����ֱ��

POCHEON, South Korea: The equipment activist Lee Min-bok uses to send balloons laden with anti-Kim Jong Un leaflets across the border from South Korea unto the North has been gathering dust and cobwebs for months.

When it became clear that center-left politician Lee Jae Myung was on track to win the June presidential election, Lee Min-bok was among several South Korea-based activists who stopped their missions, anticipating a crackdown by the new, pro-engagement administration.

Lee Jae Myung, a former human rights lawyer, is pushing to ease tensions with Pyongyang and last month said activists should be “severely punished” if they continue the balloon operations that anger North Korea.

“I’ve been doing it quietly and what’s wrong with that? Provoking North Korea? No way,” 67-year-old Lee Min-bok said as he stood next to a rusting truck equipped with a hydrogen tank for filling balloons.

“But realistically, look how serious it is right now. Police are out there and if I move, everything will be reported.”

For years, police have monitored Lee from the home next door — one plainclothes officer told Reuters they are there to protect him from potential North Korean threats — but instead of checking weather reports for ideal balloon launching conditions, Lee now spends his days writing online posts criticizing the South Korean government.

Calls to activists

The activists, many of whom are North Korean defectors like Lee, are used to being at the center of geopolitical tensions.

An attempt by a previous liberal president to ban the balloon launches was struck down as unconstitutional. And last year, North Korea began launching waves of its own balloons into the South, some carrying garbage and excrement.

Lee, who took office on June 4, has promised to improve relations with the nuclear-armed North, saying tensions with Pyongyang have had a real negative economic impact. He has urged diplomacy and dialogue and his administration has also suspended anti-North Korea loudspeaker broadcasts along the border.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, however, last year abandoned a goal of unification with the South and has shown little openness to diplomacy.

After Lee ordered measures to stop leaflet launches, officials and police discussed plans including deploying police to border regions to preempt launches, and punishing the activists by using regulations such as aviation safety laws, according to the Unification Ministry that handles inter-Korea affairs.

Several groups in the South regularly send balloons to the North carrying leaflets, bibles, food, money, and various media.

In the past year, police have investigated about 72 cases of anti-North leaflet activities and sent 13 to prosecutors, another police official said. They are still looking into 23 cases, the official added.

Police are also investigating six Americans who attempted to deliver around 1,300 plastic bottles filled with rice, dollar notes and Bibles to North Korea.

“Fear is spreading. The mood is bloody intense,” said another North Korean defector-turned-activist who had secretly flown balloons once or twice a month for more than a decade.

The activist said he had paused the launches this spring when polls showed Lee was likely to win the election.

“I get calls from the government recently that apparently want to check in, to see whether I am going to send the balloons or not,” said the Seoul-based activist, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals.

Choi Sung-yong, leader of the Abductees’ Family Union who works to bring home South Koreans abducted by North Korea, said his group had decided to suspend the balloon launches after receiving calls from new government officials.

Chung Dong-young, the Unification Minister nominee, said last month he rang Choi and thanked him for reconsidering the balloon launches which Chung described “a catalyst to confrontation and hostilities” between the two Koreas.

‘Right balance’

North Korean officials have labeled leaflet activists in South Korea “human scum” and in 2020 demolished an inter-Korean liaison office during a spat over leaflets. In 2022, they claimed the balloons could carry the coronavirus.

The Lee administration’s moves have been welcomed by some residents who have said the launches put them at risk.

“I feel much more comfortable and hopeful… People couldn’t sleep,” said Park Hae-yeon, 65, a farmer in Paju whose family runs a restaurant near the border. “Now I am hearing leaflets not being distributed, I see a sign of hope.”

James Heenan, who represents the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, told Reuters that leaflet operations are a matter of free expression that need to be balanced with legitimate national security concerns.

“We hope the right balance will be struck,” he said, noting that previous punishments were overly harsh.

BOSTON: A federal bench trial begins Monday over a lawsuit that challenges a Trump administration campaign of arresting and deporting faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other political activities.

The lawsuit, filed by several university associations against President Donald Trump and members of his administration, would be one of the first to go to trial. Plaintiffs want US District Judge William Young to rule the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

“The policy’s effects have been swift. Noncitizen students and faculty across the United States have been terrified into silence,” the plaintiffs wrote in their pretrial brief.

“Students and faculty are avoiding political protests, purging their social media, and withdrawing from public engagement with groups associated with pro-Palestinian viewpoints,” they wrote. “They’re abstaining from certain public writing and scholarship they would otherwise have pursued. They’re even self-censoring in the classroom.”

Several scholars are expected to testify how the policy and subsequent arrests have prompted them to abandon their activism for Palestinian human rights and criticizing Israeli government’s policies.

Since Trump took office, the US government has used its immigration enforcement powers to crack down on international students and scholars at several American universities.

Trump and other officials have accused protesters and others of being “pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Many protesters have said they were speaking out against Israel’s actions in the war.

Plaintiffs single out several activists by name, including Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was released last month after spending 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump ‘s clampdown on campus protests.

The lawsuit also references Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was released in May from a Louisiana immigration detention. She spent six weeks in detention after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb. She claims she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

The plaintiffs also accuse the Trump administration of supplying names to universities who they wanted to target, launching a social media surveillance program and used Trump’s own words in which he said after Khalil’s arrest that his was the “first arrest of many to come.”

The government argued in court documents that the plaintiffs are bringing a First Amendment challenge to a policy “of their own creation.”

“They do not try to locate this program in any statute, regulation, rule, or directive. They do not allege that it is written down anywhere. And they do not even try to identify its specific terms and substance,” the government argues. “That is all unsurprising, because no such policy exists.”

They argue the plaintiffs case also rest on a “misunderstanding of the First Amendment, ”which under binding Supreme Court precedent applies differently in the immigration context than it otherwise does domestically.”

But plaintiffs counter that evidence at the trial will show the Trump administration has implemented the policy a variety of ways, including issuing formal guidance on revoking visas and green cards and establishing a process for identifying those involved in pro-Palestinian protests.

“Defendants have described their policy, defended it, and taken political credit for it,” plaintiffs wrote. “It is only now that the policy has been challenged that they say, incredibly, that the policy does not actually exist. But the evidence at trial will show that the policy’s existence is beyond cavil.”