It was an obscure, 44-word demand toward the end of the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Columbia University this month ordering a dramatic overhaul of admissions and disciplinary rules. But it could prove to have consequences for colleges and universities nationwide. With $400 million in canceled government grants and contracts on the line, federal officials ordered Columbia’s administration to place the university’s Middle Eastern studies department under academic receivership for at least five years. Typically, a receivership is handled internally. University administrators can take the rare step of imposing the measure when a department descends into chaos. It is viewed as a last-resort solution to extended periods of internal strife and dysfunction. This time is different. The call for a receivership is coming from outside the university — and directly from the White House. And it arrives at a moment when dozens of other colleges and universities are facing federal inquiries and fear a fate similar to Columbia’s. “It is one small department in one university,” said Sheldon Pollock, a retired former chair of the Middle Eastern studies department at Columbia. “But it will reverberate across the entire country.” The interdisciplinary program at the center of the government’s demand — the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department — has been in a pitched battle for decades over its scholarship and employment of faculty members who describe themselves as anti-Zionist. Several historians and veteran professors said that the move by the federal government to intervene in an academic department at a private university would be unparalleled in the modern history of U.S. higher education. Laurie A. Brand, a professor emerita at the University of Southern California, who described the department as one of the most respected in the field, compared the move to the Turkish government’s centralized control of higher education during its “hard authoritarian turn” in the 2010s. “I certainly don’t remember a case in the United States,” said Dr. Brand, the chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars who focus on the region. The swirling questions about the department’s future have emerged as the latest crisis for Columbia, where pro-Palestinian demonstrations against the war in Gaza ignited a national protest movement and animated debate over free speech and antisemitism. The federal government accused the university last week of failing to safeguard students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment,” calling for changes that include the school formalizing its definition of antisemitism. The government said that it had extended its deadline to the end of Friday for Columbia to respond to its ultimatum, which would include offering a timeline for placing the Middle Eastern studies department under receivership. College administrators across the nation are closely watching whether Columbia acts with deference or defiance. As higher education institutions face federal scrutiny, many see the dispute over the department as a high-stakes test case for other Middle Eastern studies programs — and for other endeavors that could run afoul of conservative orthodoxy, such as centers for the study of climate change or gender and sexuality. Dr. Pollock described the government’s “intrusion” as “jaw-dropping” and “a historic and astonishing event.” Such a move would signal “the beginning of the end of the American university as we’ve known it since 1915,” the year that the American Association of University Professors first codified guidelines and practices for academic freedom. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, one of three federal agencies named in the letter to Columbia, did not respond to questions about the rationale for the receivership. In a letter to the university on Wednesday, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, seemed to acknowledge the growing concern over how the school might respond. “Legitimate questions about our practices and progress can be asked, and we will answer them,” Dr. Armstrong wrote. “But we will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom or our obligation to follow the law.” President Trump has previously homed in on Middle Eastern studies programs for potential bias, including in his first term. The Education Department, under its former head, Betsy DeVos, ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake their jointly run Middle East studies program, accusing it of offering students a biased curriculum in violation of federal funding standards. It was one example of the charged conflict over Middle Eastern studies, which has historically inspired debate, in part because the discipline can highlight academic scholarship that casts Israel in a negative light. At some institutions, students, professors, alumni and donors have been divided over the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in such work — and whether the two should be regarded as distinct issues. Columbia’s Manhattan campus — and its roughly 50-member Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department — have been a hot spot for these disputes. The department was a central focus of a 2004 documentary called “Columbia Unbecoming,” which interviewed students who had taken classes in the department and described facing intimidation from faculty members for their pro-Israel views. Its central thesis, which has been strenuously debated, depicted a systemic silencing of Jewish students in campus culture. During the past 17 months of fighting in Gaza, the department has come under a wave of renewed scrutiny, including during a high-profile hearing on antisemitism last spring. A number of Congressional Republicans took issue with some faculty members, including Joseph Massad, a tenured professor of Palestinian Christian descent who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history. Many students and alumni were enraged over an article he wrote after the Hamas attack, which included descriptors like “resistance offensive” and “awesome.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Michelle Steel, a former Republican representative from California, said during the hearing that the article illustrated that the department had been “extremely hostile to both Israel and Jewish students” for more than two decades, and asked whether the school would consider “placing the department into receivership.” Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president at the time, avoided a direct answer. “Academic departments at Columbia are — there isn’t really a notion of receivership,” Dr. Shafik, who resigned from her post in August, responded. Some Jewish organizations in recent months called on Columbia’s leadership to overhaul the department. Kenneth L. Marcus, the founder of the Brandeis Center in Washington, D.C., said that many Jewish students during the past two decades had “simply been warned to avoid the program altogether.” It may be debatable whether academic receivership is the answer, Mr. Marcus said. Still, he called it a milestone for federal officials to recognize “that the campus problem cannot be solved without a faculty solution.” The chair of the Columbia department, Gil Hochberg, did not respond to requests for comment. It remains unclear what an academic receivership might entail. Several advocates of academic freedom raised concerns in interviews that the government might seek to influence the selection of a new department chair, who could have broad leeway to reshape course content or pursue the dismissal of tenured faculty members. Others worried that the move could set a precedent for the Trump administration to make threats to federal funding at other universities over scholarship that it finds unfavorable. One professor wondered whether history departments could come under fire for courses that federal officials believed portray slavery and segregation too negatively. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which is representing Palestinian students in a civil rights case against Columbia, said that Middle Eastern studies departments had often been targeted for punishment or defunding because they challenged dominant narratives about Israel. Ms. Sainath called the receivership demand “straight out of an authoritarian playbook where attacking universities is the first step,” and “any institution that represents opposition to Trump’s agenda” could be next. It would not be Columbia’s first experiment with academic receivership. Some two decades ago, school administrators placed the Middle Eastern studies department under a one-year receivership and appointed an interim chair in part because of struggles to find a new leader, Dr. Pollock, the former chair, said. And amid internal disputes over cultural shifts in the study of literature, Columbia leaders appointed a scholar from a Pennsylvania university to lead the English department in the early 2000s. A weekly newspaper in New York described the stakes in now familiar terms: “Crisis at Columbia.” David Damrosch, a Harvard professor of comparative literature who was a member of Columbia’s English department at the time, said the move helped mend divisions. But he added that a receivership “might be the single most dangerous thing the administration has demanded out of everything.” To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University. The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state legislature “went ballistic,” he said, pressuring the school’s president to place the department under receivership. The move triggered an immediate backlash and mass departure of faculty members. It might have also played a small role in the reshaping of the higher education landscape: At least six professors fled to Chicago, where they helped build one of the most renowned economics departments in the world.

Pro-Palestinian activists are suing the University of California, Los Angeles, accusing it of allowing pro-Israel counterprotesters to terrorize and assault people at an encampment set up on campus last spring. The pro-Palestinian camp became a major flashpoint in the conflict over the war in Gaza and over how universities responded. The demonstrators have accused the school and various police forces of failing to protect them and shutting down the camp without legal justification, after it was attacked by pro-Israel activists over the course of several hours one night in April. But Jewish students said the university allowed the camp to stay for days, even though it had created a hostile environment and prevented them from entering some parts of campus. The new lawsuit, announced on Thursday, came the same week the Trump administration joined a separate lawsuit filed by Jewish students and a Jewish professor, in June, accusing the university of failing to protect them from the pro-Palestinian activists. The administration says it is also investigating complaints of antisemitism at a growing list of universities, including U.C.L.A., through a federal task force. The new complaint was filed on behalf of 35 pro-Palestinian activists, including students, faculty members, legal observers, journalists and sympathizers. It also names 20 people as defendants who are described as members of a “rioting mob.” Filed in superior court in Los Angeles County, the lawsuit seeks monetary damages for physical and psychological injuries suffered by the protesters. According to the suit, the university’s administration allowed pro-Israel counterprotesters to mount a large jumbotron near the pro-Palestinian encampment, which broadcast “a loop of clips of graphic descriptions of rape and sexual violence, sounds of gunshots, screaming babies, clips of President Biden pledging unconditional support for Israel, and extremely loud amplified music,” including a children’s song that the lawsuit says was used to torture Palestinian prisoners. The noise continued during the night and seeped into classrooms during the day, according to court papers. Then, on April 30, the lawsuit says, counterprotesters, some in Guy Fawkes-like masks, some draped in Israeli flags, attacked the camp in the middle of the night. They sprayed chemical irritants into people’s eyes and pulled down metal and wooden barricades, using them as weapons. The lawsuit also says that attackers threw fireworks into the encampment, and that several people went to the hospital for injuries. All the while, the lawsuit says, U.C.L.A.’s administration, the campus police, the Los Angeles police and the state highway patrol stood by passively and ignored the pro-Palestinian group’s pleas for help. Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California president’s office, said that the university had instituted reforms to promote safety and combat harassment and discrimination systemwide. “Violence of any kind has no place at U.C.,” he said in a statement. Highway patrol and the Los Angeles police said they would not comment on pending litigation. As the violence escalated, private security officers fled the area, the lawsuit says, and it took hours for them to be replaced by the police. The attack continued for nearly five hours, from about 10:30 p.m. to about 3:15 a.m. “It was immediately apparent that there was not a semblance of protection for the physical safety of the encampment members, and the mob had successfully transformed a peaceful, interfaith community into a site of horror,” court papers say. According to the suit, many of the counterprotesters were not students but community members, including a Beverly Hills jeweler, a Laguna Beach attorney and a Los Angeles teenager, who are named as defendants. Many could not be reached or did not respond to requests for comment. “Those were adult, grown members of the community,” Thomas B. Harvey, the lead lawyer in the case, said on Thursday, adding, “I think it’s a totally different understanding of who’s in that attack.