Nineteen Democratic attorneys general sued Thursday over President Trump’s executive order that aims to strengthen proof of citizenship requirements in voting and prevent states from tabulating mail-in ballots received after Election Day.
“It bears emphasizing: the President has no power to do any of this,” the states’ complaint reads. “Neither the Constitution nor Congress has authorized the President to impose documentary proof of citizenship requirements or to modify State mail-ballot procedures.”
Trump’s order, signed March 25, directs the attorney general to target states that count absentee or mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day, a practice that conservatives have increasingly targeted in recent years. Court battles over whether it is legal commenced long before Trump’s inauguration.
The president also directed that the federal mail voter registration form and the postcard application used by voters overseas require citizenship proof of citizenship.
“If instead Plaintiff States choose not to comply with the President’s blatantly unconstitutional attempt to legislate-by-fiat, they will suffer severe cuts in federal funding that will throw the national electoral system into disarray. The Framers carefully crafted a federal compact that protects the States from this Hobson’s choice,” the lawsuit states.
The White House has previously pushed back on the legal challenges, saying Trump’s order is “an effort to protect the integrity of American elections” and that “Democrats continue to show their disdain for the Constitution.”
Led by California and Nevada, the states suing are Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
The new case adds to three separate challenges filed earlier this week that include plaintiffs like the DNC, the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Columbia University’s leading anti-Semitic group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), showcased its latest act of anarchy Thursday afternoon: a campus bathroom defaced with red paint and inverted Hamas triangles.
“A group of anonymous actionists welcomed @Columbia’s new AIPAC-backed university dictator Claire Shipman with a redecoration of Columbia’s bathrooms during her campus visit,” CUAD wrote in an X post accompanying four photos of the graffiti.
SUBMISSION: A group of anonymous actionists welcomed @Columbia’s new AIPAC-backed university dictator Claire Shipman with a redecoration of Columbia’s bathrooms during her campus visit.
— CU Apartheid Divest (CUAD) (@ColumbiaBDS) April 3, 2025
The photos show two bathroom stalls vandalized with red paint on the walls reading “WELCOME SHITMAN”—referring to Shipman, Columbia’s new acting president—punctuated by upside-down triangles, a symbol Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets. The same symbol accompanied other phrases, including “FUCK the TRUSTEE COUP” and “free PALESTINE.” “WELCOME SHITMAN” was also scrawled across a toilet seat.
Flyers were posted in the stalls featuring a doctored image of Shipman crawling out of a toilet with a caption reading, “Shitman! Shitman! We know you. You arrest your students too!” The flyers bore the logo of Columbia’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter, another anti-Israel student group, suggesting it was also involved in the vandalism.
Columbia released a statement saying it notified law enforcement and was investigating to identify the perpetrators.
“On Thursday, restroom facilities at Lerner Hall, Columbia University’s Student Center, were vandalized with graffiti that included disturbing, personal attacks,” the statement read. “Law enforcement was notified, the vandalism was removed swiftly, and an investigation is underway to identify those involved. Defacing property with harassing, threatening, or intimidating language is unacceptable and will not be tolerated at Columbia.”
The incident comes as Columbia struggles to rein in campus anti-Semitism, a crisis that has destabilized its leadership and triggered a $430 million loss in federal funding. Shipman, a former ABC and CNN journalist, took on the new role on Friday following interim President Katrina Armstrong’s abrupt resignation. Days earlier, Armstrong publicly promised to enact policy reforms intended to jumpstart negotiations with the Trump administration to restore the funding, then privately downplayed or denied that change was underway. Shipman took on her new role just two weeks after finalizing her divorce from former Obama press secretary Jay Carney.
“Shipman’s ties to AIPAC and Zionist violence run deep. In 2018, she led interviews at the AIPAC Policy Conference, sharing laughs with guests including MARCO RUBIO. Rubio is directly responsible for the targeting and abduction of Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil by ICE,” CUAD wrote on X.
Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and foreign national, was detained by ICE in March after Rubio revoked his visa and green card over his pro-Hamas organizing on campus.
“But it must be noted, regardless of personal involvement, every Trustee and every Administrator is complicit in Mahmoud’s abduction. It’s their role in the genocide of the Palestinian people that has paved the way for this brutal repression today,” CUAD continued. “After months of organized pressure and protest, Columbia has been forced to reveal its entire institution as built, bought, and sold by the Zionist death machine. The Uni can no longer hide its fascist fangs, so it’s resorted to a full-force crackdown on the mvmnt [sic] for Palestine.”
