The 4-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on top of Mauna Kea is owned by the National Center for Scientific Research. Credit: Gordon W Myers/Wikimedia Commons/CC By-Sa 4.0
A French researcher was denied entry to the United States and expelled from the country for having exhibited “a personal opinion” on the research policies of the President of the United States Donald Trump, said the French government on March 19th.
The French research minister, Philippe Baptista, told the Wire Agency France-Presse (AFP) that the researcher, from France National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), was traveling to a conference near Houston. “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the research policy of the Trump administration,” said Baptiste.
AFP also reports, citing a nameless source, that the scientist works in the space sector and that the accident occurred on March 9. The researcher and the conference were not publicly identified, but the annual conference of lunar and planetary sciences – a large meeting of space sciences – was held in the woods, just north of Houston, from 10 to 14 March.
According to the sources of AFP, the researcher was randomly chosen for a check on arrival in the United States and the authorities told the researcher that they had found messages “that express hatred for Trump and can be qualified as terrorism”.
French government officials expressed alarm for the situation. In an AFP relationship and the Monde, Baptiste said: “Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values that we will continue to support with pride. I will defend the right of all French researchers to be faithful to them, respecting the law”. The French Foreign Ministry has declared to these points that “deplorates this situation” and reiterated France’s commitment for freedom of expression and scientific cooperation.
The accident occurred when spatial science was chased by the actions of the second administration of Trump, which included a freezing of funding, a purge of initiatives and research related to diversity and an order to reduce the federal scientific workforce. The reports of a potential 50 % cut to the NASA scientific balance have prompted the planetary society to warn such a cut would be “an event at the level of extinction” for US space science.
RELATED: Spatial scientists are frightened while the Trump administration turns to science and mulls the cuts of NASA
Other scientific agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and Noaa, have already faced mass layoffs. Some agencies have made cancellations of subsidies on targeted research topics, such as the hesitation of the vaccine, and others according to reports have been ordered to make lists of subsidies for the review, aim at certain topics or related key words, such as climate science and marginalized communities.
The accident also arrives in a series of high-profile detention of foreign citizens and permanent US residents-TRA to which several academics-from part of US immigration officials for alleged visa issues and political opinions. Mahmoud Khalil, permanent resident of the United States and owner of a green card that led protests to Columbia University against Israeli war in Gaza, was arrested for “actively” – although not “materially” – in support of Hamas, said an official of the White House Assios. The Trump administration has also threatened to cancel $ 400 million in subsidies and government contracts to Columbia unless you respect a series of requests that would governing the students’ demonstrators and limit the future protest activities. Some professors and groups for civil rights have denounced the requests of the Administration as an attack on freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Baptiste, the French minister, criticized Trump’s policies as an attack on science, also claiming that it is an opportunity to attract US scientists to France. On March 18, he declared on X that scientific research will play a key role in the European thrust for strategic autonomy, defining the research “a priority at a time when the Trump administration is attacking free science and endangering entire sectors of research all over the world”.
“Many well -known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States,” he wrote in a letter to French research institutes, he reported AFP on March 9th. “We would like to welcome a certain number of it.”