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations California is also providing legal assistance on the case. Less than 12 hours after the attack, the police disbanded the encampment, and in doing so, according to the lawsuit, subjected protesters to a new round of violence, including being shot at with rubber bullets, beaten with batons, wrestled to the ground and restrained. The police raid resulted in more than 200 arrests. One of the plaintiffs, Thistle Boosinger, was beaten by the counterprotesters with a metal rod that shattered her hand and severed a nerve, hurting her career as a drummer, according to the complaint. Jakob Johnson, who graduated from U.C.L.A. last year, was shot in the chest with a rubber bullet by a police officer standing less than 10 feet away, the complaint says. He suffered heart and lung injuries and depression, and had to withdraw from law school, the complaint says. Mr. Harvey said the plaintiffs had identified the counterprotesters by analyzing a CNN report on the violence that night, which captured some names and images. The lawsuit notes that none of the people who attacked the encampment were arrested. On Monday, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the separate lawsuit filed by Jewish students. That lawsuit accused pro-Palestinian protesters of setting up checkpoints on campus to block people who supported the existence of the state of Israel. In a preliminary injunction in August, a federal judge said the checkpoints were “abhorrent” to the constitutional right of religious freedom, and ordered the university to protect Jewish students. “The statement of interest is part of the task force’s nationwide effort to combat antisemitism in all of its forms,” the Trump administration said. A year after the disbanding of the encampment, the protest activity continues, though more quietly. About two dozen protesters gathered at U.C.L.A. for a second day on Wednesday to call on the university to divest from money tied to Israel, and to call for a public meeting with the University of California Board of Regents. They chanted, banged on drums and held a sign saying, “Keep your eyes on Palestine.”

It seemed as if the president just needed a little reassurance. He was in the East Room of the White House, which was packed with jittery children, conservative activists, influencers and Republican governors from states including Florida, Texas, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa. All had come to watch him sign an executive order to gut the Education Department, something conservatives have dreamed of doing for decades. No other president had done it, not even this one the first time he was in office. Now he was back, and there was the order, sitting atop a small desk at the front of that grandiose room, waiting to be signed. All around his desk were lots of other little desks, the kind you sit at in grade school. Children of varying ages, dressed in school uniforms, sat swinging their legs under their desks. They looked up expectantly as Mr. Trump approached. He turned to one small boy and said, “Should I do this?” The boy nodded eagerly. The president spun around and looked at a young girl. “Should I do it?” he asked. She nodded, too. Encouraged, he sat down, pulled out his power pen and scrawled. The governors and the children and their parents burst into applause. In some sense, Thursday’s executive order signing was on-brand for Mr. Trump. Whether he’s releasing files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, purging the board of the Kennedy Center to appoint himself its head, or carving up the Education Department, this president takes pride in doing what none of the others would dare do. But otherwise, this signing session was an odd one, as even he had to admit. He lacked that fiery conviction he usually brings to such affairs. He kept emphasizing that what he was doing was not as radical as it might have seemed: “It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Department of Education. We’re going to eliminate it.” In fact, only Congress can abolish a cabinet agency, but Mr. Trump’s order basically called on the Education Department to come up with a plan for shutting itself down. He insisted that “everybody knows it’s right,” and he reminded the room that when the department was established, by President Jimmy Carter in the same room in which Mr. Trump was now destroying it, many Americans opposed the idea — even the “famed Democrat senator” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the editorial board of this newspaper.Mr. Trump recognized that he was putting his education secretary, Linda McMahon, out of a job, which was maybe a bit awkward. “We’re going to find something else for you to do, OK?” he told her. He often describes people who make up the federal work force as being part of a shadowy cabal that he is all too happy to pulverize. Not so in this case. “They’re good people,” he said of the Education Department’s 4,200-person work force, many of whom he was effectively firing. “I want to just make one little personal statement,” Mr. Trump said at one point. Teachers, he said, are among the most important people in the country and everyone ought to “cherish” them. At another point, he promised that money for the federal Pell Grant was not going to vanish. “Supposed to be a very good program,” he said. What was interesting about Mr. Trump’s seeming ambivalence over this thing he was about to do was that everybody around him was so overwhelmingly ecstatic about it. The person who appeared least excited about what was happening was the one who was making it happen. “I never thought we’d get any serious major education reform done, let alone dismantling the Department of Education,” said Terry Schilling, a 38-year-old father and activist from Burke, Va., a Washington suburb. He was there with his wife and six of their seven children. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, bouncing a baby boy named Tucker on his shoulder, “and I’m just so happy to be here.” There were activists in the room like Chaya Raichik, the creator of the influential Libs of TikTok account, and Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a parents rights group that worked hard to help elect Mr. Trump. This was exactly how they hoped a Trump restoration might go. “You had a lot of Republican presidents promise this,” observed Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America. Mr. Trump didn’t have the temerity to tear up the Education Department the last time he was president. What changed? “He had four years to think about it and plan,” Ms. Nance said. “All of us did, frankly.”

