New York, United States – Last week, United States President Donald Trump published a message directed at the student protesters who participated in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
It was a warning. And it was aimed specifically at the immigrants among the protesters.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump was quoted as saying in a White House fact sheet.
“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
The statement was the latest sign that the fallout from the protests was far from over. If anything, under Trump’s second term, free-speech advocates and Palestinian rights supporters are bracing for a continued crackdown on the university activists who led demonstrations.
“The legal questions about deporting students for speech that would otherwise be protected in the US are complicated,” Sarah McLaughlin, a scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Al Jazeera.
“But the ethical question is clear: Do we want deportation to be a consequence for expressing political views disfavoured by the White House?”
A plan to ‘remove’ foreign students
Trump’s statements came on the heels of a new executive order, signed on January 29. It paved the way for the deportation of foreign students in the name of combatting anti-Semitism on campus.
The order pledges “immediate action” to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence”.
To achieve that goal, it calls on the secretary of education to provide an inventory of court cases involving anti-Semitism at colleges, universities and schools teaching kindergarten through 12th grade.
The order also requires all higher education establishments to be instructed on how to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” that are relevant to the anti-Semitism push.
If warranted, the government can then initiate “actions to remove such aliens”.
The order comes in response to what the Trump administration calls an “explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023”. On that day, fighters from the Palestinian armed group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing an estimated 1,139 people.
Israel responded with war. For 15 months, Israeli bombs fell on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, as its troops levelled hospitals, schools and neighbourhoods.
Now that a fragile ceasefire has taken hold, officials hope to get a more accurate picture of the death toll, which currently sits at 62,000, many of the dead being Palestinian women and children.
United Nations experts have compared Israel’s warfare methods with genocide, and concerns about human rights prompted thousands of students at colleges and universities to rally in protest.
Some set up encampments to denounce Israel’s actions. Others picketed to demand their universities divest from Israeli businesses and other companies that supported the war.
But while the protests were largely peaceful, some expressed discomfort with the public criticisms of Israel, a key US ally. Others accused the demonstrators of anti-Semitism, though protest leaders have denied such allegations.
Under pressure from donors and legislators, many universities cracked down on pro-Palestine activities on campuses. As many as 3,000 student protesters were arrested at the height of the protest movement in 2024.
‘Censors and snitches’
In the meantime, questions of anti-Semitism in the protest movement reached the highest levels of government, with then-President Joe Biden pledging to take action.
The movement also unfolded against the backdrop of a heated US presidential election season, and Trump used the issue as part of his campaign.
The Washington Post reported in May that he told donors he would take student protesters and “throw them out of the country”.
Later, in July, Republicans published a party platform that reflected similar rhetoric. One of its promises was to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”.
Trump even threatened to pull funding and accreditation from universities that failed to sufficiently tamp down on the protesters.
Dima Khalidi — the director of Palestine Legal, a group protecting the rights of Palestine advocates in the US — called Trump’s order last week “the latest in a growing list of dangerous, authoritarian measures aimed at enforcing an ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students into silence”.
She believes Trump’s order violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects free speech and the right to assembly. And she argues that the danger stretches further than the recent pro-Palestinian movement.
“The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi said.
“It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump’s agenda and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches.”
Free-speech questions
Like other executive actions Trump rushed to sign during the first days of his second term, the January 29 order is expected to face legal challenges.
Carrie DeCell, a senior staff lawyer at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, explained that First Amendment protections apply to “everyone in the United States”, regardless of citizenship or visa status.
“Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional,” she wrote in a statement.
However, McLaughlin, the free speech advocate, pointed out that the federal government still “retains significant authority over the presence of foreign nationals in the country”.
That could result in a chilling effect: silencing vulnerable student protesters who rely on visas or other immigration documents to stay in the US.
“This order, coupled with President Trump’s accompanying threat to deport what he deems ‘Hamas sympathisers’, will suggest to international students that the rights promised on our nation’s campuses are not theirs to enjoy,” McLaughlin said.
“This is a loss for these students, whose speech will likely be chilled, and for their peers, who will be deprived of the ability to hear, engage with, and challenge those views.”
In a statement for the free-speech organisation PEN America, Kristen Shahverdian said Trump’s order was “reminiscent of McCarthyism”, a period in history when the US government sought to root out and ostracise people deemed “subversive”.
“While the stated goal of this executive order is combating anti-Semitism, instead it significantly risks creating an authoritarian-like army of informers who will be empowered to target international students, faculty and staff for their views,” she explained.
“This order will do little to further dialogue and understanding on campus, or combat bigotry. Rather, it will further worsen a climate of fear and mistrust.”
Combating anti-Semitism
Not only does the executive order raise issues of free speech, but critics also questioned whether Trump’s directive would actually achieve its stated aim of combatting anti-Semitism.
In a statement, Ben Olinsky, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, accused the Trump administration of weaponising anti-Semitism “for political gain”.
“It does nothing to keep Jewish students or any other Americans safe from hate or prevent terrorism, which pose legitimate threats to America’s Jewish communities,” Olinsky wrote.
“Instead, it forsakes education and dialogue while attacking protected political speech. It’s clear that Trump’s real goal is to silence opposing voices.”
While reports of anti-Semitism did rise over the past year, so too did incidents of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate.
From January to July 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, tallied 4,951 complaints, a 69 percent increase over the same period the previous year.
In the wake of Trump’s executive order, the group denounced the fact that those incidents were not considered at all.
“The order completely ignores real and documented incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim violence against American college students by pro-Israel extremists,” CAIR wrote in its statement.
It also called the order an “attempt to smear the many Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and other college students who protested” the war together.
Other critics, like Olinksy, argued that if Trump were serious about combatting anti-Semitism, he would distance himself from groups like the far-right Proud Boys.
“If President Trump really cared [about] the very real rise in acts of anti-Semitism, he would start by firing Elon Musk for making what appeared to be a Nazi salute last week,” Olinsky also said.
“President Trump’s repeated refusal to condemn anti-Semitism when it comes from his own supporters is helping to enable the troubling rise in anti-Semitism that we see today.”
