Keep on rodden with us as we continue to broadcast the balance and defend the discourse from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios.
Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I'm your host, Ramsy's jaw. He is Rams's jaw. I am q Ward. You are tuned in the civic Cipher, Yes you are, and we are having a.
Wildly informative conversation with a man that we respect and that we tap on the shoulder from time to time to give us some clarity into the goings on in Washington, d C. So be sure to stick around for more of the conversation. The one and only Ganet Gill is here with us. He is a human rights lawyer and based out there in DC, and he's worked with Congress
with two progressive members of the House of Representatives. He's an accomplished human rights advocate defending marginalized people across the United States and abroad. And he is dropping some information for folks that don't know that need to be informed about how vulnerable we are and what we can do to push back against those vulnerabilities. But before we have any more discussion, time to Beaba become a better allied.
Baba and today's Baba. We want to shout out universities that are pushing back against the Trump Administration's attack on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. I'll share from the economic time. Several leading US universities have quietly formed a private collective to push back against the Trump Administration's efforts to control research funding and academic policies.
According to The.
Wall Street Journal, the group, made up of about ten prestigious institutions, including Ivy League schools and major private research universities, has been meeting privately to planned strategies. Their discussions intensified after the administration presented Harvard University with a list of demands viewed widely across academia as a threat to university autonomy. The collective includes university presidents, trustees, and other senior leaders.
They have discussed setting clear boundaries for negotiations with the government and have prepared for different scenarios if funding is cut or regulations are tightened. The goal is to prevent individual schools from making separate deals that could set precedents affecting the entire sector.
Is familiar with the efforts, said.
The Trump administration has used the threat of freezing or canceling billions in research grants to pressure schools citing a need to address anti semitism on campuses. According to a source familiar with The Wall Street Journal, the government's task force said that the administration had worn at least one university leadership group not to coordinate with others in resisting
these demands. The universities have agreed they will not compromise on core issues such as control over admissions, faculty hiring, and academic curriculum. One participant in the discussions pointed out, quote, several of the schools have been around for three hundred years years while President Trump has been in office for three months.
So yeah, they are.
The Trump administration is trying to frame the free speech as anti semitism, of people standing up for Palestine, as anti Jewish, as opposed to anti Israel, and so now these institutions are having to fight this made up fight. But the fact that they're banning together means something, and we'll take it.
So okay, Yannick, thank you for.
Giving us some perspective on like the conversation about that we had earlier about USAID and how that provides so much vaccines around the world and how diseases are Human diseases attack humans, and humans are all over the planet. And so you know, for people that cast their vote because they are it's a little bit of racism wrapped up in fear. You know, they would never admit to the racism, but they would admit to the fear. So
that's what I'll say. People that are afraid that, you know, these people are getting too much power, these people are taking too much from them or whatever, and they vote for a person like this. Ultimately, what you've done is given perspective on how the world is less safe for them too as a result of that. What you've done ultimately is you've reframed the conversation around how we kind of all need each other and we should be building systems to support each other as opposed to like trying
to isolate ourselves. Because there are some things that are bigger than our communities, that our individual lives, our families, our cities, our countries. And this administration I think is hyper focused on really one group of people in this country as opposed to humanity, the globe, et cetera. And I think this is why we have a lot of this weird back and forth from the White House. You know, these these tariffs and you know all this Donald Trump
saying he's negotiating with China. China is like, we're not talking about dude. The Chinese Empire has been around five thousand years. We're not worried about America has been around for three hundred. You know, like talking talking crazy, you know what I mean. And so you know that clarity and a bit of levity I think goes a long way around here.
Now.
I want you to continue helping us out, So do us a favor. Talk to us a little bit more, because I know that you kind of touched on it. But talk to us a little bit more about, you know, our Latino brothers and sisters at what they're dealing with. And share a little bit more about kind of the deportations that have been taking a place of not just you know, people whose citizenship status is kind of in limbo, but actual US citizens, American citizens who've been deported to El Salvador.
So share a little bit more with us about that.
