President Donald Trump’s executive order on foreigners who “support designated foreign terrorists” could be the start of a previously promised crackdown on radical pro-Palestinian students on American college campuses.
The Monday directive from Trump orders the U.S. government to deport foreigners who “bear hostile attitudes toward [American] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.” That could describe plenty of foreign students advocating for Hamas and other terrorist groups at American universities, an analyst told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“If a student group explicitly endorses terrorism or engages in criminality, and its leader is here on a visa, then that [student] doesn’t deserve to be here, benefiting from the country that he or she is assaulting,” Ryan Mauro, investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, told the DCNF. “Likewise, if a protestor is explicitly endorsing terrorism or ideologically-motivated crime and is here on a visa, they should also be removed.”
Mauro wrote a 122-page report on anti-Israel activism, labeling Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) the “group by far most responsible” for what he calls a “pro-terrorism” movement at colleges. The group has led demonstrations across the country and came into the spotlight in October 2023 for calling Hamas’s massacre of Israelis a “historic win.”
Bye-bye pro-Hamas students and professors here on visas
From one of Trump’s new executive orders: pic.twitter.com/yo26wrdJSg
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 21, 2025
The Republican Party’s 2024 platform and Trump’s new secretary of state both indicated that such messaging, if coming from visa holders, could result in deportation.
“If you apply for a visa to come into the United States and in the process of being looked at, it comes to light you’re a supporter of Hamas, we wouldn’t let you in,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday when asked about campus protests. “Now that you got the visa and [are] inside the U.S. and we realize you’re a supporter, we should remove your visa.”
The Senate confirmed Rubio on Monday to lead the State Department, which has the authority to issue and revoke visas. Federal law says a foreigner with ties to terrorists or who “endorses” terrorists or “terrorist activity” is ineligible to be in the U.S.
Students for Justice in Palestine did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s multiple requests for comment on how Trump’s order might affect its activism.
Constitutional law expert Ilya Shapiro told the DCNF that Trump’s executive order is both a good step toward fighting campus antisemitism and legally “tight.” Shapiro is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and frequently writes about the anti-Israel movement.
Shapiro said the U.S. government has “broad authority … to set rules for who can come to this country, how long they can stay, what they can do when they’re here,” and it is allowed to consider “cultural values” as part of its standards.
Shapiro noted that the State Department under former President Joe Biden admitted it could strip visas based on support for Hamas in a November 2023 letter to Rubio, then a U.S. senator from Florida.
“This is not creating new law,” Shapiro said of the executive order. “It’s telling the relevant authorities to enforce existing law.”
Mauro said the Trump administration could go further to thwart anti-Israel activist groups.
“If we sever the funding by revoking their non-profit statuses like we are supposed to do under IRS Code, their hate factories have to close,” the counterterrorism analyst said. Students for Justice in Palestine and other anti-Israel organizations receive funding from the tax-exempt nonprofit Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC) Foundation.
“The Trump Administration should start with revoking the pro-terrorism tax-exempt statuses because it’s the easiest and most effective measure,” Mauro told the DCNF. “Quickly get that out of the way and then focus on the more time-consuming task of forming the legal cases for revoking visas and starting deportation proceedings based on the highest possible standards of evidence.”
“I’ve got lists and evidence binders ready to go if the Trump Administration is serious about dismantling this anti-Semitic and anti-American infrastructure,” Mauro said, adding, “I’m only a call away.”
“It takes a long time for cultures to change broadly, but you’d quickly see progress on college campus[es] elsewhere,” Mauro said.
In letters sent to the Biden-Harris administration, Republicans in Congress urged officials to act on federal law that authorizes the deportation of visa holders who express support for terrorism. The House Judiciary Committee also wrote in a December report that the administration had failed to hand over information on “the number of aliens, including those on student visas,” driving support for terrorism “during anti-Israel protests.”
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