The month was January 2025. The Houthis were not attacking American ships, and the U.S. was not bombing Yemen. The month is May 2025. The Houthis are not attacking American ships, and the U.S. is not bombing Yemen. In between, there was a whole lot of bombing. President Donald Trump claimed victory over the Houthis […]
Boycotting foreign countries is an American tradition older than the United States. The Boston Tea Party that preceded the American Revolution came at the tail end of a boycott campaign against British goods. But since the 1970s, the U.S. government has tried to stop Americans from participating in unauthorized foreign boycotts. This week, the House […]
The arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi was a test of just how far President Donald Trump’s power over immigrants could go. Mahdawi, a ten-year legal U.S. resident and a student at Columbia University, was at his interview to become a U.S. citizen earlier this month. But because he wasn’t a citizen yet, the Trump administration argued […]
When immigration agents grabbed Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25, it looked like her only crime was cowriting an anti-Israel op-ed that had appeared in the school newspaper a year earlier. It still looks that way a month later, despite the government’s vague […]
One of the most poignant images of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was sailors dumping aircraft into the sea. More evacuation flights were approaching the U.S. fleet from Saigon than American ships had room to hold, so sailors had to push helicopters overboard to make room for incoming airlifts. On Monday, the U.S. military made […]
On Thursday, Trump administration officials admitted that Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested without a warrant. Khalil, a green card holder, has been detained since March, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio cancelled his visa over nebulous allegations of “pro-terrorist” speech. This admission came as part of a lengthy legal battle over the government’s attempt […]
You may find it hard to sympathize with Harvard, the nation’s oldest and richest university, especially when it is fighting to keep billions of dollars in taxpayer money flowing into its coffers. But a federal lawsuit that Harvard filed on Monday plausibly claims that the Trump administration’s freeze on research funding to the university violates […]
Writing in The Federalist this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio brags that he is protecting freedom of speech by ending his department’s misbegotten crusade against “disinformation.” Yet Rubio is simultaneously undermining freedom of speech by targeting anti-Israel activists for deportation because he deems their opinions harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests. More generally, Rubio’s ringing […]
By trying to deport student activists he describes as antisemitic “terrorist sympathizers,” you might think, President Donald Trump is cannily choosing unpopular targets who are unlikely to attract much public support. But according to recent polling by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), most Americans are not fans of that speech-chilling initiative. According […]
On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said that he was going to take away visas from “antisemitic foreigners” on college campuses. But his first target, Mahmoud Khalil, is not a visa holder; he is a legal permanent resident and the husband of an American citizen, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents discovered as […]