Columbia Punishes Dozens of Student Protesters as It Caves to Trump

Columbia University just jeopardized the academic careers of dozens of its own students for protesting against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

On Monday, more than 70 Columbia students were notified that they would be suspended, placed on probation, expelled, or even have their degrees revoked for taking part in an occupation of Butler Library in May. The students entered the library’s main room in protest, chanting slogans and occupying it for a teach-in in honor of Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist assassinated by Israeli soldiers in 2017. Unidentified police officers physically clashed with the students until they started making mass arrests. 

“Columbia responded to the teach-in by illegally kettling and body slamming protesters who asked to leave, resulting in hospitalization of four students with concussions,” the Columbia University Apartheid and Divest group, or CUAD, wrote in a statement on Tuesday. 

This move comes as the university is completely bending the knee to Trump in order to restore $400 million in federal grants that the administration is withholding. It also comes just days after the university already ceded a major deal with the Trump administration to crack down on what the administration perceives as antisemitic activity on campus. The president spent months calling out the university, baselessly accusing student protesters of collaborating with Hamas, among other allegations. 

The university’s sanctions this week demand that students apologize for protesting if they want their punishment to be lightened. 

“The sanctions are believed to be part of a federal deal Columbia is about to announce that includes a formal partnership with the zionist Anti-Defamation League and an agreement to use the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s]  definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with discrimination against Jews,” CUAD wrote in the same statement. “In collaboration with the Trump administration, Columbia’s Acting President and Board of Trustees Co-Chair, Claire Shipman, illegally restructured the University Judicial Board (UJB) and removed student members and faculty oversight to pursue exceptionally harsh sanctions against its own students. The UJB’s Rules Administrator, akin to a prosecutor, filed charges after protestors flooded Columbia’s largest library to share a syllabus and readings about al-Araj and demand Columbia divest from the Israeli war machine.” 

This is the same university that sold Mahmoud Khalil, one of its own graduates, out to ICE for simply being a politically active pro-Palestinain voice on campus. While devastating for these students, it’s unsurprising that the Ivy League institution would rather sacrifice students who are peacefully protesting to please the Trump administration. This was a heavily coordinated attack not only on free speech but on any criticism of Israel and the current destruction it’s leveled against Gaza for nearly three years now. And aside from caving to the Trump administration, the university has worked with Columbia Alumni for Israel, which is believed to rely on the shadowy blacklist Canary Mission to identify students to punish.

“Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry. This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure,” CUAD’s statement read. “We will not be deterred. We are committed to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” 

Barack Obama is hitting back at the Trump administration for accusing the former president of treason.

Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, last week shared documents that she misleadingly claimed proved that the Obama White House manufactured intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election “to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”

The president seems keen on using this purported evidence of “sedatious” activity (as he inventively put it Tuesday) to force the national conversation off his perceived lack of transparency regarding the case of deceased sex criminal and his former friend Jeffrey Epstein.

The president on Sunday shared memes about imprisoning Obama. On Tuesday, he told a reporter with an Epstein-related inquiry that Gabbard’s story is what they “should be talking about” instead.

Later Tuesday, Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush responded to the attacks with a statement excoriating Trump’s allegations as “bizarre,” “ridiculous,” and “a weak attempt at distraction.”

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement reads. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one.”

Rodenbush continues: “Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”

“These findings,” he also points out, “were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee,” which was then chaired by Marco Rubio—meaning that, somewhat uncomfortably for Trump, Gabbard’s accusations of “treasonous conspiracy,” taken at face value, would implicate the second-highest-ranking official in his Cabinet.

Bipartisan interest in publicizing the Epstein files has brought together the most unlikely of allies.

Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jamie Raskin, Lauren Boebert, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are just some of the names who have co-sponsored H.Res.581, dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Introduced by Representative Thomas Massie, who has a habit of actually standing up to Donald Trump, the bill aims to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices” relating to child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

The text of the bill specifies the release of flight logs, travel records, the names of individuals and government officials connected to Epstein’s “criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings,” the names of corporations or organizations tied to Epstein’s trafficking networks, potential immunity deals or sealed settlements, as well as “internal DOJ communications.”

A dozen Republicans have signed on to the effort in total, including Representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Jeff Van Drew, Eli Crane, Cory Mills, Tom Barrett, Max Miller, Nancy Mace, and Keith Self.

But the effort isn’t likely to get off the ground anytime soon. House GOP leadership announced Tuesday afternoon that “votes are no longer expected in the House on Thursday,” with last votes taking place on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ending the schedule a day early and starting the beginning of a five-week summer recess.

