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pen america
Journalist Who Decried Trump's 'Deportation of Dissent' Says He Was Deported for Dissent
"Alistair Kitchen's deportation is a clear case of retaliation in connection with his reporting, and such action sends a chilling message to journalists," said one press freedom defender.
Jun 18, 2025
A leading press freedom advocate on Tuesday condemned the United States' "disturbing pattern" of screening and expelling international visitors for their political viewpoints following the detention and removal of an Australian journalist who criticized the Trump administration's targeting of Palestine defenders on college campuses.
Alistair Kitchen said he was detained for 12 hours and interrogated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in Los Angeles International Airport while en route from Melbourne, Australia to New York last week.
"If you are deleting social media 48 hours before your flight to the U.S., it is already too late."
"I was denied entry, detained, and deported from the USA over the last 48 hours because of my reporting on the Columbia [University] student protests," Kitchen wrote Friday on the social media site Bluesky. "I arrived back in Melbourne hours ago and had my phone handed back to me upon landing."
"I had it easy," he added, "one woman had been in that detention room four days when I arrived; she's still there."
Kitchen said that CBP agents "were waiting for me when I got off the plane," and although he "had cleaned up my online presence expecting ad hoc digital sweeps," he "was not prepared for their sophistication."
"If you are deleting social media 48 hours before your flight to the U.S., it is already too late," he stressed.
Kitchen wrote that the agents "just came out and said it: 'We both know why you've been detained…it's because of what you wrote about the protests at Columbia,'" he recounted.
"Writers, artists, and scholars must be free to express their views openly without compromising their free movement across borders," said PEN America's @jonfreadom.bsky.social following detainment and deportation of Australian writer Alistair Kitchen for his personal writings pen.org/press-releas...
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— PEN America (@penamerica.bsky.social) June 17, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Responding to Kitchen's ordeal, Jonathan Friedman, managing director of the U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America, said in a statement Tuesday that "it is gravely concerning to read an account of someone being detained and turned away at the border due to their writings on student protests, Palestine, and the Trump administration."
"Writers, artists, and scholars must be free to express their views openly without compromising their free movement across borders," Friedman added. "Kitchen's account fits a disturbing pattern, in which border agents appear to be screening visitors to the U.S. for their viewpoints. That is anti-democratic, and it must be halted."
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)—which earlier this year issued its first-ever travel advisory for journalists entering the United States, including warnings about searches of electronic devices—called Kitchen's detention and expulsion "alarming."
"Alistair Kitchen's deportation is a clear case of retaliation in connection with his reporting, and such action sends a chilling message to journalists that they must support the administration's narratives or face forms of retribution," CPJ U.S., Canada, and Caribbean Program coordinator Katherine Jacobsen said Monday.
"Foreign media operating on U.S. soil are covered by First Amendment protections, and it is incumbent upon U.S. officials—from [CBP] to the White House—to allow journalists to do their jobs and travel freely without fear of reprisal," Jacobsen added.
Kitchen suspects CBP agents used technology contracted from Palantir, which has been targeted by the No Tech for Apartheid movement over its involvement in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing collaboration between Israel's military and tech titans Amazon and Google criticized for enabling Israeli human rights crimes.
In March, Kitchen published a piece on his Kitchen Counter blog, titled "On the Deportation of Dissent." The post highlighted the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and former Columbia University student and Palestine solidarity activist arrested on March 8 by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers in front of his pregnant wife in New York before being transferred to New Jersey and then to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his son.
Khalil, who the Trump administration admits has committed no crime, is being held as a political prisoner under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which empowers the secretary of state to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests. Numerous foreign nationals, including green-card holders, have been targeted under the law for criticizing Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and U.S. complicity.
Kitchen wrote:
The goal here is the deportation of dissent. In an executive order 10 days ago, the Trump administration promised to "go on offense to enforce law and order" by "cancel[ing] the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses." This is a mode of speech suppression that seeks to physically remove the undesirable elements it can, and, through fear, ensure silence in everyone else.
To my mind the arrest of a student on utterly specious grounds by a neo-fascist state, clearly designed to breed a climate of fear among students, calls for the resignation of a university president. That role is untenable so long as it does not involve the ferocious protection of student speech. The same goes for faculty, who last year demonstrated a mixed commitment to the defense of students. The situation requires their concerted action.