This isn’t the first time CUAD targeted Columbia bathrooms. In January, the group used cement to clog the School of International and Public Affairs’s toilets. Just months prior, Columbia student radicals had gathered in a recognized student organization for a crash course in anarchy. Training materials included a manual crafted for “aspiring revolutionaries,” detailing the very tactics seen on campus.
Wednesday afternoon, meanwhile, several Columbia student activists chained themselves to a school gate, chanting, “globalize the intifada.” After a few hours, the school’s Public Safety department removed the chains and escorted the activists through the gate, where they continued their protest. Later in the evening, Public Safety removed a second group that had chained themselves to a nearby fence.
Last week, Grant Miner, a Columbia graduate student who was expelled earlier this month for overtaking Hamilton Hall, gave a speech on campus, telling anti-Israel protesters they had to “fight back.”
Miner, the president of Columbia’s radical graduate student union, Student Workers of Columbia, led a chant before giving the speech on the steps of Low Memorial Library, an administrative building. The union organized the protest, demanding “No research cuts. No ICE. No censorship. No layoffs.”
Four days earlier, the union coordinated another demonstration to protest the Ivy League school’s policy reforms, which include new restrictions on mask-wearing during protests. Members of the union handed out masks to protesters while Columbia’s Palestine Solidarity Coalition—a CUAD splinter group—called on students to “wear a mask on Monday to protest mask bans and the fascist trustees.”
(NewsNation) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk is claiming that Social Security numbers were handed out last year to more than 2 million immigrants who entered the United States illegally and that those cards were subsequently used to collect benefits the migrants are not entitled to receive.
Musk, speaking at a weekend town hall meeting in Wisconsin, displayed data from a Social Security program called Enumeration Beyond Entry, which indicated that nearly 2.1 million migrants were given Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2024 alone.
That figure was a sharp increase from the 590,000 noncitizens who received Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2022 and the 964,000 who received them in 2023, EBE data showed. The Trump administration estimates that 11 million immigrants who crossed the border illegally are currently living in the U.S.
“This literally blew us away,” Gracias said at the town hall. “We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.”
How migrants get Social Security numbers
The Social Security Administration reports that, in general, only noncitizens who are authorized by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to work in the United States are eligible to receive Social Security numbers.
Once authorized to legally work in the U.S., migrants are eligible to apply for a Social Security card. However, the agency stipulates that for non-U.S. citizens to receive Supplemental Security Income, they must have been granted a certain classification by the Department of Homeland Security.
Those classifications include being legally admitted into the country as a permanent resident, granted conditional entry or asylum, paroled into the United States or admitted as a refugee.
However, Gracias alleged Sunday that migrants were given Social Security numbers automatically through the mail without being interviewed or being required to show identification after applying for and receiving a work permit.
The EBE program that distributes Social Security numbers to migrants with work authorizations began in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first White House term. The initiative was established as a partnership between the SSA and DHS to assist the SSA in efficiently issuing Social Security numbers to migrants who were deemed eligible.
The SSA’s inspector general wrote in 2019 that the program allowed Homeland Security to vet the legal status of migrants who were eligible to work and then automatically issue them with Social Security numbers. As part of the process, migrants seeking Social Security numbers were required to provide proof of their legal status.
A SSA spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email from NewsNation seeking comment about the claims or the EBE data Thursday.
Musk claims migrant Social Security benefits are ‘massive’ Biden program
Musk said Sunday the issuance of the Social Security numbers was part of a “massive large-scale program” by the Biden administration to “import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one-party system from which there would be no escape.”
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk listens as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show, Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Gracias added that migrants who received Social Security numbers were receiving “max benefits” and that the noncitizens who were issued the Social Security numbers were using them to register to vote. The claims came after Musk previously alleged that Social Security benefits had been paid to tens of millions of people who had died.
However, despite the growth in recent years of migrants who were provided with Social Security numbers, a 2023 government audit cited by The Washington Post stated that the SSA correctly processed cases for noncitizens to be issued Social Security numbers 99.8% of the time.
Experts, such as former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley, told Rolling Stone that the increase in Social Security numbers being issued to migrants was “inevitable” due to former President Joe Biden’s policies regarding lawfully admitted immigrants at the U.S. southern border.
How working migrants pay into Social Security
A 2024 analysis conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that migrants paid $96.7 billion into federal, state and local taxes in 2022. The migrant employees who have been issued work permits also paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes during the same year, although, in most cases, they are not eligible to receive benefits from federal agencies.
