Meet Seven Student-Scholars Targeted by ICE for Protesting Israel's Atrocities In Gaza

These are some of the students in the US who have been jailed -- some abducted right off the street -- for speaking out against Israel. All are here legally. None is charged with a crime.

(Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This is one of the few ways I can generate income after Chevron took my law license and President Biden denied me a pardon. If not, no worries. Please read on. —Steven)

Above are the faces of the first seven student-scholars from US universities being viciously targeted by the Trump Administration in retaliation for speaking out about Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. All are studying in this country legally and none committed a crime. Four of the seven are detained indefinitely, apparently in isolated for-profit jails in rural Louisiana run by a corporation that is profiting from the witch hunt against immigrants in the United States.

Three of the students — Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, and Alireza Doroudi — are being held in the private ICE detention facility below, located in the tiny town of Jena in an isolated part of Louisiana. Dr. Ozturk is also being held in a different ICE facility in Louisiana. All are cut off from engaging in regular communication with their lawyers. Ranjani Srinivasan was close to finishing her studies at Columbia before she fled the country after her dorm room was searched by ICE, apparently with the cooperation of the university administration. Two of the students, Chung and Taal, got pre-emptive court orders barring their detention or deportation; Taal later chose to self-deport. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has said the government is targeting approximately 300 students by revoking their visas or green cards for peacefully and legally supporting Palestinian rights while on campus.

The for-profit ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana where Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil and other university students abducted by ICE in the US are being held. Photo from @theguardian.

Journalist Oliver Laughland has done excellent reporting on the network of detention centers in the US holding students and thousand of other immigrants, many of whom are not charged with a crime. Conditions in the facilities are reportedly horrific, with cockroach-infested food and physical assaults.

These students are all accomplished scholars and leaders, which helps explains why they are being targeted by Trump and the fanatical pro-Israel activists at Betar and Canary Mission who have been lobbying for their deportation. Beter, a hardline pro-Netanyahu organization, has bragged that it has given lists of US-based students who challenge Israel to ICE and lobbied for their deportation. This is all happening under the guise of “fighting” anti-semitism; the reality is that the fight to eliminate anti-semitism is being perverted by the Trump team and these organizations to serve a larger political project to attack Palestinian rights and the right to protest more broadly.

Ozturk is a Fulbright scholar at Tufts on the cusp of obtaining a doctorate in early childhood development (see here for background); Khalil, someone I know personally, recently obtained a Master’s degree from Columbia, whose utterly cowardly administration has hung him out to dry; Suri is a father and beloved professor at Georgetown University whose apparent sin is being married to a US citizen of Palestinian origin (more here); and Doroudi (more here), who apparently is not involved in politics, is getting a doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama. All are detained in a gulag-like system of for-profit jails in Louisiana or Texas run by public companies like CoreCivic (see here for the company’s long history of profiting from abuse and human rights violations) and the GEO Group (see here for how it forces detainees to work as slave labor) under contract with ICE; monitoring groups like the Yale Civil Rights Project and the ACLU have documented brutal conditions in the Louisiana facilities including cockroach-infested food, physical abuse, and sexual assaults. The anti-immigrant witch hunt in the US is also feeding a profit-driven detention machine.

Located in New Orleans, this is the most Trumpian of the 13 federal appellate courts in the country. It explains why the Trump DOJ is fighting so hard to move the detained students to Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away from their homes and legal counsel in the Northeast. Trump hopes this extremist court will give cover to his illegal policy.

The location of these detention facilities is by design. The federal appellate court overseeing Louisiana and Texas (the Fifth Circuit) is the most right-wing and extremist body of jurists in the country. Lawyers often say the Fifth Circuit — one of 13 federal appeals courts in the US — is where the law goes to die. That’s why Trump’s lawyers fought so hard to move Khalil’s legal case challenging his detention to Louisiana from New Jersey.

Khalil has now been jailed for 26 days since his arrest. The process has become the punishment. I can relate — in my 2019 criminal contempt case prosecuted privately by Chevron in retaliation for helping Amazon communities win the $10 billion Ecuador pollution case, I spent more than two years in pre-trial detention in New York on a baseless misdemeanor charge with a maximum sentence of six months. I spent more than four times my maximum sentence detained before I could even get to trial to contest the charges. Abusing the procedural process to inflict punishment is the point. Two federal judges could have released Khalil during the pendency of the proceedings, but refused. His wife is about to give birth.

Judges: Where’s the courage?👊👊

-Steven