March 12, 2025

By Courtney Wise

Greetings, MindSite News Readers.

As the world reaches the 5-year COVID anniversary, grieving children still need support. More than a million Americans died from Covid in that dark time, and many of them were parents. In the third story of our Forgotten Children series, we focus on Native American children, who lost parents at the highest rate of any group.

It’s a dark time now, too. Is there any doubt that the President of the United States is trying to end our democracy? If so, we can lay that to rest. This week’s arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians makes Trump’s intentions clearer than ever. 

After all, the right to protest is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly in a statement calling on the government to reverse its course: “This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American.” And it affects the mental health of anyone who cares about American democracy.

Trump tramples the Constitution with the unlawful arrest of Columbia University student protester 

On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian activist and graduate student in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by agents with the US Department of Homeland Security at his university residence. Mere hours before his arrest, Khalil was interviewed by Reuters about the Trump Administration’s offensive against Columbia University and its students, in which he mentioned concerns about being personally targeted by the federal government for speaking to the media. The day before, the graduate student had implored Columbia University to provide security for him because he had been facing harassment and death threats for months.

In a post on X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a news story on the arrest, adding the caption “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, told the Associated Press that Khalil’s arrest is “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.” 

Khalil was a prominent leader of Columbia’s on-campus anti-war movement, which includes Jewish students and groups that reject the government’s allegations of antisemitism. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security could tell Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, that he was charged with any crime, let alone that he was giving material support to a recognized terrorist organization like Hamas. It makes his arrest wholly unlawful, even before acknowledging Khalil is a legal permanent resident with a green card. “It sounds like the ICE agents just unilaterally decided that whatever immigration status he had, it didn’t matter,” Greer said. 

The unlawful arrest sparked a large and angry protest in New York City. “This is a time to be ever more outraged because what happened to Mahmoud can happen to anyone,” Rabbi Jason Garrett Klein told reporters. On Monday, federal Judge Jesse M. Furman, an Obama-appointee in New York’s southern district, blocked Khalil’s deportation order, though the Columbia University student remains in government custody. 

Khalil’s arrest not only breaches his First Amendment rights, it threatens all of ours. “Ostensibly, the moral justification is to combat antisemitism, always a noble goal,” Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera. “Objectively, what is really happening is an effort to silence all public expression of support for Palestinian human rights to placate right-wing supporters of Israel within the Republican Party,” he said. “That is how this topic should be framed and understood.”

Agents arresting Khalil also threatened to detain Khalil’s wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. They later told Greer and Khalil’s wife that Khalil was being held in an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, but when they arrived, he was not there – he has reportedly been moved to a detention center in Louisiana. “This is a tactic that ICE loves to use, transferring someone to a facility that is further away from their legal assistance, community and loved ones,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, a policy lawyer with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “It increases the psychological strain of detention.”

Multiple human rights groups and agencies have charged Israel with committing genocide in Gaza, including the United Nations, Human Rights Watch,  Amnesty International and the International Criminal Court. Despite a ceasefire in place since January 19, Israel has cut off all electricity to the region and blocked the entry of any relief aid into Gaza since March 1, drawing further condemnation.

Left unprotected by police response to neo-Nazis, Black residents of an Ohio town create armed community watch

Lincoln Heights, Ohio, the oldest self-governing Black community north of the Mason-Dixon Line, has long made a way where there seemed to be none. The Cincinnati suburb was established in 1923 after Black people were barred from Cincinnati and surrounding towns. Efforts to incorporate were systemically impeded for another 23 years. Now, residents tell the Washington Post they are being targeted by neo-Nazis with what they view as the support of police. So they’ve taken up arms to protect themselves. 

“An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm — I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” said Daronce Daniels, a spokesman for the newly formed Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program.

Last month, masked neo-Nazis carried AR-15s through the streets while hurling racial epithets at residents, waving flags adorned with swastikas. They began their march blocks from Lincoln Heights Elementary School as students were dismissed for the day. “The way I found out that the Nazis were in my neighborhood was through children,” said DeRonda Calhoun. “They were afraid.” Two weeks later, neo-Nazis returned, distributing racist pamphlets from the Ku Klux Klan. Residents say they are distraught by the hate, and distrustful of local police.

The village lost its police department in 2014, and is served by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office. Officers from the nearby town of Evendale responded to the march but made no efforts to cite or arrest participants. The department later released body-cam footage in which an officer was so friendly with demonstrators leaving the area, he drove one back towards residents to retrieve his car, advising him to change his shirt before he did. The Evendale Police Department did not respond to the Post’s request for comment, though Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey called the neo-Nazis “cowards” and vowed to boost patrols in Lincoln Heights and investigate further. 

Residents have urged a boycott of Evendale’s businesses until the investigation is completed — demanding that all officers who aided the Nazi demonstrators are fired. For now, they’ve begun their own protective patrols. “When we saw that the police weren’t helping us, every able-bodied man in the neighborhood, with or without a gun, has stood guard and has been standing guard ever since,” said Dominic Brewton Jr., a small business owner in the town.

Seventy or so guards now comprise the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program, keeping lookout over the roads leading into the town and patrolling the streets with their own rifles. There have been some complaints, but one resident said it was “muscle memory” for the town to look after itself. The program has also been present at community meetings and a protest. They have no other choice, Brewton Jr. said. “I would for sure rather rely on the police. [This is] out of necessity.”

In other news…

Living openly as a trans person, especially in the Caribbean or Latin America, is a revolutionary act. As dangerous as it is to exist as a trans person in the United States, it is even more dangerous In the Caribbean and Latin America, – Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide reports that 70% of trans murders across the globe happen in the region. At least 57 trans people were killed in Mexico in 2024, making it the second most deadly country for trans people, behind Brazil. 

It’s a pleasant surprise then, that LGBTQ migrants, some recently shut out of asylum in the US, have found relief in Casa Frida, a shelter for LGBTQ migrants in Mexico City. As Trump continues his attacks on trans and nonbinary people via a slew of executive orders in the US, Raúl Caporal, Casa Frida’s director, told Yes! magazine it’s a great opportunity to keep hard-working, tax-paying people in the country.

Trump’s actions have some therapists making their politics clear: In the shadow of White House policies targeting minorities, a number of therapists told The Guardian that they’re abandoning the pretence of political neutrality. “You’re taught in school that therapists aren’t supposed to be political, but it’s very political,” one unnamed, liberal-leaning practitioner said. “Now, at least in my therapist friend group, we’re like, ‘Screw that, no, this is very political.’” 

No one interviewed said they try to change their clients’ political views. One provider, for instance, shared that their Trump-supporting client was deeply distressed about their church’s liberal position on some social issues. Rather than attempt to make the client believe differently, the therapist encouraged them to talk to the church, to try and understand their point of view. “I didn’t look at it as an opportunity or say, ‘Oh, I got a chance to try to win them over,’” she said. “It was, ‘Oh, you have this conflict, and maybe if you can see another perspective that would help you.’”

Conservative therapists who are more likely to support Trump’s actions declined to speak with The Guardian, stating a belief that their words would be twisted in an interview.

If you or someone you know is in crisis or experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and connect in English or Spanish. If you’re a veteran press 1. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing dial 711, then 988. Services are free and available 24/7.