LP_468x60
ontario news watch
on-the-record-468x60-white
and-another-thing-468x60

Source: Canadian Press

WINNIPEG — The Manitoba government has put forward a bill aimed at cracking down on election disinformation.

If passed into law, the bill would expand existing prohibitions on disseminating false information about candidates and impersonating election officials.

It would also ban intentionally misleading information, in the time leading up to an election, about voter eligibility, the conduct of elections officials and the people who provide ballots and vote-counting machines.

There is also a provision banning so-called “deep fakes” — altered electronic images — aimed at affecting election results.

Justice Minister Matt Wiebe says the bill is based on a report last year by the head of Elections Manitoba and is aimed at keeping up with new technologies.

The bill would also expand the number of days for advance polls and, on election day, allow voters to cast their ballot at any returning office in the province.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025

Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press

Click here for more Canada

OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Mark Carney is hoping to be sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister by the end of the week but there are some logistical hurdles like security clearances for senior members of his transition team that must happen first.

Carney won a landslide victory to take the helm of the Liberals from Justin Trudeau on Sunday night but he isn’t yet the prime minister.

He is already taking some meetings to prepare for that eventuality — meeting the Liberal caucus Monday and sitting down with Canada’s U.S. ambassador Kirsten Hillman and Chief of Defence Staff Jennie Carignan today.

But his swearing in ceremony at Rideau Hall has not yet been scheduled and Carney says he won’t take part in any formal discussions with U.S. President Donald Trump over tariffs until after that ceremony takes place.

Carney’s spokespeople will only say that they hope that happens before the end of the week.

A senior aide in Trudeau’s office says there are some operational requirements of the transition that are still just getting started.

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the internal government operations, told The Canadian Press Tuesday that Marco Mendicino, the Toronto MP and former cabinet minister tapped by Carney to be his transition team chief of staff, met for an hour Tuesday afternoon with existing staff in Trudeau’s office.

It was the first discussion between Carney’s team and Trudeau’s office staff since Sunday’s leadership convention.

There are more than 100 people employed at the PMO, from senior political advisers to people in charge of appointments, travel and issues management.

Tuesday’s meeting included Cyndi Jenkins, who was a chief of staff to Health Minister Mark Holland and is now assisting Mendicino in the transition.

The source said while Trudeau and Carney are from the same party, the two teams are treating the changeover as a whole new administration. That means for at least a month Trudeau’s staff have been packing their offices, removing personal effects like photographs and archiving emails and documents as required.

Now they are in a wait-and-see mode, as it is expected that Carney’s incoming leadership will keep many of the existing staff in place at least through the caretaker mode of an election campaign since it would be difficult to replace them that quickly.

Obtaining proper security clearances for the new people Carney is bringing in will take some time, as those clearances can often take up to two weeks or longer.

Carney is widely expected to call an election before Parliament resumes on March 24 and cannot do that until he has been sworn in.

Carney is not officially joining tariff discussions but did weigh in on social media Tuesday, blasting Trump after the U.S. president moved to double the tariffs on steel and aluminum set to take effect Wednesday. Carney called the move to increase them to 50 per cent — which Trump later reversed back to 25 per cent — “an attack on Canadian workers, families and businesses.”

“My government will ensure our response has maximum impact in the US and minimal impact here in Canada, while supporting the workers impacted,” he said. “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade.”

During the daily White House press briefing Tuesday, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavittt said that Trump has not spoken to Carney yet, but “his phone is always open” to world leaders who wish to speak with the president.

Carney also met with Kevin Brosseau, the former Mountie tapped by Trudeau to be Canada’s “fentanyl czar” overseeing efforts to end the smuggling of fentanyl across into the United States. Trump has repeatedly cited fentanyl and migrants as the reasons for tariffs against Canada, despite overwhelming evidence of the very low numbers of each crossing the northern border into the U.S. illegally.

Following his meeting with Carignan, Carney said his government will meet the two per cent NATO spending target by 2030, modernize Norad and strengthen Canada’s presence in the Arctic.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025.

