effort

Lawyers say immigration judge found that the Department of Homeland Security failed to prove the Tufts student should be removed from the US.

A judge in the United States has blocked the deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, according to her lawyers.

Ozturk’s lawyers detailed the decision in a letter filed at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.

They said the immigration judge concluded on January 29 that the US Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her.

Ozturk, a PhD student studying children’s relationship to social media, was arrested last March while walking down a street as the administration of US President Donald Trump began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Video showed masked agents handcuffing her and putting her into an unmarked vehicle.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier, criticising her university’s response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

A petition to release her was first filed in federal court in Boston, where Tufts is located, and then moved to the city of Burlington in Vermont. In May of last year, a federal judge ordered her immediate release after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights.

Ozturk, who spent 45 days in a detention centre in southern Louisiana, has been back on the Tufts campus since.

The federal government appealed her release to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The January 29 decision, however, ends those proceedings for now.

Ozturk said it was heartening to know that some justice can prevail.

“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the US government,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.

Ozturk’s immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

Patel’s decision is not itself public, and the Trump administration could challenge it ‌before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the US Department of Justice.

Khanbabai hailed Patel’s decision, while slamming what she called the Trump administration’s weaponisation of the US immigration system to target “valued members of our society”.

“It has manipulated immigration laws to silence people who advocate for Palestinian human rights and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” she said. “With this ruling, Judge Patel has delivered justice for Rumeysa; now, I hope that other immigration judges will follow her lead and decline to rubber-stamp the president’s cruel deportation agenda.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement that Judge Patel’s decision reflected “judicial activism”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can ‌come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again”.

The video of Ozturk’s arrest in the Boston suburb of Somerville was widely shared, turning her case into one of the highest-profile instances of the effort by Trump’s administration to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian views.

Separately, a federal judge in Boston last month ruled that Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities.

The Justice Department on Monday moved to appeal that decision.

The latest nauseant from MAGA types pretending to care about children was dished up last week, but amid the internment of kindergartners, the slashing of funds to catch child predators and a measles outbreak at a detention center, you are forgiven for missing it.

I am talking about a coordinated campaign launched by the religious right to overturn gay marriage, arguing it harms children. The effort is a direct attack on the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges decision making same-sex marriage a fundamental right of equality under the 14th Amendment, but also seeks to engage churches on the issue and change public opinion.

Good luck with that last part. Most Americans support marriage equality. But the Supreme Court? That’s much iffier these days.

But what disturbs me the most, while we wait for litigation, is that the campaign is yet another disingenuous ploy by MAGA to use children as an excuse for attacking civil rights, and attempting, Christian nationalist-style, to impose religious values on general society.

MAGA frames so much hate — especially around immigrants and diversity — as protection of children, and through decades’ worth of conspiracy theory has attempted to paint LGBTQ+ parents as deviant and predatory. (QAnon, for example, was all about saving kids from gay and Democratic predators.)

In reality, it’s the MAGA folks who are traumatizing children.

“Our children are afraid. They’re terrorized,” Chauntyll Allen told me. She’s the St. Paul, Minn., school board member who was arrested recently for her part in the church protest of a pastor who is also an ICE official.

“And we’re not just talking about immigrants,” she continued. All kids “are watching this, they’re experiencing this, and they’re carrying the terror in their body. What is this going to do for our society in 20 years?”

This campaign to undo marriage equality, far from protecting kids, is just another injury inflicted on them for political gain. It features two California cases that are meant to show how terrible any form of same-sex parenting is, but mischaracterizes the facts for maximum outrage.

The campaign also specifically targets in vitro fertilization and surrogacy as dangerous gateways to promoting LGBTQ+ families, an increasingly common position in far-right religious circles that would like to see more white women having babies through sex with white husbands.

Attacking marriage equality isn’t about protecting children any more than deporting immigrants is about stopping crime. Allowing it to be framed that way actually puts in danger the stability of the approximately 300,000 kids nationwide who are being raised by about 832,000 couples in same-sex marriages.