As Trump has vowed to stop the flow of migrants entering the country illegally, ITEP found that providing access to work authorizations to all migrants would increase their tax contributions from $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion. More than $33 billion of the difference would go to the federal government, the study found,
The two women running to unseat Eric Adams in the 2025 NYC mayor’s race stirred the crowd at the National Action Network‘s annual convention on Thursday, drawing thunderous applause for their pledges to take New York in a new direction and fight President Trump at every turn.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and state Sen. Jessica Ramos, both representing opposite sides of Queens, stood out among the group of roughly a dozen candidates who spoke at the convention’s candidates’ forum. The conference is convened each year at the Midtown Manhattan Sheraton hotel by Rev. Al Sharpton.
Speaker Adams spoke forcefully about why she made a late entry into the mayor’s race after previously showing little interest in running for the position. She said it was ultimately the departure of four of the mayor’s top deputies last month that pushed her into the race, along with nudges from other elected officials.
“The city needs a leader,” she said. “The city needs something different. The city needs to go without trauma, without drama, without scandal, without corruption. The city needs something different. And so I took a deep breath and believed in my God, and I jumped into this race.”
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
The speaker said she felt momentum for her candidacy that was a continuation of the enthusiasm among Black women for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign.
Speaker Adams also clearly distinguished between how she would approach Trump’s targeting of the city and how Mayor Adams has handled it thus far. She slammed the mayor for promoting a book written by Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, during remarks he gave after a judge dismissed his federal indictment on Wednesday.
Speaker Adams said we need “somebody who’s not afraid of Donald Trump, nor hawk his books.”
“We need somebody that’s not going to cower in a corner but will speak truth to power, real truth to power,” she added.
Ramos said that she also wants to take a strong stance against Trump by bringing a “gun to a gunfight.”
“If he is going to say that he’s not going to give us the money for transit, for infrastructure, Title One funding for our children with disabilities in public schools, if he’s not going to fully fund SNAP benefits, then you don’t need our money,” Ramos said, to applause and shouts of approval. “We should keep our money, re-appropriate it, and fill those holes that he thinks he’s gonna leave.”
State Sen. Jessica Ramos.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
Ramos said she would defend immigrants, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs from attacks by the Trump administration.
She said she wants to “make sure we are playing hardball with the worst of Queens,” referring to Trump.
“That’s why I want you guys to lead with the best of Queens,” she said. “So that our children are proud of who’s occupying the halls of power because we have to get it together.”
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
A fast-spreading panic hit Capitol Hill on Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s trade war prompted markets to suffer their worst day since the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and analysts were predicting the worst was yet to come.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
While most Hill Republicans tried to avoid criticizing their party’s leader, frustrations were being laid bare as their talking points didn’t match those coming out of the White House. Lawmakers were insisting Trump’s new tariffs are a starting point for a negotiation while the White House said they’re actually the end of the discussion. Frantic calls to Cabinet agencies about home-district impacts were yielding platitudes and not promises. Even give-Trump-a-chance Republicans began losing patience as their office phone lines were on fire.
Trump’s stated goal is to force businesses to make their wares on U.S. soil, in theory sparking a renaissance in domestic manufacturing. Economists are highly skeptical, but even Trump’s apologists worry that the short-term ramp-up is going to be rough. Midterm elections seldom reward the party holding the White House even in the best of times, and Republicans are quickly realizing that Trump’s kitchen-table chaos may end up tanking their hopes for retaining control of Congress next year.
“None of this was thought through,” says one Republican lobbyist who is trying to tell her association’s members not to panic. “The math doesn’t work. The end game doesn’t work. The politics doesn’t work. This is just a mess and it is going to cost Republicans seats.”
Not too long ago, Congress would have had some say in the tariffs levied on other countries. But Trump is calling the trade imbalance between domestic markets and its international partners as a national emergency to avail himself of powers that allow him, without any real check, to impose these tariffs. The result is set to be a minimum 10% tax on most goods coming into the country and climbing to a net 79% charge on some stuff coming in from China.
Put plainly: this was not the trade rebalancing Hill Republicans would have drafted had they been consulted. Just don’t expect things to move in any meaningful way against Trump’s orders any time soon, no matter how steamed they are.
