President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that would cancel visas and deport international students who have expressed support for Palestinians — the administration’s latest effort to both target immigrants and crack down on free speech, particularly on college campuses.
The fact sheet for the president’s order describes the move as a means to address antisemitism, directing the Justice Department to prosecute “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” and to use the necessary federal resources to fight what it called an “explosion of antisemitism” since Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel in October 2023.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” states the order, first obtained by Reuters.
The president said that he would also cancel the visas of students he considers “Hamas sympathizers,” describing college campuses as “infested with radicalism.”
High schools and colleges across the country erupted into protests last year over Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, which has killed at least 47,000 Palestinians in what the international community and human rights groups have since labeled a genocide. Protesters also demanded that their universities divest from Israeli companies to show their commitment to peace.
Trump’s order “promotes the false premise that Jews and Israel are one entity. This idea reinforces the antisemitic ‘dual-loyalty’ tropes,” said Jamie Beran, CEO of progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc. “Jews feel many ways about Israel and Palestine, and the protests on college campuses have included and continue to include many Jewish participants.”
Most protests appeared peaceful and unifying across ethnicities and religions — in fact, statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project in May found that 97% of U.S. campus protests over the violence in Gaza had been peaceful.
But despite that, law enforcement officials on many campuses were seen attacking and arresting students and professors in a manner not seen since the Vietnam War-era campus demonstrations.
“Like the college students who once protested segregation, the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa, the diverse collection of college students who protested against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza deserve our country’s thanks,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement.
Trump condemned the campus protests while he was on the campaign trail, while the Republican National Convention’s platform last year pledged to deport those who protested against Israel’s military offensive.
“We are disgusted that Trump and his antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian nationalist allies are planning to deport students and other immigrants for protesting the Israeli military’s brutal assault on Gaza,” said Eva Borgwardt, spokesperson for the Jewish American group IfNotNow.
Trump’s executive order is pulled directly from the “Project Esther” report created by the Heritage Foundation, the same group that put together the massive Project 2025 playbook. The former is also a blueprint for the Trump administration, focused on using the authority of the federal government to dismantle first the Palestine solidarity movement, and subsequently other progressive social movements.
Trump’s order requires federal department heads to make recommendations to the White House within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities that can be used to suppress any protests.
The order “has the potential to rip apart our communities, destroy my fellow classmates’ lives, and set a precedent that allows for authoritarian attacks on any group that opposes the MAGA agenda. As a Jewish student I refuse to allow my identity to be fuel for fascist crackdown on my fellow students,” said Benjamin Kersten, who joined the student encampment last year at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Because of the order’s broad reach, the directive won’t just impact those with student visas — millions of green card holders may face visa revocation and deportation because they support Palestinian freedom and self-determination.
Instead of actually addressing antisemitism, Trump’s order “is an excuse to exploit real Jewish fear and trauma to enact authoritarian policies – policies that functionally make all Americans, including Jews, unsafe,” Beran said. “It’s the latest cynical attempt by Republicans to use antisemitism and Jews as a tool to divide and attack their perceived enemies to further their dangerous authoritarian agenda.”
Despite the order appearing to only target immigrants and foreign students, experts of constitutional law warn that the directive moves the U.S. into dangerous territory when it comes to free speech of any kind and that the administration will surely be subject to legal scrutiny for that reason.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S., including those studying at American universities on a student visa, according to Carrie DeCell, attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Knight published two ICEmemos in 2023 confirming that efforts to deport foreign nationals who criticize Israel’s offensive in Gaza would undergo the highest level of legal review.
“Government lawyers have already considered at length whether proposals to remove people from the country based on their political speech are constitutional, and their answer is almost certainly no,” DeCell said. “They’re right. Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”
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Encouraged by pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, the Trump administration is operating under what Borgwardt called the lie that Jewish safety can be achieved through mass deportations and free speech crackdowns.
“The opposite is true: empowering the far right endangers Jews,” she said. “The only true safety is shared safety. We will be safe when our neighbors are safe; our neighbors will be safe when we are safe. There is no other way.”