Latest news with #ColumbiaProtests
Fox News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Trump to meet with security team after US carried out 'Operation Midnight Hammer' and more top headlines
Print Close Published June 23, 2025 Good morning and welcome to Fox News' morning newsletter, Fox News First. And here's what you need to know to start your day ... TOP 3 1. Trump to meet with security team after US carried out 'Operation Midnight Hammer' 2. Satellite image reveals aftermath of US strikes on Iran's Fordow site 3. Trump hints at potential for 'regime change' in Iran with new slogan MAJOR HEADLINES SUNDAY ATTACK – Church security guard kills armed suspect who opened fire on congregation. Continue reading … DETENTION DUEL – Judge makes major move in case of suspected MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Continue reading … CAMPUS CHAOS – Columbia anti-Israel figurehead Mahmoud Khalil back to protesting after release on bail. Continue reading … OFF THE GRID – Americans are vulnerable to lone wolf threats and cyberattacks, former FBI agent says. Continue reading … HIGH-STAKES SHOWDOWN – Missing witnesses and lingering questions plague prosecution as Diddy trial nears conclusion. Continue reading … -- POLITICS LEADING THE WAY – Trump to join NATO leaders in The Hague amid rising global tensions. Continue reading … MESSAGING WAR – Republicans launch attack to stop Democrats from 'pushing' tax increases. Continue reading … ROAD RAGE RESPONSE – Republican launches effort to make blocking highways a federal crime amid ICE mayhem. Continue reading … WORLDWIDE WARNING – Americans urged to exercise caution amid escalating Middle East tensions. Continue reading … Click here for more cartoons… MEDIA 'RIGHT THING' – Trump critics laud president's decision to strike Iran nuclear sites. Continue reading … 'FAKE NEWS' – White House slams CNN report claiming Dems weren't briefed on Iran strike. Continue reading … TRUTH BOMB – Rubio fires back at CBS host over Iran strikes. Continue reading … 'UNHINGED' – Former Dem advisor blasts calls for Trump's impeachment. Continue reading … OPINION GREGG JARRETT – Why Trump's preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was legal, likely saved lives. Continue reading … RILEY GAINES – Title IX was meant to protect women, not erase us. Continue reading … -- IN OTHER NEWS BLOWOUT VICTORY – Thunder blow out Pacers in Game 7 to win NBA championship. Continue reading … BUZZKILL – Mother tries to ban another woman from drinking at table, gets sobering response. Continue reading … AMERICAN CULTURE QUIZ – Test yourself on beachside bars and coaster creations. Take the quiz here … HEART AND SOLE – Mystery footwear from 2,000 years ago leaves archaeologists stunned. Continue reading … 'LIKE A LIVING ORGANISM' – Woman stunned by surprise inside loaf of bread. See video … WATCH MIKE PENCE – I couldn't be more proud of Trump's decisive leadership following Iran strikes. See video … KAYLEIGH MCENANY – Every dictator in the world is on notice now. See video … LISTEN Tune in to the FOX NEWS RUNDOWN PODCAST for today's in-depth reporting on the news that impacts you. Check it out ... FOX WEATHER What's it looking like in your neighborhood? Continue reading… FOLLOW FOX NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook Instagram YouTube Twitter LinkedIn SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTERS Fox News First Fox News Opinion Fox News Lifestyle Fox News Entertainment (FOX411) Fox News Sports Huddle DOWNLOAD OUR APPS Fox News Fox Business Fox Weather Fox Sports Tubi WATCH FOX NEWS ONLINE Fox News Go Thank you for making us your first choice in the morning! We'll see you in your inbox first thing Tuesday. Print Close URL
The Guardian
22-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Mahmoud Khalil renews devotion to Palestinian freedom at New York rally
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist, freed from Ice detention on Friday, returned to Columbia University on Sunday to renew his commitment to the cause of Palestinian freedom and opposition to both the university and the Trump administration. Khalil arrived back in New York on Saturday after being released from more than 100 days in detention in Louisiana by a federal judge who ruled that punishing someone over a civil immigration matter was unconstitutional and ordered his immediate release on bail. Just outside of Columbia's gates and reunited with wife Noor Abdalla, Khalil thanked his supporters, legal team and 'to salute the courage of all students at Columbia and across the nation who had continued to protest'. Khalil made clear that following his release from detention he would battle what he called the 'shameful trustees at Columbia that are currently attempting to expel 15 more students and to suspend tens of others, basically conceding their future, their degrees and labor because they are not afraid to stand for Palestine'. The university, he added, 'would do anything and everything it can to ensure that the words 'free Palestine' are not uttered anywhere near it. 'But while we are here, Free, Free Palestine.' The crowd followed in a chant. Khalil went on to accuse Columbia of attempting to prevent the rally at its gates 'just so we cannot remind them that they fund the killing in Gaza' and he described himself not as someone who is violent, as he claimed he has been portrayed, 'but as a human rights defender'. His address determines that Khalil, the most high-profile student to be targeted by the Trump administration for speaking out against Israel's war on Gaza, plans to sustain his criticism of the university for what activists consider Columbia's capitulation to Trump administration demands to curb antisemitic speech and threats against Jewish students on campus. 