Professor visiting Harvard arrested by ICE agrees to leave country | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
U.S. immigration authorities arrested a visiting professor at Harvard law school after he was accused of opening fire with a pellet gun outside a Massachusetts synagogue the day before Yom Kippur, and the professor agreed to leave the country, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday.
Brazilian citizen Carlos Portugal Gouvea was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Wednesday after his temporary nonimmigrant visa was revoked by the state department following what the Trump administration described as an “anti-Semitic shooting incident”; This was a statement that contradicted how local authorities described the case.
Gouvea, an associate professor at the University of São Paulo law school and teaching at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall semester, agreed to leave the country, DHS said.
Gouvea’s press representatives in Brazil issued a statement saying that after ICE took him in for questioning, he was given the option to leave the country voluntarily and was allowed to return to Brazil starting Thursday.
Harvard declined to comment.
Gouvea’s arrest comes as the Trump administration pressures Harvard to reach a settlement to resolve a series of allegations he has made against the Ivy League institution, including that the university did not do enough to combat anti-Semitism and protect Jewish students on campus.
Harvard sued over some of the administration’s actions against it, leading a judge in September to rule that the administration unlawfully terminated more than $2 billion in research grants to the university.
Police in Brookline, Massachusetts, arrested Gouvea on Oct. 1 after responding to a report of a gunman near Temple Beth Zion on the eve of the Jewish holiday. According to the police report, Gouvea said he used a pellet gun to hunt nearby rats.
He agreed last month to resolve a charge that he illegally discharged a pellet gun, for which he would be sentenced to six months of pretrial probation and pay $386.59 in restitution. As part of the deal, other charges he faced for disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and vandalism were dismissed.
Despite the Trump administration’s claims, Temple Beth Zion had previously told community members that the incident was not due to anti-Semitism; This view is shared by the Brookline police department, which is investigating the matter.
The temple said police informed it that Gouvea “lived next to a synagogue and was unaware that he was shooting a BB gun near the synagogue or that it was a religious holiday.”