The Canadian Press

Click here for more

VANCOUVER — Cracks in the Opposition B.C. Conservative Party became cavernous last week when one MLA was kicked out of caucus and another two followed in solidarity.

Dallas Brodie, Tara Armstrong and Jordan Kealy say they will sit in the legislature as Independents for now, but will “explore” the idea of forming a new political party, since the threshold for party status in the B.C. legislature is two members.

Here’s what party status could mean for the former Conservatives.

DOES IT MEAN MONEY?

If they form a party, the rebel Conservative caucus would get an annual budget of about $767,000 for staffing and office expenses, according to the clerk or the legislative assembly.

That’s about $122,000 more than they would collectively receive as Independents under a $215,000 individual entitlement.

With their ranks reduced from 44 to 41, funding for the B.C. Conservative caucus will meanwhile dip to $5.33 million. The NDP government caucus receives about $3.54 million a year. It’s less than the Opposition gets because government ministers receive separate funding for offices.

The B.C. Greens, who have two MLAs, receive about $659,000.

WHAT ABOUT SALARIES?

A party leader for the trio would be entitled to a pay rise of $29,883.19 a year, while both the house leader and caucus whip would get an extra $11,953.27. That’s on top of the annual salary for legislators of $119,532.72.

WHAT ABOUT FUNDS FOR THE PARTY?

Elections BC provides an annual allowance to political parties based on how many votes their candidates received at the most recent provincial election. But the elections body says a new party would not qualify because it did not exist on election day.

The Election Act says parties are eligible for an annual allowance if they receive either two per cent of votes across B.C., or five per cent of votes in ridings where the party runs candidates.

WHAT ELSE DOES PARTY STATUS MEAN?

It’s not just about money. Becoming a party would mean more time to speak in the legislature.

Representatives of official caucuses get to participate in question period every day the legislature sits. That’s significantly more than Independent members, who only ask questions on an agreed-upon schedule.

Party leaders also get more time to speak to motions that are brought to the house.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025.

Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press

Click here for more

WASHINGTON (AP) — A law firm targeted by President Donald Trump over its legal services during the 2016 presidential campaign sued the federal government Tuesday over an executive order that seeks to strip its attorneys of security clearances.

The order, which Trump signed last week, was designed to punish Perkins Coie by suspending the security clearances of the firm’s lawyers as well as denying firm employees access to federal buildings and terminating their federal contracts.

It was the latest retributive action taken by Trump against the legal community, coming soon after an earlier order that targeted security clearances of lawyers at a separate law firm who have provided legal services to special counsel Jack Smith, who led criminal investigations into the Republican before his second term.

Perkins Coie represented the 2016 presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent, and also represented Democrats in a variety of voting rights challenges during the 2020 election. The firm made headlines in 2017 when it was revealed to have hired a private investigative research firm during the 2016 campaign to conduct opposition research on Trump. That firm, Fusion GPS, subsequently retained a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who researched whether Trump and Russia had suspicious ties.

Lawyers representing Perkins Coie said in their lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, that the executive order was an illegal act of retaliation. They called on a judge to block it from being implemented. A hearing was set for Wednesday afternoon.

The lawsuit notes that the two primary attorneys whose work appears to have most angered Trump left the firm years ago and accounted for a tiny fraction of the firm’s more than 1,200 attorneys. They said the order had already hurt the firm’s revenue and bottom line, noting that some clients of clients have “terminated their engagements” over the last week, and illegally discriminated against the firm based on viewpoint.

“The Order is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice. Its plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration, whether those views are presented on behalf of paying or pro bono clients,” the lawsuit states.

Trump had sued the law firm in 2022, along with Clinton, FBI officials and other defendants, as a part of a sprawling complaint alleging a massive conspiracy to concoct the Russia investigation that shadowed much of his administration. The suit was dismissed.

Eric Tucker, The Associated Press

Click here for more

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is once again lashing out at three of his biggest irritants: foreign steel, foreign aluminum and Canada.