It endangers the physical and mental health of LGBTQ+ kids in any family who are growing up in a world that is increasingly hostile to them — with gender and identity hate crimes on the rise.

And it endangers everyone who values a free and fair democracy that separates church and state by eroding the rights of the vulnerable as precedent for eroding the rights of whomever ticks them off next. If LGBTQ+ marriages aren’t legally protected, how long before racists come for the Loving decision, which legalized interracial marriage?

If you doubt the MAGA agenda extends that far, when Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced her fourth pregnancy, one lovely fellow on social media wrote, “There is nothing exciting about this. We will never vote for your race traitor husband.”

Hate is a virus that spreads how it pleases.

Those behind the effort to undo marriage equality say that by legalizing the ability for LGBTQ+ folks to tie the knot, America put “adult desires” ahead of children’s well-being, which is dependent on being raised in a home that includes a married man and woman.

Never mind the millions of kids being raised by single parents, grandparents (looking at you, JD Vance) or other guardians who aren’t the biological John-and-Jane mommy and daddy of conservative lore. Never mind the many same-sex marriages that don’t include kids.

“Americans need to understand the threat that gay marriage poses to children and that natural marriage is directly connected to children protection,” Katy Faust, the leader of the campaign, said in an interview with a Christian news website.

Of course, the campaign also makes no mention of the hundreds of children currently held in detention camps around the country — on some days, the number of children locked up just by ICE (not Border Patrol or in the care of other agencies) has skyrocketed to 400 under Trump, according to the Marshall Project.

Outside of lockup, Black and brown children are being traumatized daily by the fear that they or their parents will be taken or even killed by federal agents. Thousands of kids across the country, including in California, have stopped going to school and other public places for fear of endangering themselves or their families. Don’t expect to see these folks campaigning to protect those kids.

The campaign also ignores the fact that U.S. Department of Justice funding to combat sex crimes against children was just slashed, leaving victims and prosecutors without crucial resources to fight that real and undoubtedly harmful exploitation of our youth by sex traffickers.

And Epstein. I cannot even start on save-the-children folks who seemingly ignore the victims of the sex crimes detailed in those files — many of them children at the time — while wringing their hands over families who don’t look like their own. It is a mind-blowing amount of hypocrisy.

But of course, none of this is about saving children — yours, mine or anyone’s.

But framing it around protecting children is a powerful manipulation — a last-ditch effort as same sex marriage does in fact become more accepted. Because who doesn’t want to save our kids? From whatever.

Don’t be surprised if this effort gains traction in coming months. As we head into elections, the MAGA machine will attempt to turn the lens away from immigration and back to old-school issues such as feminism, abortion and same-sex marriage, which time and again its base has been willing to vote on regardless of what else is happening.

Because they actually don’t care about kids. They care about power, and they’re perfectly willing to exploit kids to get it.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a California redistricting measure meant to net the Democratic Party more congressional seats, rejecting a challenge from the state Republican Party.

There was no dissent in Wednesday’s decision, and the conservative-majority court did not offer any explanation for its decision.

Instead, its order was comprised of a single sentence, stating that the Republican application “is denied”.

Previously, in December, the Supreme Court had allowed a similar redistricting measure, designed to benefit Republicans in Texas, to move forward.

Democratic officials in California have applauded Wednesday’s decision as fair, given that Republican President Donald Trump has led a nationwide push to redraw congressional districts in his party’s favour.

“Donald Trump said he was ‘entitled’ to five more Congressional seats in Texas,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a written statement.

“He started this redistricting war. He lost, and he’ll lose again in November.”

California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta echoed Newsom’s remarks, blaming Trump for launching a kind of redistricting arms race that threatened to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

“The US Supreme Court’s decision is good news not only for Californians, but for our democracy,” Bonta said in the statement.

The Supreme Court’s decision marks a win for Democratic efforts to counter the Trump-led redistricting efforts, which began last year in Texas.

In June last year, reports emerged that Trump had personally called Texas state politicians to redraw their congressional districts to give Republicans a greater advantage in Democrat-held areas.

