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kxraja.bsky.social
Founding director, Asian Media Initiative @ccmnewmarkj.bsky.social. Writer. Previously Sr Fellow Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affrs. Global migration + Asia-Pacific.
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At least 12 universities now have hiring freezes and nearly 30 have cut PhD admissions this year If you hear of other places you can add them to this google doc:

This is an excellent legal analysis by Katherine Yon Ebright and @lizagoitein.bsky.social of Trump's unlawful border "invasion" declaration. Turns out Abraham Lincoln once led a campaign to censure James Polk for falsely invoking the Invasion Clause, which sparked the Mexican-American War.

Perhaps the social sciences, e.g., have a larger representation of those on the left not because something about them is inherently “biased,” but because the in-depth study of many of those topics leads one to some inescapable conclusions.

There is no doubt these human beings will be abused and terrorized as a result of this policy, and in this climate of their demonization and dehumanization.

Great piece by @adamserwer.bsky.social. Reminder that this isn’t the first time the federal workforce has been resegregated: Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 order to impose Jim Crow rolled back almost half a century of progress that saw Black people working at every level of the federal government.

“RESIST. DO NOT COMPLY WITH THEIR ILLEGAL MANDATES.”Judge Ortiz emailed her EEOC colleagues after the anti-trans EO. She told me, “The unknown was not as scary as being complicit and not speaking up. I can exist on cornflakes and community at the end of the day if it means that my soul is intact.”

‘Horrible discrimination’: Federal judges say Trump’s anti-trans orders are rooted in bias, not law 19thnews.org/2025/02/trum... via @19thnews.org

Read. Not for nothing the federal workforce cuts are also rooted in racist tropes about “government employees.”

Much of the Black middle class was built by federal jobs. That may change. For the last several decades, federal jobs helped Black workers find stable work with guardrails to prevent bias, but mass cuts are threatening decades of upward mobility. www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/...

Wow. Great thread from @yaelschacher.bsky.social. Importance to bear witness to the dramatic shift in norms, returning us from the mid-late 20th century back to the broad embrace of dehumanizing xenophobia of the mid-late 19th century.

This is literally how the white supremacist OK symbol became so ubiquitous on the trollish right that establishment pols started flashing it.

This is now the moment for us to ask ourselves: at what point does complying to protect myself, my family and my staff lead to turning my back on others to do so, and in turn, betraying or sacrificing others in order to do so.

When we look to our leadership to value and protect immigrant communities and history, let us remember a democrat president authorized the forced displacement and imprisonment of 120k Japanese Americans, almost all U.S. citizens, by executive order.

#tdih 1943, Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, & Christoph Probst -- members of the White Rose -- were executed 💔 for their role in urging students to rise up & overthrow the Nazi government. #Resist In face of evil, "why do you not rouse yourselves?" they implored. ⬇️ www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/wh...

The Washington Spectator has picked up my piece about Lavrov, Rubio and the betrayal of Ukraine - washingtonspectator.org/the-leopard-...

The Trump Administration has cost our country over 22,406 American jobs. trumpcostsamerica.com

This is literally extortion

And we got finger-wagged by a New England journo "expert" for not staying in our lane and sticking to our knitting (his words) and leaving hard stuff to (paywalled) NYT and Wapo. So we were right, and we did the right thing, and we didn't need anyone's permission to make our own news decisions.

People experiencing pregnancy loss in states with abortion bans told us they wished they had known what to expect and how to advocate for themselves. We created this guide for anyone who finds themselves in the same position.

"These kinds of shocks are going to lead to a mass exodus … for minorities in particular.” For my latest @science.org story, I spoke with early career researchers who have been affected by the federal upheaval and are concerned about what it means for their future. www.science.org/content/arti...

Teachers teach. We need a leaderful movement, and there are leaders all around us.

This is an incredible loss. PRAMS (Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System) has been essential for understanding care access and outcomes in the perinatal and postpartum periods. For example, intimate partner violence before or after childbirth www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38733...

Rep Raskin has been great. Rep Ocasio-Cortez has been great. And Rep Frost and Rep Crockett. Senator Murphy. Maybe no one knew exactly what to do. But such people laid down a clear marker. Let’s respect these and other elected federal representatives who stood out these first few weeks.

