Trump orders review to identify, punish and deport antisemites-including students on visas

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday instructing federal agencies to identify “all civil and criminal authorities” available to combat antisemitism — including finding ways to deport anti-Jewish activists who violated laws.

The order, first reported by The Post, requires agency and department leaders to provide the White House with recommendations within 60 days and outlines plans for the Justice Department to investigate pro-Hamas graffiti and intimidation, including on college campuses.

“Jewish students have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination; denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault,” the order says.

“It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

The executive order calls for the deportation of resident aliens — including students with visas — who broke laws as part of anti-Israel protests following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks that sparked the invasion of Gaza.

“[T]he Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the Secretary of Homeland Security… shall include in their reports 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,” the order says.

Six Republican-led House committees issued a report last month calling for the federal government to do more to address antisemitism, including by conditioning federal aid to colleges to force stricter policies against anti-Jewish bias.

That report focused heavily on Columbia University, the site of a large encampment that featured many documented instances of anti-Jewish remarks against both pro-Israel activists and Jewish students, and noted that allegedly permissive colleges took in $2.7 billion in federal funds in fiscal year 2023.

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden stonewalled records requests about the number of visa holders among those protesters, the House GOP report said.

Trump, as a candidate, called for deporting pro-Hamas students who are in the US on visas and last week signed a different executive order that seemed to hint at steps toward that goal.

That order contained a passage that called for the US to “ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States” do not “support designated foreign terrorists,” though the intended effect of the wording was not immediately clear.

College presidents summoned to Congress in December 2023 infamously refused to say if calling for the genocide of Jews constituted punishable conduct under grilling by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump’s nominee to serve as UN ambassador. They argued that free-speech protections were at play.

Hate speech generally is legal in the US, but the House GOP report released last month argues that federal law bars recipients of taxpayer funds from tolerating discrimination — allowing a way to force recipients to stiffen policies.

Federal courts also have found that non-citizens have fewer free speech rights.

The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1972 case Kleindienst v. Mandel that the government could refuse a visa to a Belgian Marxist — after prior court cases affirmed the deportation of anarchist and Communist non-citizens.

Some of the best-known instances of activism in support of Hamas, which massacred about 1,200 Jewish residents of southern Israel, occurred in Washington, DC, when multiple protesters carried banners supporting the group as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in July.

Zaid Mohammed Mahdawi, the 26-year-old president of the Richmond, Va., chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, was arrested for allegedly climbing atop a monument near the Capitol and spray-painting “HAMAS IS COMIN.”

Trump’s attempt to crack down on antisemitism — including likely by withholding federal funds — comes on the heels of his orders to temporarily freeze federal aid and the distribution of pending federal grants, the latter of which was paused Tuesday by a federal judge.