Jessica Schwalb writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an interesting development involving the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard Law School visiting professor Carlos Portugal Gouvea—who told authorities he fired a pellet rifle outside a synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur “to hunt rats”—agreed to self-deport after ICE arrested him Wednesday.
Gouvea—who founded a Brazilian think tank that “led the largest anti-violence campaign in the country, resulting in the enactment of the federal Gun Control Act of 2003,” according to Harvard—was first arrested on Oct. 2 by the Brookline Police Department immediately following the shooting. Harvard placed Gouvea on administrative leave days later, and on Nov. 13 he pleaded guilty to illegally using the air rifle.
The incident prompted the State Department to revoke his temporary non-immigrant visa on Oct. 16, leading to the ICE arrest. He volunteered to leave the United States rather than risk deportation, ending his stretch of serving at elite American institutions like Yale Law School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“There is no room in the United States for brazen, violent acts of anti-Semitism like this,” DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Thursday. “We are under zero obligation to admit foreigners who commit these inexplicably reprehensible acts or to let them stay here.”
Gouvea—who came to Harvard from the Law School of the University of São Paulo, where he leads the Diversity and Inclusion Committee—fired his pellet gun on the eve of the holiest holiday of the Jewish year outside of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Mass., a short drive from Harvard’s Cambridge campus. More than a dozen police officers descended upon the area and arrested Gouvea, but only after he escaped to his home near the synagogue following a “brief physical struggle.”
Gouvea was handcuffed on the sidewalk outside of his home and told police he was “using the pellet rifle to hunt rats in the area.”
