More than 1,800 migrants expelled from Algeria into Niger, rights group says

CENTRAL ISLIP, New York: A New York man told federal agents, “I know I’m finished,” when he was arrested Thursday on charges that he concealed his leadership role in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 in his applications for a green card and US citizenship, prosecutors said.
Faustin Nsabumukunzi, 65, was charged with hiding from US authorities his role as a local leader in Rwanda when the genocide began in 1994. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed during the three-month-long genocide. The indictment of the Bridgehampton man was unsealed in Central Islip on Long Island.
At an initial court appearance, Nsabumukunzi pleaded not guilty to visa fraud and attempted naturalization fraud and was released on $250,000 bail. The bail package requires home detention and GPS monitoring, but he will be allowed to continue working as a gardener.
Evan Sugar, a lawyer for Nsabumukunzi, described his client in an email as “a law-abiding beekeeper and gardener who has lived on Long Island for more than two decades.”
He said Nsabumukunzi was “a victim of the Rwandan genocide who lost scores of family members and friends to the violence.”
Sugar said Nsabumukunzi was rightfully granted refugee status and lawful permanent residence and planned to “fight these 30-year-old allegations” while maintaining his innocence.
In a detention memo seeking detention, prosecutors said interviews of witnesses who knew him in Rwanda indicated that Nsabumukunzi falsely assured Tutsis at public meetings when the genocide began that they would be protected.
But, they said, he then, in private meetings, urged Hutus to begin killing Tutsis, the memo says.
Prosecutors said witnesses told them that Nsabumukunzi not only participated in the killing of Tutsis, including in his administrative offices, but he also encouraged Hutu men to rape Tutsi women as a genocidal tool.
Prosecutors said that when the charges were described to Nsabumukunzi as he was arrested Thursday morning, he responded: “I know I’m finished.”
According to the indictment, Nsabumukunzi was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted on genocide charges in absentia by a Rwandan court. He’d been accused of using his leadership position to oversee the killings of Tutsis in his local area.
He allegedly set up roadblocks during the genocide to detain and kill Tutsis and participated in killings, the indictment says.
In 2003, Nsabumukunzi applied to settle in the US as a refugee and received a green card in 2007 before applying for citizenship in 2009 and 2015, authorities said.
In his applications, they added, he falsely asserted that he was not involved in the genocide.
Matthew R. Galeotti, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a release that Nsabumukunzi participated in “heinous acts of violence abroad and then lied his way into a green card and tried to obtain US citizenship.”
“For over two decades, he got away with those lies and lived in the United States with an undeserved clean slate, a luxury that his victims will never have,” said US Attorney John J. Durham in Brooklyn.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Thursday bashed Harvard as an “Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” as the prestigious university battles his administration’s funding freeze in court.
The latest outburst from Trump comes as his administration cracks down on US universities on several fronts, alleging widespread anti-Semitism, anti-white bias, and the promotion of “gender ideology” by protecting trans students.
The administration has threatened several top-tier universities with funding freezes and other punishments, prompting concerns over declining academic freedom.
It has also moved to revoke visas and deport foreign students involved in the protests, accusing them of supporting Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack on Israel provoked the war.
Harvard, which has seen billions in federal funding frozen after it rejected wide-ranging government oversight, filed suit against the Trump administration on Monday.
“The place is a Liberal mess,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, also complaining that the university has admitted students “from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart.”
His broadside came a day after he issued an executive order targeting higher education, upending how federal authorities decide which universities and colleges can access billions of dollars from certain grants and student loans.
The executive order seeks to clamp down on what Trump brands “unlawful discrimination” — that is any measures that seek to promote the representation of “racial and ethnic minority individuals.”
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Trump could not withhold funds from public schools that operate equality and diversity policies which have been a particular target of the president.
The ruling issued in New Hampshire does not apply across the board but instead to the largest US teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) non-profit which promotes the recruitment of Black teachers.
The ruling will apply in schools employing members of the NEA, or contracting with the CBED.
Trump and his White House team have publicly justified their campaign against universities as a reaction to what they say is uncontrolled anti-Semitism and a need to reverse diversity programs aimed at addressing historical oppression of minorities.
The administration claims that protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept across US college campuses last year were rife with anti-Semitism.
Several Jewish lawmakers accused Trump on Thursday of weaponizing anti-Semitism to attack universities for his own ends.
“We reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of anti-Semitism and pit communities against one another; and we unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about anti-Semitism to undermine democratic norms and rights,” the Democratic senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, wrote in a joint letter.
Many US universities, including Harvard, cracked down on the protests over the allegations at the time, with the Cambridge-based institution placing 23 students on probation and denying degrees to 12 others, according to protest organizers.
Trump’s claims about diversity tap into long-standing conservative complaints that US university campuses are too liberal, shutting out right-wing voices and favoring minorities.
In the case of Harvard, the White House is seeking unprecedented levels of government control over the inner workings of the country’s oldest and wealthiest university — and one of the most respected educational and research institutions in the world.
Professor Kirsten Weld, president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told AFP “this is an increasingly autocratic, authoritarian government that is trying to dismantle not just our universities, but the higher education sector as a whole.”