Portside

Daniel McGowan is now serving the last six months of his seven-year sentence for an environmentally motivated arson at a halfway house in Brooklyn. The Bureau of Prisons has retaliated against McGowan for writing constitutionally protected political blogs by placing him in a special prison unit and then after he was released, re-imprisoned him when he exercised his free speech rights by writing an article complaining about it. Kafka is twirling in his grave.

For centuries, the writ of habeas corpus—a fundamental protection against unlawful imprisonment—has remained a core fixture of democratic governance. Suspending it would defy the Constitution, but Trump is weighing his options.

A federal judge freed Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student leader at Columbia University, who was part of the pro-Palestine protests. “The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,”

The government funds institutions that stretch across American society. The Trump administration is demanding the relinquishment of constitutional rights to keep the money flowing.

More than 440 college presidents and other officials signed a letter Tuesday protesting the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” that higher education is facing under the Trump administration.

He is widely known in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, where he has been based since moving to the United States more than a decade ago, as a spiritual man who grew up Muslim, a practicing Buddhist, and whose closest friends are Jewish.

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"What is at stake is the defense of our fundamental democratic rights and constitutional freedoms," said one organizer.