The Trump administration has outraged defenders of civil liberties with its campaign to abduct students off the street, and revoke the legal statuses of students holding visas and green cards for engaging in free speech the Trump administration doesn’t approve of. Yet, amid this growing chorus of dissent, one political leader has so far kept his distance from the controversy: New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres. Unlike many of his colleagues, Torres did not promptly issue any public statements about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, or other international students targeted by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These actions have not been accompanied by any evidence that the students committed a crime.
Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy called the arrests “chilling” and warned of a “massive slide away from democracy and democratic norms.” Last week, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the actions disturbing and demanded greater transparency from the administration: “Enforcement actions must adhere not just to constitutional principles but to basic norms of established procedure,” he wrote in an editorial.
But Torres, who has long teamed up with ADL leaders and championed their work addressing antisemitism, has until now kept quiet about the shocking abduction campaign. Even after Khalil, a legal green-card holder, was arrested at his home just seven miles from Torres’s district office, and flown to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, Torres kept his own counsel.
But Torres has now given The Nation an exclusive response to the detainments: “As far as individual cases, I will reserve comment until the facts are fully known,” the lawmaker said. “If a noncitizen engages in conduct that violates either criminal or immigration law or both, then there are legally grounds for deportation. But the deportation of anyone for no reason other than speech raises serious First Amendment concerns. If one accepts the premise that a pro-Israel president can deport an anti-Israel noncitizen on the basis of speech, then what prevents an anti-Israel president from deporting a pro-Israel noncitizen on the basis of speech? Deportations based solely on speech set a dangerous precedent for the future.”
“If the Trump administration is attempting to deport [Tufts University student] Rumeysa Ozturk for speech rather than conduct, then that attempted deportation, in my view, violates the First Amendment,” Torres said.
The congressman’s recently broken silence on the student deportation efforts had been all the more striking since he’d spoken out against other ICE actions, such as the Trump administration’s deportation of Kiilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland immigrant from El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was renditioned to a maximum-security prison in his own country after ICE mistakenly failed to note his protected legal status as a refugee from the very gangs that the White House erroneously claimed he belonged to.
Several of Torres’s former top fundraisers, donors and associates are actively aiding and abetting the efforts to deport Khalil and other students for their pro-Palestine speech. Torres told The Nation that he has cut ties with those donors.
“I want nothing to do with any organization that embraces either a far-left anti-Zionist ideology or a far-right Kahanist ideology,” he said. “I have cut and will continue to cut ties with anyone associated with these extremes.”
But Torres has also recently endorsed a lawsuit that employs dubious evidence and reasoning to accuse Columbia University student protesters of aiding Hamas. That action employs much the same glib equation of free expression with subversive intent that has driven the deportations Torres is now denouncing.
Torres’s contradictory stances are complicated by the congressman’s fundraising history—with one group in particular working to align him with hard-line crackdowns targeting critics of Israel. Betar US, an American offshoot of a decades-old international Zionist group founded as part of the Ze’ev Jabotinsky movement, has aggressively championed the deportations. Betar officials have targeted students and submitted their names to the Trump administration. The group is now calling for naturalized American citizens to have their citizenships revoked on the basis of pro-Palestinian sentiments. And two current and former leaders of Betar US were top Torres fundraisers.
Betar Zionist Organization, Inc. was formed in May 2024, and is now registered to the same Katonah, New York, office where the Ronn Torossian Family Foundation was incorporated. A May 2024 filing for the group listed Torossian’s Park Avenue apartment as its mailing address.
Torossian is a controversial public relations executive who has been involved in Zionist causes for decades, and supported prominent New York politicians like Mayor Eric Adams. A little over a month after resurrecting Betar US, now listed by the ADL as an extremist group, he introduced it in a WhatsApp group chat he had created after the October 7 attacks in Israel that he called “Jews for Ritchie Torres.”
Torossian was himself a Torres donor, and he helped Torres launch a leadership PAC called Chutz PAC in late 2023. Torossian went on to host the Bronx congressman at his Manhattan penthouse apartment in June 2024. The WhatsApp group, run by Torossian and another moderator, Michael Sinensky, was where the two wealthy men drummed up support for Torres and expressed far-right views about American politics.
Torossian and Sinensky would later claim they raised more than $150,000 for Torres. Torossian told me, when I first reported his support of Torres for Zeteo last year, that Torres told him he was his “number-one fundraiser since October 7.”
Sinensky was also involved in the Betar US launch as he was raising funds for Torrres. Sinensky hosted his own fundraiser for Torres in July in the Hamptons. Sinensky is a New York– and Puerto Rico–based restaurateur who runs a charity called Israel Friends US, which he founded on October 7 to bring “critical lifesaving aid to crisis zones.” Torres attended a fundraiser for that group in New York in December 2023, and a photograph of Torres with the group’s executive director from February 2024 remains the landing-page image for the group’s event page on Linktree, a platform for groups to collect all their links in one place.
