Rümeysa Öztürk, detained Tufts student, released from federal custody – US politics live
Rümeysa Öztürk, detained Tufts student, released from federal custody
Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student arrested by federal agents in March for her political speech in favor of Palestinians has been released from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Basile, Louisiana.
Öztürk, 30, a Turkish national and PhD student studying child development, walked out of the detention center and said “thank you” with her hands over her heart to supporters including members of her union, the SEIU, who shouted “free Rümeysa!”
She declined to make a formal statement, saying: “Thank you so much for being here, especially the union folks. I appreciate you being here and thank you so much for all the support and love. I am a little bit tired, so I will take some rest.”
“Rümeysa we love you!” a supporter shouted. “I love you back, thank you!” she replied.
Öztürk has been in federal custody since 25 March, when she was bundled into an unmarked car by agents and the administration moved to deport her without due process over an opinion article in a student newspaper that was critical of Israel.
A federal judge in Vermont ordered the release on bail on Friday morning, saying that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
Key events
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‘No chance’ tariffs on China will be completely paused, US commerce secretary says
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Rümeysa Öztürk, detained Tufts student, released from federal custody
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US pulls funding from UN agency for women’s health and reproductive rights
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Trump says 10% baseline minimum tariffs will remain in place, even after trade talks
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NIH tells scientists grants come with new strings attached: following Trump’s anti-trans, anti-diversity and anti-BDS orders
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Newark mayor Ras Baraka ‘arrested and detained by Ice’ at detention center protest
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Trump administration ‘actively looking at’ suspending habeas corpus, Stephen Miller says
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White House to take choice of Pentagon chief of staff out of embattled Pete Hegseth’s hands
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The day so far
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Trump signs executive order to establish national center for homeless veterans – Fox News Digital
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Deported family of US citizen girl recovering from rare brain tumor is determined to return – NBC News
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Tufts student faced higher risk of worsening asthma while in Ice custody, court filings show
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Judge says student’s Ice detention ‘potentially chills the speech of the millions’
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ACLU on Tuft student’s ordered release: ‘Her release is a victory for everyone committed to justice’
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Trump won’t unilaterally lower China tariffs, White House says
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Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk detained by US immigration authorities must be released, judge rules
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White House press briefing
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Pope Leo unhappy with US immigration policy and won’t stay silent, brother says
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People told they were being deported to Libya waited hours on airfield tarmac – Reuters
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US Postal Service names David Steiner as the next postmaster general
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Large investors increased stake in Trump Media by hundreds of millions
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Trump to unveil Medicare drug pricing plan after teasing ‘earth-shattering’ announcement – CBS News
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Trump names Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as top DC federal prosecutor
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Republicans to leave out some of Trump’s tax priorities after failing to build GOP support for deep spending cuts – Politico
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Why is Trump considering raising taxes on millionaires?
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Trump says he is ‘OK’ with Republicans raising taxes on the rich
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Trump: China tariffs should be 80%
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Majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s approach to higher education, poll finds
‘No chance’ tariffs on China will be completely paused, US commerce secretary says
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on Friday there is “no chance” that tariffs on China will be completely paused after this weekend’s trade talks in Switzerland between American and Chinese negotiators.
Speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox, Lutnick said that, if the talks go well, the tariff on imports from China will not stay at 145%, but “come down to a human level … to a level where we do business, there are significant tariffs”.
“The president is going to keep significant tariffs on trade with China, that is his objective, that’s his expectation, that should be everybody’s expectation”, Lutnick continued. “But 145% is decoupling, ‘Let’s not do business with each other’.”
“Let’s bring it down to a level that he’s studied and he knows, right? Where did we come out on ‘liberation day’?” he asked, in reference to Trump’s term for 2 April, when he imposed massive tariffs on nearly every nation, and shook the global economy. “34% is where he came out on liberation day. That’s the studied number that Donald Trump did then. He may put it up higher, but that’s kind of the idea”.
