The campus pro-Palestinian protests that erupted after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks united many Jewish students, parents and “defense” groups in a national fight against antisemitism, intimidation and the disruption of university life.
But as the Trump administration has taken up the cause with gusto — most recently arresting, detaining and threatening to deport a Columbia University graduate and green card holder who led some of the most disruptive protests — some Jews are asking: Is this the fight we signed up for?
“Antisemitism is on the rise, and we should take that very seriously, but we are not going to be able to arrest and deport our way out of the serious problem of antisemitism,” Udi Ofer, the former deputy national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “Attempting to deport green card holders for their student advocacy is the kind of action we normally associate with repressive regimes.”
Over the weekend, the administration having previously frozen $400 million of grants to Columbia over its mishandling of antisemitism on campus, immigration officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian activism at the school. Khalil, a Syria-born Palestinian who is in the country legally, was taken into custody at his apartment in a Columbia-owned building; his wife, who is eight months pregnant, was also threatened with arrest.
For some Jewish advocates, the arrest of Khalil represented a bold and long-overdue move that signaled consequences for leaders of persistent, rule-breaking protests that left Jews on campus feeling singled out and fearful. While conceding that Khalil deserves “due process protections,” the Anti-Defamation League was fast out of the gate with a statement saying that they “hope that his action serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses.”
In a thread on X, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association said it welcomed reports suggesting Khalil’s green card would be revoked, describing him as “a ringleader of the chaos” at Columbia.
“No one forced him to lead mobs that demonize America, or harass and intimidate Jews,” the group wrote. “This was his choice.”
Fighting antisemitism was one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises, and when he was elected president in 2024 he drew a slightly larger minority of Jewish voters than he did in 2016. His vow to undo diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which often did not protect Jews on campuses, also earned him praise even among traditionally Democratic-leaning Jewish voters.
Combating antisemitism has also been the point of the spear in many of Trump’s moves against higher education. Days after returning to office, he signed an executive order on combating antisemitism, focusing on what a White House fact sheet called anti-Jewish racism at “leftist” universities. On Monday, the administration warned 60 universities that they could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism on their campuses.
At the same time, Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, have said the administration’s moves to cancel research grants and contracts at universities is an effort to root out alleged left-wing bias and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
It’s this ideologically polarizing motivation that leaves some Jewish leaders wary of the administration’s crusade against antisemitism. Granted, these leaders tend to be critics of Trump, but nearly all have spoken out about antisemitism on campus, consider themselves pro-Israel and have called on universities to respond to and protect Jewish students.
The Trump administration’s efforts “are driven by political operatives who claim that they’re committed to ensuring that institutions that receive federal funding comply with federal anti-discrimination laws. This is a lie,” said Rabbi Sharon Brous, of the independent IKAR community in Los Angeles, in a sermon on Saturday.
Brous, who earned her bachelor’s degree at Columbia, acknowledged the extent of antisemitism at numerous university protests, but was skeptical of Trump administration officials who are fighting antisemitism at the same time they are rolling back protections against trans and non-binary people and gutting civil rights efforts in the name of eliminating DEI.
“We, the Jews, are being used to advance a political agenda that will cause grave harm to the social fabric, and to the institutions that are best suited to protect Jews and all minorities,” Brous said in her sermon, delivered before Khalil’s detention. “Our pain, our trauma, is being exploited to eviscerate the dream of a multiracial democracy, while advancing the goal of a white Christian nation.”
Brous is a member of a liberal Jewish majority that has long advocated for free speech and due process as hallmarks of American democracy. Under Republican and Democratic presidents, Jewish groups remained committed to these small-d democratic ideals, in part out of self-interest.
“Jews benefit when constitutional rights are protected to the fullest,” said Ofer. “Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, are core principles that define liberal democracies, and Jews are safer in the United States when liberal democracy flourishes.”
Ofer, now a visiting professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University, said he has never seen a case like Khalil’s, which appears — pending any new allegations or explanations made by law enforcement — to use the immigration service to punish a lawful permanent resident (as green card holders are designated) on the basis of speech.
Khalil had not now nor previously been charged with breaking the law, and was moved to an immigrant detention center in Louisiana after a late-night raid on his apartment.
“There are many things that have been said since Oct. 7 that I disagree with,” said Ofer, who grew up in Israel. “But protecting speech doesn’t mean agreeing with that speech. It means agreeing with the principles of a liberal democracy where dissent is welcomed and where the marketplace of ideas is robust.”
Trump’s efforts to combat antisemitism come amid a flurry of activity that is anathema to many Jews who support that notion of liberal democracy: pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters, placing loyalists in charge of the FBI and military, dropping investigations against Trump allies and declaring control over independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission. But qualms about these actions are also expressed in terms of communal self-interest.
“The Trump administration is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to undercut democracy: from gutting education funding to deporting students to attacking diversity, equity, & inclusion,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, in a statement. “As we’ve repeatedly said: this makes Jews — and so many others — less safe.”
Critics of Khalil’s detention
Critics of Khalil’s detention — and of Trump’s order in January recommending the deportation of foreign students accused of supporting terrorism — are citing historical precedents to argue that even in the fight against antisemitism Jews should be putting the defense of free speech first.
One of those precedents is the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when a government with legitimate concerns about Communist influence began targeting citizens with even tangential or long-ago connections to the far left. The effort was blunt and wide-reaching, but it disproportionately singled out Jews with leftist ties, and recent immigrants and refugees from Soviet-bloc countries.
Axios reported last week that Trump’s plan to deport what he called “resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests” and “all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” relies on a 1952 law, known as the McCarran-Walter Act, that made it easier to deport and keep out members of Communist and “Communist-front” organizations. As the Forward noted last week, the act’s “quotas and ideological litmus test were widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.”
Ofer also recalled the Palmer Raids of 1919, when the Department of Justice targeted suspected socialists and communists for deportation. Thousands of Italian and Jewish immigrants were arrested across the country and hundreds deported. Future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was among the authors of a report denouncing the Justice Department’s violations of the Constitution in carrying out the raids.
Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible, the progressive organizing group, went so far to draw an analogy with Nazi Germany, writing on X that she was “checking the history books to find out whether ‘tyrant starts redefining peoples’ citizenship status’ usually ends well for the Jews.”
Trump’s conflation of antisemitism and other administration priorities also leaves some wary of Jews being implicated in Trump’s aggressive overhaul of the liberal order.
“Authoritarian federal overreach and apparent disregard for due process only makes Jews less safe,” Jonathan Jacoby, national director of the Nexus Project antisemitism watchdog group, said in a statement about Khalil’s detention. “We refuse to have our concerns and fears over antisemitism weaponized to undermine pluralistic democracy.”
In recent testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on antisemitism, Kevin Rachlin, the Washington director of the Nexus Project, spoke against the administration’s threats to deport pro-Palestinian activists. But he also criticized a bipartisan bill, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” that would give the Treasury Department broad powers to revoke the tax exemption of any nonprofit it deems to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”
“These approaches not only violate democratic principles,” said Rachlin, “but may actually exacerbate antisemitism by fostering division and resentment on campuses, alienating potential allies in the fight against hate, and redirecting energy from proven educational and community-building solutions to surveillance and punishment.”
Brous made a similar point in her sermon, saying Jews may regret antisemitism being used as a wedge for the Trump agenda.
“What may feel, today, like a welcomed embrace is actually putting us at even greater danger,” she said.
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