Absolutely. And I want to start off by making something very clear, these are not deportations. We I even sometimes slip up, but using that word suggest a legality succest a processed, and that is not what's happening in the
United States in twenty twelve. Folks are being snatched off the road, snatched in their homes, snatched in their places of worship, schools, places in previous administrations that were protected without any due process based on the mere allegation, the mere suggestion that they may be affiliated with a gang. This is being done through tattoos. This is being done through living in the wrong neighborhood or being in the
presence of the wrong people. But unlike previous administrations, it's not as simple as going through a legal process or even fondly charged, finding access to counsel and sorting things out. No, these people are being deprived of any right to do process, which I remind you everyone is entitled to, regardless of
their nationality. Yeah, being shipped way to a land where they've never been, and being subjected to torturous conditions, having their head shaved, being locked away without access to a phone, without access to their families. The term that we are using with human rights first is being disappeared, which is far more accurate of what is happening and the reason why we are attempting to ring the alarm and how terrifying this process is is because, as you suggested, your
citizenship isn't going to protect you. Now. Although I live in Washington, d C. I'm a proud Florida man, so I still every once in a while try and keep up what's happening back home, and more and more the news is depressing, to say the least. I bring up Florida because Juan Carlos Gomes Lopez happened to be in Florida. As his name suggests, He's a Latino and he didn't look American enough, because despite being born and raised in the United States, Juan found himself in a deportation proceeding
to a country that he had no nationality. His mother panicked, collected his birth certificate, brought it to the courts, and while the judge was able to authenticate that it was a real birth certificate.
He still sat, couldn't do anything, and a.
Detention proceeding until human rights advocates, until the local community, until social media protested saying, what is happening? That is Trump's America. Thank God, in this case, there was enough noise that this American was released from deportation. Proceedings. But it only highlights what is really happening without due process
to suspect it a led gang members. And I emphasize those words because in more cases than not, we have been able to investigate and look in and find not only do these alleged victims not have criminal records in the United States, not have gang affiliation in the United States, but even in Venezuela, they have no criminal history.
Yeah.
I think it's something like seventy five percent of them had no previous criminal histories.
Exactly what I think. I heard that earlier today or something like that, so I have to check it.
But nope, of course, and I hesitate to put a specific figure because it highlights the issue. We don't have access to these people. We have been attempting to gain access to represent and see what is happening, because until you are convicted, you have rights to council to prove your inny sense to some form of due process. That is the Fifth Amendment, and that is what is being attacked.
So Al Salvador, and unfortunately Al Salvador, unfortunately is the start of what we fear is going to be many agreements that President Trump is looking to utilize to remove undesirables, people that don't fit his concept of what American again
should look like. And before I wrap this point, I do want to highlight while we're talking about Latinos today, I always bring up the case of Sean Brown brother born in Philadelphia, who happened to be in Florida again, who ended up in deportation proceedings to Jamaica, a country
had only been two hun a cruise. Because you have to understand, you can't look at someone and accurately guess their nationality, perhaps, their ethnicity perhaps, but that doesn't provide access to their nationality, which is completely different than someone's heritage. They seem to understand that with Irish communities, Irish American communities, they seem to understand that what the Italian American community with immigrant groups. I've been here for centuries.
Yeah, I see where you're going.
But again, it's an attack on black and brown communities that is being shaped under the auspices of deportation. So while many of us are slipping up and using the language because it seems natural that we want to bring in a process some form of legality, let's be clear that these are disappearances. They're stomping on our constitutional rights.
If I may right here, I think that just for our listeners to give them some perspective, because a lot of folks haven't traveled beyond this country, and Q and I we've had We've been very fortunate.
We've been all over the world.
Just if you can just imagine if you're in a foreign country wherever you've always dreamed of going. You're in a foreign country, right You're a million miles away from your family, from the political system that you know that you believe to be fair. Here in the US, you're whatever. You're in France or something, pick a place, doesn't matter. And then you're accused of stealing a candy bar and then they disappear you and you don't have have like
due process. Can I at least go in front of someone. Is there someone that can help me translate? You know, I was here on business, whatever whatever your story is. But just imagine how how having some formal process would help you, would serve you as a human being, whether or not you're a citizen of that country. You would
think that's fair. And so I think that's the point that you're trying to make here, Yannick, is that you know, for people that are snatched off of the street and then put on an airplane's shipped off without due process, that is fundamentally anti human and what we would imagine would be Unamerican.
Am I right about that?
I could have said it better myself. I tried, But you're doing my job.
I got a good teacher.
It's that simple. And the additional word is that what we believe at Human Rights First is that those acts are also unconstitutional. It's not just that it's immoral, it's not just that it feels wrong. We are stating that it is illegal. There's a reason it's unprecedented, because you're
not allowed to do that. And we're in a scary time where despite court orders from the Supreme Court, who has ordered back individuals who have been subjected to Donald Trump's heinous acts, the Trump administration is still continuing to ignore them. So we're in a place where you're calling on Congress. We're continuing to file and marry out of lawsuits.
But we also need people everyday, folks who not just are afraid of what may happen, but who are concerned for our neighbors, who have already been objected to susterranny to speak out, to yell and scream, because in the same way that we were able to shine a light on Wan's case in Florida and allow him to prove that he was an American, we have to do that with folks who may not have the same nationality as you or me, because regardless of their nationality, regardless of
the ethnicity, regardless of their race, in the United States, they still have access to constitucial protections, and the Fifth Amendment says the process as part of that.
