The Assault on Campus Protests

On January 29, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” The order, which builds on a prior executive order from Trump’s first term, represents a complete abandonment of universal principles of the rule of law. While the Biden administration encouraged suppression of campus protests against US complicity in Israel’s military operations in Gaza after October 7, 2023, in doing so, it at least alluded to such principles. The administration consistently put Islamophobia beside antisemitism as discriminatory forces that it sought to abate. By contrast, Trump’s recent executive order drops any pretense of universality and explicitly targets supporters of Palestine.

While one might think, as I initially did, that Trump’s antecedent executive order was issued in response to the deadliest antisemitic attack in US history at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh—in which Robert Bowers killed eleven worshippers and injured six others—the shooting occurred more than one year before it was issued. Instead, Trump’s 2019 executive order appears to have been issued in response to the growing salience of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement on US campuses. The calls for economic and academic boycotts gained enough momentum to generate scores of anti-BDS bills in state legislatures and two proposed federal laws introduced in Congress in 2018 and 2019.

The most significant feature of the 2019 executive order was its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which labels as antisemitic certain kinds of criticism of Israel, such as claims that it is a racist or apartheid state, as well as calls for boycotts in response to the actions of the state of Israel. To its credit, the IHRA indicates that its broadened definition is “non-legally binding.” However, state legislatures, Congress, and the White House were seeking to will into law a defense of Israel and a characterization of BDS campaigns as antisemitic. The IHRA definition—which the AAUP and others have critiqued and opposed—served those political purposes.

The second Trump executive order builds on the first in characterizing criticism of Israel after the October 7 Hamas attacks as antisemitic. As with other US defenses of Israel since the October 7 attacks, this order attempts to displace the massive death toll and civilizational destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and universities in Gaza with a narrative of American campus carnage. While the encampments erected during the peak of the protests in spring 2024 undoubtedly blocked certain thoroughfares and caused inconvenience to nonparticipants, it was likely the visibility, magnitude, and sustained nature of the protests that most shook pro-Israeli students and organizations. Israel’s unrestrained reaction to the October 7 attacks had caused an epistemic break among a generation of students (as well as faculty and staff), who no longer saw Israel as an essential regional partner immune from criticism. While that bipartisan consensus held in Washington, DC, it was being challenged from below on US campuses.

To combat antisemitism, as it had defined the term, the 2025 executive order encourages the US attorney general “to employ appropriate civil-rights enforcement authorities, such as 18 U.S.C. 241,” a federal criminal law provision that targets conspiracy against rights. Originally enacted as part of section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, the provision was intended to criminalize conspiracies, carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups, to prevent formerly enslaved people from voting. The Trump administration seems unlikely to use this provision in the fight against antisemitic white supremacist groups. It remains unclear how the provision may be enforced against pro-Palestinian protesters, as the law requires proof of the violation of federal constitutional or statutory rights and of specific intent to deprive targets of the exercise of such rights, both of which are lacking in the allegations made against protesters up to this point. Nevertheless, the order sends a signal to ambitious prosecutors seeking to distinguish themselves for promotions within the Trumpist legal firmament.

The order also instructs the secretaries of state, education, and homeland security to include “recommendations for familiarizing institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3) so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” In other words, the order seeks to leverage existing immigration laws against pro-Palestinian protesters studying in the United States.

The suggestions regarding the use of the Enforcement Act provision and deportation laws likely stem from a Heritage Foundation strategy document, Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism. Because Hamas has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department since 1997, the Heritage Foundation’s allegations that groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace are “Hamas Support Organizations” that “manufacture and mobilize support” for a global “Hamas Support Network” ostensibly implicate the terrorism grounds for deportation in the Immigration and Naturalization Act. (The Heritage Foundation further alleges that the “Hamas Support Network” is backed by such far-flung “masterminds” as George Soros, Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Angela Davis.)

The order’s deportation strategy appears to rely upon the “ideological exclusion or endorse/espouse provision” of the Real ID Act of 2005, through which President George W. Bush expanded the terrorist-activity grounds for exclusion to include anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Because visa holders have presumably been lawfully admitted to the United States, the government bears the burden to show by clear and convincing evidence that the visa holder has supported a terrorist organization. The law purports to require detention during the pendency of a deportation case on these grounds and eliminates eligibility for various forms of relief from removal, such as asylum.

Already, the US affiliate of the Betar Zionist movement, the only Jewish organization on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of extremist organizations, has taken the lead in attempting to identify immigrant students involved in campus protests using facial-recognition software. The group has given its list, which includes the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, to the Trump administration in the hope that it will initiate deportation actions. To date, no court has had to determine whether a person may be deported under the “endorse/espouse” provision for speech protected under the First Amendment. This order invites university cooperation in identifying and monitoring pro-Palestinian protesters as targets for deportation. Though it is unclear how complicit Columbia University was in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, its actions since suggest at least acquiescence to his disappearance by unidentified agents of the federal government. Further, because of the government’s seemingly accidental discovery of Khalil’s legal permanent resident status, it has been incrementally drawing on various provisions of immigration law to justify his detention and deportation with questionable basis and little grounding in practice.

Immigration law, it is worth noting, includes a clearer, less fraught ground for the exclusion of any person “who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in genocide.” Because of the current bipartisan configuration of power relations in the United States, the enforcement of this provision against participants in the destruction of Gaza in any presidential administration is not politically viable, but it is law on the books.

As universities and colleges consider their obligations to comply with this executive order, they should keep in mind the broader context of its adoption. The Right has identified universities and colleges as sites of prodemocratic and antiauthoritarian activism and collective action. Perhaps especially in an era in which the public sphere has been hollowed out and technology is a force of alienation, campuses are rare spaces in which students experiment with assertions of democratic agency and new solidarities, pushing beyond the limits imposed by family and hometown. Epistemic disjuncture is a necessary outcome of research (to look again and again, to revise and originate new theories), cogenerative teaching, and active learning. Students, staff, and faculty collectively exercise contentious citizenship and rejuvenate deadened spaces in contemporary American life.

This executive order, along with others prohibiting “DEI,” is an effort by the Trump administration to drain US campuses of their contentious, democratic spirit. Extravagantly resourced elite universities have shown few signs of resistance to authoritarian imperatives falsely premised on antisemitism. It was under the last Democratic administration, after all, that university boards, apparently in response to pressure from the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce, forced out the presidents at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania and administrators called in police to crush pro-Palestinian encampments at private and public institutions around the country. University administrators and trustees will not fight for our democratic, contentious spirit because, for the most part, they are agents of protoauthoritarian capital.

It is up to rank-and-file faculty and staff to shelter and nurture the prefigurative activism of our students, to rise from what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten termed “the undercommons” to confront administrators who bend to the whims of donors and would-be dictators. For example, at the University of California, UAW Local 4811 conducted stand-up strikes in spring 2024 against unfair labor practices and in support of their members engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. At this conjuncture, those are the kinds of formations and alliances we must join or create to stave off the death drive from above and to build power from the ground up.

Sameer Ashar is clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and faculty director of the Workers and Tenants Law and Organizing Clinic. Thanks to Annie Lai, Leti Volpp, Muneer Ahmad, and Swethaa Ballakrishnen for their comments.