Some GOP presidential candidates have called to revoke student visas and deport foreign nationals who express support for Palestinians or criticize Israel\u2019s military response.
As tensions have erupted at college campuses throughout the country after Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel, former president Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates have called to revoke student visas and deport foreign nationals who express support for Palestinians or criticize Israel\u2019s military response \u2014 moves that would amount to violations of their First Amendment rights, according to some legal experts.
Student protests have ranged from urging a cease-fire or denouncing the treatment and killing of Palestinian civilians to blaming Israel for Hamas\u2019s attack, a position that has been criticized across the political spectrum. Some Republican candidates have not differentiated the protests in their comments, generalizing protest participants as supporting Hamas.
Trump, the dominant polling leader in the GOP race, said this week that if he is returned to the White House, his administration would revoke student visas of \u201cradical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.\u201d
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also expressed support for deporting international students who he deems supportive of Hamas, saying, \u201cYou don\u2019t have a right to be here on a visa. You don\u2019t have a right to be studying in the United States.\u201d
In a radio interview the same day, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said of student protests: \u201cIf any of those students on college campuses are foreign nationals on a visa, they should be sent back to their country.\u201d
The proposals reflect the determination by much of the GOP field to stake out increasingly hard-line stances against many Muslim immigrants and in support of Israel, with candidates saying the United States should not accept any refugees from Gaza \u2014 where Israel has cut off electricity, food and fuel in response to Hamas\u2019s deadly attack. The scrutiny on students and their response to the war triggered by Hamas\u2019s strike also reflects the inclination by many Republicans to direct criticism toward universities and campus communities they have frequently clashed with on cultural issues.
Many Republicans have positioned themselves as stalwart defenders of free speech, often alleging that conservative views are muted at colleges and universities. Republicans\u2019 posture on student protesters conflicts with that stance, some immigration and civil rights advocates said. Those advocates also cautioned that such proposals dangerously conflate protesters who criticize Israel\u2019s response to Hamas\u2019s attack or voice concern for Palestinians with those supporting Hamas \u2014 the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.
\u201cThe First Amendment protects the right to speak of all people who live in this country, whether they\u2019re here as citizens, whether they\u2019re here as foreign nationals, whether they\u2019re students, whether they\u2019re visitors,\u201d said David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and a law professor at Georgetown University. \u201cThe First Amendment prohibits the government from punishing someone for their speech or their association. And so I think they\u2019re nonstarters.\u201d
The Trump, DeSantis and Scott campaigns did not respond to questions seeking more detailed explanations of how to reconcile the proposals with the Constitution\u2019s protection of free speech or how they would determine which students they classify as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas.
Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the nonpartisan American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), said he \u201ccertainly wouldn\u2019t trust [the candidates] as the judge and jury on what constitutes inappropriate protesting.\u201d
Many of the protests Republican commentators and others in the party have criticized have featured students urging a cease-fire or denouncing the treatment and killing of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. However, some college groups issued statements placing the blame for Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel, drawing backlash from faculty members, donors and alumni \u2014 most notably at Harvard University, where 30 student groups said in a letter that \u201cthe Israeli regime\u201d was \u201centirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.\u201d
A large number of the demonstrations have been organized by campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that says it \u201cseeks to empower, unify, and support student organizers as they push forward demands for Palestinian liberation & self-determination on their campuses.\u201d The National Students for Justice in Palestine group celebrated the Hamas attack in a social media post, calling it \u201ca historic win for the Palestinian resistance.\u201d The organization did not respond to an interview request.
The proposals from the GOP candidates are welcome to some conservative voters such as Ruth Wagner, a retiree from Marion, Iowa, who attended a town hall for former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley on Friday. Wagner \u2014 who is still deciding whether to support Haley, Trump, DeSantis or Scott in the GOP race \u2014 said she is \u201cabsolutely for\u201d the student visa revocations.
\u201cThey should be considered terrorists and they should go home,\u201d Wagner said. When asked whether international students advocating for a cease-fire should face deportation, Wagner said: \u201cThey\u2019re on shaky ground, but if they support Hamas, they should be gone, period.\u201d
Some attendees at the same event took a different view. \u201cThey\u2019re not to blame. It\u2019s not the students\u2019 fault,\u201d said Marla Wessel, a self-described Haley supporter. \u201cThey\u2019re protesting for what they believe in. \u2026 I just don\u2019t think the students should be [deported], unless it gets more violent, unless they find somebody that\u2019s infiltrated.\u201d
Robert McCaw, director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation\u2019s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said the proposals to revoke student visas should be viewed \u201cthrough the context of recent historical discrimination against Muslim communities,\u201d citing the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System created after the 9\/11 terrorist attacks and the Trump administration\u2019s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries.