Each congressional district elects one person to the US House of Representatives, which has a narrow Republican majority. Out of 435 seats, 218 are held by Republicans, and 214 by Democrats.

Texas, a Republican stronghold, proceeded to approve a newly revamped congressional map in August, overcoming a walkout by Democratic legislators.

That, in turn, prompted Newsom to launch a ballot initiative in California to counteract the Texas effort.

Just as the new Texas congressional map was designed to increase Republican seats by five, the California ballot initiative, known as Proposition 50, was also positioned to increase Democratic representation by five.

Voters in California passed the initiative overwhelmingly in a November special election, temporarily suspending the work of an independent redistricting commission that had previously drawn the state’s congressional maps.

Newsom, a possible 2028 presidential contender, framed Proposition 50 as a means of fighting “fire with fire”.

The new map approved under Proposition 50, however, will only be in place through the 2030 election, and Newsom has pledged to repeal it, should Republicans in Texas do the same with their new map.

The push to redistrict for partisan gain — a process known as gerrymandering — has long faced bipartisan pushback as an attack on democratic values.

Normally, redistricting happens every 10 years, after a new census is taken, to reflect population changes.

But this mid-decade redistricting battle comes before the pivotal 2026 midterm elections, which are slated to be a referendum on Trump’s second term as president. Trump has already expressed fear that he might be impeached, should Congress switch to Democratic control.

Partisan gerrymandering is not necessarily illegal, unless it purposefully disenfranchises voters on the basis of their race. That, in turn, is seen as a violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act, an important piece of civil rights legislation from 1965.

In response to the passage of Proposition 50, Republicans in California sued Newsom and other state officials in an effort to overturn the new congressional map.

They argued the new map was created “specifically to favor Hispanic voters” and would dilute the representation of Republican voters in the state.

The Trump administration joined the lawsuit on November 13, backing the state Republicans.

But Bonta, the California attorney general, argued the redistricting process was legal. In court filings, he also maintained that Trump’s backing of the lawsuit was driven by self-interest.

“The obvious reason that the Republican Party is a plaintiff here, and the reason that the current federal administration intervened to challenge California’s new map while supporting Texas’s defense of its new map, is that Republicans want to retain their House majority for the remainder of President Trump’s term,” his court filing said.

Bonto also called on the Supreme Court not to “step into the political fray, granting one political party a sizeable advantage” by overturning Proposition 50.

The victory for California Democrats on Wednesday comes as redistricting fights continue across the country.

Already, states like North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri have adopted new congressional maps to favour Republicans. There has been pushback, though.

In December, Indiana’s Republican-led legislature voted down a partisan redistricting measure, despite pressure from Trump to pass it.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday signed off on a plan to give financial relief to Palisades fire victims who are seeking to rebuild, endorsing it nearly 10 months after Mayor Karen Bass first announced it.

On a 15-0 vote, the council instructed the city’s lawyers to draft an ordinance that would spare the owners of homes, duplexes, condominium units, apartment complexes and commercial buildings from having to pay the permit fees that are typically charged by the Department of Building and Safety during the recovery.

Forfeiting those fees is expected to cost as much as $90 million over three years, according to Matt Szabo, the city’s top budget analyst.

The vote came at a time of heightened anxiety over the pace of the city’s decisions on the recovery among fire victims. Bart Young, whose home was destroyed in the fire, told council members his insurance company will cover only half the cost of rebuilding.

“I’m living on Social Security. I’ve lost everything,” he said. “I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m asking for something fair and with some compassion.”

The ordinance must come back for another council vote later this year. Councilmember Traci Park, who pushed for the financial relief, described the vote as a “meaningful step forward in the recovery process.”

“Waiving these fees isn’t the end of a long road, but it removes a real barrier for families trying to rebuild — and it brings us closer to getting people home,” she said in a statement.

Bass announced her support for the permit fee waivers in April as part of her State of the City address. Soon afterward, she signed a pair of emergency orders instructing city building officials to suspend those fees while the council works out the details of a new permit relief program.

