘Even the Nazis allowed New York Times and Times of London reporters into their early concentration camps in 1933,’ Pitzer told him. ‘They wanted their targets to be terrified, but they were proud of what they were doing.’”

“The arc of concentration camps is twofold,” Pitzer told Mathias. “First, there’s supposedly some very bad group so dangerous that the government says they have to be removed from society. Second, the definition of who’s dangerous expands, often coming to include political opponents and rivals.

“If the government can arrest civilians with no criminal record and put them on planes out of the country without accounting for who they are or for any actual legal process — as has been happening in recent weeks — what would stop them from deporting whomever they like?” Pitzer continued. “Or from saying they had deported detainees while actually disappearing people to black sites internally? If the courts can’t enforce due process and find out who’s being detained, where they are now and what’s happening to them, then we’re all vulnerable.”

Given the Trump Administration’s predilection for demonizing political opponents and the mainstream media, defying judicial orders, and trampling on the rule of law, is it wishful thinking or delusional to believe that internment camps can’t happen here?

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Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

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DSA DYNAMIC DUO

AOC, Sanders Rallying 15,000 Arizonans—With Thousands More Watching Online—Makes Clear 'The Moment We're In'

"People are starting to put the pieces together, and ironically the most divisive forces in this country are actually starting to bring more of us together," said Ocasio-Cortez.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), left, joins Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on stage before speaking at "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" rally Thursday, March 20, 2025, in North Las Vegas.
(Photo: Ronda Churchill for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Eloise Goldsmith
Mar 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

A stop on Sen. Bernie Sanders' nationwide town hall tour "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" in Tempe, Arizona that also featured Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Thursday broke the record for the number of attendees at an event hosted by Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, in the state, according to his director of communications.

"This is a big deal," wrote communications director Anna Bahr on X of the gangbusters turnout.

"Just to be clear about the moment we're in: Bernie Sanders' biggest crowd in Phoenix previously was 11,300 in 2015 when he was running for president. Tonight, in a non-campaign year, when he is running for nothing, 15,000 Arizonans turned out," she wrote. Bahr also said that more than 123,000 people watched the livestream of the event online.



Footage of the event shows a completely packed event space at Arizona State University's Mullet Arena. At least a 1,000 people could not enter the arena because there was no room inside, according to the Arizona Mirror.

Sanders launched his "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" tour, which focuses on working-class districts that President Joe Biden won in 2020 but were won by a House Republican in 2024, in February, with the aim of talking to Americans about the "takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country's move toward authoritarianism."

In their remarks on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders spoke about Republican efforts to target programs like Social Security and Medicaid and billionaire Elon Musk's influence over the GOP.

"The billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country," said Ocasio-Cortez—alluding to Musk's efforts to slash federal spending and personnel with the Department of Government Efficiency, and other billionaires in U.S. President Trump's orbit—"derive their power from dividing working people apart."

"People are starting to put the pieces together, and ironically the most divisive forces in this country are actually starting to bring more of us together," said Ocasio-Cortez.

"Their disdain for working people," she continued, "is a shorthand for the right's entire political agenda and a certain kind of ugly politics in this country—and that is lying to and screwing over working at middle class Americans so that they can steal our healthcare, Social Security, and veterans benefits."

When Sanders took the stage, he said, "Trump and his billionaire friends have never, ever had it so good in the history of this country."



Sanders also argued that if a Republican voiced opposition to Republicans' plan to deliver tax cuts that will primarily benefit the wealthy, "Musk in five minutes would say, 'we are going to primary you'... That is not a democracy."

Musk—who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and other GOP candidates in 2024—has threatened to fund moderate candidates in heavily Democratic districts.

AOC Joins Western Stops of Sanders 'Fighting Oligarchy' Tour

"While Republicans try to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, people across the country are standing up against these attacks on the working class," the congresswoman said.


U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks to a capacity crowd for his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour on March 07, 2025 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Mar 16, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is set to join five stops of Sen. Bernie Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy" tour this week.

Sanders (I-Vt.), who mobilized working-class voters nationwide during his 2016 and 2020 runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, launched the tour in the Midwest last month. Thousands of people have attended his events in cities across Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

"Today, the oligarchs and the billionaire class are getting richer and richer and have more and more power," Sanders said in a Friday statement. "Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and most of our people are struggling to pay for healthcare, childcare, and housing. This country belongs to all of us, not just the few. We must fight back."

Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) are set to join the senator on Thursday, March 20 at the East Las Vegas Community Center, for an event scheduled to begin at 1:30 pm local time. From there, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders plan to head to Arizona State University in Tempe for a 6:00 pm stop.

The pair has two more events on Friday: A 1:00 stop at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and a 5:00 pm stop at Civic Center Park in Denver. They are slated to wrap up the trip on Saturday with Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) at an 11:30 am event at Catalina High School in Tucson, Arizona.

"While Republicans try to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, people across the country are standing up against these attacks on the working class," said Ocasio-Cortez. "They deserve representation that is willing to stand with them. I look forward to hitting the road with Sen. Sanders."

Since Sanders announced the new tour stops and guests on Friday, Republicans and a handful of Democrats on Capitol Hill have given them some new developments to discuss on the road. Ahead of a potential government shutdown on Friday, 10 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus—including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—helped GOP senators advance a stopgap measure that critics warn will further empower President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's attacks.

Schumer's "gutless" handling of the situation sparked calls for him to step down as Senate minority leader and for Ocasio-Cortez to launch a primary challenge against him in the 2028 cycle—something the congresswoman has not ruled out.



As the Senate was sending the stopgap bill to the president's desk, Trump was at the U.S. Department of Justice, delivering a speech that sparked widespread alarm. As Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program and an adviser at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, summarized, he "sought to undermine faith in our judicial system, attacked lawyers who support due process and the rule of law, and made it clear that he expects the attorney general and other leaders to use the full force and resources of the Justice Department to roll back our civil and human rights, target his enemies, and operationalize a worldview that perpetuates white supremacy."

On Saturday, Trump bombed Yemen and revealed that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. The 1798 law was used during World War II to force thousands of people of mostly German, Italian, and Japanese descent into internment camps.

Meanwhile, Sanders wrote in a Saturday email to supporters that from the tour stops so far, "what I have found is that in these districts, and all across the country, Americans are saying loudly and clearly: NO to oligarchy, NO to authoritarianism, NO to kleptocracy, NO to massive cuts in programs that working people desperately need, NO to huge tax breaks for the richest people in our country."

"There must be meetings and rallies in all 50 states, and they should take place over and over again. And when those rallies are over, we need to organize the people who attend to mobilize in their communities and be in touch with their members of Congress. But that is not all," he wrote. "We need progressives to run for office at all levels. I am talking about school boards, city councils, state legislature, and the races that are not in the news but make a tremendous difference in local communities."

"We need to build community and bring people together even when it isn't about politics first. The Republican Party is always trying to divide us up based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more... we need to come together as one," he continued. "We need to elect a U.S. House and a U.S. Senate that will prioritize the needs of the working people in this country."

Sanders concluded that "we need to be looking for new and creative ways to educate each other in a world where nearly the entire media and communications infrastructure is owned and controlled by the wealthiest people in this country. If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, this is that time."

 

United States: Free, Free Mahmoud Khalil! Their first line of attack must be our first line of defense

By Tempest

Published 19 March, 2025

First published at Tempest.

On March 8, ICE agents abducted Mahmoud Khalil, an activist in the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestine campus protests and occupations. Khalil is a legal permanent U.S. resident who holds a green card. Upon his detention, Khalil was transported to the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana without criminal charges. The Trump administration invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a Cold-War-era law allowing the deportation of those deemed to be threats to national security. The abduction and detention of Khalil is the first of what will be many such efforts on the part of a Trump administration determined to shut down campus protest alongside and in conjunction with the administration’s sweeping assault on academic freedom, protest, and diversity efforts on college campuses across the nation. The attacks on higher education, protest, and defenders of Palestine are part and parcel of the right’s war on working class people and struggle.

The Trump administration’s arrest, detention, and possible deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is a threat to all our democratic rights. For now, a judge has stayed his deportation, but he remains incarcerated far away from his home in New York City in Jena Louisiana in one of the most notorious detention facilities in the U.S.

The abduction and disappearance of Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is part of Trump’s class war on all of us. He aims to divide and conquer the multiracial, multinational, multi-gendered working class picking each group off separately in the hope that we sell each other out and not rally to our mutual defense.

Trump aims to rollback all the gains made by our movements not only in the 1960s but all the way back to the 1930s. He is shredding regulations, gutting institutions, abolishing whole departments, firing workers, overriding union rights and contracts, and threatening the bedrock institutions of our limited welfare state — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

One of his key targets is higher education, which he delusionally believes is controlled by the Left and wielded against him, his fellow oligarchs, and far-right minions. So, he is targeting Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement to carry out a cultural counter-revolution on campuses.