The Trump administration said Wednesday it would suspend about $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its approach to transgender athletes, according to a White House social media account that trumpeted the pause. The move would intensify the government’s campaign against transgender people’s participation in public life and escalate a clash with elite colleges. The White House’s rapid response account on X said the decision was based on Penn’s “policies forcing women to compete with men in sports.” A person familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration had not formally announced the pause, confirmed the suspension and cited Penn’s past embrace of Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, as a member of its women’s swim team. In a statement, Penn said it was “aware of media reports suggesting a suspension of $175 million in federal funding to Penn” but that it had not “received any official notification or any details” from the government. The university added that it had been, and remained, “in full compliance with the regulations that apply to not only Penn, but all of our N.C.A.A. and Ivy League peer institutions.” Penn, President Trump’s alma mater, is the second Ivy League university in two weeks to be so explicitly targeted by the administration. The administration announced on March 7 that it was pausing about $400 million in contracts and grants involving Columbia University, over accusations that it did not do enough to counter antisemitism on campus. Last week, U.S. officials sent Columbia a list of demands that they said needed to be met before negotiations about the canceled funding could begin. Dozens more schools are facing federal inquiries and are being squeezed by the administration’s broad efforts to cut federal spending. The administration is also putting pressure on the K-12 system. The U.S. Education Department told Maine officials on Wednesday that their federal funding was at risk because transgender athletes had been allowed to participate in girls and women’s sports.The administration’s move against Penn, which was first reported by Fox Business, came about three years after Ms. Thomas won a National Collegiate Athletic Association title in the 500-yard freestyle. Before her victory, more than a dozen members of Penn’s swim team complained, in an anonymous letter to the university and the Ivy League, that Ms. Thomas enjoyed “an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category.” Ms. Thomas was a talented athlete, they acknowledged, who had been a top-tier swimmer in the Ivy League. But they said that her achievements in women’s competition were “feats she could never have done as a male athlete.” Ms. Thomas graduated soon after, and a decision from swimming’s international governing body kept her from competing for a spot on the United States’ Olympic team. She could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, and a lawyer who has represented her in the past did not respond to a message. The acrimony over her Penn career has lingered, in part, because of Mr. Trump’s decision to make the participation of transgender people in sports a signature rallying cry during last year’s campaign and once he returned to power. In February, one day after three former Penn swimmers sued the university and others over Ms. Thomas’s participation, he issued an executive order that declared it to be “the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.” The next day, the Department of Education said it would investigate whether Penn had violated Title IX. The department’s announcement quoted a Penn swimmer, Paula Scanlan, saying she had been “forced to compete against and share a locker room with a male athlete.” The Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, reported that Penn’s athletic department removed a website about diversity, equity and inclusion, which had included the university’s policy about transgender participation, soon after. Mr. Trump’s executive order also led the N.C.A.A., which sponsors competition for more than 500,000 college athletes, to decide that transgender women would be forbidden from competing in women’s events. Penn, like many other universities, had already been bracing for a financial storm. A threatened change involving National Institutes of Health funding, the university has warned, could cost it about $240 million a year. If other federal agencies adopt similar formulas, the toll could rise to roughly $315 million annually, according to Penn. The university said this month that it was imposing freezes on hiring and midyear salary adjustments, as well as starting reviews of capital spending and faculty hiring. “The scope and pace of the possible disruptions we face may make them more severe than those of previous challenges, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid pandemic,” Provost John L. Jackson Jr. and Craig R. Carnaroli, Penn’s senior executive vice president, wrote in an open letter announcing steps like the hiring freeze. The person familiar with the decision said Wednesday’s cuts were not a result of the Department of Education’s investigation into Penn but amounted to “immediate proactive action to review discretionary funding streams.” That suggests more funding reductions could be in the offing, with repercussions beyond this week’s anticipated loss of money from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense. The administration did not immediately detail specific Penn programs that stood to lose funding. But any cuts tied to medical science would be a blow to the university that prizes its hospitals and laboratories. (Medical sciences are so integral to the university at large that trustees voted last week to name J. Larry Jameson, an endocrinologist who had previously been the medical school dean, as Penn’s president.) Penn has an endowment of roughly $22 billion, which university officials say supports about 20 percent of the operating budget. Replacing lost funding, though, is not always as simple as tapping into such a war chest, and university officials across the country have been studying how long they could underwrite projects without federal backing. Johns Hopkins University, which boasts an endowment of about $13 billion, said last week that it would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs that had been connected to federal money. At Columbia, dozens of scientific studies may soon shut down after the N.I.H. moved to end more than 400 grants involving the university.