"The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests," Kitchen told Guardian Australia on Sunday.
However, a DHS spokesperson denied Kitchen's assertion, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he was denied entry to the United States "because he gave false information" regarding alleged drug use on his Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application.
"Lawful travelers have nothing to fear from [vetting] measures, which are designed to protect our nation's security," the spokesperson added. "However, those intending to enter the U.S. with fraudulent purposes or malicious intent are offered the following advice: Don't even try."
Kitchen told Guardian Australia that he had previously indicated on an ESTA application that he had not done drugs, but admitted under interrogation that he legally purchased marijuana in New York state and partook while abroad.
"There's certainly not proof of me doing drugs on my phone," he said. "But this is a method of interrogation that uses entrapment."
Kitchen added that "in retrospect, I should have... accepted immediate deportation," but that he was "too compliant, too trustful, too hopeful" at the start of his detention.
Free press advocates said Kitchen's detention and removal was yet another sign that "we are becoming a police state," as well as a reason "to avoid the United States as a holiday destination like the bubonic plague," and, as the hacktivist collective Anonymous called it, "a harsh lesson in digital footprints."
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Number of Jailed Writers Increases Worldwide for Sixth Consecutive Year
"We are seeing that free expression, and therefore writers, are increasingly in the crosshairs of repression in a much wider range of countries," said PEN America.
Apr 24, 2025
A report released Thursday by the free expression group PEN America detailed how authoritarian regimes around the world, recognizing "the role that writers play in promoting critical inquiry and cultivating visions of a better, more just world," jailed more journalists and writers last year than ever before.
The number of imprisoned writers has ticked up each year since the group began its yearly Freedom to Write Index six years ago. In 2024, the index recorded 375 writers in prison across 40 countries—up from 339 writers who were detained in 33 countries the previous year.
The group observed startling trends in governments' crackdown on freedom of expression last year. The number of women imprisoned for their writing rose, with women making up 16% of those incarcerated last year, compared with 15% in 2023 and 14% in 2022.
Writers classified as "online commentators" accounted for 203 imprisoned authors last year, while 127 journalists were jailed for their work. Other professions represented in the index include literary writers, poets, songwriters, and creative artists.
"The high numbers of writers in the online commentator and journalist categories suggest that a significant proportion of the cases included jailing or other threats because of their writing commentary on politics or official policies, economic or social themes, or advocacy for a range of human rights," reads the report.
China and Iran are the biggest jailers of writers, with the two countries accounting for 43% of imprisoned writers worldwide.
Other top offenders include Saudi Arabia with 23 writers, Israel with 21, Russia with 18, and Belarus with 15.
"Authoritarian regimes are desperate to control the narrative of history and repress the truth about what they are doing. That is why writers are so important, and why we see these regimes attempting to silence them," said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, PEN America's director of writers at risk. "Jailing one writer for their words is a miscarriage of justice, but the systematic suppression of writers around the world represents an erosion of free expression—which is often the precursor to the destruction of other fundamental human rights."
The index includes all cases in which writers are detained for at least 48 hours in its accounting of jailed writers. The report notes that as in previous years, PEN America observed an increase in the number of writers held without charge or in pre-trial detention, with 80 such cases last year—up from 76 in 2023.
The majority of writers held in administrative and pre-trial detention—"tools of repression," the report says—were detained by officials in China, Egypt, and Israel.
The index highlighted a number of cases of jailed writers, including:
- Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur economist and blogger who "has been detained incommunicado since 2017" after being sentenced to life in prison by a court in Umruqi, China in 2014;
- Nobel Peace Prize laureate and women's rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi, who was among several women attacked by Iranian military forces and prison guards at Iran's Evin prison in August 2024; and
- Mahmoud Fatafta, a Palestinian columnist who was arrested in May 2024 by Israeli security forces in the West Bank while traveling with his 10-year-old son, with authorities citing his Facebook post in which he quoted Egyptian scholar Abdul Wahab al-Mesiri: "The more brutal the colonizer becomes, the nearer his end is."
Fatafta's arrest came amid Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and the West Bank, which has provoked outcry by international human rights groups, including in Israel and the United States.
The U.S. was not named as a country of concern in the index, but PEN America pointed to "recent developments in the United States," with the Trump administration revoking visas of foreign students who have protested the government's support for Israel and detaining several student organizers, as evidence of "the precarious nature of freedom of expression."