Trump hopes to purge colleges and universities of radicals and socialists, curtail fundamental democratic rights, bust unions, defund and shut down whole programs, and threaten any dissent with repression. Columbia University is ground zero for his counter-revolution.

The attack on Mahmoud Khalil is thus an attack on all of us. Already other Palestinian students from Columbia University have been detained or forced to leave the country. We call on all organizations and unions to unite and demand that the Trump administration immediately release these students and to drop all legal proceedings against Khalil and his fellow university activists.

The crime of protesting genocide

The Trump administration manufactured two claims to justify its detention of Khalil — antisemitism and support for terrorism. Both are lies. To begin with, no one believes  charges of antisemitism coming from Trump and his followers, who include Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, with their Nazi salutes, christian zionist antisemites like the pastor John Hagee, and the fascist goons that marched in Charlottesville chanting “blood and soil.”

In reality, Khalil has explicitly and repeatedly denounced antisemitism as anathema to the Palestine solidarity movement. He and all the activists at Columbia, other campuses, and cities across the country have not engaged in antisemitism but in constitutionally protected speech and protest against Israeli apartheid and genocide.

That is in fact part and parcel of the best tradition of Jewish radicalism. That’s why Jews have joined the protests at Columbia and everywhere raising the slogan, “Not in Our Name,” “Never Again is Now,” and “Never Again for Anyone.” It’s also why Jewish students at Columbia rallied to demand Khalil’s immediate release after his arrest.

The movement in solidarity with Palestine is a multiracial movement against all forms of racism that aims for collective liberation and equal rights for all, including Palestinians and Jews, here in the U.S. and in historic Palestine. It stands in the long and noble tradition of abolitionism, antiwar protest, and international solidarity with the oppressed.

And, far from supporting terrorism, Khalil and other activists are protesting Israel’s state terrorism, settler colonialism, and genocide against the Palestinian people. Collectively, we have been calling for a ceasefire, an end to U.S. support for the Israeli war machine, and for peace, justice, and equality among all peoples in historic Palestine.

Trump’s allegations of antisemitism and terrorism are just a smokescreen to obscure what his administration is actually doing. In clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, Trump has deemed it a crime to exercise our constitutional right to speech and protest against Israel’s genocidal war.

Khalil’s “crime” is support for the survival of his people and their struggle for liberation from colonial occupation. Jailed for that, he can only be called a political prisoner of the Trump administration.

Biden’s New McCarthyism

With Khalil’s imprisonment, Trump has dramatically escalated the New McCarthyism. But he did not start the witch hunt. In fact, the Biden administration, Democratic Party mayors, and liberal university bosses were the first to whip up a moral panic over false charges of antisemitism to justify mass repression of Palestine solidarity activists on and off campuses.

They called cops on protestors, arrested activists, suspended SJP chapters, and expelled students. They did so to squelch opposition to their collaboration with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Of course, the far-right led by the execrable Elise Stefanik, who has supported the antisemitic “great replacement theory” and is now Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador, took advantage of the hysteria to hold openly McCarthyite congressional hearings, demanding even more repression by the university bosses. Unsurprisingly, they capitulated, pledging increased censorship, suspensions, and expulsions of any activists, including Jews, who support Palestinian liberation.

Such domestic repression during a war should not surprise anyone. As Martin Luther King famously warned during the Vietnam War, bombs dropped abroad explode at home. Today, Noura Erakat describes how Washington’s support for Israel’s genocide creates a boomerang effect, suppressing democratic dissent here in the US.

That boomerang has hit antiwar protest and radical dissent since the U.S. became an imperialist power at the end of the 19th century. The U.S. always paired foreign intervention with domestic repression from the Palmer raids in the aftermath of World War One to Japanese Internment during World War Two, the original McCarthyite attack on the labor movement amidst the Cold War, the mass repression conducted by J Edgar Hoover COINTELPRO against the Black Panthers at the height of the Vietnam War, and the Patriot Act and surveillance, entrapment, and interrogation  of Muslims during the so-called War on Terror over the last two decades. And that is just a short list.

Anticipatory obedience and collaboration

Now faced with an unbridled McCarthyite witch hunt against Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists, the liberal university bosses and the Democrats have done little to nothing to oppose it and in most cases have collaborated with the Trump administration in carrying it out. Columbia did nothing to protect Khalil despite his repeated calls to administrators.

