Arrest of Palestinian student activist raises alarm about free speech – US politics live
Key events
South Korea’s acting president Choi Sang-mok said on Tuesday that US president Donald Trump’s “America First” policies had started targeting his country.
Choi said discussions with the United States over tariff measures and stronger cooperation on energy and shipbuilding were beginning ahead of “reciprocal tariffs” set to take effect on 2 April.
The US president announced a global regime of reciprocal tariffs on all US trading partners from 2 April.
Trump has threatened to impose “all-out pressure” on South Korea, Choi said, citing his comments to the U.S. Congress where he singled out the key US Asia ally for applying high tariffs.
Earlier this week, Choi ordered authorities to actively communicate with the Trump administration to resolve any misunderstanding about tariff rates.
US judge says Musk’s DOGE must release records on operations run in ‘secrecy’
A federal judge on Monday ordered the government-downsizing team created by US president Donald Trump and spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk to make public records concerning its operations, which he said had been run in “unusual secrecy.”
US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington sided with the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in finding that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was likely an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Reuters reported.
The ruling, the first of its kind, marked an early victory for advocates seeking to force DOGE to become more transparent about its role in the mass firings being conducted in the federal workforce and the dismantling of government agencies by the Republican president’s administration.
The Trump administration had argued that DOGE as an arm of the Executive Office of the President was not subject to FOIA, a law that allows the public to seek access to records produced by government agencies that they had not previously disclosed.
But Cooper, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama, said that DOGE was exercising “substantial independent authority” much greater than the other components of that office that are usually exempt from FOIA’s requirements.
He said it “appears to have the power not just to evaluate federal programs, but to drastically reshape and even eliminate them wholesale,” a fact that the judge said the agency declined to refute.
He said its “operations thus far have been marked by unusual secrecy,” citing reports about DOGE’s use of an outside server, its employees refusal to identify themselves to career officials and their use of the encrypted app Signal to communicate.
US president Donald Trump on Tuesday said he will buy a new Tesla car to show support for the electric carmaker’s chief and his ally Elon Musk amid recent “Tesla Takedown” protests and the slump in the company’s stock price.
Musk’s role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump has led to protests in the US against Tesla, Reuters reported.
About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla electric vehicle dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, while nine people were arrested during a raucous demonstration outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March.
Musk is spearheading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump defended Musk by saying he was “putting it on the line” to help the country and was doing a “fantastic” job.
“I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump said.
Musk thanked the president for his support on his own social media platform X.
The World Health Organization has started a process of fixing new priorities and announced a one-year limit on staff contracts, an internal memo showed on Tuesday, as it aims to make the UN agency more sustainable after the US withdrawal.
The memo, dated 10 March and signed by WHO’s Assistant Director-General Raul Thomas, laid out further cost-cutting measures – the latest in a series of such steps since US president Donald Trump’s announcement in January.
Senior WHO officials have begun “prioritisation” work over the past three weeks to make the global health agency sustainable, the document says.
“While operating in an extremely fluid environment, WHO’s senior management are working to navigate these shifting tides by undertaking a prioritisation process,” the memo said.
“Their work will ensure that every resource is directed toward the most pressing priorities while preserving WHO’s ability to make a lasting impact,” it said.
Mahmoud Khalil: arrest of Palestinian student activist raises alarm about free speech in US
Good morning, and welcome to our US politics blog.
The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest Mahmoud Khalil – a vocal critic of Israel’s war on Gaza – for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union has warned.
Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.
Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was reportedly detained at his Columbia apartment building in Manhattan in front of his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, on Saturday evening.
The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.” The US president said Khalil’s arrest was the “first arrest of many to come”.
The Department of Homeland Security accused the former student of “leading activities aligned to Hamas” but gave no details.
“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”
This morning, a federal judge in New York City ordered that Khalil not be deported for now and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday.
The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus.
