NEW DELHI: India resumed issuing e-visas for Canadian tourists and business travelers on Wednesday two months after it suspended such services following a row over Ottawa’s accusation of possible Indian government involvement in the murder of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader.
Though the move is likely to ease tensions slightly, relations between the two countries are not expected to significantly improve in the near future.
“E-visa services to Canadian nationals have resumed,” an Indian government official aware of the decision said on the condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak on the subject.
The official did not say if the decision will lead to a significant thaw in the relationship with Ottawa.
India issues e-visas only for tourism and business for Canadian nationals.
It comes a month after New Delhi had resumed visas under four of the 13 categories that had been suspended in September.
Ties between the countries nosedived after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canada’s parliament that his government was “actively pursuing credible allegations” linking Indian government agents to the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45 in a Vancouver suburb.
Nijjar was a proponent of a decades-long, but now a fringe demand to carve out an independent Sikh homeland from India named Khalistan.
India restarts suspended tourism and business e-visas for Canadians after two months
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India restarts suspended tourism and business e-visas for Canadians after two months
- Services were suspended following a row over Ottawa’s accusation of Indian government involvement in murder of Canadian Sikh separatist leader
- Though the move is likely to ease tensions slightly, relations between the two countries are not expected to significantly improve in the near future
Arrest of Palestinian activist stirs questions about protections for students and green card holders
Arrest of Palestinian activist stirs questions about protections for students and green card holders
- A green card holder is someone who has lawful permanent residence status in the United States
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a message posted Sunday on X that the administration will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported”
WASHINGTON: The arrest of a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests of the war in Gaza has sparked questions about whether foreign students and green card holders are protected against being deported from the US
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Homeland Security officials and President Donald Trump have indicated that the arrest was directly tied to his role in the protests last spring at Columbia University in New York City.
Khalil is being held at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, while he awaits immigration court proceedings that could eventually lead to him being deported. His arrest has drawn criticism that he’s being unfairly and unlawfully targeted for his activism while the federal government has essentially described him as a terrorist sympathizer.
A look at what kind of protections foreign students and green card holders have and what might be next for Khalil:
Can someone with a green card be deported?
A green card holder is someone who has lawful permanent residence status in the United States.
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer is a law professor at Cornell Law School who teaches immigration law. She said lawful permanent residents generally have many protections and “should be the most protected short of a US citizen.”
But that protection isn’t absolute. Green card holders can still be deported for committing certain crimes, failing to notify immigration officials of a change in address or engaging in marriage fraud, for example.
The Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was taken into custody as a result of Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.
Trump has argued that protesters forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated as a terrorist organization.
Khalil and other student leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest have rejected claims of antisemitism, saying they are part of a broader anti-war movement that also includes Jewish students and groups. But the protest coalition, at times, has also voiced support for leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Islamist organization designated by the US as a terrorist group.
Experts say that officials seem to indicate with their rhetoric that they are trying to deport Khalil on the grounds that he’s engaging in some sort of terrorist activity or somehow poses a threat.
Khalil has not been convicted of any terrorist-related activity. In fact, he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
But experts say the federal government has fairly broad authority to arrest and try to deport a green card holder on terrorism grounds.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, green card holders do not need to be convicted of something to be “removable,” Kelley-Widmer said. They could be deported if the secretary of homeland security or the attorney general have reasonable grounds to believe they engaged in, or are likely to engage in, terrorist activities, she said.
But Kelley-Widmer said she’s never seen a case where the alleged terrorist activity happened in the US, and she questioned whether taking part in protests as Khalil did qualifies.
What did ICE say about why they were arresting him?
One of the key issues in Khalil’s case is what ICE agents said to his lawyer at the time he was arrested.
His lawyer, Amy Greer, said the agents who took him into custody at his university-owned home near Columbia initially claimed to be acting on a State Department order to revoke his student visa.
But when Greer informed them that Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card, they said they would revoke that documentation instead.
Kelley-Widmer said that exchange raises questions about how familiar the agents who arrested him were with the law or whether there was a “real disregard for the rule of law.”
“I think we should be really concerned that this is happening,” she said.
What are the next steps in his case?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a message posted Sunday on X that the administration will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
If someone is in the country on a student visa, the State Department does have authority to revoke it if the person violates certain conditions. For example, said Florida immigration attorney John Gihon, it’s quite common for the State Department to cancel visas of foreign students who get arrested for drunk driving.
But when it comes to someone who’s a lawful permanent resident, that generally requires an immigration judge to determine whether they can be deported.
Gihon said the next step is that Khalil would receive charging documents explaining why he’s being detained and why the government wants to remove him, as well as a notice to appear in immigration court.
Generally, he should receive those within 72 hours of being arrested, and then he would make an initial appearance before an immigration judge. That could take from 10 days to a month, Gihon said.
But he cautioned that right now he’s seeing extensive delays across the immigration court system, with clients often moved around the country to different facilities.
“We are having people who are detained and then they’re bounced around to multiple different detention facilities. And then sometimes they’re transferred across the country,” he said.