President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, according to two White House officials. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But the Trump administration has already taken steps to narrow the agency’s authority and significantly cut its work force while also telegraphing plans to try and shutter it. The White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said the order instructed Ms. McMahon to return authority over education to the states. USA Today was first to report Mr. Trump’s intent to sign the order on Thursday. Republican attempts to shutter the agency date back to the 1980s. But the push gained steam in recent years after a parents’ rights movement grew out of a backlash to school policies and shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic. That movement, which includes key pro-Trump, grass-roots activists, expanded around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.But the hyper-partisanship around education issues has been present for decades, from progressive-leaning teachers’ unions who organized against President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policies to conservative Republican presidential candidates in 2016 who ran against the Common Core standards elevated by President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program. Caught in the middle are the nation’s 50 million public school pupils, 15 percent of whom have disabilities. Also watching the debate are undergraduate students who receive Pell Grants because they qualify as low-income (nearly one-third of all college students) and those who receive federal student loans (about 28 percent). Public schools are mostly funded by taxes collected by states and municipalities that, by definition, already have control over that money. The federal government accounts for about 10 percent of total school funding, but that is distributed by the Education Department largely according to federal law — not the discretion of the president. That balance of power in Washington explains, at least in part, why no modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. The Education Department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and federal lawmakers would have to approve of eliminating it. Shuttering the Education Department is broadly unpopular, public opinion surveys show. Multiple polls in the past month have shown that roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea. Mr. Trump’s order is expected to spark another legal fight for the administration, which is already embroiled in multiple lawsuits. No modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. Other agencies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board, were phased out under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, but with the support of Congress through legislation. Additionally, no cabinet-level department has been abolished outright since the U.S. Postal Service replaced the Post Office Department more than half a century ago, and many of the programs the Education Department administers provide a lifeline to schools and students that most lawmakers have been hesitant to jeopardize in the past. Still, Republican lawmakers have already shown unusual deference to Mr. Trump, even as he has taken steps to challenge Congress’s authority in several areas while flexing his own. Notably, he directed agencies not to spend funds already authorized by Congress on programs he dislikes, a move that is banned under current law and may be unconstitutional. Closing the department would not by itself revoke the various laws that established federal funding for public schools and underserved school districts or for specific student populations, including those with disabilities. Furthermore, many education policies are controlled by other agencies, and the department does not oversee schools on military bases or in Native American territories. The Education Department has already reoriented itself to pick up many of Mr. Trump’s goals by winding down investigations started under the previous administration; starting new ones reflecting its own priorities; rolling back protections for transgender students; and cracking down on diversity programs.

The U.S. government has detained an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, and said he had been deemed “deportable” for violating the terms of his academic visa. On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that the scholar, Badar Khan Suri, could not be deported from the United States for now, pending further litigation. Mr. Suri was detained at his home in Rosslyn, Va., on Monday night, according to his lawyer, Hassan Ahmad. Mr. Suri was “awaiting his court date in immigration court” in Alexandria, La., Mr. Ahmad said. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Mr. Suri was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” Ms. McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Mr. Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, according to Mr. Ahmad. Politico first reported on the news of Mr. Suri’s detention. Mr. Ahmad said that Mr. Suri denied all of the allegations in Ms. McLaughlin’s statement. He said that he believed the accusations against Mr. Suri were “seemingly based on who his father-in-law was,” but that he was still researching the case. Mr. Suri’s wife is Palestinian American. Her father, Ahmed Yousef, is a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader whom Israel assassinated last year in Iran. Mr. Yousef confirmed in a voice message that Mr. Suri is his son-in-law and said that Mr. Suri was not involved in any “political activism,” including on behalf of Hamas. Mr. Yousef, who lives in Gaza, said he had left his position in the Hamas-run government in Gaza more than a decade ago and does not currently hold a senior position with the militant group. He has publicly criticized Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off the war in Gaza. Ms. McLaughlin said that Mr. Suri had “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior adviser to Hamas,” and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had deemed him “deportable.” Ms. McLaughlin said Mr. Suri had been detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the administration is using to try to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident who had a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. The measure says the secretary of state can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States he deems a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests. Mr. Trump said earlier this month that Mr. Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.” Civil rights groups have said such arrests of immigrants with legal status are a clear violation of the First Amendment. While both men were deemed deportable under the same statute, Mr. Suri has a J-1 visa, which is used for students and academics, while Mr. Khalil has a green card. Georgetown University, where Mr. Suri is a postdoctoral fellow, said in a statement that it was not aware of Mr. Suri “engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention.” “Seeing our government abduct and jail another innocent person is beyond contemptible,” Mr. Ahmad said.

