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The brazen killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers after a Jewish social event in Washington on Wednesday quickly became a flash point in the Trump administration's broader campaign against antisemitism, with the White House and a top Justice Department official tying the shooting to ongoing campus protests of Israel's war in Gaza. "Frankly, we have seen a rise in antisemitic protests, of pro-Hamas protests, of terrorist sympathizers - we saw them on our college campuses," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said after kicking off her Thursday briefing by expressing condolences to the victims, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26.
She said the Trump administration "has done more than any administration in history to crack down on antisemitism."
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, "reaffirmed his commitment to uproot the violent antisemitism that has swept across university campuses in this country" during a conversation about the slayings with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, said Yechiel Leiter, the country's ambassador to the United States.
And Leo Terrell, a Justice Department official leading the administration's multiagency antisemitism task force, said in a post to X that the shooting "goes far beyond the murder of two individuals."
"It reflects a systemic crisis of antisemitism - seen in the shooter's hatred, the failure to enforce hate crime statutes, the institutions that helped shape him, and the media narratives that normalize or excuse antisemitism," Terrell wrote.
Since taking office, Trump has made combating antisemitism a key part of his agenda, an effort that critics say has veered at times into stifling dissenting speech critical of Israel's war in Gaza. Wednesday's slayings cast those policies into sharp relief, as several administration officials sought to draw a connection between the startling act of violence and Trump's stated rationale for controversial policies like canceling billions in federal funding to universities and trying to detain and deport protest leaders.
The man charged in the slayings - Elias Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago - was caught on video shouting "free, free Palestine" as he was taken into custody near the shooting site late Wednesday night. According to a criminal complaint filed in his case, he spontaneously told officers, "I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza."
Officials have not yet said whether Rodriguez had any connection to campus protests or other organized groups. And as the FBI worked Thursday to probe his background and motivation, Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that investigators believe Rodriguez acted alone.
Rodriguez was charged with, among other crimes, murdering foreign officials and first-degree murder. "We're going to continue to investigate this as hate crime, and a crime of terrorism, and we will add additional charges as the evidence warrants," Jeanine Pirro, Trump's appointee as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., said at a news conference.
In his online posts Thursday, Terrell, the leader of the antisemitism task force, said the slayings "underscore the magnitude of antisemitism" in the country and threatened lawsuits against universities that fail to stop its spread on their campuses.
He shared video of a protest of Israel's actions at Columbia University with the message, adding "This madness must stop NOW!" and retweeted messages from others calling on the Justice Department to pursue a death-penalty case against Rodriguez - a move Bondi would not immediately commit to when asked by reporters as she visited the shooting scene later that day.
A former Fox News personality who now serves as a senior counsel to the attorney general for civil rights, Terrell has emerged as an outspoken leader of the multiagency team that Trump launched in the first days of his administration to root out "anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses."
Since then, the task force has threatened or imposed sanctions against universities including Harvard and Columbia - and launched investigations into several others - over administrators' response to demonstrations against Israel's war in Gaza that have erupted on their campuses.
The task force's work is part of a larger push by the administration to scrutinize the pro-Palestinian protest movement in the U.S. Trump signed an executive order to combat antisemitism the week after he took office, and it included a provision "to marshal all Federal resources to combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets."
In February, Bondi launched a separate Justice Department task force charged with investigating the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, specifically directing prosecutors to, among other things, bring charges of terrorism, civil rights violations and other federal crimes "committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses."
Already, the department has launched an investigation into whether Columbia's handling of clashes on its campus "violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes," Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a speech in March.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students, citing in parts what Secretary Kristi L. Noem described as a "fostering [of] violence" and "antisemitism" on campus. Meanwhile, at least a dozen students and faculty members at colleges across the country who have led protests or voiced criticism of Israel have been detained by immigration authorities seeking to revoke their legal status and remove them from the country.
Among them is Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and one of the leading figures in pro-Palestinian protests at the school, who has been held in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana since March. Though he is a legal permanent resident, the administration has sought Khalil's deportation, arguing that he is a Hamas sympathizer and his presence in the United States is a national security threat.
Whether Rodriguez, the suspect in Wednesday's shooting, had significant ties to the wider, organized Gaza protest movement remains under investigation, investigators said. Yet there were signs that Rodriguez harbored some interest in the methods and effectiveness of nonviolent resistance.
He was quoted in a 2017 media article as having participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Chicago that year on behalf of Party for Socialism and Liberation. The group distanced itself from Rodriguez on Thursday, saying in a post on X that he had only "a brief association" with one branch of the organization and that they had not had contact with him in more than seven years.
"We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it," the group said in its post.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said Thursday that agents were still working to authenticate writings posted online about an hour after the shooting by an account that appears to have belonged to Rodriguez.
The document - titled "Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home" - accused Israel of "genocide" and references the protest movement that has erupted in the United States in response to the war in Gaza. It also makes oblique references to what its author describes as efforts by the U.S. government to "criminalize" nonviolent protests and political pressure in support of Gaza.
After his arrest, Rodriguez allegedly expressed admiration for a man who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington in 2024 and told agents he found that form of protest courageous, according to the criminal complaint filed in his case.
Pirro, speaking to reporters at a news conference Thursday, said the investigation into Rodriguez's background and beliefs continues.
"Violence against anyone based on their religion is an act of cowardice - it is not the act of a hero," she said, adding: "Antisemitism will not be tolerated, especially in the nation's capital."