'If they threaten me with detention, even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine,' Khalil said after shortly after landing in New Jersey on Saturday. 'I just want to go back and continue the work I was already doing, advocating for Palestinian rights, a speech that should actually be celebrated rather than punished.' Khalil was sent to Jena, Louisiana, shortly after being seized by plainclothes US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents in the lobby of his university residence in front of his heavily pregnant wife, who is a US citizen, in early March. The 30-year-old, who has not been charged with a crime, was forced to miss the birth of his first child, Deen, by the Trump administration. Khalil had been permitted to see his wife and son briefly – and only once – earlier in June. The American green card holder was held by Ice for 104 days. Khalil was ordered to surrender his passport and green card to Ice officials in Jena, Louisiana, as part of his conditional release. The order also limits Khalil's travel to a handful of US states, including New York and Michigan to visit family, for court hearings in Louisiana and New Jersey, and for lobbying in Washington DC. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx Democrat, said Khalil's ordeal was 'not over, and we will have to continue to support this case. The persecution based on political speech is wrong, and it is a violation of all of our first amendment rights, not just Mahmoud's.' The Trump administration has said it will appeal the order to release Khalil. 'This is yet another example of how out of control members of the judicial branch are undermining national security,' Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant homeland security secretary, said in a statement. 'Their conduct not only denies the result of the 2024 election, it also does great harm to our constitutional system by undermining public confidence in the courts.' The Trump administration claims it had the authority to detain and deport Khalil, arguing that his presence in the US is a threat to national security. A second charge alleges that he omitted details about his work history and membership in organizations on his green card application. Nina Lakhani contributed reporting
Irish Times
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Encampments director Kei Pritsker: ‘The students risked a lot to stand with the people of Gaza. That's tremendous'
The Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University , in uptown Manhattan, were not the first such US student protests during the continuing Gaza conflict. But they came to be the most impactful. Beginning in April 2024, the occupation saw tents spreading across the Morningside Heights campus of the Ivy League institution. Flags and banners were unfurled. Chants went up. That first protest, seeking Columbia's financial divestment from Israel, was broken up when Minouche Shafik, the university's president, authorised the New York Police Department to enter the campus and conduct mass arrests. Nothing like this had happened since the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War. 'Columbia wasn't actually the first campus to set up an encampment,' Kei Pritsker, director of a fine new documentary on the protests, confirms. 'Stanford University, Vanderbilt University – they also had encampments going. But the whole world saw how Columbia had called the police on their own students – students who paid tuition to study at that school, only to be arrested by their own faculty, by their own school administration.' Pritsker's The Encampments stands as a lucid, sober examination of a still-developing story. The director, unapologetically on the side of the protesters, reflects that mood in his own conversation. He lays out the case calmly. The anger is implied, not explicit. READ MORE 'People saw this happening in broad daylight,' he says. 'These videos were circulated around the world. There was so much outrage over the treatment of students who weren't bothering anyone, who were protesting peacefully. The hypocrisy of it all. The fact that the students were saying, 'Hey, we're doing this in the spirit of education.'' The protests spread across the United States' universities and then across the world. The students in Manhattan returned and tensions continued to mount. There were disputes about anti-Semitic incidents happening in the vicinity of the encampments. The university ended up cancelling its graduation ceremony in May of 2024. Shafik resigned that August. Future histories will position all the testimonies in proper context, but The Encampments is an invaluable first draft. There is a lot to unpick here about the general condition of American education and, more specifically, about its relationship with the almighty dollar. 'The schools have this false reputation – it's almost a caricature – that's been built up by conservatives, that they are run by Marxists, by leftists,' Pritsker says of the top US universities. 'The reality is the schools are really run like businesses, especially the private institutions. In the United States the average American pays more for education than any person in the world, but we have very low outcomes for education. 'That's because the schools are run like a business. The money is not just being invested in big sports stadiums and huge monuments but also just in inflating the endowment of the school. Inflating the investment portfolio. Buying real-estate investments.' [ Protesting students will not be shamed, badgered or bribed into silence Opens in new window ] The film puts the case that Columbia's vigorous response to the protests was driven more by financial concerns than by any ideological unease. 