A handful of Republicans were motioning to curb Trump’s capricious trade war, but not in a way that anyone in Washington expects will go anywhere. As TIME’s Nik Popli reports from the Hill, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican whose home-state farmers will pay dearly if the export markets close, is backing a measure that requires Congress to approve tariffs within 60 days of a White House announcement. But there is almost zero chance the bill will get sufficient backing—let alone a vote—in the GOP-led House. Grassley’s move tweaked the White House, but is just that: an annoyance. It’s the same fate that awaits a small-scale, symbolic version to undo the penalties against Canada that immediately cleared the Senate on Wednesday.
For now, the Senate map in 2026 still favors Republicans, with retirements of Democrats in toss-up states like New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota giving GOP strategists optimism about adding to their majorities. But the argument for electing Republicans becomes tougher once clothing and grocery bills spike, and housing starts plummet because Canadian lumber is too expensive to frame up a new development.
This tit-for-tat trade retribution is an impulse that has long been part of Trump’s worldview. He thinks the United States is getting ripped off, plain and simple. He sees a deck stacked against American manufacturers, and he has the power to remedy this for what he calls the little guy. It’s all guaranteed to be bad politics for a President who returned to office on promises of curbing inflation, driving down costs, and fixing Washington—and his fellow party members who are fine going along.
Republicans at the Capitol understand this is going to hurt not just Americans, but their own political futures. It’s why, in a low-key fever, they’re freaking out. But here’s the rub: while they know this is bad for just about everyone, don’t expect them to exercise their congressional authority to get Trump to back off. Their prospects may be bad right now, but they view crossing a President who leads a vindictive movement as even worse. This is not a moment where anyone in Washington is expecting political bravery. Far from it. The question many Republicans in the Capitol are asking themselves: which path will yield the least pain for selfish spoils? It’s a pretty weak way to run a superpower.
As Israel continued its monthlong blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza and pounded the enclave with American bombs, in Washington the Senate on Thursday voted down two resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to block the sale of tens of thousands of 2,000-pound bombs and other offensive weapons to Israel.
The resolutions marked the second time since November that Sanders forced a vote on arms sales. Once again, they exposed a deep divide among Democrats and blanket Republican support for Israel.
The Senate voted 15-82 on the first resolution, concerning 2,000-pound bombs, with all Republicans present voting against it, along with most Democrats. Sanders was joined by 14 Democrats.
The second resolution, focusing on other weapons, fared even worse. It was defeated 15-83.
The Trump administration officially opposed the resolutions, along with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“If you are a Republican, and you vote against the Trump–Musk administration in one way or the other, you’ve got to look over your shoulder and worry that you are going to get a call from Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world,” Sanders said. “If you are a Democrat, you have to worry about the billionaires who fund AIPAC.”
He cast his resolutions as a chance to stop exporting weapons that enable what he called “barbarism” in Gaza.
“History will not forgive us for this,” Sanders said. “The time is long overdue for us to tell the Netanyahu government that we will not provide more weapons of destruction for them.”
Changing Landscape
The votes came only four months after Sanders’s prior, unsuccessful attempt to block arms sales to Israel, but against a vastly different geopolitical backdrop.
Since November, Israel has reached and abandoned a ceasefire with Hamas. Donald Trump has taken over the White House from Joe Biden, while touting his support for ethnically cleansing Gaza. And a Republican majority has assumed control in the Senate.
One of the resolutions up for a vote Thursday would have blocked the sale of more than 35,000 2,000-pound bombs, which have been widelycriticized by humanitarian groups for the indiscriminate destruction they cause in densely populated urban areas such as the Gaza Strip.
The other resolution targeted the sale of thousands of smaller-diameter — but still powerful — bombs and thousands of bomb-guidance kits and fuses.
Sanders said the situation in Gaza now is even worse than it was during the Biden administration, which humanitarian groups criticized for its half-hearted attempts to pressure Israel.
“What is happening right now is unthinkable. Today it is 31 days and counting with absolutely no humanitarian aid getting into Gaza,” Sanders said. “That is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. It is a war crime. You don’t starve children, and it is pushing things toward an even deeper catastrophe.”
Despite Sanders’s attempt to tie his resolutions to opposition to Trump, many Democrats voted against them. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., voted no, as did Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who gave a floor speech to rally support against the resolution.
Passing the resolutions, Rosen said, would send a “message to terrorists” of “impunity.”
“If we are serious about stability in the region,” she said, “and the safe and secure state of Israel someday living alongside a peaceful, independent Palestinian state, I urge all my colleagues to vote no on these resolutions.”
