President Donald Trump has signed an executive order promising “immediate action” from federal law enforcement against noncitizen college students and others in the United States who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations during Israel’s war in Gaza.
The president has pledged to “deport” all “resident aliens” who joined protests, Trump said in a White House fact sheet.
“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” he vowed.
Trump also pledged to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” he claimed.
The Department of Justice will “aggressively” prosecute what it characterizes as “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” after “the explosion of antisemitism” on college campuses in the wake of Israel’s campaign, according to the White House.
“It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” the executive order states.
As The Independent has reported, both antisemitism and Islamophobic threats and violence surged after Hamas invaded Israel in 2023, kicking off the war in Gaza and widespread protests on U.S. campuses.
Under the order, government agencies have 60 days to produce a report “identifying all civil and criminal authorities or actions” to “curb or combat” antisemitism, with an inventory of complaints “against or involving” antisemitism in colleges and universities.
The U.S. Attorney General is “encouraged to employ appropriate civil rights enforcement authorities” to combat antisemitism, the order states.
The order also empowers colleges and universities to “monitor for and report activities” by “alien students and staff” for “investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”
Civil rights advocates warned that Trump’s antisemitism policy is likely unconstitutional and unfairly paints largely peaceful student protesters as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers.
“The Trump administration’s attempt to smear the many Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and other college students who protested the Israeli government’s genocide in overwhelmingly peaceful ways represents a dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attack on both free speech and the humanity of Palestinians, all for the sake of a foreign government,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote in a statement. “So is the administration’s apparent threat to deport any foreign student who merely participated in anti-genocide protests.”
“The First Amendment protects everyone in the United States, including foreign citizens studying at American universities,” Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Times of Israel. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”
Trump accused the previous administration, which opened more than 100 investigations into alleged antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus, of failing to stop anti-Jewish hate at universities.
Trump’s order does not define antisemitism, though the State Department currently relies on the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
A Biden administration official told Jewish Insider in 2023 that the White House maintained the first Trump administration’s policy of factoring antisemitism into federal discrimination investigations on campus, which included and consideration of the IHRA definition.
Ahead of Trump taking office, universities including Harvard, one of the most-watched centers of student protest activity against the Gaza war, settled antisemitism complaints, in what was seen as a move to head off scrutiny from the Trump administration.
The new administration could exert considerable influence over campus action through federal funding, investigations of schools, and using Trump’s considerable bully pulpit to add to the already heated atmosphere on campus around the Israel-Hamas war.
Estimates suggest more than 3,000 students were arrested across the U.S. protesting the Israel-Hamas war, which human rights groups have called genocide. Trump has urged that Palestinians be “cleaned out” of Gaza, which he callously characterized as a “demolition site.” His real-estate developer son-in-law Jared Kushner remarked last March that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could “be very valuable,” and also suggested civilians be moved out as the strip is “cleaned up.”
As The Independent has reported, campus protesters were met with a heavily armed police response, doxxing from outside groups, and violence from masked vigilantes.
Trump has made fighting what he deems antisemitism a major part of his new administration, nominating New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik to be his UN ambassador. Stefanik aggressively questioned university presidents about antisemitism during a hearing in the House in 2023.
On the campaign trail, Trump threatened to pull funding and accreditation from schools that allow what he called “antisemitic propaganda,” and to deport foreign student protesters.
He also claimed that Jews who maintained their traditional support for Democrats need to have their “head examined.”
Trump, in addition to fighting antisemitism, has been accused of antisemitism and fascist rhetoric himself.
The Republican allegedly said during his first term that he wished he had “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and that the genocidal fascist who killed millions of Jews did “some good things,” though Trump has denied making these comments.
General Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
In remarks from Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said he wants Egypt and Jordan to “take” the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who have been displaced by Israel’s bombardments, and “clean out” the area — alarming human rights groups who have warned that the president’s remarks amount to an endorsement of ethnic cleansing.
“You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said. “You know over the centuries it’s had many, many conflicts. And I don’t know, something has to happen. … It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Congress considered a bill last year that would require the Department of Education to consider the IHRA antisemitism definition when it carries out investigations on campus under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Civil rights advocates have warned against such policies, arguing they would chill legitimate criticism.
“Instead of addressing antisemitism on campus, this misguided legislation would punish protected political speech,” Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said in a statement at the time.