“That’s the number you should look at, somewhere around there – maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower – Donald Trump will make the deal with the Chinese to deescalate”.
Rümeysa Öztürk, detained Tufts student, released from federal custody
Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student arrested by federal agents in March for her political speech in favor of Palestinians has been released from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Basile, Louisiana.
Öztürk, 30, a Turkish national and PhD student studying child development, walked out of the detention center and said “thank you” with her hands over her heart to supporters including members of her union, the SEIU, who shouted “free Rümeysa!”
She declined to make a formal statement, saying: “Thank you so much for being here, especially the union folks. I appreciate you being here and thank you so much for all the support and love. I am a little bit tired, so I will take some rest.”
“Rümeysa we love you!” a supporter shouted. “I love you back, thank you!” she replied.
Öztürk has been in federal custody since 25 March, when she was bundled into an unmarked car by agents and the administration moved to deport her without due process over an opinion article in a student newspaper that was critical of Israel.
A federal judge in Vermont ordered the release on bail on Friday morning, saying that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
US pulls funding from UN agency for women’s health and reproductive rights
The United Nations Population Fund, which promotes gender equality and empowers women and girls “to take control of their bodies” through sexual and reproductive health projects, said in a statement on Friday that the Trump administration has decided to stop providing $180m in funding for its work.
The US had already sent the agency termination notices for more than 40 humanitarian grants, worth $335m, that had already been awarded to fund maternal healthcare, protection from violence, treatment for rape survivors and to pay midwives who prevent mothers from dying in childbirth.
The agency’s work was briefly in the social-media spotlight in January, when a Trump supporter, eager to find some support for the fictional claim that Elon Musk had stopped $50m in taxpayer dollars from being spent on condoms for Gaza, identified a $45m grant to the agency, still known by its old acronym, UNFPA, made in September to support its work in the occupied Palestinian territories.
But a spokesperson for the agency confirmed to the Guardian at the time that none of that funding had been used to buy condoms for anyone in Gaza.
Trump says 10% baseline minimum tariffs will remain in place, even after trade talks
Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that the United States will keep in place tariffs of at least 10% on imports even from countries that strike trade agreements like the one with the United Kingdom he announced on Thursday.
“You are going to always have a baseline,” Trump said after his near daily signing ceremony. “I mean, there could be an exception, at some point, we’ll see, if somebody does something exceptional for us, it’s always possible. But basically, you have a baseline of a minimum of 10%, and some of them will be much higher — 40% 50% 60% – as they’ve been doing to us over the years”.
“We had a wonderful deal yesterday”, he said, in reference to the agreement with the UK, which did keep the 10% tariff rate in place that he had announced last month. “We have four or five other deals coming immediately. We have many deals coming down the line, and ultimately we’re just signing the rest of them in”.
“But we always have a baseline of 10%,” Trump reiterated.
The president’s comments make some sense of the otherwise baffling boast from his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, on Thursday that the deal with the UK had left a 10% tariff in place. “We started at 10% and we ended at 10%,” Lutnick said triumphantly.
The US tariff on UK goods did indeed remain unchanged from the 10% announced by Trump five weeks ago, when he showed off a confusing and hard-to-read chart of the new rates he imposed on nearly every nation, except Russia.
NIH tells scientists grants come with new strings attached: following Trump’s anti-trans, anti-diversity and anti-BDS orders
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that scientists who get federal grants from the National Institutes of Health are being notified that funding for their work could be pulled if they boycott Israel or fail to follow Donald Trump’s executive orders decreeing that diversity is a form of anti-white racism and there are only two sexes, male and female.
In one case, a researcher at a teaching hospital in the Boston area, who studies how genes are regulated in lung disease, discovered in the fine print of her grant renewal that she was expected to comply with Trump’s anti-trans order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth”.
The Chronicle has confirmed that at least two institutions have received grant notices ordering them to comply with Trump’s anti-transgender executive order.