Fewer Votes
Critics of Israel’s war had hoped that the earlier resolutions in November, while unlikely to succeed, might begin a longer process of building support for Palestinians in Congress. Sanders’s resolutions on Thursday, however, drew four fewer votes than his best showing in November.
One notable defection was of Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who faced a backlash from some Jewish community leaders over his support of Sanders’s first set of resolutions in November.
After defending his earlier votes, Ossoff voted against blocking arms sales on Thursday. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ossoff is considered the Democrats’ most vulnerable incumbent in next year’s election, and the party will also be defending three open seats that Republicans have a chance of taking, according to the Cook Political Report.
Seeming to anticipate electoral concerns from Democrats, Sanders during his speech bemoaned the role of money in politics and the influence of AIPAC, which spent on 389 congressional races last year. The pro-Israel lobby group had urged its members to oppose Sanders’s “dangerous” resolutions in a message before the vote.
AIPAC hailed the vote in a press release.
“We applaud the Trump administration for approving these sales and helping ensure Israel has the resources it needs to win,” the group said. “The majority of Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans reaffirmed profound American support for our ally and rejected the repeated dangerous efforts by Senator Sanders and his allies to weaken Israel and undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
A group that has been critical of Israel, the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, expressed its disappointment after the vote.
“Democrats in Congress have their lowest approval rating in decades,” the group’s executive director Margaret DeReus, said in a statement, “and today’s vote was yet another demonstration of why they have lost the trust of their own voters and the American people.”
When President Donald Trump initially announced his new tariffs in February, he proposed them as a “fair and reciprocal plan on trade.” And so it was assumed that these reciprocal tariffs, as they are known, would be equal in value to the taxes that foreign countries have set against U.S. goods.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
In fact, the tariffs unveiled on Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” were slightly more complicated—and for some economists, more worrying.
Trump first slapped a 10% blanket tariff on all imports into the U.S., including from uninhabited islands, such as the Heard and McDonald islands, and on places with which the U.S. runs a surplus, such as the U.K.
“To all of the foreign Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Queens, ambassadors and everyone else who will soon be calling to ask for exemptions from these tariffs, I say: ‘Terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers, don’t manipulate your currencies,’” Trump said while speaking from the Rose Garden at the White House.
On top of this baseline 10% charge, Trump held up a cardboard chart and announced additional tariffs for some countries, calculated by “tariffs charged to the USA.”
The Trump Administration ended up using a simple calculation: Each country’s U.S. trade deficit divided by its exports to the U.S.. The final reciprocal tariff was then divided by 2, with a minimum of 10%.
“Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” the former financial columnist for the New Yorkerposted on X. “What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
The Office of the United States Trade Representative confirmed Trump’s tariff math in an explainer, stating: “Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners….To conceptualize reciprocal tariffs, the tariff rates that would drive bilateral trade deficits to zero were computed.”
Though the explanation uses Greek letters and formulas, Politico notes that it is essentially the same formula that Surowiecki posted.
Using this formula, the Trump Administration calculated extremely high rates for certain countries, including a new 34% tariff imposed on China, 46% for Vietnam, and 20% for the European Union.
Felix Tintelnot, associate professor of economics at Duke University, sees major problems with this method of calculation—notably that the trade deficit is “normal” and “can change.”
“Let’s say the trade deficit in Vietnam shrinks over the next year. Well, then the tariff rate also should change. But now market participants need to forecast how much the trade deficit with individual countries will change,” Tintelnot says. “And that’s not straightforward, because we are changing so many tariffs at the same time, and ultimately, the aggregate trade deficit of the U.S. is largely determined by other macro decisions, like aggregate savings and aggregate investment, that have nothing to do with tariff rates.”
“The fact that countries that charge zero tariffs on the U.S. have been hit with tariffs illustrates that these are not reciprocal tariffs in their true meaning,” Tintelnot says. “It is perfectly normal in an integrated global economy for a bilateral trade deficit to exist. A little introspection helps: You have a bilateral trade deficit with your grocery store, but a bilateral trade surplus with your employer. Why would you put a tariff on your local grocery store?”
Brian Bethune, professor of economics at Boston College, argues that the Trump Administration should have never calculated these tariffs for countries with such vastly different economic standings and relationships to the U.S. while utilizing the same formula.
“Treating all of the small developing countries the same way as you’re treating the European Union… that seems to be outrageous,” Bethune says. “Some of these countries with relatively small and more fragile economies may have somewhat of a different approach to trade. This is the problem when you lump them all together.”