Even worse, the university responded to Trump’s threat to cut off $400 million in federal funding by expelling 22 students for participating in the protest. No doubt, the university  will agree to Trump’s unprecedented demands that Columbia give campus security “full law enforcement authority,” ban masks, impose a more stringent disciplinary system, expel more students, subject entire academic departments to political review, and “reform” its admissions process, no doubt to exclude those Trump deems undesirable.

Trump and his regime will not stop at Columbia. He’s already singled out 60 other colleges and universities for investigation, disciplinary demands, and funding cuts. His aim is to do to all of them what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did to New College–purge progressive faculty, strip the curriculum of any courses critical of the U.S., and hire right-wing professors to train authoritarian nationalist cadres to carry out his class war on workers and the oppressed.

No one should expect any of the bosses at those institutions to put up a fight. As the AAUP has documented, they’ve all engaged in “anticipatory obedience” to Trump’s dictates, especially against DEI, eliminating programs and removing references to class, race, and gender from course titles and descriptions.

They are obeying not only because they put their bottom line first but also because they only conceded space to the Left on campus and in the curriculum under mass pressure from progressive social movements. Now with those struggles on the defensive, they’re only too happy to take back their concessions to the Left.

For their part, the Democrats have at best put up tepid opposition and at worst joined Trump’s assault. To their credit, 14 Democrats in the House Progressive Caucus signed a letter objecting to Khalil’s abduction and demanding his release, but over 86 refused or neglected to add their names to the list, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

She and others did sign letters from their state delegations. But the establishment embodied by Chuck Schumer reiterated Trump’s false accusations against Khalil while calling for his release and defending his freedom of speech. They have, however, not lifted a finger to follow through on that demand.

No one should expect them to. They support Israel, even as it commits genocide, and they despise anyone who supports Palestinian liberation. As liberal Zionists, they will happily sacrifice their liberalism and support of democratic rights in the service of defending Israeli apartheid.

For that reason, they will not lead the resistance to Trump’s assault on Khalil, Palestinian solidarity activists, and higher education in general. They won’t even resist Trump on other fronts. They are determined to follow James Carville’s idiotic strategy to oppose Trump — roll over play dead in the vain hope that his administration will self-destruct.

But Schumer couldn’t even follow that plan, opting instead to join the Republicans in passing Trump’s new austerity budget. Expecting the Democrats, who nearly unanimously supported Israel’s genocidal war, to defend Palestine solidarity activists and their rights is just naïve. It’s as foolish as expecting a vampire to suddenly have a moral awakening and adopt veganism.

Clear and present danger

The Trump administration, the academic bosses, and the Democratic Party pose a clear and present danger to Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists on campus. And, even worse, that danger is to all of us.

If Trump can get away with his attack on Mahmoud Khalil, it sets an ominous precedent for further attacks on oppressed people and workers. The threat to all immigrants is obvious: Already engaged in an all-out war on immigrants, Trump will use the abduction of Khalil, who has a green card, as a precedent to threaten others with green cards and visas with arrest, detention, and deportation from the country.

The threat posed by the expulsion of a Palestinian, a person of color, to Black people and other racialized groups is also obvious. So is it to workers’ rights. In its purge of 22 students, Columbia expelled and fired Grant Miner, the elected president of UAW Local 2710, which represents thousands of student workers, the day before they were scheduled to open contract negotiations.

Finally, Trump’s arrest of Khalil and his attack on higher education is a threat to us all. If they can impose McCarthyite restrictions on faculty, staff, and students’ rights to speech, organization, assembly, protest, and strike they will generalize that to other workplaces, cities, and the entire country. To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem, first they came for Mamoud Khalil, but we are all next in line.

An injury to one is an injury to all

All of our rights and the very existence of our democracy are at stake in the fight for Mahmoud Khalil’s freedom. Trump is hoping that his weaponization of false charges of antisemitism and terrorism can hoodwink people into supporting his assault on Khalil’s rights.

He is hoping that his divide and conquer strategy will work, and we will sell each other out in the vain hope of protecting ourselves. He is hoping that his threat of more repression will dampen resistance.

But already our forces are proving him wrong: Civil liberties groups like the ACLU have rallied to Khalil’s defense; students have protested on campuses across the country; unions have issued statements condemning the crackdown at Columbia; and coalitions have staged mass marches in countless cities demanding his release. We must build this united resistance in defense of our fundamental constitutional rights across the country at universities, workplaces, and cities.

