Latest news with #English-as-a-second-language
Japan Times
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Unmarked vans and secret lists. The police state has arrived.
"It's the unmarked cars,' a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil's abduction. In the video, which Khalil's wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband. "We don't give our name,' one responds. "Can you please specify what agency is taking him?' she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can't shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. "I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in communist Romania,' another friend, literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. "Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.' It's the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by a half dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car. It's the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It's the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It's the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment. It's the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings. It's the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in New York City. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia University. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don't open the door for deliveries. Don't leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out. It's the invisible hand of the authorities. Media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students' status in the database that's usually maintained by universities. (Normally, once a person has entered the country on a valid academic visa, they have the right to stay as long as they remain in the program for which the visa was granted — this is what university administrators track.) These changes have reportedly been made with no notification and in the absence of any transparent process. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has bragged to reporters about revoking the legal status of upward of 300 people and promised there would be more: "We're looking every day for these lunatics.' It's the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor's visa and then also legal permanent residents. They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an opinion essay in a student newspaper. And then there was a German green card holder at Boston's Logan Airport who was allegedly stripped and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Border Protection — actions that could fit the legal definition of torture. (The agency has denied the allegations.) And a Canadian with a job offer who was detained at the southern border and held for 12 days. And another German, a tourist, who was detained at the southern border and held for more than six weeks. And a Russian biomedical researcher at Harvard University who was detained coming back from France and has been in the infamous detention facility in Louisiana for over a month. It's the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won't happen to us or that there is some logic to these arrests. The German man had a misdemeanor charge a decade ago. The Canadian was possibly using a crossing not meant for people submitting work visa applications. The other German, a tattoo artist, was carrying her equipment and customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work illegally. The Russian scientist was bringing in frog embryos that the Department of Homeland Security says she did not declare properly. When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches from political speech to a paperwork error, we are in territory described by the Russian saying, "Give us a person and we'll find the infraction.' And, as historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, when an unknown number of U.S. citizens were caught up in the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the late 1920s and 1930s. It's the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it's the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a "protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.' The app promises rewards for "capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity' and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting - for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is "an honest, hardworking undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.' The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries. The state appears to have outsourced surveillance. A Columbia professor shared an Instagram story by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei that showed Elon Musk's "X' symbol rotating and morphing into a swastika. The professor did it on personal time, from a personal residence, to a personal account. An Instagram story lives only for 24 hours; someone was watching. It was reported to the university; three months passed before the professor was cleared. Then the professor's name and picture, along with a new inventory of ostensible offenses, popped up on one of those lists of supposedly antisemitic faculty members. There was, of course, nothing antisemitic about the Instagram story or the rest of it. The professor, like so many of the people on these lists, is Jewish. Late last month, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X: "We have identified faculty members' who, the group believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant. This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state. The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passerby, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building's super, your own student, your child's teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer. People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state. People lose the ability to plan for the future, because they feel that they have no control over their lives and they try to make themselves invisible. They move through the world without looking, for fear of seeing too much. But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I've seen it before. M. Gessen is an opinion columnist for The New York Times who won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024 and is the author of 11 books, including 'The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,' which won the National Book Award in 2017. © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Detroit TV will air 1975's 'Saturday Night Live' premiere on Saturday -- unlike 50 years ago