Trump’s new tariffs have prompted renewed fears that a U.S. recession could be on the horizon. Today, an immediate impact has been felt as a result of Trump’s “Liberation Day.” The U.S. dollar has fallen to a six-month low against the EURO and Dow Jones has plunged over 1,500 points. Trump has previously said that “some pain” could be encountered as a result of the tariffs. Bethune predicts that the Trump Administration is preparing people for a recession that is, in his professional opinion, “inevitable.”
Eight international students at Arizona State University have had their visas revoked amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and a crackdown on students expressing their political views.
An ASU spokesperson confirmed Wednesday in an email to Arizona Luminaria that the students’ visas were revoked recently — in the first two days of April and in late March.
Little more is publicly known about who the students are or why their visas were revoked.
The ASU spokesperson wouldn’t comment on whether any of the students who had their visas revoked have been arrested.
“The only thing we can tell you at this time is that eight out of our 15,100 international students have had their visas revoked. These were not protest related,” the spokesperson wrote.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late last month that more than 300 visas, primarily student visas, have been recently revoked by the State Department.
“No one has a right to a visa. These are things that we decide,” Rubio said. “We deny visas every day, and we can revoke visas. If you have the power to deny, you have the power to revoke.”
The university spokesperson, repeatedly saying they couldn’t offer specifics, added that “none of the eight students I mentioned previously are from Latin American countries.”
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked.”
Michael Kintscher, an ASU graduate student and president of United Campus Workers of Arizona, also confirmed that their international classmates are being targeted.
“The letters I have seen do not contain any reason for the visa being revoked,” they said.
Arizona Luminaria reached out to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues visas, as well as the State Department for comment. The news organization also asked for the students’ nationalities and why their visas were revoked.
Officials with the federal agencies did not immediately respond.
Citing student privacy protections, Mitch Zak, spokesperson for the University of Arizona, would not say whether any UA students have had their visas revoked.
“UA International Student Services and International Faculty/Scholar Services monitor immigration-related developments and provide students and scholars with updates to ensure they are informed and in compliance with federal regulations,” Zak added.
The UA has recommended that all international students carry a copy of their passport, their visas, and proof of their immigration status on them at all times.
After selling for $12.5 million in 2022, the Brooklyn Heights dwelling perhaps best known as the “Moonstruck” house is back on the market. The most recent buyer of 19 Cranberry St. was an LLC, with the New York Post reporting at the time that comedian Amy Schumer and her husband, chef Chris Fischer, were the buyers.
The 19th century house within the Brooklyn Heights Historic District has a few hundred years of history behind its walls, but the fact that its exterior played a supporting role in the 1987 film has remained the bit of trivia that sticks. It was portrayed as the home of the multi-generational Castorini family, and the surrounding area figured prominently in the movie along with stars Cher, Nicholas Cage, and Olypmia Dukakis. For film buffs, the interior won’t look familiar, as those scenes were filmed elsewhere.
The exterior of the historic home looks largely the same from the street. Photo courtesy of The Modlin Group & Corcoran
For real estate buffs, the interior will look familiar as many of the previous listing photos are the same. A parlor and some bedrooms have been restaged since 2021, but otherwise the photos are identical.
An exterior restoration project on the 26-foot-wide brick house, set on the prominent corner of Cranberry and Willow streets, was already completed before it last sold. The LPC approved reno included work on the mansard roof, the brownstone stoop, and the ironwork fence. That mansard roof, complete with cresting, is a later 19th century addition to the circa 1830s house, bringing a Second Empire touch to the original Federal-style house.
One of five bedrooms in the home. Photo courtesy of The Modlin Group & Corcoran
While the fictional Castorini family may be the one many associate with the property, some of the real owners who lived there over the building’s 180-plus years have some equally dramatic stories. The most extreme might be the 1880s scandal and drawn-out lawsuit over the house’s ownership after Dr. Herman Richardt was accused of having “complete control and mastery” over the mind of owner Catharine A. Valentine, resulting, her family alleged, in her handing over the deed to 19 Cranberry Street. The case was followed extensively in the press as competing interests fought for the property and the guardianship of her son, who was removed from her care over claims of an “illicit relationship.”
In more positive recent history, in 1961 the house was purchased by Edward and Francesca Rullman. An architect, Edward Rullman was chairman of the Brooklyn Heights Association’s Design Advisory Council and was active in the movement to designate the Brooklyn Heights Historic District. His decision to sell the house in 2008 after years of restoring it and more than 50 others in the neighborhood made the New York Times, with Mr. Rullman telling the paper, “We got 100 times what we paid for it back in 1961.”