That effort stalled, with some on the council saying they feared the relief program would pull funding away from core city services. In October, the council’s budget committee took steps to scale back the relief program.

That move sparked outrage among Palisades fire victims, who demanded that the council reverse course. Last month, Szabo reworked the numbers, concluding that the city was financially capable of covering all types of buildings, not just single-family homes and duplexes.

Fire victims have spent several months voicing frustration over the pace of the recovery and the city’s role in that effort.

Last week, the council declined to put a measure on the June 2 ballot that would spare fire victims from paying the city’s so-called mansion tax — which is levied on property sales of $5.3 million and up — if they choose to put their burned-out properties on the market.

Bass and other elected officials have not released a package of consulting reports on the recovery that were due to the city in mid-November from AECOM, the global engineering firm.

AECOM is on track to receive $5 million to produce reports on the rebuilding of city infrastructure, fire protection and traffic management during the recovery. The council voted in December to instruct city agencies to produce those reports within 30 days.

Bass spokesperson Paige Sterling said the AECOM reports are being reviewed by the city attorney’s office and will be released by the end of next week. The mayor, for her part, said Monday that the city has “expedited the entire rebuilding process without compromising safety.”

More than 480 rebuilding projects are currently under construction in the Palisades, out of about 5,600, the mayor’s team said. Permits have been issued for more than 800 separate addresses, according to the city’s online tracker.

The council’s vote coincides with growing antagonism between the Trump administration and state and local elected officials over the recovery.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order saying wildfire victims should not have to deal with “unnecessary, duplicative, or obstructive” permitting requirements when rebuilding their homes. On Tuesday, the county supervisors authorized their lawyers to take legal action to block the order if necessary.

Lee Zeldin, Trump’s administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is scheduled to meet Wednesday with Bass and LA. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger in Pacific Palisades to discuss the pace of the recovery. He is also set to hold a news conference with Palisades residents to discuss the roadblocks they are facing in the rebuilding effort.

MINNEAPOLIS — A federal judge says she won’t halt the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota as a lawsuit over it proceeds.

Judge Katherine M. Menendez on Saturday denied a preliminary injunction sought in a lawsuit filed this month by state Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It argued that the Department of Homeland Security is violating constitutional protections. The lawsuit sought a quick order to halt the enforcement action or limit its scope. Lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice have called the lawsuit “legally frivolous.”

The ruling on the injunction focused on the argument by Minnesota officials that the federal government is violating the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which limits the federal government’s powers to infringe on the sovereignty of states. In her ruling, the judge relied heavily on whether that argument was likely to ultimately succeed in court.

The federal government argued that the surge, which it calls Operation Metro Surge, is necessary in its effort to take criminal immigrants off the streets and because federal efforts have been hindered by state and local “sanctuary laws and policies.” State and local officials argued that the surge is political retaliation after the federal government’s initial attempts to withhold federal funding to try to force immigration cooperation failed.

“Because there is evidence supporting both sides’ arguments as to motivation and the relative merits of each side’s competing positions are unclear, the Court is reluctant to find that the likelihood-of-success factor weighs sufficiently in favor of granting a preliminary injunction,” the judge said in the ruling.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi lauded the ruling Saturday on social media, calling it “another HUGE” legal win for the Justice Department.

Federal officers have fatally shot two people on the streets of Minneapolis, Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan. 24.

Most European countries have either turned down their invitations to join United States President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” for overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza – or politely suggested they are “considering” it, citing concerns.

From within the European Union, only Hungary and Bulgaria have accepted. That is a better track record of unity than the one displayed in 2003, when then-US President George W Bush called on member states to join his invasion of Iraq.

Spain, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia said “yes”.

France turned the invitation down on the grounds that Trump’s board “goes beyond the framework of Gaza and raises serious questions, in particular with respect to the principles and structure of the United Nations, which cannot be called into question”.

Trump pointedly did not invite Denmark, a close US ally, following a diplomatic fracas in which he had threatened to seize Greenland, a Danish territory, by force.

