TV News LIES

The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.

The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them only give glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.

A federal judge on Friday ordered that a Turkish Tufts University student detained by immigration authorities in Louisiana to be brought to Vermont by 1 May for a hearing over what her lawyers say was apparent retaliation for an op-ed piece she co-wrote in the student newspaper.

US district judge William Sessions said he would hear Rumeysa Ozturk’s request to be released from detention. Her lawyers had requestthat she be released immediately, or at least brought back to Vermont.

The 30-year-old doctoral student was taken by immigration officials as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on 25 March. After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana. An immigration judge denied her request for bond Wednesday.

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The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block what the group called the imminent deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas without the judicial review previously ordered by the court.

In an emergency Friday court filing, ACLU lawyers said dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas were given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”.

The ACLU has already sued to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of two Venezuelans held in the Texas detention center and is asking a judge to issue an order barring removals of any immigrants in the region under the law.

The Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassona, killed along with ten family members in an Israeli air strike on her home in northern Gaza, is the star of a documentary due to be screened at the Cannes film festival next month.

Fatima Hassona, a Palestinian photojournalist who's stars in a documentary selected to be screened at Cannes next month, has reportedly been killed in an Israeli air strike on her home in northern Gaza.

A graduate of the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, Fatima was not just a photographer, she was a visual witness to a reality that is getting harsher by the day. Hours before she was killed, she posted a photo of the sunset from her balcony, writing: "This is the first sunset in a long time."

In an earlier post, she wrote: "As for the inevitable death, if I die, I want a loud death, I don't want me in a breaking news story, nor in a number with a group, I want a death that is heard by the world, a trace that lasts forever, and immortal images that neither time nor place can bury."

TVNL Comment:  Israelis are cowards who kill those who dare to tell the truth about the daily horrors inflicted on Gaza.  Cannes will show Fatimah's documentary, and people around the world will learn more about the evils perpetrated on her people.

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On November 9, 2023, a little over a month into Israel’s war in Gaza, two student groups at Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), held a protest on campus. Now, seventeen months later, the protest and its aftermath are the subject of national scrutiny as the Trump administration goes after pro-Palestine demonstrators with little pushback from the university itself. In fact, the Trump administration drew on Columbia University’s own mischaracterization of the protest in its effort to arrest and potentially deport U.S. legal resident Mohsen Mahdawi—a characterization that former university President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik privately acknowledged was inaccurate, according to audio obtained by Drop Site News.

Mahdawi, a green card holder since 2015, was arrested in Vermont on Monday after being called in by immigration authorities for what he thought was a naturalization interview as part of the process to gain U.S. citizenship. He is the third green-card holder at Columbia that the Trump administration is moving to deport under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that alleges their activism has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—after Palestinian and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and fellow demonstrator Yunseo Chung.

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