Trump on Wednesday will effectively plaster 25% taxes – tariffs – on all steel and aluminum imports. And on Tuesday the president said the U.S. would double the forthcoming levy on the two metals to 50% if they come from Canada — only for the White House to pull back its threat by the afternoon after the province of Ontario suspended its own retaliatory plans.

The pain won’t just be felt by foreign steel and aluminum plants. The tariffs will likely drive up costs for American companies that use the metals, such as automakers, construction firms and beverage makers that use cans. The threats to the economy have rattled stock markets.

“Unilateral tariffs will raise prices, cost American jobs, and strain alliances,” Philip Luck and Evan Brown of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a report last month.

Trump is pressing tariffs from his first term

The latest tariffs are an amped-up replay from Trump’s first term.

In 2018, in an effort to protect American steelmakers from foreign competition, he imposed tariffs of 25% on foreign steel and 10% on aluminum, using a 1962 trade law to declare them a threat to U.S. national security.

The tariffs landed most heavily on American allies: Canada is the No. 1 supplier of foreign steel and accounts for more than half of aluminum exports to the United States. Mexico, Japan and South Korea are also major steel exporters to the U.S.

The president insists that steel imports are a threat to the very existence of the United States. “If we don’t have, as an example, steel, and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and frankly we won’t have — we just won’t have a country very long,” Trump said last week in his joint address to Congress.

His 2018 sanctions were gradually watered down.

Trump spared Canada and Mexico after they agreed to his demand for a revamped North American trade deal in 2020. For some U.S. trading partners, the tariffs were supplanted by import quotas. And the first Trump administration also allowed American companies to request exemptions from the tariffs if, for instance, they couldn’t find the steel they needed from domestic U.S. producers.

This time, Trump is closing those loopholes and raising the levy on aluminum to 25%.

He’s shown a willingness to go higher — as the apparently short-lived 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum suggest.

Trump was originally punching back at the government of Ontario for imposing a 25% surcharge on electricity sold to the United States, a move that was itself a response to Trump’s tariff threats. After Trump said he’d hit the Canadians with a 50% metals tax, Ontario suspended its planned electricity surcharge. In response, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the U.S. would pull back on doubling the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

Expecting more of the same

Trump’s first-term steel and aluminum tariffs benefited American producers of the two metals, encouraging them to increase production. But the beneficiaries were relatively few: The U.S. steel industry, for instance, employs fewer than 150,000 people. Walmart alone has 1.6 million employees in the United States.

Moreover, economists have found, the gains to the steel and aluminum industries were more than offset by the cost they imposed on “downstream’’ manufacturers that use steel and aluminum. In 2021, production at such companies dropped by nearly $3.5 billion because of the tariffs, canceling out the $2.3 billion uptick in production that year by aluminum producers and steelmakers, the U.S. International Trade Commission found in 2023.

This time, “there is no particular reason to think that the economics won’t be more of the same: small gains for the U.S. steel and aluminum producers and employees, but larger overall losses for the rest of U..S manufacturing,’’ said Christine McDaniel, research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

Taken by themselves, the metals tariffs are unlikely to do much damage to the nearly $30 trillion U.S. economy. “Steel and aluminum – they’re just a drop in the ocean,’’ said Satyam Panday, chief U.S. and Canada economist at S&P Global Ratings.

But Trump isn’t just hitting steel and aluminum. He’s slapped 20% tariffs on all Chinese imports. He’s set to hammer all Canadian and Mexican products with 25% taxes next month, while limiting the tariff on Canadian energy to 10% – moves he has twice postponed with 30-day reprieves. And he has an ambitious and complicated plan to impose “reciprocal tariffs,’’ raising U.S. import taxes to match those of countries that impose higher levies on American products.

The scope and unpredictability of Trump’s tariff agenda threatens to rekindle inflation and to slow growth by discouraging companies from making investments until the trade tensions have eased. “If you’re an executive in the board room, are you really going to tell your board it’s the time to expand that assembly line?” said John Murphy, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

US steelmakers raise prices

U.S. steelmakers can step up production to offset lost imports. They can also raise prices – and have already started, putting U.S. companies that use American steel at a disadvantage to competitors who get theirs elsewhere.

