Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told Fox News host Harris Faulkner Wednesday on “The Faulkner Focus” a visa pause was “perfectly permissible,” saying the U.S. has “the right to know” who enters the country.
The Trump administration announced Tuesday it was pausing new student visa interviews to expand vetting of social media accounts. Faulkner noted the “lawfare” being waged against Trump administration policies, and asked if the new procedures would hold up in court after Dershowitz described deportation as a tool to prevent violence.
“Legally, it’s perfectly permissible,” Dershowitz said after he described the rise of antisemitism at Harvard. “The administration has the right to determine who comes into the country. Congress has some power, but the branch that has the least amount of power over this issue is the judiciary, which is taking all the power now and we have the right to know who comes into this country. There is no First Amendment right to come into the country and preach anti-American, anti-Semitic.”
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“From the beginning of time, countries have deported, exiled, made decisions about who stays in the country and who doesn’t,” Dershowitz continued. “What we’re seeing going on in the college campuses today, two kids killed in Washington, D.C last week, two wonderful young people, I predicted that shooting in my book ‘The Preventive State,’ I absolutely predicted it. I said based on my representation over the years of radicals, some of whom become murderers, when you start protesting in a violent way, breaking windows and harassing people and shoving people, the step toward planting a bomb or getting a gun is a short step.”
A pro-Hamas activist was charged in connection with the May 21 shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum that left Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim dead. Since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by the radical Islamic terrorist group Hamas that killed over 1,200 people in Israel, pro-Hamas protesters have occupied buildings, chanted a slogan that has connotations of wiping out Israel and blocked Jewish students from parts of campus at colleges and universities across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security also terminated Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification Thursday, citing the Ivy League school’s failure to address antisemitism and its failure to provide accurate data on funds from foreign sources. Dershowitz said that the Trump administration was taking a general approach to the situation on college campuses.
“They should be targeted actions targeting the departments that are teaching this stuff,” Dershowitz said. “They should be targeting students who, if they got a visa, would be hurting people in this country. They should be more targeted and less general. It is a good beginning. Vetting every potential applicant coming into this country is legally permissible and desirable from a moral point of view.”
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