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Last May, Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil said his status as a foreign national made him “nervous” to participate in the encampment that roiled campus. 

“Since the beginning, I decided to stay out of the public eye and away from media attention or high-risk activities,” he told Al Jazeera. He apparently did not consider blabbing to Qatar’s media mouthpiece either media attention or a high-risk activity. Oops.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Khalil’s visa—he is a Syrian national, according to ICE—and sent immigration enforcement officials to detain him. When Khalil’s attorney said Khalil had received a green card, one of the officials told the attorney the State Department had revoked that as well. A senior State Department official told us Rubio pulled both the visa and green card.

The arrest, which came to light on Sunday, is the first high-profile action under Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” effort targeting foreign Hamasniks causing trouble on college campuses. Khalil became one of the Columbia encampment’s public faces last spring when he led negotiations with administrators and demanded they divest from Israel. Columbia suspended him shortly thereafter before dropping the disciplinary charges. Khalil pledged to secure Israeli divestment by “any available means necessary” and participated in Wednesday’s occupation of the Barnard library.

“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” a senior State Department official told us. Rubio issued a similar statement, saying he will “be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

If that seems hyperbolic, it’s not: The Columbia University Apartheid Divest group Khalil belongs to commemorated the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7 by endorsing Hamas’s “armed resistance,” lauding the “Al-Aqsa Flood” as a “moral, military and political victory,” and quoting the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

READ MORE: Columbia Student Activist in ICE Custody After Trump Admin Revokes Visa

As the Trump administration takes aim at DEI in higher education, it may have a new target: Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH).

Founded in 2015 as “the first university-wide institute in the country focused exclusively on research to improve the health of the sexual and gender minority community,” the institute received a $1.3 million grant from Joe Biden’s NIH in 2022. At the same time, it “hosted a summer program for graduate scholars that it offered only to ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and also sexual and gender minorities,” our Lexi Boccuzzi reports.

Beyond attracting the administration’s ire—the grant is active through 2027, and roughly half of the funds are yet to be distributed—the program’s racial and sexual requirements could prompt legal challenges. “Similar racial restrictions for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont prompted the school to pull the job posting amid threats from attorneys,” writes Boccuzzi. “Northwestern appears to have made a similar move—sometime between September and January, the ISGMH amended the webpage for its summer program to remove references to race, gender, and sexual orientation, archives of the site show.”

READ MORE: At Northwestern, NIH Grant Funds Gender Institute That Hosted ‘BIPOC’-Only Academic Program

Speaking of DEI, one of the Biden EPA’s first moves was the creation of an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that empowered staffers to establish equity workgroups. The result, internal agency documents and communications obtained by our Thomas Catenacci show, was the repeated use of taxpayer dollars to “de-gender” bathroom and police pronoun use.

The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, for example, unveiled its “priority actions” during a 2023 presentation. They included the implementation of all-gender bathroom and locker rooms, the addition of “gender pronouns” in internal communications, and the adoption of a “style manual requirement for gendered honorifics in Agency Correspondence,” according to slides from the presentation.

“And the group achieved many of its objectives,” writes Catenacci. “Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations.”

“The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration”—efforts that “likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.”

READ MORE: Biden EPA Officials Used Government Time To ‘De-Gender’ Bathrooms and Police Pronoun Use, Internal Docs Show

Away from the Beacon:

• Israel announced it would cut off its supply of electricity to Gaza, furthering its plans—first reportedby the Free Beacon—to cut off aid and “eradicate Hamas.”
• Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and things got awkward when she was pressed about boys competing in girls’ sports: “For me though, I think this issue is being brought up in order to make sparks and see sparks fly,” she said, declining to say whether she supported or opposed boys competing against girls.
• Sixty-five percent of U.S. voters agree that “no one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for, other than opposing Donald Trump,” according to Democratic pollster Blueprint.
• Gov. Tim Walz (D.) said he and Kamala “played it too safe last year” and should have “just rolled the dice and done the town halls.” More Walz—that would’ve done the trick.

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