U.S. steel was priced at $854 per metric ton as of Feb. 24, considerably higher than the average world export price of $488, according to Steel Benchmarker.

Aluminum is a different story. The United States has just four aluminum smelters and only two of them were fully operating last year. Increasing U.S. smelter production would require “enough power for a small city,” S&P Global said in a report last week.

Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs are also certain to draw retaliatory taxes. Canada’s are expected to be announced Wednesday.

Contending with angry Canadians

Critics say Trump’s metals tariffs are hitting the wrong target.

China is widely seen as a source of the world steel industry’s problems. Chinese overproduction, heavily subsidized by Beijing, has flooded the world with steel and kept prices low, hurting steelmakers in the United States and elsewhere.

But the U.S. already uses trade barriers to keep out most Chinese steel. China accounted for less than 2% of U.S. steel imports last year, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. “Instead of focusing on the real issue — China’s market-distorting policies — the United States risks entangling itself in tariff disputes with its closest allies,’’ wrote Luck and Brown at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, companies that use steel are already feeling the pain.

Steelport Knife Co. in Portland, Oregon, uses U.S. steel in its knives for home cooks and professional chefs. Last month, its American steel supplier, anticipating Trump’s tariffs, raised its price by 10%.

CEO Ron Khormaei says Steelport’s Japanese and German competitors are benefiting. “It’s cheaper for them,’’ he said. Khormaei says his small company — it has 12 employees — will lose business if it raises prices. So he’s doing everything he can to cut costs — keeping inventories tight, for example, and limiting travel to trade shows.

And he’s facing another problem. “Canadians are mad at us,’’ he said.

Khormaei said that one of his Canadian customers just cancelled an order by email: “Thank you. We love your product. We are not buying.’’

Paul Wiseman And Josh Boak, The Associated Press




Click here for more

VICTORIA — British Columbia’s Energy Ministry says the United States has paused negotiations with Canada on the wide-reaching Columbia River Treaty that regulates everything from flood control and power generation to water supply and salmon restoration in the region.

The ministry says in a news release that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration “is conducting a broad review of its international engagement.”

The two countries reached an in-principle deal on a new version of the decades-old treaty last July, and while officials from both countries pushed for its finalization before Trump took office in January, the treaty’s fate remains unsettled.

The Columbia River’s headwaters are in British Columbia before it flows down into the states of Washington and Oregon.

The stoppage in talks comes amid trade tensions between Canada and the United States, and the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that Trump called the treaty unfair to the United States in a call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in February.

B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix says he will be hosting a virtual information session to update residents about the status of treaty talks on March 25 “in light of new developments from the U.S.”

The ministry also says it will schedule in-person community meetings that were originally planned for earlier this year “once there is more clarity about next steps on the path to modernizing the treaty.”

The original treaty was signed in 1961 after a flood in 1948 devastated communities in the region, and B.C. First Nations have been calling for the new treaty to support restoration of salmon runs that have been blocked by dams in the United States.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025.

The Canadian Press

Click here for more

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is canceling studies about ways to improve vaccine trust and access, a move that comes in the midst of a large measles outbreak fueled by unvaccinated children.

Researchers with grants from the National Institutes of Health to study why some people have questions or fears about vaccines and how to help those who want to be vaccinated overcome barriers are getting letters canceling their projects.

The step — first reported by The Washington Post, which cited dozens of expected cancellations — is highly unusual, as entire swaths of research typically aren’t ended mid-stream.

“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” say NIH letters sent to two researchers with different grants.

“It’s really concerning,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who viewed and read the content aloud, noting its claim that the research doesn’t benefit people or improve quality of life.

“That’s inaccurate. Vaccines clearly save lives, there’s no question about the science of that,” O’Leary said. Better understanding what parents want to learn from their pediatrician – or adults’ questions about their own shots — is “really about improving care and not just necessarily about just the vaccination rates.”

