Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters
This was one of the many I missed in my previous roundups of the illegal and / or immoral garbage coming out of the US administration at the moment.
Under the duplicitous pretence of caring about anti-semitism, Trump et al want to be able to round up anyone who took part in, for instance, the wide variety of well-attended and peaceful US college protests against Israel’s recent actions in Gaza, and if they’re not a US citizen then deport them.
Unsurprisingly, this is, once again, likely unconstitutional:
“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. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”
I’m not sure in which way deporting for instance the 750 Jewish students who wrote a letter supporting these protests is going to protect them from antisemitism, but there we go. It’s not like this was ever the real intent of Trump or those who surround him.
It goes without saying that any truly anti-Semitic activity must be stopped. But as the aforementioned Jewish students wrote in their letter:
The denial of Jewish participation in this movement is not only incorrect, but it is an insidious attempt to justify unfounded claims of antisemitism