In the last week of January, US President Donald Trump promised to deport foreign college students involved in pro-Palestinian protests. The measure is part of a crackdown on alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses in the United States.

In Executive Order 13.899 signed on January 29, the federal government indicates the use of “all available and appropriate legal tools” to prosecute and remove perpetrators of “unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” These perpetrators include those who are foreigners on student visas who participated in “pro-jihadist” protests on college campuses, according to Al Jazeera. “To all foreign residents who joined the pro-jihadist protests, we warn you: in 2025, we will find you and deport you. [...] I will also swiftly cancel the student visas of all Hamas supporters on college campuses that have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said in remarks made on January 29.

This executive order, highlighted later on January 30 in a newsletter on the official White House website, comes in response to what the Republican administration calls an “explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023,” the date on which the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas began. Among the measures in the signed order are the following: “The Department of Justice will take immediate action to protect law and order, suppress pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism at leftist and anti-American colleges and universities.” [...] The Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Homeland Security have familiarized universities with a section of immigration law that states that aliens convicted of an act of terrorism are inadmissible to the United States [and] each Federal Executive Department and Agency Leader will review and report to the White House within sixty days on all available criminal and civil authorities and actions to combat anti-Semitism”.

The ratified document also accuses these pro-Hamas radicals of celebrating mass rapes, kidnappings and murders committed by the Hamas group. In addition, it accuses them of acts against American Jews, in which these described left-wing radicals are said to have physically prevented Jews from attending college classes, obstructed synagogues, assaulted worshippers and vandalized American monuments and statues.

Current US immigration law prohibits individuals from endorsing support for terrorist groups and practices, such as the US government considers the Hamas group to be. Thus, current immigration legislation authorizes the deportation of a non-citizen who endorses or supports terrorist activity. Although many protests on college campuses in the United States do not directly support Hamas, they are instead progressive and pro-Palestinian. "There is a great irony in the fact that students who were protesting apartheid are now subjected to forms of exclusion that border on apartheid [...]. Pro-Palestinian activism comes from your obligations as a human being and that when fascism is at the door, what we do is come together and become even stronger." Said Cornell University PhD student Momodou Taal, originally from Gambia, who is facing deportation in 2024, in an interview with “Democracy Now!”.

Humanitarian groups and organizations have also expressed their condemnation of the executive order signed by Trump. Dima Khalid, director of Palestine Legal, a group that seeks to protect the rights of Palestinian defenders in the United States, argues that the American president violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and the right to assembly: [...] “the latest in a growing list of dangerous and authoritarian measures designed to impose an ideological stranglehold on schools, trying to scare students into silence [...]. He encourages government agencies to find ways to achieve any dissent from Trump’s agenda and aims to recruit the universities themselves as their censors and informants”.

The executive actions signed in the last week of January demonstrate that the current Republican administration treats security and immigration issues in a biased manner. The reactionary agenda of the Trump administration tries to associate pro-Palestinian protests with a base of support for groups considered terrorists such as Hamas, in addition to classifying these students and protesters as anti-Semites, who hold demonstrations in favor of the end of armed conflicts in the region of Israel and Palestine.

At the same time, the orders signed by the US government completely ignore real and documented incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim violence on university campuses carried out by Zionists. From January to July 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, recorded 4,951 complaints, a 69 percent increase over the same period the previous year.

While these measures are clearly intended to combat anti-Semitism, they are clearly creating a space ripe for attacks on international students, faculty, and staff at American universities. These speculations clash with what Donald Trump claimed in his inauguration speech as President of the United States in January of this year: “we will end all censorship to restore freedom of expression”. Executive Order 13,899 itself does not guarantee the immediate deportation of international students involved in pro-Palestine efforts, but is based mainly on guidance from heads of departments, such as education, to measure efforts to promote means to combat anti-Semitism within 60 days. At the same time that Donald Trump announced these measures, the American president backtracked on other measures announced by his government, such as the third retreat in less than three weeks of new 25% tariffs on products from countries such as Mexico and Canada, both economic partners of the United States. Such revocations came after conversations with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. International students are the second largest group of visa recipients in the United States, with the country issuing around 300,000 to 500,000 F1 visas – the most common type for students – every year since 2007, with 472,000 visas approved in 2023 alone. The foreign student population in the United States is the largest in the world, reaching a record 1.1 million students in 2024, with the majority of these students originating from countries such as India and China.

Speculation about the Trump administration's next measures on security and immigration has been largely focused on two aspects at the beginning of this administration. These include authoritarian decisions and measures that deport international students considered anti-Semitic and/or accused of supporting terrorism, and the federal government's retreat from security and immigration measures to keep the world's largest foreign intellectual capital.