Trump admin seeks to deport Hasidic Jew who protested Israel's Gaza actions

Trump Administration Seeks to Deport Hasidic Jew Over Anti-Israel Protest

The Trump administration is attempting to deport a Hasidic Jewish man for protesting against Israel.

According to The New York Times, Yehonatan Ovadia, a religious teacher in Rockland County, New York, had his visa revoked by the federal government for participating in an October 2023 protest against Israel's actions in Gaza. During that protest, an Israeli flag disappeared from a local town hall.

Ovadia belongs to Satmar, an anti-Zionist religious sect that believes a Jewish state cannot be established before the arrival of the messiah. Shortly after the protest, he and another member of the sect were charged with hate crimes. They later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and paid a fine in early 2024.

In August, the federal government revoked his religious worker visa, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Ovadia, an Israeli citizen who has been in the U.S. since 2022, said he took part in the protest but did not tear down the flag. His lawyers sued the government later that month, arguing that the government was punishing him for religious and political expression and conflating that with antisemitism.

"He's against the Israeli government and the existence of the state of Israel for religious reasons, but to claim that he's an antisemite is the peak of absurdity," said Eric Lee, one of his attorneys.

"We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace," Ovadia told the Times in a telephone interview.

"It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. "The Trump administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews and steals property."

The White House has targeted noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, including students and permanent residents, ever since President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to pursue them for antisemitic activities. When Ovadia applied for an extension to his religious worker visa in 2025, the government demanded court documents and police records, and then stripped him of his legal status.

Ovadia's lawyers plan to request his release at a bond hearing Wednesday. If the government prevails, Ovadia could be deported to the country he was protesting against.

Editor's Pick: Trump Just Pledged to Let AI Companies Do Whatever They Want

Federal Government Using Anti-Drug Program to Collect License Plate Data Nationwide

Thanks to a 1980s anti-drug trafficking program, cities across the U.S. are being forced to turn over their license plate reader data to the Trump administration.

404 Media reports that the federal government is using the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program to collect data from Flock, Axon, and other cameras used by local police for a national surveillance program. The plan is to centralize the data on government servers and make it available to other law enforcement agencies. Data collected by HIDTA can also be shared with the National License Plate Reader Program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The program allows the federal government to bypass local and state restrictions against Flock and similar license plate reader companies without oversight. 404 Media learned about the plans through public records and court documents.

The HIDTA program is part of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was recently recognized by the Trump administration for "managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement."

In many states, local police departments cannot set up license plate cameras without agreeing to send their data to the federal government, according to 404 Media. In Georgia, for example, cities must sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send their data to the HIDTA program.

Flock cameras are experiencing a backlash from the American public over their warrant-free surveillance and data collection. They have been abused by local police to spy on people unrelated to law enforcement investigations and have inspired protests at municipal meetings. The cameras collect far more than license plates: One hacked camera revealed it catalogs people, bicycles, small details such as bumper stickers, and, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist's bag.

This latest news shows that the Trump administration could be doing anything it wants with the vast amount of data these cameras collect, skirting the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A centralized database such as HIDTA could be misused by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, or any number of unscrupulous Trump administration officials.

Editor's Pick: Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Criticizing Flock at City Council

Republican Senator Urges Trump Administration to Scale Back Immigration Raids

Another Republican senator is asking the Trump administration to reduce its immigration raids.

West Virginia Senator and Trump loyalist Jim Justice—mostly known for parading his massive bulldog around Capitol Hill—drew a line in the sand in a Tuesday interview with Politico. Notably, Justice is not running for reelection and does not currently need to win voters over to his side.

"Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you're dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don't know that we need to be doing that stuff," he said.

"To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you're doing something wrong.… And in this situation, with all that's going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say, 'Maybe we're doing something wrong here or there,' and then adjust to that."

"This is a stunning shift from Senator Jim Justice," former Obama and Biden immigration policy adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. "The alternative to ICE sweeps is legalization. People who have lived in your neighborhood for 15 years won't have a path to legal status until both parties come together to create one."

Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall (who is up for reelection) also made headlines for a similar rebuke of the Trump administration just last week.

"When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe," Marshall wrote on X after a spike of ICE activity in multiple Kansas towns. "I'm closely following what's happening in SW Kansas and have been in direct contact with Secretary Mullin and local law enforcement as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe." Marshall is up for reelection this November.

ICE conducted a massive immigration raid in West Virginia earlier this year named "Operation Country Roads." They arrested and detained more than 600 people in two weeks, the vast majority of whom were eventually revealed to have no criminal record—a far cry from the dangerous people ICE constantly claims to be prioritizing.

Read about ICE: MAGA Senator Abruptly Changes His Tune on ICE Weeks Before Midterms

Trump Proposes Bribing Americans to Accept Data Centers in Their Communities

The Trump administration has resorted to trying to bribe Americans to allow data centers into their communities.

"The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community get paid a dividend, you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right," Trump said Tuesday evening. "They are going to greatly benefit by what's happened."

"And by the way, I'm very good at real estate," Trump added. "Some of those data centers are absolutely beautiful."

The president then blamed the hardware sites' bad reputation on Democrats, suggesting that there was no sensible or justifiable reason that the public could be opposed to their creation.

Trump did not elaborate on how he would ensure that Americans received their share of data center profits, or how much that sum could be.

Data center development is necessary for building out artificial intelligence. Yet despite collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the critical infrastructure, the tech industry has done a remarkably poor job at marketing its product to American communities contemplating their futures alongside them.

Unaware of any benefits, the public has instead become highly attuned to the inordinate resource drain the centers create: A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Meanwhile, Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

The president's 2026 financial disclosures [Content truncated]