Khalil’s lawyers have also filed a lawsuit challenging his detention. A federal judge in New York City ordered that Khalil not be deported while the court considered his case. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
Judge temporarily blocks deportation of arrested Palestinian Columbia student
- On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation “unless and until the Court orders otherwise”
NEW YORK: A US judge on Monday ordered that Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil not be deported for now as part of US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on some anti-Israel protesters, and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday. Trump publicly denounced Khalil and said more arrests would follow. Khalil has been moved to a federal jail for migrants in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings, according to his lawyers and a US detainee database.
Demonstrators on the streets of New York City, the state attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union have denounced his arrest by US Department of Homeland Security agents as an attack on free speech.
Police and hundreds of protesters briefly clashed in lower Manhattan and at least one person was detained, according to a Reuters witness. Khalil, who had held legal permanent resident status and was arrested Saturday, has been a prominent figure in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student protest movement that set off campus demonstrations across the United States and around the world last year. Trump branded Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” on social media. On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation “unless and until the Court orders otherwise.” Khalil’s lawyers also urged Furman to order Khalil’s return to New York. They accused the government of seeking to deprive Khalil of access to legal counsel by sending him far from New York.
Trump said on social media that Khalil’s “is the first arrest of many to come.”
The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. Even before Khalil’s arrest, students say federal immigration agents have been spotted at student housing around Columbia’s Manhattan campus since Thursday, a day before the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts awarded to the school because of what it described as antisemitic harassment on and near Columbia’s New York City campus.
The federal agents have been trying to detain at least one other international student, according to the Student Workers of Columbia labor union. Spokespeople for DHS and ICE declined to answer questions about the union’s account, which Reuters was unable to independently verify.
A spokesperson for the Department of State said visa records are confidential under US law and so the department could not comment.
’CHILLING EFFECT’
On Saturday evening, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested Khalil in front of his wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, telling him his student visa had been revoked, according to Amy Greer, a lawyer for Khalil.
His wife showed the agents Khalil’s green card and they also threatened to arrest her if she did not leave her lobby, Greer said. They then said the green card was also revoked and handcuffed Khalil, Greer said.
Hours before his arrest, Khalil told Reuters he was concerned that the government was targeting him.
Khalil and other activists note that Jewish students are among the protest organizers, and say their criticism of Israel and its US government support is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying “Jews say no to deportations.” “There is a chill in the air. It’s a chill of fear and despair,” said Marianne Hirsch, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who grew up in Romania as a child of Holocaust survivors. While the Trump administration has cited concerns over antisemitism, the president and his allies have themselves been accused of enabling antisemitism. Following a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where some demonstrators carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump said there were “fine people on both sides.” Trump, who denies allegations of being antisemitic, also faced criticism in 2022 for dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Gabon junta chief faces three challengers in election
- Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last premier under ousted ex-president Ali Bongo Ondimba, is considered the strongest potential opponent to Oligui, who led the military coup that ended 55 years of Bongo family rule
LIBREVILLE: Gabon’s military leader Brice Oligui Nguema will face three challengers, including a former prime minister, in the country’s April 12 presidential election, according to the candidate list.
Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last premier under ousted ex-president Ali Bongo Ondimba, is considered the strongest potential opponent to Oligui, who led the military coup that ended 55 years of Bongo family rule.
Lawyer and tax inspector Joseph Lapensee Essingone and doctor Stephane Germain Iloko Boussengui round out the final candidates list.
Interior Minister Hermann Immongault said 23 Gabonese had presented their candidacy, with only four “deemed admissible.”
Immongault did not detail the reasons for the 19 rejections, which include leading trade unionist and senator Jean-Remy Yama.
Oligui, who announced on March 3 that he would run for president, had pledged to hand the reins of power in the nation back to civilians.
But a new electoral code rubber-stamped by the transitional parliament in late January allowed army officers to stand for election, paving the way for his presidential tilt.
When filing his candidacy on Saturday, Oligui said that he had his request to abandon his general’s uniform for the election period — as required by procedure — granted by the Ministry of Defense.
Rwandan truckers pay price for DR Congo conflict
KIGAIL: Rwandan truckers and exporters say they are paying a steep price for the conflict in the eastern region of neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, having to deal with angry locals and fearful customers.
Olivier Munyemana, a Rwandan lorry driver, knows the route from the Indian Ocean port of Dar Es Salaam to the DRC by heart, having driven it for eight years.
But as fighting has escalated in DRC in recent months, with the Rwandan-backed M23 armed group seizing large areas of the east, including the border towns of Goma and Bukavu, he is too afraid to cross.
He says drivers face attacks from locals angry at Rwanda’s involvement in the conflict.
“I can’t risk my life or lose my truck,” he said.
“We have had cases of trucks being burned and drivers attacked.”
Rwanda says the M23’s takeover in eastern DRC is necessary to eradicate a Rwandan militia formed initially by those who committed the 1994 genocide and which threatens to attack its borders.
The DRC claims that Rwanda seeks regime change and control of the east’s vast mineral wealth.
Whatever the motives, it has been bad for business.