I had already interviewed Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, for his new book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” when President Trump accused him of being “a Palestinian” who was “not Jewish anymore.” A few days later, Schumer decided to postpone his book tour after joining Republicans to support a stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown — one that would have played straight into Trump’s hands. Furious progressives were threatening a demonstration at every stop. Derided by the MAGA right and yelled at by the far left? Outside of Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s hard to imagine a more Jewish place to be. As Schumer told it in his modest Brooklyn apartment over gluten-free cookies (and disquisitions about digestive issues), he’s been in that place most of his adult life. The son of an exterminator, he went to Harvard in the fall of 1967 and quickly got involved in antiwar politics. But never as a student radical. “I didn’t like the left taking over buildings,” he told me, adding he believed in working through the system, not against it. Student militants “didn’t want to debate; they wanted to call people names.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Harvard was also the place where Schumer first saw left-wing antisemitism in action — using the cloak of anti-Zionism, as it often does today. At a 1970 campus speech by the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, students in the gallery unfurled a banner that read, Fight Zionist Imperialism. Schumer’s book recalls Eban’s reply: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery,” Eban said. “Every time a people get their statehood, you applaud it. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that is the Jewish people.” The double standard — whether it was about who could work in what profession or move to Moscow in the Czarist empire, or who could have a state — was the essence of antisemitism.It’s notable, and politically gutsy, that Schumer’s book devotes plenty of space to exposing leftist antisemitism, including calling out congressional colleagues like Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for antisemitic outbursts. He also calls out campus anti-Israel demonstrators, like a protester at a U.C.L.A. rally screaming, “Beat that fucking Jew” next to a piñata bearing the likeness of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, or a masked thug at Columbia telling Jewish students that “the seventh of October is going to be every day for you.” Does Schumer worry that his party is tilting in an anti-Israel direction — one that will, at its edges, also tilt into antisemitism? “My caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel,” he insisted to me, noting that when the Senate last year voted for “the largest package of aid to Israel ever, I only lost three Democrats,” including Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. But he also warned that “the greatest danger to Israel, long-term, is if you lose half of America” — the liberal half. On one of Netanyahu’s previous visits to the United States, Schumer told me he urged the prime minister to “go on Rachel Maddow and not just Sean Hannity.” Netanyahu ignored the advice, and Schumer, in a Senate speech, later called for new elections to replace him, for which he remains “fiercely proud.” It showed Democrats, he said, that it’s possible to oppose Netanyahu while championing the Jewish state. “My job,” he told me, “is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Then there’s right-wing antisemitism. Just as some anti-Israel demonstrators use the word “Zionist” as a substitute for Jew, corners of the right have also had their own coded antisemitic language, like “neocons” or “globalists.” Trump’s dig at Schumer’s Jewishness was of a piece. “There’s a long and dark history of non-Jewish people trying to decide who gets to be Jewish,” Schumer told me in a follow-up on Monday. “Maybe President Trump should spend less time trafficking in bigotry and focus more on rooting the antisemites out of his administration.” That would include people like the Pentagon deputy press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, whose obsessions include relitigating Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia, or Amer Ghalib, a Michigan mayor who’s Trump’s choice as ambassador to Kuwait and who appears to have liked a Facebook post referring to Jews as “monkeys.” Where does this leave American Jews today? “My worry as an American Jew,” he told me, “is a pincer, from the right and left, who would cohabit in strange and dangerous ways.” That has happened before: In France in the 1890s during the Dreyfus affair, in Germany in the 1920s in the run-up to the Third Reich. Could it happen here? Schumer insists he wrote his book with a “nervousness rather than a pessimism,” because the roots of America’s warmth toward Jews run deep. But as he also points out, citing the Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, “antisemitism is a light sleeper.” When I mentioned to some friends that I had read and liked Schumer’s book and was going to write a column about it, they kvetched that the New York Democrat had let them down on one issue or another. Then again, where today is the sitting G.O.P. senator, representative or governor willing to call out the bigotries on his own side? Did John Thune defend his colleague in the face of the president’s slander? A Jew stands up for his people regardless of the cost, and regardless of the politics of it. On this, Schumer has acquitted himself bravely.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Education Department to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Judge Julie R. Rubin of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland said in an opinion that the department had acted arbitrarily and illegally when it slashed $600 million in grants that helped place teachers in underserved schools. The judge also ordered the administration to cease future cuts to those grants. The grants fund programs that train and certify teachers to work in struggling districts that otherwise have trouble attracting talent. The programs cited goals that included training a diverse educational work force, and provided training in special education, among other areas. The department, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, argued that the grants trained teachers in “social justice activism” and other “divisive ideologies” and should be eliminated. A coalition of educator organizations sued to stop the Education Department from terminating the grants. The coalition included groups, such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, whose members depend on the grants at issue. The judge found that the loss of the federal dollars would harm students and schools with the fewest resources. “The harms plaintiffs identify also implicate grave effect on the public: fewer teachers for students in high-need neighborhoods, early childhood education and special education programs,” she wrote. “Moreover, even to the extent defendants assert such an interest in ending D.E.I.-based programs, they have sought to effect change by means the court finds likely violate the law.” In early February, schools involved in the programs received a letter from the Education Department notifying them that the grants had been canceled as part of the agency’s initiative to “eliminate discrimination in all forms of education throughout the United States.” The grants, made through the Supporting Effective Educator Development, or SEED, program and the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, among others, are competitive for the states and school districts seeking the assistance. The grants also help states set up specialized college programs to train educators with the goal of placing them in schools where literacy rates or performance gaps are deemed key issues. For example, last year, Miami-Dade County received a nearly $10 million grant to set up a partnership between Miami Dade College and Miami-Dade County Public Schools through which the college would help train 180 teachers to “break the cycle of teacher shortages” and help prepare future educators for work in high-need schools over five years. In another case last year, Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where Ms. McMahon previously served on the board of trustees, received nearly $3.5 million to enroll around 20 teaching residents per year, who would team up with mentors and help staff local schools facing teacher shortages. The grant noted a focus on “emphasizing outreach to recruit teachers of color.” The preliminary injunction issued on Tuesday also covered the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program, which provided performance-based financial incentives for teachers and principles who were able to close achievement gaps in high-need schools. It stopped short of a nationwide injunction, but required the department to reinstate the funding that was previously awarded to any members of the groups behind the lawsuit. Taken together, Congress had appropriated well over $200 million to fund the three programs in past years. The continuing resolution, passed last week, provides less clarity than a full budget on specific grant programs, giving the Education Department more discretion in how to spend congressionally appropriated funds.

