Pro-Palestinian activism has returned to college and university campuses, and so has the political turbulence.
This month, students took over Butler library at Columbia University in the middle of exam period. The university wasted little time in calling NYPD to regain control of campus and to authorize the arrest of students who refused to leave. By the end, roughly 80 demonstrators had been arrested, and two public safety officers and several protestors had sustained injuries.
The same day, demonstrations ended in chaos and arrests at Brooklyn college when protestors gathered in front of the school’s Tanger Hillel House chanting anti-Israel slogans and attempting to erect tents. Once again, the college was quick to call in police, who arrested a number of protesters.
Some colleges may be getting serious about addressing environments that threaten Jewish students. We can’t say the same about the Trump administration’s efforts.
In addition to the misguided institutional war that President Trump is waging by cutting off funding to institutions of higher learning such as Harvard, there is another war he is fighting — namely, a war against students themselves, particularly foreign students. The administration’s campaign against students involves the revocation of student visas, followed by the arrest and deportation of foreign students under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. In most cases, the method is to revoke students' visas and then declare them present in the country illegally, followed by arrest and deportation proceedings.
Many frustrated with university administrators' passivity against campus social unrest have cheered on the administration, glad that at least the federal government is taking action. But Trump’s actions, particularly related to seemingly random deportations, are merely performative, netting few tangible benefits and causing much harm to higher education along the way.
As national security experts, one of whom ran the FBI’s counterintelligence division and the other who has been written about combatting antisemitism in higher education, we know the president’s actions won’t ferret out root causes like foreign-based and NGO sponsorship of the radicalization of U.S. students. They are fanning the flames of protests and encampments, supporting the circulation of escalatory printed materials and fomenting terrorist affiliations, all of which normalize terrorist organizations and contribute to the creation of a hostile environment for Jewish students. In fact, if left unchecked, a policy of isolated snatch and grab deportation actions is likely to worsen both problems.
Courts are beginning to push back against the detention of student deportees, given that the administration is holding these individuals without having made any show of dangerousness. Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk has now been freed by Judge William Sessions of Vermont, who said that her detention constituted a “continued infringement” on her First Amendment and due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, Moshen Mahdawi, who was arrested at a naturalization interview, has been freed by a federal judge in Vermont. But Columbia student and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil remains in custody in a detention center in Louisiana, and all three remain subject to deportation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said deportation actions of the foregoing sort are necessary because such students create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States” and “severely undermine ... significant foreign policy objective[s].” If Rubio is truly driven by foreign policy objectives, particularly those connected with foreign terrorist influence, he should demand comprehensive investigative efforts across the Department of Justice, the Treasury and his own department to detect, deter and defeat any global efforts to sow discord and violence on our campuses.
An administration’s best tool against terror networks and the adherents they create is to conduct rigorous and evidence-driven criminal investigations, leading to the indictment and prosecution of terror suspects where the evidentiary standard of probable cause is met. Random deportations do not provide for the weighing and sifting of evidence and the finding of guilt.
Moreover, coordinated, complex enterprise-style national security investigations, not deportations, have kept the country safe since 9/11. Counterterrorism investigations are severely hampered when suspects are removed from the jurisdiction. Suspects can no longer be questioned by federal authorities; cannot aid authorities in identifying other conspirators; and can no longer assist with the gathering of evidence or identifying the trail of terror funding.
The more the government addresses terrorism concerns through hurried deportations, the less able it will be to use its tools to take down cells and follow the money.
Another flaw with the Trump administration’s methodology lies in its focus on foreign students. Most individuals who have displayed support for terror organizations or fanned the flames of antisemitic sentiment on campus have been American. Of the roughly 80 students arrested for taking over the library at Columbia, for example, a number of those were reportedly Americans who had previously been arrested and subject to campus discipline for the Hamilton Hall takeover at Columbia in 2024.
Not only are deportations ineffective against them, but those less vulnerable students will be galvanized by seeing their friends not only removed from campus but removed from the country. Already, numerous demonstrations have swept the country in solidarity with the students subject to deportation.
For decades, universities failed to impose disciplinary measures on students who engaged in harassment, intimidation, stalking or other activities that violate the civil rights of Jewish members of their communities, and unsurprisingly they have failed in signaling that violations of campus rules would be taken seriously. Nor have universities taken simple measures to disentangle pro-Palestinian from pro-terroristic speech, measures one of us has written about here and here.
But the Trump administration’s targeting of foreign university students also reflects a failure of accountability: it is a shallow attempt to intimidate that fails to balance accountability with due process and open expression. As such, it will not succeed on its own terms, as the increasing pushback from federal judges demonstrates. Nor will this approach effectively combat antisemitism. Achieving the balance between accountability and individual rights is not only the hallmark of a properly functioning democracy, it’s also the best recipe for conducting effective counterterrorism and eliminating antisemitism on campuses.
Frank Figliuzzi if former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI. Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and the faculty director of Penn’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.
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