As Sinensky and Torossian mobilized financial support for Torres, they were also busy resurrecting Betar US, and the two efforts often crossed over. On July 6, 2024, Torossian logged into the Jews for Ritchie Torres chat to post an invite link to a new WhatsApp group with the following message: “Betar (betarus.org) a 101 Zionist Jewish movement for strong, tough, proud Jews provides pro bono lawyers to Jewish Zionists with legal issues for fighting for Jewish Zionist issues.… Please help us add lawyers to serve as a better resource during these vital times. There’s many cases as we know and necessary to fight many fronts [sic].”
The same confrontational message carried over into the formal launch of Betar US. “We are looking for bear Jews!” a group official wrote on its Instagram account, uploading photos of guns, baseball bats, and smashed watermelons throughout the summer.
That July, Torossian and his partners created the Betar WhatsApp group, later renamed “Betar Activism,” a new X account called Betar USA, and a new Instagram account for the group in June. That Instagram account was later banned by Meta in November 2024 after it posted stories suggesting Betar would hand out pagers to their political opponents—an apparent violent threat based on the Israelis’ electronic sabotage of pagers belonging to Hezbollah users.
In Betar’s early days last summer, Sinensky served as the group’s interim executive director, and the group sent out a “travel warning” for New York City, writing, “Authorities won’t protect Jews.”
Meanwhile, in the Jews for Ritchie Torres fundraising group chat, Sinensky and Torossian often opined about how dangerous Democratic leaders like New York Senator Chuck Schumer were for Jews. Sinensky championed Donald Trump for president.
Torres said he returned the donations of both men after the Zeteo story was published, telling the outlet, “My campaign has thousands of donors. I do not have, nor is it reasonable to expect me to have, Godlike knowledge of everything that every donor has ever said or done at every point in his life.”
“Ronn Torossian is an American-Israeli who grew up in the Betar Movement and today sits on the board of Betar Worldwide in Israel and Betar US in North America. Sinensky is not involved with the Betar movement,” Daniel Levy, spokesman for Betar, told The Nation.
Torossian has also reportedly introduced Torres to multiple senior Israeli government officials, including key ministers, as well as wealthy American donors in 2023 and 2024.
After Trump won the election, Betar began making national headlines: The group was preparing a list of “foreign pro-Hamas students” to give to prospective Trump appointees to be deported, then–Betar director Ross Glick told Jon Levine of the New York Post. Betar had compiled 30 names at that point, the Post reported. Glick is no longer working for Betar, Torossian told The Nation.
On February 11, Betar shared four names from its list with the right-wing outlet The Washington Free Beacon; one was Mahmoud Khalil’s. Less than a month later, ICE agents apprehended him at Columbia University student housing, while his pregnant wife, an American citizen, looked on in horror. Just the day before, he asked the university for protection, partly because of his targeting by Betar.
Other names Betar provided the Free Beacon were Momodou Taal, Mosab Abu Toha, and Mohsen Mahdawi. Taal, a Cornell University graduate student, would later see his visa revoked on March 21 and decide to leave the United States voluntarily.
Toha, a Palestinian writer and poet, canceled a planned campus speaking tour last week, fearing for his safety after being named as a target. “I don’t even feel safe going out to pick up my kids from school,” he said on X.
Although Betar was one of the earliest groups to proclaim that it was compiling lists of students to hand over to Trump officials, it wasn’t the only one.
For several years now, Canary Mission, which earlier reporting shows has ties to Israeli intelligence, has been assembling dossiers of people it accuses of “anti-Israel” behavior. Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student whose arrest on the street was filmed, was featured on the Canary Mission website, along with Khalil and others.
Betar’s Torossian has long operated in the same settler circles as the shadowy nonprofit that allows Americans to donate to Canary Mission: the Central Israel Fund, now run out of a Five Towns, Long Island, interior design store.
American donations to the Israel Land Fund, an Israeli settler organization, also go through the Central Israel Fund. Torossian spoke at a fundraising event for the Israel Land Fund with its founder Aryeh King in 2016, and has written two editorials defending King and his group’s work.
Although Canary Mission is largely shrouded in secrecy, previous reporting by The Forward exposed a nonprofit in Israel called Megamot Shalom that is likely to be running its efforts. All the board members of Megamot Shalom come from the right-wing Orthodox Jewish organization Aish HaTorah, according to The Forward’s investigation. Torossian previously served as spokesperson for Aish HaTorah. A Canary Mission researcher identified by The Forward previously wrote for the pro-Israel website HonestReporting.com, which shared a Manhattan address with Aish HaTorah while Torossian represented the group.
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Some board members of Megamot Shalom share something else in common with Torossian: Support for the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Israeli politician whose party was outlawed in 1988 and whose affiliated American organization was designated as a terrorist group by the US for more than 20 years. Betar recently shared a video of the actor Michael Rapaport praising Kahane, and Torossian praised Kahane while a young member of the original Betar US.
Canary Mission’s dossiers have figured into efforts by Israeli border authorities to decide whom to interrogate and even permanently ban from entering the country. In much the same fashion, Betar US is now expanding its efforts to get the Israeli government to ban “Diaspora Jews from the State of Israel.”
