Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would crack down against pro-Palestinian student protesters.
Over the past few weeks, he has forcefully followed through.
His administration has directed investigators at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), who would typically target human traffickers and drug smugglers, to track down students who may have shown sympathy for the Palestinian cause in social media posts. His secretary of state has deployed an obscure statute to detain PhD candidates and researchers. Openly flouting bedrock principles of free speech in the US, his administration has thrown the weight of its executive power into crushing political dissent.
First, immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student and permanent resident who led pro-Palestinian protests. The secretary of state personally signed off on his arrest by invoking an obscure provision of the law that allows him to deport foreign nationals deemed to have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” – a vague formulation that the government has claimed provides it extraordinary leeway to pursue opinions it doesn’t like.
Khalil was just the first. This month, immigration officials have made a string of arrests with similarly specious justifications from the government. And it hasn’t always been clear why the government has targeted specific students.
Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student and legal permanent resident, was pursued after she attended a sit-in expressing solidarity with student protesters who were expelled. In a lawsuit filed to block her arrest and deportation, lawyers noted that she never played an organizing or leading role in any of the protest efforts, saying: “She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns.” Yet immigration agents went to great lengths to find and arrest her, seeking help from federal prosecutors to search her dormitory using a warrant that cited a criminal law against “harboring noncitizens”. (To date, they have not managed to detain her, and a judge has asked officials to halt efforts to do so.)
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student at Tufts, was ambushed by agents on the street outside her home and put in a detention center in Louisiana. She, again, was accused of supporting Hamas. But her only known activism, friends and colleagues said, was co-authoring an op-ed in the school newspaper amplifying a student senate vote demanding that the university cut ties with Israel.
Trump is making good on campaign promises. “Any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told donors last May.
To aid the government’s hunt, far-right, pro-Israel groups such at Betar US have been flagging individual student protesters. The state department has also said it has launched an AI-enabled “catch and revoke” initiative, which will scrape social media to find “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups”.
This isn’t the first time the US has taken aim at young people advocating for Palestinians – nearly 40 years ago, immigration officials in Los Angeles arrested eight young immigrants, including two permanent residents, claiming they supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the US designates a terrorist group. At that time, after extensive surveillance and investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that these activists – who came to be known as the “LA eight” – had committed no crimes, let alone terrorism. But the agency urged immigration authorities to deport them anyway, characterizing their protests as “anti-Israel” and “anti-Reagan” – echoing the current administration’s rhetoric.
The LA eight fought deportation for two decades, and the US government has not tried to deport people over speech in the same way since – until now.
And there are signs that this is just the beginning.
Weeks before the 2024 election, the ultra-conservative Heritage Project thinktank released “Project Esther”, a 10,000-word blueprint for quashing pro-Palestinian and anti-war protests.
The Trump administration has not confirmed whether it has taken cues from the document, but it has adopted many of its suggestions, including pushing universities to restrict protests and reform their curricula. Last week, under threat of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, Columbia caved to the administration’s demands to implement stronger disciplinary measures against pro-Palestinian protesters and take control of one of its academic departments away from faculty. The university agreed to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism that academics and activists say could be weaponised to harass and expel critics of Israel. Even Kenneth Stern, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College and the lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, said he shares this worry.
Many of the administration’s moves are being challenged in the courts, teeing up what is certain to be a high-stakes fight over the first amendment. Judges have so far temporarily blocked the deportation of several students and recent graduates caught up in the administration’s scheme.
In the meantime, academics and students have said that the administration’s aggressive crackdown has had a chilling effect on academic freedom and free expression.
Ramya Krishnan, of the Knight First Amendment Institute, a non-profit legal organization at Columbia University, and lead attorney on one of the cases against Trump’s efforts to deport protesters, compared the current scenario with the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
Even then, “you did not see the government rounding up students and faculty for engaging in political protest”, she said. “I really think this is unprecedented.”