In that struggle, we must recognize the truth of two pivotal slogans: “An injury to one is an injury to all” and “No one is coming to save us.” Beginning with Mahmoud Khalil, we must defend anyone under attack, both because it is right to do so and because we all have an interest in their struggle.

If Trump can take them down, we’re all next in line. That’s why his first line of attack, whether against Palestinians, migrants, trans people, women, people of color or unions, must be our first line of defense. The old labor slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all is now more true than ever before in the history of this country.

In that collective self-defense, we must recognize that liberal university bosses, existing institutions, the court systems, and the Democratic Party will not save us. Of course, we must use every institutional mechanism, exploit every legal means, and secure any and all political allies anywhere we can to advance our demand for the freedom of Khalil.

But we must have no illusions in the court system or the Democratic Party. The courts are stacked against us today, and they have historically protected all the injustices and inequalities of U.S. capitalism from slavery and Jim Crow to mass deportation, restrictions on reproductive justice, and the open shop. Almost every single legal advance was won not through court cases but through mass, often illegal protests and strikes.

The same is even more true of the Democratic Party. It is the party of the capitalist establishment, bankrolled and controlled by the biggest corporations in this country, and utterly committed to advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism as its unrelenting support of Israel through the genocide proved.

It put its steadfast support of Israel as Washington’s regional cop in the Middle East before securing votes from Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and young people. In the end, the party’s commitment to Israel helped doom Kamala Harris to defeat.

The Democratic Party support for U.S. capitalism, imperialism, and the New McCarthyism paved the way for Trump to win the presidency and implement his authoritarian nationalist rule. Apart from a handful of exceptions, they have not and will not be reliable allies of the defense of Khalil or the resistance to Trump.

Instead of a popular front with that liberal capitalist party, we must forge a united front of the working class — the Left, social movements, and unions — in defense of Khalil and all our democratic rights, social programs, wages, and benefits. We must trust in our own power to sit in, protest, and strike until justice for Khalil and all of us is won.

We must put his defense at the center of all the agitation this spring on campus and off. We must include the demand for Khalil’s freedom and have Palestinian speakers at all protests on the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17.

Unions and migrant justice groups must do the same on May Day. We must end the exclusion of Palestine from the broader social and trade union struggle against Trump and his authoritarian nationalist regime.

If it persists, it will be a chink in our armor, and one that our enemy’s will exploit to divide and conquer us all. If we end the Palestine exception, we can wield together a genuine and inclusive movement for our collective liberation. It is time for us to unite, free Khalil, and free ourselves.

American Spring? Uphold Freedom of Speech on American Campuses

Protect the First Amendment!

by Dennis Kucinich Posted onMarch 19, 2025

Reprinted with permission from The Kucinich Report.

Throughout my political career, I have steadfastly defended the First Amendment, particularly the right to free speech. In 2002, I delivered a speech entitled A Prayer for America, where I challenged the rationale of the PATRIOT Act and questioned actions that infringed upon the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and protection against unreasonable searches.

My commitment to upholding free speech has been a guiding principle throughout my tenure in public service. While a Member of Congress, I consistently opposed measures that, in my view, threatened civil liberties, including the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which I believed was unconstitutional and could potentially criminalize thought. The bill passed. I was one of 6 members who voted against it.

The Current Assault on Free Speech on Campus

In the past few weeks, federal officials have conducted aggressive attempts to squelch protest and dissent on college campuses, intimidating higher education administrators into adopting standards that inherently violate First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of association. The government prescriptions for campus conduct, if actually implemented, expose the academic institutions to civil lawsuits.

There is an open assault on the First Amendment. College students who have peacefully exercised their constitutional right to freedom of speech and association—by challenging government policies or the policies of a foreign government—have been arrested in droves, suspended, expelled, or even faced deportation.

Much of this government activity claims to target anti-Semitism as a civil rights violation, which, on its face, seems reasonable. However, the way this policy is being applied has significant implications for free speech and so needs to be examined.

The Definition of Anti-Semitism and Its Misuse

In the late 18th century, the term “Semite” described languages relating to Hebrew and Arabic. Linguistically, the Semitic Language Tree includes Jews (speaking Hebrew), Arabs (speaking Arabic), and several other groups.

However, in May 2016, a European Union commmittee redefined “anti-Semitism” to refer exclusively to abhorrent conduct toward Jews. This definition was later updated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and was formalized through Executive Order 13899 by President Trump. The order placed anti-Semitism under the enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, classifying it as discriminatory conduct against Jews in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.

