By Bruce S. Ticker
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — An associate professor here who questions how authorities will acquire information to deport anti-Israel foreign students may well be right. Therein lies the main rub with President Trump’s executive order to crush antisemitic activity when and where possible.
That is one area in which associate professor Harun Kucuk of the University of Pennsylvania and I concur: How will Trump identify foreign students here on visas who have violated the law or support terrorists?
All Trump’s people need to do is check police records for those charged with crimes, but this begs the question: How many of them have authorities arrested? Police and the courts have also been much restrained in response to criminal offenses that accompany protests against Israel, and that predates the current conflict sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023, savagery which left 1,200 Jews and others dead in southern Israel.
Ten days after taking office, Trump proved he can do something right when he signed the executive order to confront antisemitism and deport non-citizen college students and others who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.
The Times of Israel reports that a fact sheet on the order promises “immediate action” by the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” and orchestrate all federal resources to fight what it dubbed “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since 10/7.
“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,” he said in the fact sheet. The fact sheet states that last week’s order will require agency and department leaders to send recommendations to the White House within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities that could be employed to combat antisemitism.
My acceptance of Trump’s antisemitism order could appear to contradict my dread of the coming three years and 49 weeks. I voted for Kamala Harris for president because of her focus on domestic concerns such as poverty, health care, climate change and gun safety – in spite of the Democrats’ responsiveness to an anti-Israel and antisemitic agenda among a minority of congressional Democrats. Trump was a horrible president in his first term and he promises to be a worse one this term.
However, American Jews and others need to take advantage of Trump’s willingness to aid Israel and reduce antisemitism. We must focus upon the pro-Arab activists’ criminal offenses and distorted attitudes and other provisions in the order, but this is not about deterring peace protests and expression of legitimate concerns. Many protesters are genuinely upset about civilian deaths caused by Israel’s attacks.
The Trump administration must be able to deport most foreign students who have caused trouble, not just a few of them. Deporting a large number is the best chance of diluting their movement. Likely they are the main force driving the campaign in America to delegitimize Israel. After all, many protestors behave as if they are not used to voicing dissent within the contours of our legal system.
For the last few decades, pro-Arab activists have committed a series of crimes in the name of the Palestinians on and off campus. They blocked the Brooklyn Bridge at least twice, stopped traffic on a major downtown Los Angeles freeway, closed approaches to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and marched through the streets of Philadelphia, my hometown.
Were any ambulances cut off transporting patients to local hospitals? Were police officers frustrated trying to reach crime scenes? Under Pennsylvania’s criminal code, cases can be made for disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment. These are serious crimes that have their equivalents under different titles in all the other 49 states. They could have been prosecuted for each time they occupied a college building, assaulted or harassed Jewish students or set up illegal encampments on university grounds.
Yet police have often avoided arrests and neglected to press charges when they had every right and perhaps obligation to do so. Many activists who committed offenses have gotten away with their actions, and therefore no records of charges and convictions would be available.
Protesters who occupied a building at Columbia last spring were not charged. In Orange County, Calif., in 2011, 10 pro-Arab students were convicted after being charged with disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, then Israeli ambassador to the United States, at the University of California – Irvine. The judge himself declared that the defendants should never have been prosecuted.
Some student protesters were cited for trespassing in Manhattan when they could have been charged for more serious offenses. Trespassing is too weak an excuse for expelling someone from the country.
Those foreign students who participated in illegal incidents may not be located so easily if they were never charged. Possibly Trump’s people will find some through colleges that investigated them for violating school policies.
Trump faces a more subtle hurdle: Do hideous opinions held by foreign students justify deporting them?
“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump adds in his fact sheet.
Demonstrators often make ghastly remarks about Israel and the Jewish people. They have held placards celebrating 10/7 and shouted “F— Jews,” and they have warned that “Hamas is coming.” Then there is “From the river to the sea.”
“The First Amendment protects everyone in the United States, including foreign citizens studying at American universities,” said Carrie Decell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, according to the Times of Israel. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”
Is it? Temporary residents here on student visas are not American citizens. Does this mean they lack freedom of speech? Free-speech and Arab-American groups strongly suggest that deportation policies will prompt lawsuits. That legal test would be interesting.
Perhaps a case can be made that some antisemitic and anti-Israel statements would amount to “terroristic threats,” a term cited by Trump. Calls to celebrate 10/7 and “f— Jews” while announcing that “Hamas is coming” leave no room for interpretation. “From the river to the sea” is code for destroying Israel, but can that be proven in court?
Probably Trump can also press law enforcement authorities to reconsider how they enforce the law here. They must do more than slap the wrists of alleged offenders. They need to address situations in which protesters hold demonstrations without acquiring city permits. I cannot imagine their receiving permits for blocking bridges and freeways.
The president manufactures an Achilles Heel by politicizing this order: “(The) Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this coordinated assault on public order; it simply refused to protect the civil rights of Jewish Americans, especially students,” he writes, according to media reports. He also calls their schools “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”
These words subject Trump to credible pushback.
To top it off, he engages in self-praise: “I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.”
Can he ever play it straight?
*
Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.