Harvard announced on Monday that it plans to offer free tuition for students whose families earn $200,000 and below, making it the latest elite school to expand financial aid after the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The plan with the new income cap will take effect starting this fall. Previously at Harvard, only families with incomes under $85,000 were offered free tuition. The median household income in the United States is about $80,000. In addition to boosting diversity, the move could serve to improve the school’s image as higher education is under assault by the Trump administration and growing unpopular with Americans who have lost confidence in education. The University of Pennsylvania announced last November that it would offer free tuition for students from families making under $200,000. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also announced a $200,000 cutoff then, similar to a plan offered by Caltech. Other universities have also increased their financial aid limits in the past year, including Dartmouth, the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action led to declines in the number of Black and Hispanic students at many schools, including Harvard. Last fall, the proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard declined to 14 percent from 18 percent the previous year, while Hispanic students’ enrollment increased slightly. The ruling has posed a dilemma for schools that have argued that diversity is important, but that are now under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration, which is seeking to eliminate diversity efforts. Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said that improving financial aid packages makes sense for colleges that are looking to attract more Black and Hispanic students, since race and income are often intertwined. “Now that universities can no longer employ racial preferences, if they want racial diversity, the best path forward is to boost the chances of admissions of nonwealthy and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Hispanic,” Dr. Kahlenberg said in an email. “To get such students to apply, and then to enroll, requires generous financial aid.” In making the financial aid announcement, Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, mentioned neither the Supreme Court decision nor the White House’s ongoing assault on elite universities, which has resulted in dramatic funding cuts at many schools that receive federal dollars. But he referred to the value of bringing a cross-section of people together. “Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth,” Dr. Garber said in the announcement. “By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the university.” The annual cost of attending Harvard, including tuition and housing, was almost $83,000 this school year. In addition to offering free tuition to students with family incomes up to $200,000, Harvard said that students from families that make under $100,000 will pay for practically nothing. For those students, Harvard will cover tuition, fees, food, housing, travel costs between campus and home, event fees and activities, and health insurance, if needed. The university will also pay for “winter gear” to help students brace against harsh winters on Harvard’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, along with a $2,000 “start-up” grant. Harvard’s announcement said that in addition to tuition, students from families making up to $200,000 could be eligible for extra financial aid, depending on their circumstances. The university also said that some students from families making more than $200,000 could be eligible for some forms of financial aid, depending on their family’s situation. Harvard said it spent $275 million on financial aid this year, but did not have an estimate of how much its new plan will cost. Just over half of Harvard’s undergraduates received financial aid, the school said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The push to expand financial aid as schools compete for students comes at a precarious time in higher education. Harvard’s announcement comes within days of the school saying that it would freeze hiring to gird against White House threats of funding cuts and tax increases. Major cuts in international health and agricultural programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development have led to hundreds of layoffs at universities around the country, most notably Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Wealthy universities are also wary of various proposals by congressional Republicans to increase the endowment tax on Harvard and other schools. Some have said that could hurt their efforts to offer financial aid. Currently, the annual investment income earned by the endowment is taxed at 1.4 percent. Vice President JD Vance has proposed raising it to as much as 35 percent. (Mr. Vance himself received a generous financial aid package to attend Yale Law School.) The Trump administration also moved to cap overhead reimbursements on National Institutes of Health grants to 15 percent, which could cut hundreds of millions of dollars that schools have come to rely on to cover facilities and staff. That proposal is being challenged in courts. The overhead rates normally vary depending on the grant recipients, but in some cases, they provide up to 60 percent of the grant in additional reimbursements.

