Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell told Fox News host Harris Faulkner on “The Faulker Focus” Tuesday that the Trump administration wasn’t backing down in its efforts to hold universities accountable for failing to prevent antisemitic activities.
The Department of Homeland Security 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. After Faulkner played a clip of Harvard’s president declaring his intention to be “firm” in defense of the university, she asked if he imagined antisemitism would be an issue.
“How did we get here?” Faulkner asked Terrell, who serves as senior counsel to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon. “Did you ever think this would be a principal part of your job in 2025?”
“Not in my lifetime. How did we get here? Because we have tolerated, we have tolerated antisemitism the last four years,” Terrell said. “And basically the Trump Administration — thank goodness President Trump is in office, he’s not going to tolerate it. He’s going to eliminate it.”
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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. Terrell said Harvard’s president was conflating academic freedom with being able to have international students.
“I want to destroy this myth by that president,” Terrell said. “Coming to school on a student visa is a privilege and he conflated that somehow academic freedom, this is not academic freedom. This is anti-Semitism in its purist, most hated form, being tolerated not only at universities, but throughout the country.”
Terell also told Faulkner he visited the scene of the Wednesday night shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum that left Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim dead.
“What happened last Friday — last Thursday with those two Israeli staffers. I was at the crime scene, I went to the scene. It was horrific,” Terrell told Faulkner. “This type of conduct should never be tolerated… We should have stopped it.”
Terrell also hinted that the Justice Department would be acting to address the rise of antisemitic harassment on campus.
“Unlike the previous administration, expect massive lawsuits against UC systems who practice on the East Coast, on the West Coast, in the Midwest,” Terrell said. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. Expect Title VII lawsuits… This is going to stop. We’re going on a full front of activity in the courtroom. We will meet them in court.”
Ivy League school Columbia University is also facing a civil rights investigation over claims it failed to address antisemitism on its campus. Health and Human Services announced on May 22 that the campus had acted with “deliberate indifference” regarding the harassment of Jewish students on campus since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
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