The US leader signed the charter for his Board of Peace on January 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling it “one of the most consequential bodies ever created”.

It has come across to many of the countries invited to join it as perhaps too consequential – an attempt to supplant the United Nations, whose mandate the board is meant to be fulfilling.

Although Trump said he believed the UN should continue to exist, his recent threats suggest that he would not respect the UN Charter, which forbids the violation of borders.

That impression was strengthened by the fact that he invited Russia to the board, amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

‘Trump needs a big win ahead of midterms’

“Trump is thinking about the interior of the US. Things aren’t going well. He needs a big win ahead of the November midterms,” said Angelos Syrigos, a professor of international law at Panteion University in Athens.

The US president has spent his first year in office looking for foreign policy triumphs he can sell at home, said Syrigos, citing the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the bombing of Iran and his efforts to end the Ukraine war.

Trump has invited board members to contribute $1bn each for a lifetime membership, but has not spelled out how the money will be spent.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a member of the executive board.

“How will this thing function? Will Trump and his son-in-law administer it?” asked Syrigos.

Catherine Fieschi, a political scientist and fellow at the European University Institute, believed there was a more ambitious geopolitical goal as well.

“It’s as though Trump were gathering very deliberately middle powers … to defang the potential that these powers have of working independently and making deals,” she said.

Much like Bush’s 2003 “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, Trump’s initiative has cobbled together an ensemble of countries whose common traits are difficult to discern, ranging from Vietnam and Mongolia to Turkiye and Belarus.

Fieschi believed Trump was trying to corral middle powers in order to forestall other forms of multilateralism, a pathway to power that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outlined in his speech at Davos, which so offended Trump.

“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: [to] compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact,” Carney had said, encouraging countries to build “different coalitions for different issues” and to draw on “the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules”.

He decried the “rupture in the world order … and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints”.

After the speech, Trump soon rescinded Canada’s invitation.

Countering agglomerations of power and legitimacy was Trump’s goal, Fieschi believed.

“Here you bind them into an organisation that in some ways offers a framework with Trump in it and the US in it, and implies constraints,” said Fieschi. “It’s not so much benign multilateralism as stopping the middle powers getting on with their hedging and with their capacity to have any kind of autonomy, strategic and otherwise.”

At the same time, she said, Trump was suggesting that the Board of Peace “might give them more power than they have right now in the UN”.

“Trump thinks this is like a golf club and therefore he’s going to charge a membership fee,” Fieschi said.

“If it was a reconstruction fee [for Gaza], I don’t think people would necessarily baulk at that,” she noted, adding that the fee smacked of “crass oligarchic motivation”.

The Board of Peace is called into existence by last November’s UN Security Council Resolution 2803 to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.

It is defined as “a transitional administration” meant to exist only “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program … and [can] effectively take back control of Gaza.”

Trump’s charter for the board makes no mention of Gaza, nor of the board’s limited lifespan. Instead, it broadens the board’s mandate to “areas affected or threatened by conflict”, and says it “shall dissolve at such time as the Chairman considers necessary or appropriate”.

China, which has presented itself as a harbinger of multipolarity and a challenger of the US-led world order, rejected the invitation.

“No matter how the international landscape may evolve, China will stay firmly committed to safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun last week.

The UN itself appears to be offended by Trump’s scheme.

“The UN Security Council stands alone in its Charter-mandated authority to act on behalf of all Member States on matters of peace and security,” wrote UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on social media on Monday, January 26.

“No other body or ad-hoc coalition can legally require all Member States to comply with decisions on peace and security,” he wrote.

Guterres was calling for a reform that would strengthen the legitimacy of the UN Security Council by better reflecting the balance of power in the world as it is, 81 years after the body was formed. But his statement can also be read as a veiled criticism of Trump’s version of the Board of Peace.

Transparency and governance are problematic, too.

Trump is appointing himself chairman of the board, with power to overrule all members. He gets to appoint the board’s executive, and makes financial transparency optional, saying the board “may authorise the establishment of accounts as necessary.”