“You can’t say you’re for vaccine safety and not study how people think about vaccines,” added Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association.

Some of the canceled grants are a type that help fund the salaries of promising young researchers, whose careers may be threatened, O’Leary said.

It’s the latest move against vaccines since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the nation’s health secretary, directing the agency that oversees the NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration. Kennedy has long criticized vaccines and since taking the new post has vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule — shots that prevent measles, polio and other dangerous diseases — and CDC and FDA meetings of independent vaccine advisers have been postponed or canceled.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Lauran Neergaard, The Associated Press

Click here for more

President Donald Trump has nominated a cybersecurity executive to lead the agency that works to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, one that has faced Republican criticism in recent years over its involvement in elections.

Sean Plankey, who retired from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2023, was nominated Tuesday to lead the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA. He worked in the first Trump administration as a director for cyber policy at the National Security Council and then as a principal deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy.

CISA was formed in 2018 during the first Trump administration and is charged with protecting the nation’s sensitive infrastructure, including dams, nuclear power plants and voting systems. Though it’s under the Department of Homeland Security, CISA is a separate agency with its own Senate-confirmed director.

CISA’s first director, Chris Krebs, was fired by Trump after he highlighted a statement issued by a group of election officials that called the 2020 election the “ most secure in American history.” At the time, Trump was contesting his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and promoting false claims of widespread fraud.

The agency under both the Trump and Biden administrations has received praise from many state and local election officials. But some Republicans remain angry over its efforts to counter misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s new homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said during her January Senate confirmation hearing that CISA had strayed “far off mission” and she pledged to work with senators “should you wish to rein them in.”

CISA officials have said they were never engaged in censorship and only worked with states in 2020 to help them notify social media companies about misinformation spreading on their platforms. They said the agency did not instruct or try to coerce those companies to act.

During the 2024 election, CISA and other federal agencies alerted the public to various foreign misinformation campaigns, including three fake videos linked to Russia purporting to show election misconduct in battleground states.

Under the new Trump administration, CISA officials have launched a review of the agency’s work related to elections and placed more than a dozen agency employees who had worked on elections on administrative leave. Recently, the agency announced plans to cut about $10 million in annual funding from two cybersecurity initiatives, including one dedicated to helping state and local election officials.

In a letter released Tuesday by the National Association of Secretaries of State, Noem told state election officials that existing programs will allow them to access help CISA has traditionally provided. That includes security assessments of potential cyber threats and physical attacks, and how to plan for specific scenarios their offices might encounter.

The group’s bipartisan executive board had urged Noem to continue the agency’s services to state and local election officials.

Christina A. Cassidy, The Associated Press

Click here for more United States

OTTAWA — The federal Liberals and the Conservatives are running neck-and-neck in voter support, a new Leger online poll suggests.

The poll of Canadians’ voting intentions has both parties sitting at 37 per cent.

It shows a drop of six points for the Conservatives and a seven per cent jump for Liberals since Feb. 24, while the NDP is down two per cent to 11 per cent.

Leger surveyed 1,548 Canadians between March 7 and March 10 — which means the poll wrapped up just after Liberals picked Mark Carney as the new party leader and prime minister-designate.

Because the poll was conducted online, it can’t be assigned a margin of error.

The Liberals have rebounded in the polls after lagging behind the Conservatives for nearly two years.

But Canadians are still hungry for change — the poll suggests more than half of all Canadians, 53 per cent, want a change of government in the next election.

Andrew Enns, Leger executive vice-president for central Canada, said the movement in voting intentions and the “cross-current of issues that Canadians are grappling with” are unprecedented.

He said U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats to make Canada the 51st state have captured the attention of Canadians.

“It’s triggered a lot of emotions, anger, frustration, disappointment, shock, and so that, I believe, is having an impact on changing perceptions because of this change in U.S. relations,” he said. “It’s changed a bit in terms of what we’re asking of our political leadership now in the country.”

