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stephen miller
Sanders Meets Freed Trump Political Prisoner Khalil as Columbia Punishes Gaza Protesters
"We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment," Sanders said as the Ivy League school expelled or suspended scores of students in what critics called a bid to win back blocked federal funding.
Jul 22, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.
Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.
Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.
Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.
On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.
"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.
The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.
As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.
The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."
Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.
Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.
"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."
All They Will Call You Will Be ‘Deportees’
A recording of an iconic Woody Guthrie folk song has resurfaced just as the Trump administration has unleashed another wave of deportations against immigrants it tries to keep nameless.
Jul 21, 2025
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”—“Deportees,(Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” Woody Guthrie, 1948
On January 28, 1948 a small plane transporting 28 migrants with three flight crew members and a guard departed Oakland bound for a deportation center in El Centro, California near the Mexican border. The aircraft, which had come from Burbank, however, had been switched in Oakland to a smaller aircraft. It was now loaded with more passengers than outfitted for, and overdue for a required safety inspection. It never reached El Centro.
Near Coalinga, California in Fresno County, the airplane caught fire in midair, and fell to Earth, “crashing in a spectacular fireball” in Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard. The crash was reported in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and other outlets, with the names of the crew and guard. The others who horribly died were identified only, as the Times put it, as Mexican nationals who entered the United States Illegally (though one was actually a Spaniard and another Filipino, as author-artist Tim Hernandez told National Public Radio 60 years later).
Or as legendary folk singer and social activist Woody Guthrie, who was moved to honor the migrants left nameless in one of the most iconic protest songs in U.S. history, put it: “Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, "They are just deportees.”
On multiple levels, the haunting words and tones of “Deportee” have even more resonance today.
Since 1948, Woody’s plaintive song has been recorded by scores of legendary musicians and featured in a book by Hernandez. What brought it back to life this week was the announcement July 14, Woody’s 113th birthday, of the release of an unearthed collection of home recordings made available now through the use of new equipment and software. The newly released tapes would be his last due to his early signs of Huntington’s disease. Woody never studio recorded “Deportee,” it was “lost to history, until now,” as the Rolling Stone notes.
Introducing disclosure of the 20 newfound gems, including home recordings of many of his classics, The New York Times reports that his estate and record company fittingly chose to publicly release one particular song, “Deportee.”
It was a decision surely reflective of the politics of a songwriter whose guitar was famously adorned, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And whose working-class politics are beautifully delineated by this nugget in the Times report: “‘Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord,’ a parable about two characters trekking toward heaven. The bum has practical skills—building a fire, cooking a stew—while the landlord weighs himself down with gold, expecting to buy his way into salvation. In a Woody Guthrie song, that doesn’t happen.”
Though not mentioned by Times, the selection of “Deportee” is highlighted in a Rolling Stone headline as “an Ode to Deported Workers, [That] Has Never Been More Relevant.” On multiple levels, the haunting words and tones of “Deportee” have even more resonance today.
For a nation of immigrants—none of us are native, save Indigenous peoples—immigration has long been controversial, especially of those less desired due to race or ethnicity, other than enslaved people dragged in by chains. Restrictive immigration laws date to as early as a 1790 act which required immigrants to be “free white persons.” Similar racist intent characterized the notorious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which gave special preference to white immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.
But the nation has also long depended on the hard labor—from the fields to transcontinental railroads to garment factories, construction, and meat processing plants of today—of immigrants of color who could be exploited with low wages, harsh living conditions, and coercive threats of deportation.
Unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Miller and his fellow immigrant haters have adopted the most racist and militaristic practices of the past, and the same disregard to who is rounded up.
Mass deportations are sadly not new either. They include a large early 1930s Depression expulsion of migrants of Mexican descent, though 60% were American citizens. Until now the most notorious mass expulsions occurred in 1953-54 under the racist title of “Operation Wetback,” estimated to seize as many as 1.3 million low-income migrant workers. “Tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats, and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives,” writes Erin Blakemore.
“In Chicago,” she continues, “three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25% of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease, and other causes while in custody.”
“The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United State,” notes Blakemore. It has no doubt served as a model and inspiration to Stephen Miller, the fanatical architect of today’s mass deportation crusade.
Unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Miller and his fellow immigrant haters have adopted the most racist and militaristic practices of the past, and the same disregard to who is rounded up. They have escalated the mass deportations to new depths, flagrantly flaunting court orders, with masked secret agents in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people and terrorizing immigrants and communities of color.
Their campaign was kicked off with the mid-March dispatch of three planeloads of hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men, only 32 with criminal accusations, renditioned in secret, with no notice to their families or attorneys and with no due process to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.
As with the Los Gatos Canyon deportees, none had their names disclosed. But within days, court filings revealed that at least one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been mistakenly deported. By April, about 90% were shown to have no criminal record. They included gay makeup artist Andry Hérnandez, Venezuelan professional soccer player Jerce Reyes, baker Neri Alvarado whose alleged “gang” tattoo was actually an autism awareness image honoring his brother, and Frengel Reyes, all ultimately identified by family members, careful legal work, and media investigative research.