'It's clear to us that Columbia's main consideration was how their donors would feel about their reaction to the protests, not whether the school was on the moral side of history or if they were actually invested in genocide,' Pritsker says. 'They were concerned with pleasing their donors – who happened to support Israel.' The Encampments further argues that members of Columbia's board of trustees may have direct interest in organisations that would suffer if the university divested as demanded by the students. 'They're titans of industry. They are wealthy. They are influential in politics and in culture,' he says, moving on to discuss a former secretary of homeland security. 'We talk about a few like Jeh Johnson, who is someone who sits on the Columbia board of trustees and also sits on the board of Lockheed Martin, which is a weapons manufacturer that builds weapons that are sold to Israel.' Pritsker, a journalist with BreakThrough News , did not initially set out to make a film about the phenomenon. He went to Columbia first to report on the early protests. Some of his footage from that visit made it into the final project. 'I had been in contact with the Columbia students since then,' he says. 'So when they were setting up the encampment they reached out to me and said, 'Hey, do you want to cover this? You know the administration isn't listening to our demands. They're ignoring us completely. They are banning our student groups. They're looking the other way. So we're setting up this encampment.'' Pritsker went back to the university and began filming. He felt it would be just a straightforward news package, but when rumours emerged of imminent arrests he realised that he might have a larger story to tell. He hung around, and the next morning the first police actions took place. Then information came in that other colleges across the nation were setting up their own encampments. Pritsker found himself monitoring the progress of a mighty wave. 'I asked the students, 'Hey, can I live with you guys?'' he says. 'So I lived in the encampment for the next 12 days – all really as a journalist. I had no intention of making a film out of any of this.' News reports suggest that the encampments temporarily transformed the whole atmosphere in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Cops were everywhere. The press was hovering. Chants and cheers were audible. Did Pritsker get that sense of the protests bleeding out into the wider community? 'That was a big part of it that we didn't quite get to address in the film,' he says. 'This was a citywide, and a countrywide, and a globalwide encampment at Columbia. Every single night and every single day people were going to the gates of Columbia to chant very loudly – loudly enough that the students in the camp could hear them chanting in support.' He goes on to argue that the issue of the genocide in Gaza is not something 'that stops at the university gates'. This was a concern that, one way or another, energised the whole community. 'It should come as no surprise that people in New York City wanted to express their support for the students,' he says. 'Without that support the encampment wouldn't have survived, but the students inside were receiving tons and tons of food.' [ Irish J1 visa students urged to be informed of potential risks of 'activism' in US Opens in new window ] All well and good. But student protests have, to put it delicately, never been universally popular with the wider public. There was, in the blue-collar US, at least as much outrage at student militancy of the late 1960s as there was support. And Columbia is not just some community college. These are elite students at the most prestigious of universities. 'To a degree, there is an aspect of that,' he says. 'The movement hasn't quite reached blue-collar America. There is a perception that the movement is solely for people who consider themselves progressive or left-wing. When it's really not. I think that is kind of where the movement needs to go. It needs to broaden and approach people who might consider themselves conservative or right-wing.' The Encampments does, at least, push aside the notion that there is nothing at stake for the protesters. Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist at Columbia and one of the lead negotiators during the protest, is interviewed at length. In March this year Khalil was arrested by immigration officials in his university accommodation. 'Mahmoud is still in prison in Jena, Louisiana,' Pritsker says. 'He's still facing potential deportation. Some judges have issued orders slowing down the process, and obviously he has tremendous public support. 'So anything the Trump administration tries to do to Mahmoud will be heavily watched and criticised. They're trying to be really careful, and it's not clear that the administration has a solid case to do this.' Few of the protesters are facing anything like that sort of challenge. But there are risks for even those from more comfortable backgrounds. 'They have all these shiny little objects waved in front of them: lucrative careers, fancy job titles, all this,' Pritsker says, wryly. 'And the fact is they rejected that entirely. They said, 'We don't care about any of these bribes, these little trinkets that you're offering us. We want to stand with the people of Gaza at great detriment to our own safety and our own reputation.' That's tremendous.' The Encampments is in cinemas from Friday, June 6th