“We are living in very dangerous times worldwide and Betar International is building lists of Jews unwelcome,” Betar officials recently wrote on the group’s X account. “We are glad kapo Norman Finkelstein has been banned,” the post continued, likening the anti-Zionist critic of Israel to a collaborating prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.
“Betar confirms we have added names to our ban list! Americans, Canadians, Latin American, French and British Jews have been added,” the account posted.
“Betar is a historical, ideological Zionist movement from which two Israeli prime ministers emanated, we are affiliated with the Likud Party and share office headquarters with the Likud Party in Ze’ev Jabotinsky, for whom the movement and building is named,” Levy told The Nation. “We are mainstream Zionism active in 35 countries with worldwide support. The State of Israel would not exist without the Betar Movement. Those who speak of boycotting Betar must boycott Israel’s Consul General in New York Ofer Akunis, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon, and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, all of whom are Jabotinsky followers and supporters and part of the Betar movement.”
After he spoke with The Nation, Torres blocked the X account for Betar, and issued a statement saying that he would decline the group’s offer to sponsor a meeting between him and Israel’s minister of public safety, Itamar Ben Givr, whom Torres denounced as an “extremist.” Betar called out Torres’s actions on the platform with a statement both affirming Torres’s broad support of Israel and denouncing his rejection of the Ben Givr meeting and his support for a two-state solution.
Also targeting student protests is a group called End Jew Hatred, and an associated organization, the Lawfare Project, both run by Brooke Goldstein. End Jew Hatred posted the link to the ICE hotline on a February post in an online community, asking, “Do you know students at Columbia or any other university who are here on a study visa and participated in demonstrations against Israel?” in Hebrew, according to ABC News.
In September 2024, End Jew Hatred presented Torres with an award called “Hero of the Week,” for his “consistent and unwavering dedication to stand up to hate and antisemitism, and speak up for those who can’t. Week after week he shows up for his community and in the face of rising Jew-hatred, he speaks out!” Torres shared the award on his own Instagram feed.
The Lawfare Project has also provided legal support for Canary Mission, according to the group.
Levy, the Betar spokesman, reaffirmed the group’s full support for deportations. “Betar remains committed worldwide, including in New York, to working to deport those jihadis who are a danger to the United States. Those who lead rallies screaming to Free Palestine, or writing it have no place in the US.”
Meanwhile, Torres has continued to champion hard-line positions on anti-Gaza protests, most recently by amplifying a conspiracy theory about a student group at Columbia.
Torres shared a civil lawsuit from families of October 7 victims that alleges Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) had advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks, because of the timing of an Instagram post announcing their first meeting of the fall semester.
Torres called it “a bombshell revelation.”
“Three minutes before Hamas began its attack on October 7th, Columbia SJP posted on Instagram ‘We are back.’ Before the 10/7 posting, Columbia SJP’s account had been inactive for months, only to be suspiciously reactivated minutes before the 10/7 terror attacks. The timing seems too coincidental to be a coincidence. If there are organizations here in the US that had advance knowledge of the 10/7 attacks, which led to the murder of American citizens, the American people have a right to know the full truth,” Torres wrote on X and Instagram last week, quoting the lawsuit’s claims.
Torres’s posts drew mockery and criticism for its evidence-challenged lurch into conspiracy theorizing. In reality, Columbia SJP had posted about its first meeting two days before that “bombshell” October 7 Instagram post. The group’s message about its return appeared on its Facebook page on October 5. There appears to be no coincidence here at all, let alone one that’s “too coincidental to be a coincidence.”
Columbia SJP’s first social media posts of the previous academic year were in the month October as well, to announce that year’s first meeting, so it seems that the lawsuit’s claim that the SJP account was “inactive for months” refers to the summer academic break. The group posted on Instagram up until May 2023.
Maryam Alwan, a SJP leader who was named in the lawsuit, responded to the allegations in a recent podcast: “Absolutely not,” Alwan said when asked if she was contacted by Hamas before the attacks.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in that lawsuit are closely tied to the Trump administration: David Schoen represented Trump himself during his second impeachment. Two attorneys are listed for the firm Greenberg Traurig, where a recent shareholder has just been appointed interim US attorney in Florida by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“The Congressman did not claim anything,” a spokesperson for Torres told The Nation. “He is sharing a legal document submitted by hostage family members to a court of law under the penalty of perjury. If you are so confident that the claim is a lie, then you should submit documents saying so to a court of law under the penalty of perjury.”
It’s not the first time Torres has targeted students and professors for having views critical of Israel. He has singled out adjunct professors and even graduate students by name on his social media accounts. At an event at the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute in June, he said that “the irony of our society is that the most academically educated people are the morally least educated people,” again invoking alleged rampant support for Hamas on campus.
“When people ask me, Ritchie, why are you so pro-Israel, it’s because I dropped out of college,” Torres said.
Torres’s difficult balancing act between a robust defense of civil liberties and the donor-sanctioned attack on Gaza protesters on campus won’t be getting any easier. Rubio said the United States has revoked at least 300 foreign students’ visas so far. “We do it every day,” he said last week. “At some point I hope we run out, but we are looking every day for these lunatics.”
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