\u201cWe\u2019ve already seen elected officials and media miscategorize pro-Palestinian, pro-human-rights rallies as being in support of violence, instead of opposing it,\u201d since the war began, McCaw said. \u201cThis mischaracterization has led to the silencing of potential Muslim voices that would want to speak out on this issue but fear retaliation at school or in the workplace.\u201d
Before the war, polling suggested a generational and ideological divide in how Americans view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Gallup survey this year found that the percentage of Americans sympathizing more with Israelis than Palestinians is \u201csolidly positive among older generations\u201d but that \u201cmillennials are now evenly divided.\u201d According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll conducted after the war began, voters 18 to 34 disapproved of the United States sending weapons and military equipment to Israel in response to Hamas\u2019s attack, by a margin of 51 percent to 39 percent, whereas every other age group approved.
The Gallup poll found Democratic sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians (49 percent) than the Israelis (38 percent). In contrast, 78 percent of Republicans sympathize more with the Israelis, while 11 percent side with the Palestinians.
\u201cThe overwhelming majority of Republicans are very sympathetic to Israel and very supportive of Israel\u2019s right to exist peacefully with its neighbors,\u201d Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. \u201cThat\u2019s especially true among evangelical Christians, who form such an important component of the Republican primary.\u201d He said proposals such as those the GOP candidates are advocating for are in a way performative politics, because they \u201care going to get slapped down by lawyers and judges in a heartbeat.\u201d
In an interview with Fox News Radio\u2019s Guy Benson, DeSantis claimed that college students are \u201cfalling all over themselves to try to glorify Hamas terrorists,\u201d arguing that \u201cwe need to reorient academia\u201d so that it is not \u201ctrying to impose radical ideologies on the students.\u201d Battles over college campuses and education have been central to DeSantis\u2019s record in Florida, where he defunded diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges.
Scott framed his proposal around the \u201cindoctrination of our young people versus the education of our young people,\u201d claiming that students are now taught \u201cthat America is evil, or that Western democracies are somehow oppressors.\u201d
AILA\u2019s Johnson said this of the comments made by Trump, DeSantis and Scott: \u201cWhat I hear in that ugly rhetoric is saying that there can be no disagreement with the U.S. position or no disagreement with Israel. It sounds to me like: Where do we draw that line? Does that mean that anybody who\u2019s concerned about the plight of 1.3 million people in Gaza, that we would try to deport them?\u201d
\u201cYou can be both pro-Israel and pro the protection of innocent people in Gaza,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd before the Republican Party goes down the road of trying to punish people for simply disagreeing with popular opinion, they should check themselves.\u201d
Some of the rhetoric that focuses on student visas echoes the broader posture on immigration that Trump and much of the GOP has embraced in recent years.
\u201cUnder the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home. They go back home. Enjoy your life,\u201d Trump said Monday in Iowa. In the same speech, he proposed harsher restrictions on immigration based on ideology, promising to \u201cdeport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies.\u201d
DeSantis said on \u201cThe Megyn Kelly Show\u201d that \u201cany of those students who are here on visas, those visas should be canceled, and they should be repatriated back to their home country. That\u2019s a no-brainer.\u201d
\u201cWhy would we want to welcome people into this country who are totally hostile to basic American decency and values?\u201d he added.
The idea of revoking student visas has also spread among some Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he would file a resolution calling to \u201cdeport any foreigner who supports Hamas.\u201d Over the weekend, he sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him to \u201cimmediately perform a full review and coordination effort to revoke the visas of those who have endorsed or espoused Hamas\u2019s terrorist activity.\u201d Rubio has previously suggested rescinding visas, after the Boston Marathon bombing.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Monday likewise sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas urging him to deport any foreign national who has expressed support for Hamas, citing language in the Immigration and Nationality Act regarding anyone who \u201cendorses or espouses terrorist activity.\u201d
Cole, the ACLU legal director, said that he was not aware of anyone ever being deported under that provision and that if the Department of Homeland Security sought to enforce it, it would face \u201ca serious First Amendment problem.\u201d
\u201cThe proposals are not unprecedented, but the precedents are not ones we should be proud of,\u201d Cole said. He pointed to instances where laws to make it a deportable offense to advocate communism or be affiliated with the Communist Party in the McCarthy era, or to affiliate with anarchists in the 1920s, were abused and applied in an overly broad manner that swept up people who simply expressed dissent. The most recent version of such a law was struck down and repealed by Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n