The fine print of grant awards even bans scientists from promoting “accessibility” for people with disabilities, making DEIA a prohibited term.
According to new conditions for NIH grants released last month:
By accepting the grant award, recipients are certifying that:
(i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and
(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.
Newark mayor Ras Baraka ‘arrested and detained by Ice’ at detention center protest
The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka, “was arrested and detained by Ice” on Friday at an federal immigration detention center where he was protesting, a spokesperson for his campaign to be the state’s governor confirmed.
NJ Spotlight News, a New Jersey public media outlet, caught the mayor’s arrest on video.
Witnesses told The Associated Press the arrest came after Baraka attempted to join a scheduled tour of the facility with three members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation, Representatives Robert Menendez, LaMonica McIver, and Bonnie Watson Coleman.
When federal officials blocked his entry, a heated argument broke out, according to Viri Martinez, an activist with the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. It continued even after Baraka returned to the public side of the gates.
“The agents started intimidating and putting their hands on the congresswomen. There was yelling and pushing,” Martinez said. “Then the officers swarmed Baraka. They threw one of the organizers to the ground. They put Baraka handcuffs and put him in an unmarked car”.
The mayor has been protesting the opening of Delaney Hall, an detention facility run by private prison operator GEO Group, all week, saying its operators did not get proper permits.
Alina Habba, a former personal lawyer for Donald Trump who is now interim US attorney for New Jersey, wrote on social media that Baraka “has been taken into custody” after, she alleged, he “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the Ice detention center in Newark”.
Video of the mayor being led away in handcuffs was posted on social networks by a local news station.
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“We’re at Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark that opened without permission from the city & in violation of local ordinances” Coleman wrote on social media before the mayor’s arrest. “We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other ICE prisons. We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves”.
Our colleague Richard Luscombe has more on this developing story:
Trump administration ‘actively looking at’ suspending habeas corpus, Stephen Miller says
In response to a question from a blogger for the far-right Gateway Pundit about when the Trump administration could start “suspending the writ of habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem”, White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, said the Trump administration is “actively looking at” doing so.
Federal habeas corpus is a procedure under which a federal court may review the legality of an individual’s incarceration.
Miller told the blogger, Jordan Conradson, he had made a point of calling on first: “The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of invasion. So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not”.
Miller’s use of the word “invasion” reflects the Trump administration’s argument that the US is under invasion from undocumented migrants and so the president is justified in claiming the power to deport anyone the administration brands a suspected gang member, with little to no due process under the rarely-used, wartime Alien Enemies Act.
A recently declassified intelligence assessment, however, shows that US agencies do not believe that the gang Tren de Aragua is operating on behalf of the government of Venezuela, as the administration has claimed as justification to use the Alien Enemies Act.
Just last week a federal judge in Texas ruled that the law does not authorize the administration to deport such individuals. You can read more on that here:
White House to take choice of Pentagon chief of staff out of embattled Pete Hegseth’s hands
Hugo Lowell
Exasperated by the turmoil that has dogged Pete Hegseth’s office in recent weeks, the White House will block the US defense secretary’s choice of chief of staff and select a candidate of its own, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Hegseth had suggested giving the chief of staff position to Marine Col Ricky Buria after the first person in the role, Joe Kasper, left last month in the wake of a contentious leak investigation that brought the ouster of three other senior aides.
But the White House has made clear to Hegseth that Buria will not be elevated to become his most senior aide at the Pentagon, the people said, casting Buria as a liability on account of his limited experience as a junior military assistant and his recurring role in internal office drama.
“Ricky will not be getting the chief position,” one of the people directly familiar with deliberations said. “He doesn’t have adequate experience, lacks the political chops and is widely disliked by almost everyone in the White House who has been exposed to him.”