The first legal battle for Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate who was arrested and moved to Louisiana last week, is the fight to keep his case in New York. The issue may seem minor compared with the First Amendment concerns raised by the arrest of Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus and whom the Trump administration is seeking to deport. But where Mr. Khalil’s case is heard could have profound consequences, not just for him but for anyone else the White House targets for removal from the United States. If Mr. Khalil remains in Louisiana, his case is likely to end up in one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts, which could determine whether the law the government has cited as the rationale for his detention is allowed to stand. The White House has accused Mr. Khalil of siding with Hamas terrorists during the Columbia protests and spreading antisemitism. That accusation, which Mr. Khalil’s lawyers deny, is not criminal, and in fact, Mr. Khalil has not been charged with any crime. Instead, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has cited a little-used law to justify the detention. The measure says Mr. Rubio can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States he deems a threat to the country’s foreign policy aims. That law, which would seem to grant the Trump administration almost unchecked power in deporting noncitizens, appears not to have been reviewed by an appeals court, which could determine whether it is constitutional. And if Mr. Khalil’s immigration case plays out in Louisiana, it will most likely be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which presides over federal court cases that come from Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. It is one of the country’s most conservative appeals courts. Most of its judges were nominated by Republican presidents, including six by President Trump during his first term.“The Fifth Circuit is the court I’d least want to be in if I were Khalil,” said Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school who studies constitutional issues and has written about Mr. Khalil’s case. He added, “It is a court where immigrants in general have a historically poor track record, and it’s a court in which judges are going to be most sympathetic to the government’s ability to point at someone and say, ‘You supported Hamas.’” If judges in that court were to decide against Mr. Khalil, he could appeal to the Supreme Court. But there is no guarantee that the justices in Washington would take his case, and even if they did and found in his favor, the government is likely to continue to revoke green cards in the interim, citing the same statute that informs Mr. Khalil’s case. Other detainees might have little legal basis to fight the government’s accusations. On the other hand, if Mr. Khalil’s immigration case was to play out in New York — where his lawyers first called for his release — any appeal would arrive at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. That court includes more judges appointed by Democratic presidents and is widely considered a less partisan venue. And in the meantime, Mr. Khalil, if he was released, would have access to his family. His wife, Noor Abdalla, is expecting a baby next month. On Monday, Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also sought to stop the Trump administration from detaining and deporting others under the same justification. They asked the New York judge overseeing his case, Jesse Furman, to prohibit the government from enforcing what they called a policy of arresting, detaining and deporting noncitizens who expressed support for Palestinian rights or criticized Israel. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request to comment on that characterization or on the lawyers’ move. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have sought his release and return to New York from almost the moment he was arrested, on the evening of March 8. The timing of his arrest and transfer to Louisiana is key to understanding their case. Video of the arrest filmed by Ms. Abdalla and released by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that agents from the Department of Homeland Security handcuffed Mr. Khalil in the lobby of his apartment building, which is owned by Columbia. After his wife, holding back tears, repeatedly asked where Mr. Khalil was being taken, the agents responded “26 Federal Plaza,” the address of New York’s downtown immigration court. Amy Greer, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, was told the same thing. Ms. Greer worked through the night on a legal filing known as a habeas petition, a vehicle for challenging unlawful detentions. Occasionally, she checked an online locator to make sure of Mr. Khalil’s location. At 1:35 a.m. on March 9 and again at 4:29 a.m., the locator said that Mr. Khalil was in New York. She filed her petition at 4:40 a.m. in a New York federal court, where it was assigned to Judge Furman. But the government has since said that Mr. Khalil arrived in New Jersey more than an hour before that. He was taken there, they say, because the New York facility does not have beds or overnight medical staff, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy dictates that no detainee should be held in such a facility for longer than 12 hours. Around noon on March 9, Mr. Khalil was brought back into New York, to Kennedy International Airport. He was then flown to Dallas and then to Louisiana, where he has been held since. The following day, Judge Furman ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the country. There is no indication that the government has ignored the judge as it may have in other recent deportation cases. Mr. Khalil’s first hearing in immigration court is scheduled for March 27. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The arguments in front of Judge Furman have piled up, with Mr. Khalil’s lawyers imploring the judge to return their client to New York and the government insisting that the proper venue for his case is the district in which he is being held. The law that dictates where a case is heard is complex. The government has argued that, particularly since Mr. Khalil’s lawyers did not file their petition in the appropriate court, any detention case should be heard in Louisiana. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have argued that the government frustrated Ms. Greer’s efforts to file her petition in the right place. Accordingly, they argue, the law says that his case should be heard in New York. Judge Furman could rule as early as Monday. He has insisted that he has no view on the issues at play in the case — which include core concerns about First Amendment rights amid Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and vow to fight antisemitism — but has acknowledged their importance. If Judge Furman decides the case should not be heard in New York, Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have asked for the opportunity to transfer it to New Jersey. If the case were to play out there, any appeal would be heard in yet another appeals court — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — and Mr. Khalil would be closer to his family.