TV News LIES

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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Sen. Chris Van Hollen demanded Wednesday that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele open the doors of a notorious Central American prison and free a Maryland father who was wrongly deported by the Trump administration.

“I’m not asking him to smuggle Mr. (Kilmar) Abrego Garcia into the United States,” the Maryland senator said, standing at the side of a busy road not far from the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. “I’m simply asking him to open the door of CECOT and let this innocent man walk out.”

Van Hollen, who traveled to El Salvador to discuss Abrego Garcia's case with Salvadoran officials, described the union sheet metal worker and father of three as “a man who was illegally abducted from the United States and charged with no crime.”

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Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland will travel to El Salvador on Wednesday and attempt to visit Kilmar Ábrego García, a constituent whose deportation and incarceration in the Central American country, he warns, has tipped the United States into a constitutional crisis.

In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Van Hollen said he hopes to learn of Ábrego García’s condition and convey it to his family, who also live in the state he represents.

The state department has confirmed that Ábrego García is held in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), and despite the US supreme court last week saying the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return to the United States, the president refuses to do so.

It’s Jackie Robinson Day on Tuesday, with every player wearing No. 42, teams holding ceremonies, ballparks showing video tributes, and Major League Baseball reminding America that he helped spearhead the Civil Rights movement in 1947 with the integration of its sport.

Yet, here we are 78 years later, and the African-American player population on opening-day rosters and injured lists this season is 6%. There are three Black managers. There is one Black general manager.

“It’s infuriating. I think it's the new kind of antisemitism. It's just using Jews in a very cynical way.”

This is what Israeli Columbia PhD student Sahar Bostock told Zeteo regarding the Trump administration’s arrest of Palestinian Columbia undergraduate Mohsen Mahdawi on Monday. And she’s not alone in feeling this way. Students and professors spoke fondly of Mahdawi, a green card holder who was detained at his scheduled citizenship interview.

Mahdawi was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank. As a child, he watched an Israeli soldier shoot and kill his best friend. After arriving in the US 10 years ago, he went to Lehigh University to study computer science, before transferring to Columbia to study philosophy. While there, he organized with Palestinian and Jewish students towards peace, served as Columbia’s Buddhist Association president, and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union, alongside now-fellow-detained classmate Mahmoud Khalil.