The subsequent buyers undertook the major exterior and renovation mentioned in the listing. In addition to the exterior restoration, the work included a new steel infrastructure and the addition of a gym and wine cellar in a excavated cellar.
The wood-paneled library in the home. Photo courtesy of The Modlin Group & Corcoran
The single-family dwelling has the kitchen on the garden level, double parlors above, and two floors of bedroom space. Laundry is in the cellar.
On the parlor level are pocket doors between the double parlors, crown moldings, and two dark marble mantels with working fireplaces. Downstairs, the kitchen has a warm, aged look with vintage wood cabinets salvaged from an Ohio mansion to go along with exposed beams, a wood-burning stove, wide-plank floorboards, and a banquette. There’s also a garden-facing wood-lined library with built-in bookshelves and a wood-burning stove.
The freestanding shower and tub in the bedroom ensuite. Photo courtesy of The Modlin Group and Corcoran
Above the parlor floor is a bedroom suite with study, dressing room, and bath. The latter continues the vintage look with marble floors, a freestanding glass shower, and separate soaking tub. Three more bedrooms and another full bath — this one covered in penny tile and with a walk-in shower and marble corner sink — make up the top floor. The house also has a laundry room and central air, according to the listing.
There is a driveway on the Willow Street side entrance to the property, and the floor plan shows a car parking space takes up less than a third of the backyard. That rear yard, formerly paved, now has artificial grass.
Modlin Group and Corcoran have a co-exclusive on the property and it is listed at $14 million.
This story first appeared on Brooklyn Paper’s sister site Brownstoner.
Anna Feder worked at Emerson College in Boston for 17 years. For 12 of them, she ran the school’s exhibitions and festivals program and curated the Bright Lights Cinema Series, which screened documentaries about liberation struggles, social justice, and marginalized communities.
According to a civil lawsuit filed by Feder against the college this week, the school administration never interfered with her programming until 2023, when she scheduled a screening of the film “Israelism,” a documentary by Jewish filmmakers about young American Jews coming to reject Zionism. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Emerson leadership pressured Feder to cancel the planned November screening.
Feder agreed to postpone and screened the film in February 2024. She then wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Emerson’s treatment of campus speech about Palestine. And even as a crackdown across the U.S. on all things pro-Palestine got underway, she continued a longtime partnership with the Boston Palestine Film Festival.
Then, in August, Emerson abruptly ditched Feder and her program.
“Emerson terminated Ms. Feder, cancelled the entire Bright Lights program, and barred Ms. Feder from campus,” her lawsuit says.
“We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech.”
Feder’s suit is the first of its kind in thistime of campusrepression. Filed in Massachusetts state court, the suit claims that Emerson violated Feder’s free speech rights and that, while it is a private college, it is nonetheless obligated to uphold First Amendment protections.
Private institutions are not as a matter of course subject to the First Amendment, which protects against government violations. Private colleges are, on the whole, permitted to enact greater restrictions on speech on their premises than public institutions.
Feder’s suit, however, claims that a Massachusetts law, Article 16 of the state’s Declaration of Rights, extends First Amendment protections usually applied to government violations of civil rights to private actors, too — including universities and colleges. (Emerson did not respond to a request for comment about the suit.)
The suit against Emerson is a test case. If successful, Feder’s effort could set a precedent for holding Massachusetts colleges — of which there are many — to legal account for constitutional violations of free speech. A minority of other states, including California, have similar statutes on the books, which could be deployed in a similar vein.
More broadly, Feder’s suit exemplifies ways those facing apparent retribution for pro-Palestine speech on campus have had to seek new ways to contest their school’s actions, including in the courts.
“If we don’t defend our rights vigorously, they will surely be taken away,” said Feder.
“It’s a scary time to be public in this way, but it’s also the highest expression of my Jewish values,” she said. “We all need to find the courage in this moment and push back against the attacks on speech — particularly on college campuses.”
Not a Budget Issue
Emerson claimed, according to Feder’s lawsuit, that it was terminating Feder’s position and canceling the Bright Lights program for budgetary reasons.
The suit directly challenges that claim: “The Bright Lights series was a very inexpensive program in comparison with other non-academic programs that were not cancelled, and Ms. Feder had recently cut the program budget even further.”
