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| Protesters march during a demonstration in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, March 10 in New York. AP Photo/Arhó Albi |
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| Professor of Law and Founding Director of CLEAR at the City University of New York, Ramzi Kassem, speaks to the media after attending a hearing in Manhattan federal court addressing the deportation case of Mahmoud Khalil, March 12 in New York. AP Photo/Albert Arhó |
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urged universities around the country to reject any federal pressure to surveil or punish international students and faculty based on constitutionally protected speech in response to recent executive orders and other communications from the White House.
The orders attempt to pressure university officials to target students, faculty, and staff who are not U.S. citizens, including holders of non-immigrant visas and lawful permanent residents or others on a path to U.S. citizenship, for exercising their First Amendment rights, said the ACLU in an open letter. |
It stems from President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders: 14161 (“Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats”/Jan. 20, 2025) and Executive Order 14188 (“Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”/Jan. 29, 2025) and related communications from the White House.
The ACLU letter came after President Trump threatened to stop all federal funding for any college, school or university that allow “illegal protests,” to imprison or permanently send back “agitators” to the country from which they came, and that “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”
“It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly. We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director of the ACLU and co-author of the letter.
“Trump’s latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities,” she said in a March 4 news release announcing the letter.
Mr. Khalil became the face of campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war which took root on Columbia University’s campus last spring. The father-to-be became a familiar, outspoken figure in a student movement that soon spread to other U.S. colleges, according to arraw.medium.com
On March 13, nearly 100 arrests were made at Trump Tower in Midtown after hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers and friends packed into the lobby to protest Mr. Khalil’s detainment, according to a WABC news report.
Video taken that afternoon showed officers handcuffing some of the demonstrators associated with Jewish Voice for Peace—an organization that is critical of many of Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians, WABC reported. At least 98 people arrested face charges of trespassing, obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest.
Columbia University became the hotbed of student protests of Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians, waged on October 7, 2023, under the guise of eradicating the resistance group Hamas.
Nationwide demonstrations began at Columbia University in New York City on April 17, 2024, in protest of Israel’s bloodshed in Gaza. After failed negotiations between students and college administrators, pressure was exerted to demolish the student campus encampments.
This is not the first time the university has been a hotbed of activism, such as the successful 1985 three-week student demonstration by members of the Coalition for a Free South Africa which forced Columbia into the movement that divested from South Africa against its anti-Black racial apartheid policies.
In December 2023, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) called on Columbia University to withdraw financial support from Israel on behalf of a coalition representing 300 students and 89 student organizations.
On March 7, members of the White House Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced the immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University citing the school’s alleged “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
Before the arrest of Mr. Khalil, the Trump administration pressured Columbia University to crack down on reported anti-Israel activism among students and faculty, and he has threatened to go after any college that supports protests he deems “illegal,” noted AP.
Whether colleges and universities will enact measures to protect student protesters now targeted by the new federal policies by executive order remains to be seen. Particularly because some of the schools called law enforcement on peaceful student demonstrators, and allowed off-campus counter-protesters to enter campuses and violently attack student encampments.
Students across the country rose up to demand that their colleges and universities stop doing business with military weapons manufacturers who supply arms to Israel; stop accepting research money from Israel for projects that aid the country’s military efforts;
Stop investing college endowments with money managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors; and have more transparency of funds received from Israel and how it is used, according to various reports.
Mr. Khalil, like many around the country, was leading some of the protests on the campus, daring to demand, “Free Palestine,” stated Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-founder and director of Black Lives Matter Grassroots based in Los Angeles.
It is not radical to say that Palestinians have the right to their lives, Palestinian children have the right to live, that they don’t get to bomb houses and genocide an entire people for the purposes of their own enrichment, she argued.
As of Feb. 3 the latest death toll stood at over 62,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza and the West Bank according to Al Jazeera. There are still thousands missing who are presumed dead.
“It’s beyond what our constitutional right is. It’s what our human obligation is,” Dr. Abdullah told The Final Call. Speaking up and organizing is imperative, not just as human beings in the United States, but “also what our religion, what our faith demands of us,” she added.
According to Dr. Abdullah, threats are also being sent to other students who are part of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP, which uplifts demands for freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people) or any protest group.
“I think about my own child (Thandiwe Abdullah), co-founder of the SJP chapter on her campus at Howard University and about all of the students we work with and encourage to speak up in the face of oppression,” she added.
“It’s the duty that our faith gives us, is that we should speak up, but it’s also any human being should not just sit idly by as injustice happens. … We have to remember this is not just a one-person thing. This is what they’re planning to do and so we all have to stand together because what they can’t do is they can’t get all of us,” she said.
Dr. Ray Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, stated he is concerned about President Trump’s disturbing vision of turning Gaza into a “resort.”
It shows an absence of conscience, he said, adding, “How could you even think to build a resort area over the dead children and women and men of Gaza?”
Where it’s going to turn, Dr. Winbush said he does not know, but remarked the world is in an upheaval and it would take years to undo some of the damage. He shunned the idea that critiquing or criticizing Israel makes one “anti-Semitic,” saying the term has been misused, abused and co-opted by Israel.
Meanwhile, “These are smart students! And they saw a crime against humanity being committed against the Palestinians, and they rose up against it,” he said about their calls for top Ivy League schools—Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, and Brown—to stop funding huge amounts of money to Israel.
“They saw an injustice, and they wanted to cut off all aid to the perpetrator, which was Israel. … And their protest said, divest in Israel. We are not anti-Jewish. What we are is anti-atrocity and anti-criminal behavior toward Gaza,” he added.
Victoria Hinckley, a student organizer with Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was a senior at the University of South Florida when she was suspended and then expelled right before graduation for participating in demonstrations.
Despite her appeal being denied, she is fighting the expulsion through legal means, including a complaint with the Federal Office of Civil Rights. “But given how Trump is attacking that office now it’s not looking good, but we’re still trying to fight it back with other legal strategies,” Ms. Hinckely told The Final Call.
Already, the Department of Education has issued letters to 60 universities, alleging instances of anti-Semitism, and many had very strong campus movements with encampments, including USF, she said.
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