Unlike the 1948 crash, or the 1930s and 1950s mass deportations, most of their names eventually became known due to the rise of multiple immigrant legal rights groups and sleuthing of investigative reporters and families. After months of legal work and public protests, 250 of the Venezuelans have been finally released from the Salvadoran prison and flown to Venezuela. It’s an alarming prospect for anyone who came to the U.S. for legal protection due to credible security concerns in their native country.
Subsequently, the Trump administration doubled down with other renditions of immigrants to foreign, often failed and dangerous countries, where the deportees may not speak the language or have any resources. When Trump and Miller realized dispatching alleged gang members and undocumented people already in prisons was not generating the numbers they desired, they turned to setting arbitrary quotas of 3,000 abductees a day.
That led to the daily Gestapo-style raids of farms, factories, construction sites, Home Depot parking lots, and courthouses where immigrants have gone to fulfill their legal obligations. The raids have targeted mostly brown and Black people, whether legal immigrants, people with temporary protected legal status, even citizens. And, as reports have found, most with no criminal record. The draconian crusade has engendered a fierce backlash by other Americans that has led to plummeting poll support for Trump’s signature issue of immigration policy.
As Woody sang:
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Most of those being seized today are regular working people—day laborers, restaurant and hotel employees, meat processing workers, janitors, landscapers, and farm workers. Though it takes family members, immigrant rights attorneys, and activists to find them, they now have names—and often videos of brutal assaults while being grabbed by masked secret agents—widely circulated so others can recognize what their neighbors are enduring and demand justice.
For the deportees honored by Woody Guthrie, it took author Hernandez and another “son of a migrant farm worker, just like myself” years later to find a list of the names in “annals of the Fresno County Hall of Records,” he explained to NPR in 2013, and their burial site in a mass Fresno grave marked with a headstone from an anonymous donor that just reads, "28 Mexican Nationals Who Died In A Plane Crash Are Buried Here." Hernandez gave “these 28 passengers what every human being is afforded, and that’s the right to have their name. Our names are really what represent who we are.”
SCOTUS v. Democracy: 7 Supreme Court Decisions Brought Fascism to America
Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the coup de grace, capping six earlier and toxic SCOTUS decisions which, scattered over two centuries, collectively enabled this moment.
Jul 07, 2025
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on June 27, 2025 created in President Donald Trump an American fascist dictator.
The decision in the case Trump v. CASA, Inc. did not seem momentous. It declared only that Federal District judges could no longer issue “universal” injunctions to foreclose nationwide harm; they could now grant relief only to a plaintiff in a specific lawsuit. But the decision was far from trivial: Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the coup de grace, capping six earlier and toxic SCOTUS decisions which, scattered over two centuries, collectively enabled fascism.
In deciding Trump v. CASA Inc., the six conservative justices of the Roberts Court agreed with the Republican Party’s inane claim: The injunctions of Federal District judges across the country were impeding President Trump’s ability to govern.
A president who can break laws at will is a dictator. The political system creating and accommodating this condition is fascism. Donald Trump is a dictator heading a fascist regime.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: “Our objective, one way or another, is to make clear that the district courts of this country do not have the authority to direct the functions of the executive branch.”
Attorney-General Pam Bondi: “Active liberal… judges have used these injunctions to block virtually all of President Trump’s policies.”
The argument is laughingly specious, plausible but dead wrong in describing what is actually transpiring. It is no more than misleading spin, resting on two audacious assumptions: (1) The “functions of the executive branch” never violate the law, and “President Trump’s policies” certainly have not. (2) The “active liberal judges” who think otherwise are knee-jerk partisans with not a shred of professional integrity.
Injunctions in lawsuits are issued to block the defendant’s illegal action from continuing to harm the plaintiff, when the judge determines the lawsuit is warranted and the harm is serious. Federal District judges deal with issues nationwide in scope—their purview is every bit as wide as the Supreme Court’s—and if they believe the harm from the defendant’s action poses a threat to the nation at large, the injunction is applied “universally” across the country. We have followed this protocol since it was established by the Judiciary Act of 1789.
Federal District judges do not engage in blocking actions they know to be legal. The injunction in the case at hand and some 40 others against Trump were issued by judges who thought his actions were not, and were harmful nationwide.
Did they make judgment calls? Yes, Federal District judges don’t do anything else. Do they ever make bad ones? Certainly, but they err on the side of caution. If they’ve misjudged, and the enjoined action turns out to be legal, its interruption does no serious social harm. If they’ve judged correctly, and the action is in fact illegal, its interruption prevents serious social harm.
Here, then, is what Mr. Miller, Ms. Bondi, et al., are truly seeking: No Federal District judge should be empowered to protect the nation’s well-being from President Trump’s illegal actions.
And that’s what the Supreme Court’s decision has now codified.