Some good news today! The stop work order for those providing legal representation to unaccompanied children has been cancelled.

Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965 at the age of 39.

Beautiful story about a Jewish father and son being able to return to a post-Asaad Syria from New York, to pray in synagogues in Damascus' ancient Jewish quarter, and be well received by neighbors and friends three decades after they left home.

www.refugeesinternational.org/statements-a...

INBOX: The Harvard-Yenching Institute will be holding its annual roundtable, "Authoritarianism in Hong Kong" on Tuesday, March 11th. www.harvard-yenching.org/events/autho...

Ill. @govpritzker.illinois.gov said: need to respond quickly & forcefully to fascism, citing Nazi Germany & response to Nazi's 1977 plan to march in Skokie. Read @jewishcurrents.bsky.social on racist & antisemitic Nazis in Skokie: jewishcurrents.org/the-skokie-m... www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qa...

The ugly side of revolutions is that people can get really into the freedom afforded by chaos and lawlessness. Trust me, none of you want for society to break down and for order to cease.

Elon Musk’s actions are leading Afghan refugees who fought alongside our soldiers and have escaped the Taliban to be evicted from their houses.

From @theborderchronicle.bsky.social: A Long History of Migrant Detention at Guantánamo, A Q&A with Jenna Loyd www.theborderchronicle.com/p/a-long-his...

The Trump admin says it took 177 Venezuelans detained at Gitmo and sent them to Honduras, where Venezuela will pick them up and take them back. This raises the obvious question of why the hell the US needed to send these people to Gitmo in the first place, at massive cost to the US taxpayer.

“Instead of asking, ‘How can we defend DEI initiatives in this hostile climate?’ we might ask, ‘Where have our diversity efforts created the most value, and how can we build on these successes?’,” Carrie Bloxson writes for The Emancipator. theemancipator.org/2025/02/20/t...

Susanne Ussing, installation, ’I Drivhuset (In the Greenhouse)’, 1980

Hogwash. discussion of country conditions impossibly lame given worsening violence in Haiti. TPS as pull factor for unauthorized migration absurd since so many recent TPS applicants came in through ports of entry at border or airports. public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-02970.p...

🚨The Trump admin is moving to terminate Temporary Protected Status for half a million Haitians in the United States, seemingly illegally moving up the expiration date from next February to August of this year. In a single day, 500,000 people could lose work authorization and deportation protections.

Some transparency into DOGE, from Pro Publica:

Look to Black and Indigenous history for the precedents, and also know that many AAPI communities experienced pogroms and structural exclusion. Who incited these attacks? White-led news. Who spoke out for them? Black press.

Same for those who look abroad for Trump’s coup precedents when Wilmington NC in 1898 is right there

DOGE cut 20% of the World Trade Center Health Program staff, which serves people who were exposed to toxic chemicals during the terrorist attack. The incompetent foreign puppets at the so-called agency known as DOGE and its state media apparatus known as X can go **** themselves.

"The list.. includes words such as underrepresented, underserved, understudied, sex, identity, diverse, women, woman, promote, definition, continuum, ideology, self-assessed, special populations, elderly and disabled. It was not accompanied with an explanation." www.reuters.com/world/us/fda...

Today marks 8 years of continuous protest by families of the victims of enforced disappearances in Kilinochchi in the North of Sri Lanka. From 2020, Bhavani Fonseka on the long wait for justice and the chronic failures of criminal justice in #SriLanka:

NEW: Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion, according to ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis, which found the sepsis rate for women hospitalized as they miscarried in the 2nd trimester shot up by more than 50%. https://propub.li/43487Tj

On Audre Lorde’s birthday, I’m thinking about her Kitchen Table Press. She (second from left), Barbara Smith, Cherrie Moraga and Hattie Gossett came together to establish a press centering feminist and lesbians of color — and it shook the publishing industry. #bhm

Zheng Lijuan, a Chinese woman who is one of the 170 people deported by the US and held in a hotel in Panama, has escaped www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...