Harvard professor arrested by US immigration agents after firing pellet gun near synagogue
By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – U.S. immigration authorities arrested a visiting professor at Harvard Law School this week after he pleaded guilty to firing a pellet gun outside a Massachusetts synagogue the day before Yom Kippur, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
Carlos Portugal Gouvea, a Brazilian citizen, was arrested Wednesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after “his temporary nonimmigrant visa was revoked by the U.S. State Department following what President Donald Trump’s administration called an “anti-Semitic shooting incident” — a description at odds with how local authorities described the case.
Gouvea, an associate professor at the University of Sao Paulo law school who had taught at Harvard during the fall semester, agreed to leave the country, the Department of Homeland Security announced. He could not immediately be reached for comment, and Harvard, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, declined to comment.
Gouvea’s arrest comes as the Trump administration has pressed Harvard to reach an agreement to resolve a litany of allegations made against the Ivy League institution, including that Harvard had not done 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 to rule in September that the administration had illegally terminated more than $2 billion in research grants to the university.
Police in Brookline, Massachusetts, arrested Gouvea on October 1 after responding to a report of a person with a gun near Temple Beth Zion on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Gouvea said he was using a pellet gun to hunt rats nearby, according to a police report.
He agreed last month to plead guilty to illegally discharging the pellet gun and to serve six months of pretrial probation. Other charges against him for disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and vandalizing property were dismissed as part of the plea deal.
Despite the Trump administration’s “claims,” Temple Beth Zion has previously told members of its community that the incident did not appear to have been fueled by anti-Semitism, a view shared by the Brookline Police Department, which investigated the matter.
The temple said police informed it that Gouvea “did not know that he lived next to a synagogue and was shooting his BB gun next to it, nor that it was a religious holiday.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Kate Mayberry)
