Pro-Palestinian Students Fearing Deportation Scramble To Erase Opinions From Newspaper Articles

Foreign students are reportedly asking campus newspapers to scrub their comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict as the Trump administration deports alleged terrorism supporters.

Visa holders at American universities have requested that student publications make them anonymous in articles, remove their written-down commentary such as opinion pieces and have quit working for the outlets since President Donald Trump’s return to office, the Guardian reported. The panic comes as Trump’s officials have worked to deport foreign nationals accused of supporting terrorist groups or putting U.S. foreign policy at risk, citing federal law.

The trepidation around anti-Israel advocacy stands in contrast to the years of Joe Biden’s presidency, when activists frequently made national news at colleges by illegally taking over campus facilities in large numbers or espousing violent rhetoric against Israel and Jews.

The first highly publicized example of the Trump administration’s crackdown was its arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead a pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia University that cost the school millions of dollars in federal funding. Lawyers are fighting in court to keep the government from deporting him on the basis of national security.