ICE Makes Another Student Disappear—and No One Knows Why

The Trump administration has detained another international student, but this time has not provided any justification.

University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian citizen, was picked up at his home on 5 a.m. Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. A university spokesperson said that Doroudi was detained off campus, but ICE didn’t respond to reporters at The Guardian or The New York Times.

The university’s student newspaper, The Crimson White, reports that Doroudi was in the United States on an F-1 student visa, awarded in January 2023, and had cleared immigration checks. He reportedly received a message that his student visa was revoked six months later and then contacted University of Alabama’s office of International Student and Scholar Services.

“ISSS replied with confidence, stating that his case was not unusual or problematic and that he could remain in the U.S. legally as long as he maintained his student status,” read a message in a group chat that includes Iranian students, according to the campus newspaper. On ICE’s website, Doroudi is listed as being “in ICE Custody,” but the “Current Detention Facility” field is conspicuously left blank.

Doroudi’s detention came the same day as another international student, Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University, was detained by ICE in a brazen arrest, captured on video, by plainclothes immigration agents wearing masks, after which she was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana. In that case, Ozturk’s arrest appears to be due to her pro-Palestinian activism, specifically her co-authoring of an op-ed in the university’s student newspaper.

Several international students have been detained by the Trump administration in the past month due to their support for Palestine, most notably Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University. All are assaults on free speech and are blatant violations of immigration law.

The White House’s attempt to minimize the Trump administration’s Signal group chat scandal isn’t convincing anyone … not even the usual cheerleader Fox News.

Fox News’s chief political analyst Brit Hume posted a straightforward rebuke on X Wednesday of the Trump administration’s sloppy handling of the crisis, in which several Cabinet members discussed sensitive military information in a Signal group chat that accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. 

“There are a couple of iron rules for dealing with a scandal. One: get the facts out as fast as possible and don’t be afraid to take responsibility. Two: Once rule one is taken care of, don’t feed the story,” Hume warned. “With regard to the Signal message case, the administration is making a mess of rule two by getting bogged down in a dispute over whether the details of Yemen bombing raids were a war plan and whether those details were, or should have been, classified. All that has done is prolong the story.”

On Wednesday, after the full details of the conversation were released, the Trump administration began attacking The Atlantic over a word in its headline, pouncing on the nonexistent differences between “war plans” and “attack plans”—as if that somehow negated the fact that the secretary of defense had revealed launch times to a reporter, and the White House then readily lied about whether there was classified information in the chat.

Hume continued, criticizing the Trump administration for attacking Goldberg, “who, through no fault or action of his own, received the Signal conversation.” 

“All attacking him did was give him a reason to release further details from the Signal chat, which appeared to contradict the administration’’s claim that no ‘war plans’ were discussed. That gave the story at least another day of life,” Hume wrote. 

In an interview Monday, Hegseth called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time.”

Later Wednesday, Hume appeared on Fox News’s Special Report, where he repeated his point that attacking Goldberg was a huge mistake. “Look, I’m not a particular fan of Goldberg or his magazine, but he didn’t do anything wrong here,” Hume said. “He got that thing sent to him passively. He didn’t do anything to get it. And when he reported on it, he left out a lot of the details. So, then they attacked him and said that he wasn’t telling the truth about it, which just gave him a reason to release the details as he did this morning.”

Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy also skewered the Trump administration’s handling of the leak in an op-ed for the New York Post, a conservative tabloid that regularly pushes stories to back up Trump’s agenda. 

McCarthy wrote that the “blunder of discussing the details on a Signal group chat that is not authorized for the communication of national defense information—to say nothing of top secret intelligence—was an unconscionable security breach.

“I like Pete Hegseth. That said, it was reckless to disseminate information about imminent combat ops over a non-approved chat app,” McCarthy added. “As defense secretary, he is expected not just to comply with the rules but to enforce them in his department.”

Other steadfast defenders of Trump’s agenda in conservative media have started to defect over the administration’s outrageous national security slipup.  

Right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren urged that White House’s “word gymnastics” needed to end. “Regarding this whole signal debacle, the administration really just needs to come out and explicitly say they F’d up,” she wrote in a post on X Tuesday. 

Conservative media personality Piers Morgan said that Trump ought to “roll some heads” over the group chat. “They *were* war plans, and it *was* (obviously) classified material. This whole Signal-gate scandal is a shockingly egregious f*ck-up that could have had catastrophic repercussions for US forces in combat on that operation,” he wrote on X Wednesday. 