No reasonable, fair-minded person supports discrimination against Jews or anyone else. Yet, this definition is now being used to suppress legitimate criticism of the Netanyahu government, which has faced condemnation both on American college campuses and within Israel for its deadly actions toward Palestinians.

A paradox emerges: It is deemed anti-Semitic to criticize Israel for killing Arabs, but not anti-Semitic for the Israeli government to kill Palestinians, who are also Semitic. This contradiction, tragically, will likely stir genuine anti-Semitism against Jews in particular.

If criticism of Israel is officially equated with anti-Semitism, then attempts to suppress public outrage over war crimes and genocide can only undermine the moral weight of actual cases of anti-Semitism—such as stereotyping, demonization, harassment, incitement, and discrimination against Jewish people.

The First Amendment and the Historical Fight for Free Speech

I taught a college course years ago on the History of the First Amendment. Given recent actions by government officials, it is timely to revisit this linchpin of our freedoms and the Supreme Court decisions that have expanded its application to college and university campuses.

On December 15, 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Throughout history, the government’s attempts to restrict free speech have ultimately backfired. The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) criminalized criticism of the federal government, leading to the defeat of the Federalist Party. The Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917-1918) resulted in the imprisonment of Eugene Debs for speaking against WWI. The Supreme Court upheld these laws in 1919, triggering public outrage and setting the stage for stronger free speech protections in later rulings. Yates v. United States (1957) rejected McCarthy-era suppression of speech, reaffirming the primacy of the First Amendment.

In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” This decision should be displayed in every college administration office across the country.

Legal precedent has consistently upheld the right to free speech, striking down policies that restrict it. Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) protected inflammatory speech unless it incited immediate violence. R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992) warned against “viewpoint discrimination.” Doe v. University of Michigan (1989) overturned overly broad university speech codes.

There is no constitutional right to suppress speech simply because it offends, upsets, or makes people uncomfortable. Government actions or university policies that infringe upon these rights have frequently been invalidated.

Student Protests and Free Speech in American History

Student activism has long shaped American democracy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam antiwar movement exploded on college campuses.

I remember attending massive student rallies at Cleveland State University (CSU). Instead of threatening students with arrest, CSU President Harold Enarson (later President of Ohio State University) created a space for dialogue. He encouraged peaceful protest, transforming CSU into a hotbed of political activity that shaped future leaders.

The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, arose after students were arrested for protesting university speech restrictions. This was the spark which lit further campus unrest, over government policies. The Vietnam War protests pressured Lyndon Johnson to decline re-election in 1968. The impact of student activism upon the political system was undeniable.

The Dangers of Suppressing Dissent

Historically, authoritarian regimes have targeted universities and intellectuals to suppress dissent. Nazi Germany dismissed or imprisoned Jewish scholars and critics of the Third Reich. Stalin’s Soviet Union forced universities to align with Marxist ideology, executing dissenters. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution targeted intellectuals, imprisoning them, or killing the thinkers as a way of restructuring thought to fit that regime’s ideology.

Here, in the United States, we are currently witnessing a government crackdown on free speech, freedom of express and freedom of association. The government, aided by networks of informants, is pressuring universities to investigate and silence students.

The First Amendment as a Shield Against Tyranny

The First Amendment is the foundation of American democracy, enabling open dialogue, dissent, and debate. Supreme Court rulings have reinforced academic freedom: Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), and Healy v. James (1972).

Following 9/11, the Patriot Act expanded government surveillance and curtailed civil liberties. I voted against it because I read it. The Iraq War, based on lies, further demonstrated the dangers of unchecked government power. Any infringement resembling the Patriot Act should be repealed.

The Power and Necessity of Protest

We should view campus protests as a healthy sign in a nation where government surveillance, support for a genocidal war, and media complicity have created an alternate political reality.

As George Orwell wrote in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

America’s college students are not rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. They see at least 46,000 dead Palestinians, most of them women and children. They know their government is complicit and are demanding an end to the atrocities. That does not make them anti-Semitic—it makes them human.

They are part of a long American tradition of challenging war and repression. History shows that when governments which try to suppress legitimate protest only fuel greater resistance.

The persistent suppression of free speech now underway may temporarily undermine democratic institutions, but in the end, a government that attacks the First Amendment will destroy its own legitimacy.

Disobedience to authority is the privilege of youth. When young Americans put their academic careers and freedom on the line for moral principles, they renew our faith in America’s future.

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