Political Glance
Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania – including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses – as government abuse with “ominous historical overtones”.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.
The EEOC sued Penn in November over the university’s refusal to fully comply with its demands. On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.
“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff – a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the groups argued.
The number two prosecutor in the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of Virginia has been fired, according to two people familiar with the matter, the latest in a series of dismissals in an office that is leading controversial criminal prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James.
Federal immigration agents detained an employee of the New York City council on Monday, sparking outrage from the city’s leaders and renewed rebukes against the Trump administration’s immigration actions.
Minnesota and Illinois, two states targeted by the Trump administration for immigration enforcement, sued Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem on Monday, aiming to curb the agency’s crackdown after a woman was shot and killed by a federal agent last week.
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC has removed a placard that referred to Donald Trump’s two impeachments and his supporters’ January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to multiple news reports.
Shortly after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison heard something unusual was happening: Federal agents were not going to share their investigative file with their state counterparts.
