Congress has provided the Department of Homeland Security with powerful tools to remove non-citizen immigrants who support terrorism or incite genocide.
The Biden administration refused to use these tools. Fortunately, the Trump administration thinks differently.
Hamas’s meticulously planned October 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians resulted, in then-President Biden’s words, in “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” with “more than 1,000 civilians slaughtered,” “parents butchered using their bodies to try to protect their children.” Biden concluded that Hamas’s act of “pure, unadulterated evil” had “reminded us all” that “silence is complicity.”
What, then, should we call not silence, but vocal celebration of Hamas’s mass murder? As Hamas would gladly kill every Jew in Israel if it had the opportunity, this is akin to the celebration of genocide.
Much of this celebration took place on Americans college campuses by foreign students during demonstrations apparently catalyzed by campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. The Anti-Defamation League reported that the group’s chapters giddily celebrated the massacres.
The group's Tufts University chapter proclaimed that “footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory [i.e. Israel] has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.” The Bard University chapter proclaimed that “Liberation ... requires confrontation by any means necessary. From the river to the sea, we will continue to fight.” And last October, Swarthmore's chapter wrote, “Happy October 7th everyone! In honor of this glorious day and all our martyred revolutionaries.” Swarthmore College at least pushed back, responding that “celebrating the killing of innocent people is shocking and reprehensible.”
This all calls to mind the incitements driving the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote Secretary of State Warren Christopher at that time of reports that “a private [radio] station affiliated with an extremist Hutu political party” was broadcasting messages urging the killing of "all remaining Tutsi children,” urging them, “‘Take up your machetes; the graves are only half full! Who will help us fill them?’” Kennedy warned that the broadcasts were “continuing to incite genocide of the Tutsi people” and pleaded with Christopher to help jam them.
Federal law provides powerful tools enabling the removal of non-citizen immigrants who advocate for terrorism and incite genocide. I should know — I had the honor of assisting House Judiciary Committee Chair F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. in his successful push for the inclusion of provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2001 and the REAL ID Act in 2005, providing for the deportation of immigrants who endorse or espouse terrorism.
One year earlier, Congress had made subject to deportation non-citizens who incite genocide. In 1990, Congress created a ground of deportation for immigrants “whose presence or activities in the [U.S.] the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Non-citizen immigrants do not have the same level of First Amendment rights as do American citizens. The Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that “the government does not offend the Constitution by deporting [an illegal immigrant] for the additional reason that it believes him to be a member of an organization that supports terrorist activity.” This prompted a future executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association concluded that the “simple, clear message” the court had sent was “immigrants have no First Amendment rights.”
Despite the availability of statutory tools, and Biden’s professions of revulsion as to Hamas, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken took no action to seek the removal of foreign students advocating for terrorism or genocide.
This led Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to write Mayorkas on Oct. 16, 2023, urging that he “immediately deport any foreign national” who “expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel.” It led 19 members of the House of Representatives to write to Mayorkas and Blinken on within a week, asking whether the visas of any foreign students who had endorsed or espoused Hamas terrorism had been reviewed or revoked. It led me, the following month, to urge the Department of Homeland Security to attempt to remove non-citizens endorsing or espousing terrorism.
No action was ever taken by the Biden administration. One must wonder whether Mayorkas would also have turned a blind eye to foreign students calling for the genocide of the Tutsis, whether Blinken would have dismissed Kennedy’s letter without a second thought.
It took Trump’s inauguration to get Homeland Security and the State Department to heed calls for the removal of non-citizens in our country advocating evil. This began with Mahmoud Khalil, who, according to the White House press secretary, “organized group protests [at Columbia University] that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda flyers.”
The Trump administration should continue — must continue — its efforts to seek the removal of non-citizen immigrants who celebrate the killing of innocent people. America will be a better place for it.
George Fishman serves as senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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