The lawsuit also notes that the series “was an extremely popular program and core to Emerson’s academic programs.” Forty percent of Emerson undergraduates are enrolled in the Visual and Media Arts department, to which the film series was consistently relevant, the suit says.
Other details in the suit suggest the termination was not a normal layoff over budget concerns.
Feder was, due to provisions in her union contract, employed for 60 days after Emerson announced her termination. During that time, she was banned from campus and told she would be fired “for cause” if she made public statements about the Bright Lights series. Feder said that she had never previously heard of such requirements during a laid-off employee’s notice period.
According to Feder’s lawsuit, she was not laid off but terminated “for asserting her legally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression.” That speech involved screening an Israel-critical film and “support for Palestinians and student activism in support of the Palestinian cause,” she claims.
“We are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
“Our film has played at hundreds of campuses in the U.S., is made by Emmy and Peabody-winning Jewish filmmakers, won the audience award for best documentary at the U.S.’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and tells what is arguably the defining story of American Jews in our time,” said Erin Axelman, the co-director of “Israelism.”
“Yet because our film is critical of Israel,” Axelman said, “we are seen as dangerous to universities who claim to care about learning, but who only seem to care about avoiding controversy and difficult conversations.”
Axelman noted that polling from the Israeli government showed over 40 percent of American Jewish teenagers believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
“Emerson’s behavior is pathetic, and history will judge them for it,” they added. “We stand with Anna.”
New Approach to Free Speech
If Feder’s attorneys can establish in court that the Massachusetts free speech statute applies to Emerson’s actions, it could spur the use of the law by other faculty, staff, and students in the state who believe their freedom of speech has been violated by private colleges retaliating against pro-Palestine activism.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the state’s Supreme Court has not yet decided whether private colleges and universities are covered by Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
Schools have been sued under the act before. Emerson itself faced a lawsuit in 1989 from a professor who claimed she was denied a promotion and tenure on the basis of her expression of her political beliefs. The case was settled out of court, but an initial ruling from a judge clarified that the case had merit.
There are reasons to suspect that Emerson may not be held to account. Over the last 18 months, numerous public universities, which are unambiguously beholden to the First Amendment, have readily seen Palestine student activists arrested, speakers canceled, and faculty terminated.
Even if Feder’s suit does not lead to a ruling that private colleges must uphold First Amendment free speech standards in Massachusetts, the case is nonetheless an effort to hold Emerson responsible for its treatment of Palestine solidarity speech — to, at the very least, have to face a legal challenge. For the most part, schools have only shown a readiness to respond to pressures from pro-Israel groups and their allies in government.
Schools around the country have already faced a host of federal civil suits from individuals and groups under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits against discrimination based on shared ancestry.
The vast majority of these cases have been cases of alleged antisemitism, and schools including Columbia, Harvard, and New York University have reached settlements with student plaintiffs for monetary sums and agreements to change school policies, purportedly around combating antisemitism.
These legal remedies have, in certain cases, involved the further erosion of distinctions between anti-Zionist expression and antisemitism in campus disciplinary policies and conduct codes.
Harvard, for example, agreed to adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism to deploy in its disciplinary processes as a part of settlement agreements. The IHRA definition, which has been used to include criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism, was officially embraced by the Biden administration and, in turn, the Trump administration has used the expansive view of antisemitism for its own political attacks.
Meanwhile, there have been a smaller number of lawsuits against universities for their treatment of pro-Palestine students or for discrimination against Muslim and Arab students. Pro-Palestine students, for instance, sued Columbia in February for alleged Title VI violations.
Already a “Chilling Effect”
At a time when the Trump administration is targeting Palestine solidarity activists for deportation, and right-wing doxing carries higher risks than ever, there are a number of reasons why individual students, staff, and faculty members might fear coming forward as named plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Other burdens, like expense, can also make the courts a difficult route for anti-repression work. Feder, for example, has launched a fundraiser for her legal costs.
“There are not many available resources,” said Yaman Salahi, an attorney who focuses on corporate and government misconduct. “Second, whoever would come forward as a potential plaintiff is exposing themselves to a very high risk of retaliation from employers or future employers or future schools.”
Salahi said that a “chilling effect” was already present.
“This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t come forward. It’s very important that they do. But it does require being thoughtful and strategic,” Salahi said. “I do think that without more and more test cases to try to hold firm on what is supposed to be protected expression, we are going to see a pretty troubling slide in what those freedoms look like.”