According to the National Institute of Statistics, DRC is Rwanda’s second-biggest trading partner, buying $156 million worth of goods in the first nine months of 2024.
Anjia Prefabricated, a $100 million Chinese-owned cement factory in Rwanda’s Muhanga district, gets all its clinker — a key ingredient for cement — from DRC by truck and boat.
“This stopped shortly before the war reached Bukavu. All our trucks ... are now parked,” said Israel Byiringiro, its head of procurement.
Although the Rwanda-allied M23 now has considerable control along the border region, their vehicles must still pass through hostile and precarious areas.
“We’ve been using our clinker stocks, but they are drying up fast,” said Byiringiro, adding that they now had to use a much costlier route through Tanzania that adds some 800 km.
Firms are also losing customers after construction companies in Bukavu and Goma were targeted in the unrest or fled the violence, said Davis Twahirwa, head of sales for Cimerwa, another Rwandan cement company, which typically sold a third of its output into DRC.
“Some of my customers have lost millions,” he said.
“One lost two brand-new trucks in Gomab ... stolen by government forces apparently, and also his depots were looted.”
He said local banks were cut off by the Congolese government, making it hard to access dollars, and many traders fear the government will punish companies who resume business under the M23.
However, he added that relative calm was returning now that the group had consolidated control over the region.
“Normalcy is returning, and we have resumed selling in both markets, primarily in Goma. Bukavu is also slowly returning, and we hope to ramp up by mid-March fully,” said Twahirwa.
As demand increased in the hinterland countries of East Africa in the last decade, many Rwandans invested in lorries to ply routes from the coastal ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam.
They now have large loans to repay, and the conflict’s impact is taking a toll.
“When it is a war zone, no one wants to enter there,” said Abdul Ndarubogoye, president of the Rwanda Transporters Association.
“This has cost transporters and traders a lot of money; some truckers were trapped there in the war zone, which caused major delays,” he added.
He said Rwandan-registered lorries account for 40 percent of those entering eastern DRC, but they don’t want to risk being attacked by anti-Rwandan groups.
Secretary of State Rubio says purge of USAID programs complete, with 83 percent of agency’s programs gone
- Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs eliminated
WASHINGTON: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development and he would move the 18 percent of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department.
Rubio made the announcement in a post on X, in one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from US foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at State and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams.
Rubio thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.
In another final step in the breakup of USAID, the Trump administration on Monday gave USAID staffers abroad until April 6 to move back to the United States if they want to do so on the government’s tab, according to a USAID email sent to staffers and seen by The Associated Press. Staffers say the deadline gives them scant time to pull children from school, sell homes or break leases, and, for many, find somewhere to live after years away from the United States.
President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all of the tens of billions of dollars of US aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.
Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs eliminated.
Those programs “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.
“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18 percent of programs we are keeping ... to be administered more effectively under the State Department,” he said.
Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’ approval.
USAID supporters said the sweep of the cuts made it difficult to tell what US efforts abroad the Trump administration actually supports.
“The patterns that are emerging is the administration does not support democracy programs, they don’t support civil society ... they don’t support NGO programs,” or health or emergency response, said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator for Republican former President George W. Bush.
“So what’s left”?” Natsios asked.
A group of former US diplomats, national security figures and others condemned what it said was an opaque, partisan and rushed review process and urged Congress to intervene.
“The facts show that life-saving programs were severely cut, putting millions of people in allied countries at risk of starvation, disease and death,” while giving Russia, China and other adversaries opportunities to gain influence abroad as the US retreats, the group, the US Global Leadership Coalition, said.
The Trump administration gave almost no details on which aid and development efforts abroad it spared as it mass-emailed contract terminations to aid groups and other USAID partners by the thousands within days earlier this month. The rapid pace, and the steps skipped in ending contracts, left USAID supporters challenging whether any actual program-by-program reviews had taken place.
Aid groups say even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare are in limbo or terminated, such as those providing emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water for sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.
Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance that would promote a far narrower interpretation of US national interests going forward.
The State Department in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAID had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90 percent of USAID programs. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.
The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced US national security by stabilizing regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.
In the weeks after Trump’s order, one of his appointees and transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development contracts by the thousands.
Contractors and staffers running efforts ranging from epidemic control to famine prevention to job and democracy training stopped work. Aid groups and other USAID partners laid off tens of thousands of their workers in the US and abroad.
Lawsuits say the sudden shutdown of USAID has stiffed aid groups and businesses that had contracts with it totaling billions of dollars.
The shutdown has left many USAID staffers and contractors and their families still overseas, many of them awaiting back payments and travel expenses to return home. The administration is offering extensions on the 30-day deadline for staffers to return, but workers are skeptical enough USAID staffers remain on the job to process requests.
In Washington, the sometimes contradictory orders issued by the three men — Rubio, Musk and Marocco — overseeing the USAID cuts have left many uncertain who was calling the shots and fueled talk of power struggles.
Musk and Rubio on Monday, as Trump had last week, insisted relations between the two of them were smooth.
“Good working with you,” Musk tweeted in response to Rubio’s announcement.
