Campus Protests Spread, UK Asylum Law, Starbucks at SCOTUS

The United Kingdom is ready to pay a country thousands of miles away to take its unwanted refugees.

The ruling could set a precedent for future union-building efforts.

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Students at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan set up Gaza solidarity encampments on Monday.

And tensions are high at Yale, Columbia, and NYU.

Students at all three universities have been arrested in recent days.

NPR's Jasmine Garst has been reporting at Columbia. Jasmine, what message are protesters sending?

Yesterday I was able to speak to one organizer who's part of the encampment at Columbia University.

Her name is Soyda. She requested that her last name be withheld due to concerns for retaliation.

And here's what she had to say.

through the genocide right now and the slower displacement throughout occupied Palestine.

Israel strongly denies that allegation.

What the students are asking for is divestment.

And by divestment what they mean is that they want the university to disclose and end investments in weapons technology and in Israel.

Last night at NYU several protesters were taken into custody.

And some of those students have been suspended, kicked out of university housing.

Yesterday while I was at Columbia University I got a chance to speak to Professor Joseph Howley.

He was out there supporting the encampment.

He was very critical of the fact that NYPD was allowed on campus.

You can't discipline and punish your way out of prejudice.

which is an environment in which they say free speech is not being protected.

You've mentioned you've spent the day at Columbia.

Have you heard about any threats of violence toward Jewish students on campus?

One of them was an alumna. Her name is Elise Mordos.

And she told me she feels attacked and she wants the school administration out.

Faculty members need to go.

The students need to understand that they can't get away with what they've been getting away with.

And it starts with leadership.

Republican lawmakers have said it's just words. It's not matched by actions.

Protesters I spoke to said being critical of Israel doesn't automatically make you anti-Semitic.

Now what's clear from spending time at these protests is that there isn't one unified, monolithic Jewish voice.

It's in fact very diverse.

But the last day of classes are on Monday and final exams on May 3rd.

I mean, what's going to happen at Columbia?

Graduation is on the horizon.

Students I spoke to said they're going to continue to protest and camp out until their demands are met.

The eyes of it, the eyes of it, look!

Supporters call it a creative solution to fix a broken asylum system.

Critics say it's a violation of human rights.

Good morning, Lauren.

no matter what type of persecution they're fleeing.

Instead, they'll be deported to Rwanda where authorities there will evaluate their cases.

The U.K. government has paid the Rwandan government hundreds of millions of dollars to take these people.

And this applies to Syrians, Afghans, anyone else who crosses the English Channel from France to England without a visa.

There have been legal battles over this for two years.

The bill was struck down by U.K. and European courts.

Sunak's party rewrote it several times, and they finally got it through Parliament after midnight last night.

Sunak, though, sees this as a powerful deterrent to stop people from entering the U.K. illegally,

in many cases risking their lives to do so.

I mean, just this morning there are reports that at least five migrants have died crossing the English Channel from France, including a child.

And Sunak says the key to stopping smugglers who take them is to get these Rwanda flights off the ground ASAP, in 10 to 12 weeks, he says.

And he wants those, incidentally, to coincide with his party's campaign for re-election this fall.

Here's what he said at a news conference yesterday.

Sunak has vowed to pull out of its jurisdiction, so pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights if necessary.

It was on the basis of that treaty that flights have been halted in the past.

And two summers ago, there was actually a plane load of asylum seekers on the runway, ready to be deported to Rwanda,

when they were pulled off one by one with 11th hour reprieves because of human rights concerns.

I asked a pollster, Sundar Kadwala, what Britons think of this Rwanda plan.

On the principle, people are split down the middle, really.

there's a majority that are very skeptical of this already.

The opposition Labour Party says it will scrap this plan if and when it wins power.

So, you know, with legal challenges, there could be really only a handful of people deported to Rwanda.

And critics are asking, will that have been worth hundreds of millions in taxpayers' money,

let alone damage to the U.K.'s reputation in terms of human rights?

And the justices will weigh a big question.

How much power should the government have to protect workers during a labour investigation?

Given the court's conservative tilt, the ruling could further tip the scales in unionization disputes from workers to employers.

and federal authorities ask a court to intervene while they investigate.

And that's what happened with Starbucks.

For the past two and a half years, workers at hundreds of coffee shops have pushed to unionize,

and Starbucks have fought these campaigns.

And this Supreme Court case started with a pretty dramatic situation with a group of workers in Tennessee called the Memphis Seven.

It was a group of seven baristas and shift supervisors.

They'd launched a union campaign at their store.

This was two years ago.

And Starbucks fired them, saying they broke many company rules, including when they let a TV crew into a closed store.

The workers said it was retaliation for their union work, which is protected by law.

And just so, federal labour authorities got involved.

And this is the crux of it.

That legal process takes a very long time, sometimes years.

So while labour officials investigated, they asked a federal district court to sort of reset everything in the meantime.

That included reinstating the fired workers, rehiring the Memphis Seven.

The court agreed, but Starbucks appealed, and it kept appealing all the way now to the Supreme Court.

And even more specifically, actually, the question before the Supreme Court is about how easy it should be for labour officials to get a court to intervene.

And this matters because that's one of the few tools the National Labour Relations Board has to enforce labour law.

The agency does not have many ways of making a company stop doing whatever it's doing that officials believe is illegal while the investigations and hearings drag on.

So occasionally, the board asks for an injunction from a federal district court.

And this is where Starbucks argues some of those courts give the labour officials too much leeway, letting the government meet a lower legal bar than they should.

And Starbucks wants the Supreme Court to fix that.

Do we have a sense of what would happen, what the impact would be if Starbucks prevails in this case?

That's what Starbucks is seeking.

Unions worry that it could also make unionizing harder.

And pro-union workers talk about the potential chilling effect of the top court siding with the employer.

We heard this from Starbucks worker Florentino Escobar, who's one of the Memphis Seven.

Fundamentally, labour laws over recent decades have made it more difficult for unions to organize and to bring labour complaints.

But now companies argue labour officials under President Biden have gotten more aggressive trying to help unions along.

And a ruling here could tilt the power dynamic between federal labour watchdogs and companies resisting unionization.

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