You know, during the campaign, during election season. And I like to pause a second on election season because I hear adults, in order to justify their apathy or their lack of action, say I'm not really political. I think what they mean is the electoral process.
They don't participate. But everyone here is political.
Every aspect of your life is affected by politics, from the way that you buy groceries, the way you go to school, your civic engagement, traffic lights, the fact that you're supposed to be able to have due process if someone accuses you of doing something illegal.
All of this stuff is inherently political.
We and I know we because we talked the three of us during the last election season, saw so much of this coming, and even the other side knows that it's wrong, because they denied they would do it when they were trying to get elected. They tried to distance themselves from it, and they were trying to get elected
because even they know it's wrong. But now, because they're you know, a religion, they will find a way to back their messiah figure with the zealot like passion and find a way to justify every decision that's made by this administration, even when it is blatantly illegal and blatantly in direct conflict with our constitution. We've seen the suppression
of disagreement. We've seen the suppression of criticism. We've seen the suppression of honest journalism, and on a large scale, the suppression of immigrant college students.
All of us are in an.
Interesting space where there's public dissent with what's going on with the administration. And I've expressed my fears of all the things that the three of us do for a living being considered legal at some point in the near future by this administration, because that shouldn't even sound ridiculous to anyone of us, or to anyone listening.
Where are we on it?
And when students can't protest, when journalists can't disagree, when even law firms and attorneys are being attacked in some again preemptively bending the knee and falling in line.
Scary doesn't really say it. I can't find the right way.
To articulate the space that we're in now, and this is something that you're living every day.
I acknowledge that I'm at times afraid because it is a scary time. It's an unprecedented time, and I've been fooled at times into believing that the constitutional protections that sometimes don't impact my community would at least impact America and impact everybody. But we're in a time where we are seeing outright defiance not just our Constitution but our courts. The word that we're experiencing is authoritarianism, and we often think about that word as something that happens over there.
I mean, we point to Russia, we point to China, we even point to Cuba. But if we just look at the way that things are being implemented in the United States today, there's no other way to articulate what is happening. And you pointed out something so key anywhere that they see resistance uprising, quite frankly just questioning they are attacking it. We're going to compare two very different groups. One will be Ivor League college students. The second will
be nonprofits and law firms. And I'm going to frame it within those same executive orders. I started by talking. I started off our conversation. The attacks on law firms was quick and swift because they were afraid to fight back. There was no fight. They immediately thought and strategized, similar to the same businesses we talked before. Who's going to
be in power? Where do we win? And they removed again years years of precedent of working in tandem with the US government to ensure that people that don't often have a fair bide at the legal system had a representation. This is a public service that helps all of us. You want people to function through the courts because you want people to trust the courts. But that was attacked and removed. Why because statistically and human rights First has
seen this time and time again. When there's counsel involved, people have a much higher chance in naturalizing into the United States or in our case, having access to asylum that they are entitled to under both international law but domestic law. How does that tie it to the students. They were expressing disdain for atrocities happening on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, something that they have a constitutional rights to the First Amendment protections to speak out against.
But it didn't fit in line with exactly how Trump wanted things to do or to happen again, authoritarianism. This is not the way our country should function. This is not this way our country has functioned. But unless we stand up, unless we the people, not just human rights lawyers, not just members of Congress, not just these Ivy League students, but you the listener, You regular person with a regular job,
that here's this and thinks this is not right. You should also be thinking this could be me as evidenced by the three kids that were deported US citizens again facing deportation, facing let me correct myself again, disappearances under an authoritarian system. Yeah. So, while I'm afraid of what may happen, I'm also angry that anger that conviction has to cause us to resist, has to cause us to fight.
Okay, listen, I know that this conversation could go on and on and on. You have a brilliant mind and we appreciate your strategy, but we're gonna we're gonna have to leave.
It right here.
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to come and talk with us this week. Do us a favor before you go, let folks know how they can tap in with you on social media, websites, you know, anything that you got going on so people can get some more of this game because we need.
It absolutely and it's been a pleasure. Look forward to continue the conversation. As always, brothers, I am pretty easy to find Yanet Gil across most platforms, and also it's really important in twenty twenty five that we support the organizations doing the work, so I could also be found through Human Rights First again, a human rights organization doing
strategic litigation and adgacy both here and abroad. I look forward to chatting more about y'all in the next one hundred days, hopefully with a few more wins under our belt.
Well we look forward to it too.
Be sure to follow us on social media at Civic Cipher.
And subscribe to the podcast and the YouTube. And until next week, y'all, Peace,