The emergence of Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, has given Canadians a new political option to evaluate.

“Obviously, given the economic situation, he’s an interesting character,” Enns said.

At the same time, he said, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s departure has “also loosened up some voting tendencies that we had seen locked in for quite a period of time.”

The Conservatives also have been thrown off their message track, Enns said. Carney’s promise to scrap consumer carbon pricing has made Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “axe the tax” mantra seem less relevant to many.

Enns predicted that as Canada heads into an election, which could be called within days, there will be more swings in voting tendencies.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2024.

Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press

Click here for more

NEW YORK (AP) — The White House complained Tuesday that Columbia University is refusing to help federal agents find people being sought as part of the government’s effort to deport participants in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, as the administration continued to punish the school by yanking federal research dollars.

Immigration enforcement agents on Saturday arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident and Palestinian activist who played a prominent part in protests at Columbia last year. He is now facing possible deportation.

President Donald Trump has vowed additional arrests. In a briefing with reporters in Washington, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said federal authorities have been “using intelligence” to identify other people involved in campus demonstrations critical of Israel that the administration considered to be antisemitic and “pro-Hamas.”

She said Columbia had been given names and was refusing to help the Department of Homeland Security “to identify those individuals on campus.”

“As the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that,” Leavitt said.

A Columbia spokesperson didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment.

Last week, the Trump administration announced it was pulling $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia, accusing the school of failing to stop antisemitism on campus. As part of those cuts, the National Institutes of Health late Monday it was cutting more than $250 million in funding, which included more than 400 grants.

X. Edward Guo, director of Columbia’s Bone Bioengineering Laboratory, posted a screenshot on X of an email he received notifying him that one of his NIH awards had been canceled. “We understand this may be shocking news,” the email reads.

The university was wracked last spring by large demonstrations by students calling for an end to Israeli military action in Gaza and a recognition of Palestinians’ human rights and territorial claims. The university ultimately called in police to dismantle a protest encampment and end a student takeover of an administration building.

Khalil, 30, had been a spokesperson for the protesters. He hasn’t been charged with any crimes, but Leavitt said the administration had moved to deport him under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the secretary of state the power to deport a non-citizen if the government “has reasonable ground to believe” the person’s presence could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

As of Tuesday, Khalil was being held at an immigration detention center in Louisiana.

Civil rights groups and Khalil’s attorneys say the government is unconstitutionally using its immigration-control powers to stop him from speaking out. A federal judge set a hearing for Wednesday and ordered the government not to deport him in the meantime.

Trump, a Republican, has suggested that some protesters support Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251. Israel responded with bombardment and other military offensives that have left over 48,000 Palestinians dead in Hamas-ruled Gaza. Israel says more than 17,000 were militants.

Trump heralded Khalil’s arrest as the first “of many to come,” vowing on social media to deport students the president described as engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

Immigration agents also tried to arrest another international student at Columbia, but they weren’t allowed into an apartment where she was, according to a union representing the student.

Khalil, who finished his requirements for a Columbia master’s degree in December, and protest leaders have said they are anti-war, not antisemitic. They note that some Jewish students and groups have joined the demonstrations. A Columbia disciplinary body recently told Khalil it was investigating whether he violated a new harassment policy by calling a school official “genocidal.”

Leavitt didn’t detail specific wrongdoing by Khalil. But she said he had organized protests that disrupted classes, harassed Jewish students and “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, fliers with the logo of Hamas.”

Born in Syria, Khalil is a grandson of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homeland, his lawyers said in a legal filing. It didn’t address his citizenship but said his relatives have been displaced anew amid Syria’s civil war and are now in other countries.

Khalil is married to a U.S. citizen, who is expecting their first child.

“For everyone reading this, I urge you to see Mahmoud through my eyes as a loving husband and the future father to our baby,” his wife, who has not been publicly identified, wrote in a statement provided by his lawyers. “I need your help to bring Mahmoud home, so he is here beside me, holding my hand in the delivery room as we welcome our first child into this world.”

The Associated Press

Click here for more United States