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Trump signs order to combat ‘antisemitism’, targets deportations

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US president Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday instructing federal agencies to identify ‘all available civil and criminal authorities’ to ‘combat antisemitism’. These include finding ways to deport anti-Semitic activists who violate the law.

The order requires agency and department leaders to make recommendations to the White House within 60 days and outlines plans for the Justice Department to investigate ‘pro-Hamas graffiti and threats’, including on college campuses.

‘Jewish students have faced a relentless barrage of discrimination, denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including the library and classrooms, and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assaults,’ the order said.

The presidential order emphasizes that it will use all available and appropriate legal tools to ‘prosecute, eliminate, or otherwise hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence’.

The presidential order provides for the deportation of resident aliens, including students on visas, who broke the law as part of anti-Israel protests on campuses following Operation Aqsa Flood, which began on 7 October 2023.

The order states that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Education and the Minister of Internal Security will include in their reports recommendations for higher education institutions to familiarize themselves with the grounds for ‘inadmissibility’.

These institutions would thus be empowered to monitor and report on the activities of foreign students and staff related to these grounds, and to ensure that such reports on foreigners, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, lead to investigations and, if necessary, actions to deport such foreigners.

Last month, six Republican-led House committees issued a report calling for greater efforts by the federal government to combat anti-Semitism, including by conditioning federal aid to universities on stricter policies against anti-Semitic bias.

The report focused on Columbia University, the site of a large camp with multiple alleged incidents of documented ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks against both pro-Israel activists and Jewish students and noted that the allegedly permissive universities received $2.7 billion in federal funding in fiscal year 2023.

The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden turned down requests for records on the number of visa holders among these protesters, according to a report by House Republicans.

As a candidate, Trump called for the deportation of pro-Hamas students in the United States on visas, and last week signed a separate executive order that appeared to imply steps towards this goal.

It included a section requiring the United States to ensure that ‘admitted aliens and aliens already in the United States’ do not ‘support designated foreign terrorists’, but its intended effect was not immediately clear.

AMERICA

Republican senators propose bill for US withdrawal from the UN

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A group of Republican senators has introduced a bill to the Senate that calls for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations (UN). The bill was published on the website of one of the authors of the initiative, Energy Commission Chairman Mike Lee, who represents Utah. Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Chip Roy of Texas, and Mike Rogers of Michigan also co-signed the bill.

“The President should fully terminate the United States’ membership in the UN and its membership in all organs, specialized agencies, commissions, and other bodies officially affiliated with the UN,” the text of the bill reads.

The bill would also prohibit rejoining the organization without Senate approval and require the US to cease participation in UN peacekeeping missions.

In a statement to Fox News, Senator Lee described the bill as a response to “years of out-of-control bureaucratic expansion and financial abuses by the UN at the expense of American taxpayers.”

Lee said the organization “has become a platform for tyrants and a venue for attacks on the United States and its allies, so Washington must stop paying for it.”

Senator Roy argued that the UN “has failed for decades to prevent wars, genocides, human rights abuses, and even epidemics, despite all the money and attention.”

According to data from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the leading US think tanks, cited by Fox News, the US provided more than $18 billion to the UN in 2022. The CFR stated that this amount is equal to about one-third of the organization’s total budget.

US President Donald Trump had advocated reducing funding to the UN during his first presidential term. At the time, Trump described the organization as “a simple club where people gather to chat and have a good time.”

On January 20, Trump signed a decree to withdraw the United States from the UN Human Rights Council and ban funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after he began his second presidential term.

Meanwhile, Senator Lee also proposed a bill to withdraw the US from the UN in December 2023 but failed to find support at the time.

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Media embargo: US State Department targets six news outlets

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The US State Department announced on Thursday that it had ordered a halt to all media subscriptions as part of a government-wide effort by the Trump administration to cut spending it deems unnecessary.

“The department has halted all non-mission-critical contracts for media subscriptions other than academic or professional journals,” a State Department spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement.

Bureaus and agencies can request exemptions on grounds of “why the access is mission critical, how it aligns with the Secretary’s priorities, and how it affects the safety, security and well-being of the workforce,” the statement said.

The State Department did not explain how long the pause would last. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said that all government spending must be in line with Trump’s “America First” priorities.

The Washington Post, which first reported the decision on media subscriptions on Wednesday, also cited a State Department memo instructing staff to prioritize the termination of contracts with the Economist, New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, Associated Press, and Reuters.

A Reuters spokesperson said it was their policy not to comment “on commercial agreements.”

Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters, said last week that Trump and Musk had “misrepresented” their work with the US Department of Defense after they publicly criticized a Pentagon contract for a division of the company to work on cyber threats.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said, “Public officials, like Americans in the private sector, need reliable information to do their jobs. The government is, of course, free to cancel any subscription it wants. But the main consequence of blacklisting independent news is that these agencies and offices will know much less about what is going on in the world. It’s hard to imagine how that would serve the people of the United States,” he said.

The president said on Tuesday that he would deny the Associated Press (AP) access to the Oval Office and Air Force One because it continued to refer to the region as the Gulf of Mexico despite an executive order he signed in January directing his administration to change the name to the Gulf of America.

In response, AP said that while it accepted Trump’s new name, it would refer to the Gulf by its original name to ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to readers around the world.

In early February, the White House ordered the cancellation of subscriptions to Politico, a news organization that had come under fire for receiving payments from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for subscriptions to the premium news service Politico Pro.

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Trump administration freezes immigration applications from Latin America and Ukraine

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Citing “fraud” and “security” concerns, the Trump administration has halted all immigration applications from immigrants from Latin America and Ukraine who were allowed to enter the US under some Biden-era programs, according to two US officials and an internal memo obtained by CBS.

According to the directive, the freeze on applications will remain in effect indefinitely while government officials work to improve review procedures to detect potential cases of fraud and mitigate concerns about national security and public safety.

The move, which has not been previously reported, creates uncertainty over the status of many immigrants who are in the process of applying for various immigration benefits that would allow them to remain in the US legally and, in some cases, permanently.

While the exact number of immigrants affected is unknown, the suspension of applications applies to several programs of the Biden administration that allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to come to the US legally through an immigration law known as parole.

This law authorizes the US government to quickly admit aliens on humanitarian or public interest grounds.

The Biden administration had used the parole stamp/document on an unprecedented scale to encourage migrants to enroll in legal immigration channels rather than cross the southern border illegally.

The Trump administration moved swiftly to suspend these efforts, claiming that he had abused his parole authority.

The Trump administration had previously halted new entries under Biden-era parole policies. But in a letter dated February 14, Andrew Davidson, a senior official at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, ordered an agency-wide “administrative pause” on all “pending requests for relief” made by immigrants who were allowed to enter the US under three Biden administration programs.

These programs include a policy called Uniting for Ukraine, which was created to offer a safe haven to those fleeing the Ukrainian war.

Some 240,000 Ukrainians with American sponsors arrived in the US under this process before President Trump took office.

Another affected program, known as CHNV, allowed 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans sponsored by American citizens to enter the US.

The third affected program consists of processes that allow some Colombians, Ecuadorians, Central Americans, Haitians, and Cubans with American relatives to come to the United States and wait for family-based green cards.

Because those allowed to enter the US under these programs are granted only temporary work permits and deportation protections that typically last two years, many apply for other immigration benefits, lawyers and experts said.

These benefits include a program known as Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from crisis-affected countries such as Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela; asylum, which allows those fleeing persecution to obtain a permanent safe haven in the US; green cards or permanent American residency.

Due to a Cold War-era law, Cubans who have been “paroled” to the US can apply for green cards.

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