“I think everyone wants to see the information that was sealed away,” Greene told reporters inside the Capitol Tuesday morning, highlighting that at minimum, the prospective legislation would have to wait for the courts to reply to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request to unseal the documents. “I’m all for voting on it, I’m all for transparency. We just have to be a little patient.”

House Republicans did already have a chance to stand up for transparency last week, but 211 of the caucus’s 212 members voted to block a Democratic-led effort to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.

Donald Trump’s administration has signed off on building the country’s largest immigrant detention center, a sprawling tent camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

The Department of Defense awarded the Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics a nearly $232 million contract to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term detention facility, according to a contract notice Monday. In total, however, the contract is worth closer to $1.26 billion, two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named publicly told Bloomberg.

The new tent camp is estimated to be completed by the end of September 2027. Sitting close to the Mexican border, and with its own airport, the new facility would serve as a deportation hub for the Trump administration’s purge of immigrants from the United States.

For scale, an estimated 700 detainees are currently held at “Alligator Alcatraz,” but the Trump administration’s wetland-themed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades is also expected to have a capacity of up to 5,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Acquisition Logistics has no experience in detention, according to Bloomberg. The company specializes in supply chain and project management, as well as technical and engineering services, and has previously received $29 billion worth of contracts from the DOD for jobs such as providing logistical capabilities, or lodging and conference room services for the agency’s work at the Southern border.

Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, expressed grave concern to Bloomberg over the government’s plans to house immigrants in tents. “All the reasons why you and I live not in tents but in homes are going to inevitably come up in a facility that doesn’t offer people walls and floors and insulation,” she said.

“It’s very hard to imagine how soft-sided facilities could satisfy even the low detention standards that are reflected in ICE’s most recent standards,” Winger added. This latest contract comes amid reports of inhumane conditions at ICE facilities, where detainees have alleged physical abuse, medical neglect, and psychological torture.

Acquisition Logistics’ startling lack of experience setting up a detention facility, as well as the government’s own wavering commitment to safe conditions for detainees, ought to spark grave concern as the rate of immigration arrests and of deaths in ICE facilities continues to rise. The government has greenlit yet another concentration camp—and this one is on track to be the largest so far.

This latest contract comes as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that two army bases would be used to house immigrant detainees, one in New Jersey and the other in Illinois. The moves severely undermine his supposed commitment to maximizing so-called military “lethality,” by transforming his own training facilities into pit stops for his boss’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. Like those facilities, Fort Bliss had previously housed Afghan refugees as part of the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome.

The government previously operated an Emergency Intake Site at Fort Bliss under the Biden administration, erecting a tent city to house unaccompanied migrant children. One whistleblower account revealed horrific living conditions similar to those in ICE facilities now, with children subjected to constant light, collective punishment, and even burns from unsafe materials.

An obviously fake image, purporting to show a resignation letter by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, made the rounds in MAGA circles on X Tuesday. Among the duped was Republican Senator Mike Lee.

Among other eyebrow-raising details, the letter includes an abundance of end-of-line hyphens, as well as punctuation errors (e.g., “Over the past years. I have worked alongside …” and “public confidence in its independence and effectiveness, My decision comes from …”) and an awkward line break causing an apostrophe-s to appear alone at the beginning of a new line.

Most egregiously, the words encircling the seal of the Federal Reserve System at the bottom of the letter are largely gibberish—ridden with the glitchy characters one often finds in AI-generated images containing text.

Nonetheless, Lee shared the letter on X, with the caption “Powell’s out!” flanked by (false) alarm emojis. According to Politico’s Jordain Carney, the senator decided to delete the tweet shortly thereafter “out of an abundance of caution.” Lee also told reporters, “I don’t know whether it’s legit or not.”

MAGA influencer Benny Johnson similarly shared the image with an alarm emoji, writing, “BREAKING: Fed Chair Jerome Powell has resigned,” before removing the post. “Sorry. Bad look,” Johnson wrote in a follow-up. “I still want Jerome Powell to resign really bad.”

It’s no wonder many Trump supporters got over their skis, losing any eye for detail at the whiff of Powell’s fictitious departure. The Fed chair has been persona non grata in Trumpworld in recent months, with the president calling him just about every insulting name in the book (“numbskull,” “dumb guy,” “major loser,” “low IQ”) for the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates (a decision that seems to be a cautious reaction to Trump’s capricious tariffs).