Donald Trump is still publicly backing his national security adviser—but behind the scenes, the president is reportedly “mad” and “suspicious” of Mike Waltz’s contact list, which, as his allies learned Monday, includes The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Trump administration has reiterated its confidence in Waltz, who earlier this month seemingly accidentally invited Goldberg to participate in a Signal group chat where top administration officials discussed imminent attacks on Houthi targets on Yemen.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president has “the utmost confidence” in Waltz, while White House communications director Steven Cheung argued online that the Atlantic story had been blown out of proportion and wasn’t what former U.S. officials have described as “the highest level of fuckup imaginable.”

But three unidentified sources familiar with the situation told Politico that Trump was more than upset about the whole situation behind closed doors, though his frustration had been dampened by the success of the mission itself.

“The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid,” one person told the publication.

The report was soon followed by a damning revelation regarding Waltz’s behavior: Wired reported Wednesday evening that an account sharing the intelligence official’s name had left his Venmo profile public. In doing so, Waltz had disclosed the names of hundreds of his personal and professional associates, including government officials and lobbyists.

Waltz’s Venmo friends list also included a slew of media personalities, including Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes of CNN, a cable news producer, local news journalists, a national security reporter, documentarians, and “noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin,” per Wired.

As the week wears on and Waltz’s scandals pile up, the national security adviser’s behavior appears to suggest a pattern of haphazard thoughtlessness rather than isolated mistakes, for what should be one of America’s foremost security experts.

On Wednesday, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that several senior administration officials had their personal data—including account passwords, cell phone numbers, and email addresses—listed online.

Some of the compromised Cabinet members include Waltz, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The foreign publication was able to track down their information via commercial search engines as well as databases composed of hacked customer data.

“Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use,” reported Der Spiegel.

Through those details, reporters were further able to uncover Dropbox accounts and personal profiles on running apps that track users’ health data. Reporters were also able to locate WhatsApp and, ultimately, Signal accounts for some members of the administration.

Even the chief national security correspondent at Fox News is calling bullshit on the Trump administration’s Signalgate story.

Trump and co. are sticking to the story that the Signal chat that The Atlantic editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to did not contain any classified information, even though the messages contained precise timing about plans to bomb Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and press secretary Karoline Leavitt have been steadfast in this.

Fox’s Jennifer Griffin thinks they’re lying.

“There is a debate about whether the operational details Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in the Signal Group Chat were ‘classified’or not. So I surveyed a range of current and former US defense officials who agreed ‘war plans’ is not the right term but what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation, which could have placed US military pilots in harms way,” Griffin wrote.

“What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time-sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks. This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no [form] message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.”

Griffin continued. “This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than ‘war plans,’ which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials. ‘This information was clearly classified,’ according to former senior defense official #1. The Defense Secretary can retroactively declassify information after the fact, but the fact that this was shared in real time before the strike took place makes it unlikely to have been declassified when it was being shared and seen by the journalist for The Atlantic who was inadvertently included in the Signal chat.”

It says a lot when the administration’s own media wing is starting to get tired of its gaffes.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on Wednesday visited the mega-prison in El Salvador where U.S. deportees are being held—and decided to post a propaganda video to push the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Noem visited the Terrorism Confinement Center in the country Wednesday, posting a garish video of herself speaking in front of crowded prison cells full of partially clothed, tattooed detainees on X and bragging about the administration’s policy of deporting immigrants to El Salvador, at times without even due process.

“I also want everybody to know that if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences that you could face,” Noem said. “First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

The video sparked immediate criticism on social media, with commentators remarking on everything from how dystopian it looked to the clear constitutional violations of deporting people from the United States to a foreign country without due process.

Many of the people the administration has deported are civilians accused of being hardened criminals or gang members, sometimes on the flimsy basis of being Latinos with tattoos. In one case, a Venezuelan asylum-seeker was deported to El Salvador because he had a tattoo inspired by the soccer club Real Madrid and had made hand gestures in social media posts.

Meanwhile, El Salvador is run by autocrat Nayib Bukele, who has been accused of severe human rights violations and has thumbed his nose at U.S. court rulings. Still, the Trump administration made a deal with him to aid in mass deportations, and now El Salvador is helping administration officials make attention-seeking propaganda videos.