The White House has always selected political appointees at agencies through the presidential personnel office, but the move to block Hegseth’s choice at this juncture is unusual and reflects Donald Trump’s intent to keep Hegseth by trying to insulate him from any more missteps.
The intervention comes at a time when Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon has come under scrutiny. It also runs into the belief inside Trump’s orbit that even the president might struggle to justify Hegseth’s survival if the secretary does not have a scandal-free next few months.
Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order later today discouraging criminal enforcement of regulatory offenses, in a bid to combat the overcriminalization of federal regulations, a White House official has told Reuters.
Trump also plans to sign a proclamation to encourage migrants who are in the US illegally to voluntarily depart the country, according to a White House official.
The “Project Homecoming” initiative will encourage migrants to leave voluntarily with the assistance of the federal government and financial support, or face enforcement and penalties, according to the official.
The day so far
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A federal judge ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, whose detention in March for writing an op-ed critical of Israel’s war in Gaza in her school newspaper judge William Sessions ruled “raised significant due process concerns”. Ordering her release, Sessions said her continued detention “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens”.
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People in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat waiting on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, Reuters reported. After several hours, they were bused back to the detention center around noon, an attorney for one of the men said. A US official told Reuters the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.
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Pope Leo is “not happy with what’s going on with immigration”, his brother told the NYT, adding: “How far he’ll go with it is only one’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.” Here’s our write-up.
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The major “earth-shattering” announcement Donald Trump teased earlier this week in the Oval Office is a “most favored nation” plan to cut Medicare drug prices, sources told CBS News, a policy he pursued unsuccessfully in his first term. The move would require Medicare to pay drug companies the lowest price paid in similar countries for some expensive, physician-administered drugs.
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Donald Trump said he would be “OK” if Republicans in Congress raised the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, but warned of political consequences. He wrote on his Truth Social platform: “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” It comes after the president privately urged House speaker Mike Johnson to raise the tax rate, Reuters reported.
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But, in a sign of just how tricky it may be to get Republicans to vote for raising anyone’s taxes, the tax portion of the GOP mega-bill is at risk of unraveling, three people told Politico, after leaders failed to win enough support for deeper spending cuts. That means Republicans will have to leave out some of Trump’s tax priorities, according to the people.
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A majority of US adults disapprove of Trump’s handling of issues related to colleges and universities, as his Republican administration escalate threats to cut federal funding unless institutions align with his political agenda. According to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 56% of Americans said they disapproved of the US president’s approach to higher education, while about four in 10 expressed approval, which is broadly consistent with his overall job approval ratings.
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Large institutional investors massively increased their holdings of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) in recent months according to SEC filings, with many enlarging their positions by hundreds of millions of dollars. The revelations raise further questions about big business’s desire to curry favor with Donald Trump and his administration via the enterprises he has maintained or commenced.
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Trump remains firm that the US is not going to unilaterally reduce tariffs on Chinese goods without concessions from China, the White House said, only hours after Trump floated the idea of reducing the current rate of 145% down to 80% as the two sides prepare for talks in Switzerland. “That was a number the president threw out there, and we’ll see what happens this weekend,” Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
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The US Postal Service named David Steiner as the next postmaster general after the Trump administration pressured the prior leader to resign in March. Steiner is a former Waste Management CEO and has served on the board of FedEx.
Trump signs executive order to establish national center for homeless veterans – Fox News Digital
Donald Trump has signed an executive order to establish a national center for homeless veterans with redirected funds previously spent on services for illegal aliens, according to Fox News Digital.
The order directs the secretary of veterans affairs to establish the “National Center for Warrior Independence” on the veterans affairs campus in West Los Angeles, Fox reports.
Fox quotes the White House: “The new National Center for Warrior Independence will help [LA’s unhoused veterans’] and other veterans like them rebuild their lives.”
The center will allow veterans from around the nation to seek and receive care, benefits and services “to which they are entitled”, the White House said.
The White House told Fox the goal is to house up to 6,000 homeless veterans at the center by 2028.
