Human Rights Glance
More than a dozen progressive lawmakers have signed on to a letter demanding the Trump administration release Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from detention, after he was unlawfully taken by agents for helping lead anti-war student protests on Columbia University’s campus last year.
The administration has been facing growing backlash over Khalil’s arrest, which happened Saturday night as he and his wife were coming back to their university-owned apartment. Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him without a judicial warrant, threatening to revoke his green card that makes him a permanent legal resident.
Khalil’s wife, who earlier made a public plea for her husband’s release, is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant with their first child. At the time of his arrest, ICE agents also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife if she did not leave him and go up to their apartment. Agents would not give her nor their attorney enough information on the officers’ identities and Khalil’s whereabouts.
In response to Israel cutting off the electricity supply to a desalination plant for drinking water in the occupied Gaza Strip a week after it blocked the entry of vital humanitarian aid to the Strip, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns, Erika Guevara Rosas said:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday backed a federal judge's power to order the Trump administration to pay $2 billion to U.S. Agency for International Development contractors but did not require immediate payment.