Trump v. CASA is truly cataclysmic. After 236 years of upholding the rule of law, the Supreme Court has now offered Trump an off ramp. He can violate any law he pleases and not be enjoined from jeopardizing the American people.
A president who can break laws at will is a dictator. The political system creating and accommodating this condition is fascism. Donald Trump is a dictator heading a fascist regime.
Fascism is defined in scholarly literature as far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist governance, characterized by a dictatorial leader, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, frequently a fusion with corporate power, and often a cult of personality.
Here we are.
The Supreme Court’s first toxic decision occurred in 1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison. With no constitutional authority to do so, Chief Justice John Marshall’s Court overturned a law passed by an elected Congress and signed by an elected president. How democratic was that? SCOTUS has exercised the power of judicial review ever since, throwing out both federal and state laws.
Corporate oligarchy was the intermediate step between government by the people and fascism.
The next devastating decision was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 83 years later. In this case the court upgraded the status of U.S. corporations from artificial persons created by state charters, to that of legal persons, with constitutionally protected rights of free speech, peaceful assembly, petition for redress of grievances, and freedom from unlawful search and seizure. Corporate personhood is prima facie preposterous—in fact its granting was technically illegal—but today it is “settled law.”
The misfortunes of judicial review and corporate personhood joined forces in two more SCOTUS decisions, in 1976 and 1978. Buckley v. Valeo found unconstitutional the Corrupt Practices Act of 1910, and declared spending money in political campaigns is an exercise of free speech. Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a state law prohibiting corporations from spending money in political campaigns. The court concluded, citing Buckley, spending money in political campaigns is free speech and corporations have that right, protected by the Constitution.
But money doesn’t utter sounds or leave marks, and corporations don’t walk, eat, breathe, make love, or succumb to disease. Money is speech and corporations are people? How can that be? These two absurd concepts set the nation on the path to fascism.
Both Buckley and Bellotti, however, retained some minor restrictions on corporate spending: “Some conditions apply.” But spend the corporations could, and savagely they did. Over the rest of the 20th century, American corporations exercised their rights of free speech to dominate campaign finance, and their rights of petition to dominate congressional and executive branch lobbying. When the constant stream of corporate money became more influential in Washington than citizens’ episodic votes, democracy was displaced. Corporations succeeded in tilting the crafting of public policy to favor corporate interests over the American people’s well-being. (The nation’s physical infrastructure decayed, for example, while the defense corporations prospered.) Corporate oligarchy was the intermediate step between government by the people and fascism.
The minor restrictions on corporate spending were lifted by the next toxic decision, Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. The court declared corporate political spending could not be constitutionally constrained. “Some conditions [no longer] apply.”
The grip of corporate oligarchy tightened, expressed vividly in the first Trump administration’s slashing of corporate taxes. But at the end of those four years the transition to fascism appeared in dramatic fashion, when Trump refused to leave office, and his cult of personality stormed the Capitol.
Trump was subsequently indicted in two federal cases involving his presidency, for a total of 48 felonies. He denied everything and fought back, claiming his prosecution would handicap future presidents’ freedom of choice, especially in national security issues, if they feared prosecution when out of office. He took his case to SCOTUS.
The Roberts Court showed its propensity for accepting inane arguments. In Trump v. United States, July 1, 2024, the court declared immunity from prosecution for former presidents, if their violations of law were incidental to “official acts.”
No one is above the law, the Roberts Court proclaimed, except presidents.
Then a year later Trump v. CASA Inc. was the straw that broke democracy’s back.
SCOTUS v. DEMOCRACY brought us fascism and fashioned a dictator. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority continues as Trump’s compliant servant. Pam Bondi is his defense attorney. The sycophantic Republican Congress passed a law massively enriching the corporate and the wealthy at the direct expense of everyone else. No democracy on Earth would do that, ever.
And no country is a democracy if commanded by a single unaccountable man.
Trump can violate, has violated, is violating, will violate any law he chooses and face no universal injunctive interdiction. If he is sued for violating federal statutes and Pam Bondi fails with demonstrated vigor to dismiss the charges, his prosecution is postponed by Department of Justice policy until he is out of office. And once out of office Trump is immune.
But that may not happen. he may not leave office. If Trump can ignore the 14th Amendment in voiding birthright citizenship, he can ignore the 22nd and run for a third term. Or he might declare martial law and suspend elections altogether.
What will stop him? He’s 79. Maybe death. Anything else?
Angry, well informed, organized, and committed people are already protesting in the streets. That could stop him, but only if the movement grows larger.
Toppling Trump is by no means out of reach. Scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan tell why in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Based on their rigorous research into historic conflicts, they offer a “rule of thumb.” An autocratic regime is in mortal peril when 3.5% of the people register civil resistance.
Doing the math we need a bit more than 12 million Americans to do this, and we may be about halfway home. An estimated 4-7 million individuals have joined in thousands of protests multiple times since Trump was inaugurated.
So, people, we have to get that many more into the streets. Full stop.
This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Savaged a Thriving Nation, Normalized Fraudulent War, and Brought Forth Donald Trump.
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