"The suppression of free expression has taken on an especially troubling dimension on college campuses where Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices are being silenced, including via attempts to deport student activists, limiting discourse on issues of the war in Gaza and human rights," reads the report.
PEN America noted that Columbia student organizers Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk were apparently detained "purely on the grounds of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution," with Ozturk targeted specifically because she co-authored an opinion piece for a student newspaper.
Their detention, said the group, "not only undermines academic freedom but also stifles the critical exchange of ideas."
"As geopolitics continue to shift and authoritarian tendencies spread to countries that were once considered safely anchored in openness," said PEN America, "we are seeing that free expression, and therefore writers, are increasingly in the crosshairs of repression in a much wider range of countries."
Karlekar said that writers like those who have been detained in the last year "represent a threat to disinformation and encourage people to think critically about what is going on around them."
"War, conflict, and attacks against the free exchange of information and ideas go hand in hand with lies and propaganda," said Karlekar. "With the index, we want to alert the world to the jailing and mistreatment of these 375 writers. Each and every one of them should be released, and we insist that the world's jailers of writers end this repression and abuse."
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'Truly Dystopian': Trump Administration Threatens Public Schools With Funding Cuts
A new Trump administration directive aims to "reduce our colleges and universities to the status of echo chambers, similar to those controlled by authoritarian states," warned PEN America.
Feb 16, 2025
Lawmakers and free expression groups voiced alarm Saturday after the Trump administration threatened to investigate and strip federal funding from public schools, including colleges and universities that don't comply with its broad interpretation of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action programs in admissions.
In a letter to state education officials on Friday, Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, wrote that the agency "intends to take appropriate measures to assess compliance with the applicable statutes and regulations based on the understanding embodied in this letter beginning no later than 14 days from today's date, including antidiscrimination requirements that are a condition of receiving federal funding."
"Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding," the letter states.
The letter takes aim at "DEI programs"—a right-wing boogeyman that the Trump administration has used as a pretext to rip apart federal agencies—and declares that the Education Department "will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this nation's educational institutions," even as halts thousands of civil rights investigations.
PEN America warned that Trainor's sweeping directive "seeks to declare it a civil rights violation for educational institutions to engage in any diversity-related programming or to promote any diversity-related ideas—potentially including everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration."
"This declaration has no basis in law and is an affront to the freedom of speech and ideas in educational settings. It represents yet another twisting of civil rights law in an effort to demand ideological conformity by schools and universities," the group said in a statement Saturday. "To enact government interference in the intellectual life of such institutions is to end the United States' centuries-long history of intellectual freedom in educational settings, and to reduce our colleges and universities to the status of echo chambers, similar to those controlled by authoritarian states."
Brian Rosenberg, visiting professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed that the letter was "truly dystopian."
"It goes well beyond the Supreme Court ruling on admissions and declares illegal a wide range of common practices," Rosenberg said. "In my career I've never seen language of this kind from any government agency in the United States."
"Republicans tell you they want to empower local communities and that states, schools, and parents know best, and again and again use top-down threats to achieve their culture war agenda."
The letter comes amid the Trump administration's broader assault on public education, including a push to abolish the Education Department altogether. That assault is expected to intensify if billionaire Linda McMahon, a proponent of school privatization, is confirmed as education secretary.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—which is currently rampaging through the Education Department and terminating contracts—posted Trainor's letter to X, the social media platform owned by Musk.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a senior member of the Senate Education Committee, said Saturday that "this threat to rip away the federal funding our public K-12 schools and colleges receive flies in the face of the law."
"I hope no parent, student, or teacher is intimidated by these threats—this former preschool teacher certainly is not," said Murray. " While it's anyone's guess what falls under the Trump administration's definition of 'DEI,' there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate. In fact, federal laws prohibit ANY president from telling schools and colleges what to teach, including the Every Student Succeeds Act, that I negotiated with Republicans."
"Rather than trying to make college more affordable or helping to improve our kids' outcomes, Trump is letting far-right extremists inject politics into the classroom at every turn," Murray added. "Republicans tell you they want to empower local communities and that states, schools, and parents know best, and again and again use top-down threats to achieve their culture war agenda."
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