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of "Saturday Night Live," NBC will show the first-ever episode of the landmark series at 11:30 p.m. Saturday. "SNL" made its debuts on Oct. 11, 1975, with George Carlin as host and Billy Preston and Janis Ian as musical guests. Detroit's NBC affiliate, WDIV-TV, will be airing the original episode Saturday night — unlike in 1975, when it chose not to be part of TV's comedy revolution. Other NBC stations aired what was then titled "NBC's Saturday Night," which began with head writer Michael O'Donoghue playing John Belushi's English-as-a-second-language tutor in a skit called "Wolverines." As Belushi himself might have said, but, nooooooooo, WDIV wasn't among those stations. When "SNL" first started, it was such an unknown factor that WDIV — then known as WWJ-TV — didn't carry the first two seasons and let WKBD-TV (Channel 50), a fuzzy UHF station at the time (ask your grandparents) pick them up instead. Why? There are different theories on the reasons for ignoring a show that is still going strong after a half-century of irreverence (and a show that made a star that first season out of metro Detroit's own beloved Gilda Radner). According to 2022's "Going 4 It: The Inside story of the Rise of WDIV," the decision was a matter of taste. The station "banned it from their airwaves because it was too sarcastic, too satirical, too funny, too smart," said Joe Lapointe, a former Free Press sportswriter, in the documentary. More: How Harrison Ford, Jeep ended up in this year's Super Bowl ads More: 1 goal eludes Flint boxer Claressa Shields, but she holds out hope But in 1977, Free Press television writer Bettelou Peterson wrote that Channel 4's choice to skip the early seasons of "SNL" had nothing to do with its sometimes controversial content. According to Peterson, Channel 4 decided to run movies instead in the late-night timeslot after considering the cost factors, including the profits from commercials. Since NBC wouldn't allow the show to be taped for a delayed viewing, the network, with Channel 4's permission, persuaded Channel 50 to pick up "SNL," according to Peterson. It's not clear exactly when Channel 50 picked up "SNL.' But according to the Free Press TV listings for the historic Oct. 11, 1975, premiere date, Channel 4 aired the 1959 rom-com "Pillow Talk" with Doris Day and Rock Hudson at 11:30 p.m., while Channel 50 had a 1954 movie called 'Track of the Cat" starring Robert Mitchum. It's a Detroit-related footnote in the history of "SNL." Just don't get us started on WDIV's decision to delay NBC's "Late Night With David Letterman" in the 1980s. Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@ This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: It's the 50th anniversary of Detroit TV not airing the 'SNL' premiere
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rutherford County school board reverses vote on DEI, opts to remove more books
RUTHERFORD COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) — It was a tense two hours at the Rutherford County school board meeting Thursday night as the board reversed a resolution in support of closed borders, revised its stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and then voted to remove 32 books from school libraries. The board took back a vote made two weeks ago on a resolution that called for the closure of the nation's borders. The sponsor said it was meant to highlight the need for more resources to support English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students. Rutherford County school board passes resolution encouraging closure of borders According to the school board, the resolution was filed after the county experienced a 'significant surge in its English Learner (EL) population, stating the population has seen an increase of over 140% in the past decade. In fact, the board said RCS schools had 6,214 ESL students in May 2023. Now, the district has grown to 8,373 ESL students in the current school year. The increase of funding needed to serve ESL students is $3,500 more per student, according to the board. TN lawmakers file bill that would allow schools to opt out of enrolling undocumented students The board previously approved a resolution encouraging the state board of education to amend its policy on DEI in hiring. The resolution also included support for a bill filed in the general assembly to eliminate DEI in local government and at public universities. But after a recess, the board reconsidered and the proposal then failed by one vote after strong comments from the board chair, Claire Maxwell. 'We've been through too much with the vouchers, we're doing the books still, if something passes up at the state legislature and they ask us, I know you say 'They I don't know who they are, I didn't talk to this gentleman, I didn't know this was coming until Friday.' I don't want any more resolutions. I implore this board, lets get out of politics and lets get going on the bus contract and the budget and what we were put up here to do,' explained Maxwell. The board then went into a review of more than 40 books identified for possible removal. In the end, the board pulled 32 of those titles from school libraries. Rutherford County school board chair Claire Maxwell addressed attendees before the public comment period began and urged anyone speaking at school board meetings to refrain from personal attacks, adding anyone who speaks should keep their remarks to 'all things local.' 'There is no demonic agenda on the behalf of any of our library staff. We're not responsible for what goes on in other parts of the country,' Maxwell said. 'We can't control what goes on in schools in New York, Chicago or California. In Rutherford County, there are no drag show storytimes or Satanic afterschool programs.' Ten books will remain on library shelves, but only for 11th and 12th graders who have permission from their parents. Click here to watch the meeting in its entirety. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
