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President Donald Trump's crackdown on alleged antisemitism on college campuses is alarming students and instructors who say the administration is trying to outlaw criticism of Israel's war in Gaza and bend universities to his will.
Trump says he's just getting started.
Since last Saturday's detention of a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder without criminal charges, the Department of Homeland Security has publicized the removal of two students who participated in Gaza protests at the school. Federal agents entered two dorms on the New York campus with search warrants Thursday night, the university's interim president announced, saying she was "heartbroken." No one was arrested.
Several agencies sent a joint letter demanding disciplinary changes and the right to monitor an academic department as a precondition to restoring $400 million in federal funding. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating Columbia not only for civil rights violations but also for "terrorism crimes."
Administration officials, including Trump, have been vague about what constitutes antisemitism. But the crackdown fulfills multiple campaign promises: a pledge to stand with American Jews, whom he heavily courted for their votes in November; a promise to combat "anti-American" behavior on liberal campuses; and, perhaps his top policy priority, the deportation of noncitizens living in the United States illegally.
What is clear is that Trump is willing to use the full power of the federal government, including its purse strings, to dramatically change behavior - by both students and administrators - on college campuses. Trump applauded the detention of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and called it "the first arrest of many to come."
"The chill seems to be the point here," said Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. "If we say that folks who are here lawfully, even those folks who have committed no crime, need to watch what they say, lest they get a knock on the door in the middle of the night, we're essentially no better than the countries that folks have left for decades and centuries to come here."
On Thursday, Columbia announced expulsions, multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and other punishments for students who the university said had violated rules while protesting the Israel-Gaza war. The actions stemmed from high-profile protests last spring that sparked a national movement of tent encampments and police crackdowns across the country. It also animated a campaign rallying cry by Trump and other Republicans, who lambasted elite college presidents for struggling to distinguish protected free expression from misconduct, leading to resignations at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Columbia has been investigating and holding hearings for nearly a year.
The Trump administration's letter to the university, from the Education and Health and Human Services departments and the General Services Administration, directed school officials to expel or suspend protesters who joined an encampment and seized a university building last year. The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, also demanded that the school define antisemitism, ban masks, reform admissions and impose five years of academic receivership for its department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies.
The letter set a deadline of March 20 for the measures as a "precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University's continued financial relationship with the United States government." And it shocked advocates for free speech.
"The subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. "No one should be under any illusions about what's going on here."
The ripple effects are already apparent.
On Tuesday, Columbia Journalism School held a meeting with students to talk about free speech and reporting after Khalil's arrest. Someone asked what the school was doing to protect visa-holding students from arrest and deportation. The school's dean, Jelani Cobb, said that he would do anything in his power to protect students and their ability to report but that no one has the capacity to stop DHS from jeopardizing their safety.
"These are, in fact, dangerous times," Cobb posted later on social media. "They require as much caution as they do courage."
DHS said Friday that it revoked the visa of a Columbia student from India who participated in protests and that she left the country on Tuesday, releasing surveillance footage of her departure. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested another student, from the West Bank, for overstaying her visa after she had previously been arrested as part of the Gaza protests.
The effects are not confined to higher education. The mayor of Miami Beach proposed defunding an arthouse theater that screened an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Khalil, a native of Syria who studied at Columbia with a student visa and then became a legal permanent resident, is being held by federal immigration authorities in Louisiana. His lawyer said he was arrested last Saturday while returning to his apartment with his pregnant wife, who is a U.S. citizen. First Amendment attorneys called the arrest a violation of Khalil's rights and an attempt to intimidate others.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who personally ordered Khalil's detention, denied that free speech rights were relevant.
"No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card," he said. "If you told us that's what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in. And if you do it once you get in, we're going to revoke it and kick you out."
The administration has not alleged that Khalil violated any laws. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said DHS provided her with a copy of "Hamas propaganda" fliers that Khalil allegedly distributed, but declined to provide them to reporters.
"He's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity," DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar told NPR's Michel Martin of Khalil on Thursday. "The secretary of state can review his visa process at any point and revoke it."
Edgar repeatedly declined to specify whether criticizing the government was a cause for deportation.
In an interview with The Post in January, Khalil said he was not affiliated with the main protest group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest. He served as a negotiator between the group and university officials during protests last year.
The question of whether anti-Israel demonstrations have amounted to antisemitism has roiled U.S. protests since the war broke out. While there have been instances of protesters targeting Jews and breaking anti-vandalism and anti-trespassing laws, most have demonstrated specifically against Israel's bombardment of Gaza. Some Jewish students say protests have made them feel unsafe on campus and disrupted their ability to get an education.
The administration's measures grew out of Trump's outreach to Jewish voters after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. During the campaign, Trump pledged to deport pro-Palestinian student demonstrators. Other Republicans argued that student encampments protesting the war created a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students and cited instances of harassment.
"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," the White House said in a Jan. 30 statement.
In an executive order that day, Trump directed agencies to review laws available to fight antisemitism and told the Justice Department to "investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities."
The order built on a 2019 measure he signed specifying that antisemitism is a form of illegal discrimination that could trigger the loss of federal education funding. That order did not define antisemitism but instructed officials to "consider" a nonbinding definition that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance established in 2016.
That definition, which has been criticized as overly vague and broad, described antisemitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews." The IHRA cautioned, however, that criticizing Israel does not automatically qualify as being antisemitic.
Forty-eight percent of Americans oppose canceling visas for students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, with 31 percent strongly opposed, according to an NPR/Ipsos survey in February. About a third supported the policy somewhat or strongly, and 16 percent said they did not know.
Past efforts by the U.S. government to punish opposing views often targeted immigrants, according to Beverly Gage, a Yale historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover. In 1919 and 1920, the Justice Department arrested and deported suspected anarchists and communists in what were known as the Palmer Raids, after then-Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Historians call the period the "First Red Scare."
The Immigration and Nationality Act that Rubio cited to justify detaining Khalil was passed in 1952 amid Cold War fears of communist subterfuge, a period often called the "Second Red Scare."
"The targeting of specific people and specific institutions can very rapidly have an oppressive effect," Gage said. "They make other people want to put their heads down, shut up and hope that they escape."