A pro-Israel group says it gave the Trump administration a list of students to deport

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to punish protesters who supported Palestine and called for an end to Israel's military onslaught in Gaza, including the potential deportation of non-citizen students and university staff. The escalation comes with the assistance of Betar, a right-wing group whose stated mission is to "defend Zionism with clarity and courage," which told Salon it has compiled a list of foreign students and teachers that it believes should be expelled from the country — and shared it with the Trump administration.

According to Trump's executive order, federal authorities are now charged with identifying all civil and criminal actions within their respective jurisdictions "that might be used to curb or combat anti-Semitism." This includes working with university administrators to monitor activities "by alien students and staff" and, "if warranted," taking action "to remove such aliens."

"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before," Trump said in a "fact sheet" distributed by the White House.

Even before Trump's victory last November, Betar had been using AI facial recognition technology and tip-offs to ascertain anti-Zionist protesters' identities, hoping that authorities would eventually vet and use the information to deport "despicable, egregious people who openly support Hamas and other terrorist organizations," spokesperson Daniel Levy said in a statement to Salon. According to Levy, such people "pose an immediate and present danger to this country."

"The Zionist community in America has had enough, and while we vowed many months ago to build lists and have them deported, we are pleased that this will now begin," Levy said. "We have already submitted names of hundreds of terror supporters to the Trump administration who proudly support terror and don’t belong in this country as they are here on visas."

A spokesperson for the Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Levy said Betar has supplied copies of its list to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, UN ambassador nominee Elise Stefanik, and other confirmed or incoming members of the Trump administration. Betar's U.S. executive director, Ross Glick, has also made multiple trips to Capitol Hill both before and after the election, meeting not just with pro-Israel Republicans but also Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn.

According to Glick, people who engage in "respectful" dialogue should have nothing to fear, as his group is only submitting the names of those who are "fomenting hatred against Israel" such as by participating in "pro-jihadi protests," saying that "Zionists don't deserve to live" or calling for a global "intifada." In the case of professors and PhD candidates, deportable offenses include teaching "alternate history" that is "aligned with negative propaganda," Glick said, including Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."

Betar, however, has an expansive view of what constitutes support for terror, with Glick's definition including those who advocate for a single, secular democratic state encompassing both Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"When they say 'one-state solution,' it's not for the benefit of the truth or for the benefit of the Jews. They want the six million Jews wiped out," he said, referring to the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. "Their position, if you listen to them, is go back to Europe. Go to the ovens, go back to Brooklyn. That's what we're facing. That's the underlying meaning of all of these messages."

Among the people the Betar has "recommended for deportation" are faculty and students from Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles, where The Daily Bruin, UCLA's campus paper, reported that Betar incited vigilante violence against student protesters.

“We demand police remove these thugs now and if not we will be forced to organize groups of Jews to do so,” the group said in the statement at the time.

While Betar and supporters of protest crackdowns often raise the specter of rampant antisemitism and sympathy for terrorist groups, pro-Palestine activists say that such claims are typically pretenses used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. Jewish pro-Palestine activists in particular have disavowed attempts to conflate their religion and identity with support for the state of Israel.

"Betar attacks all who express support for Palestinian freedom or even sympathy with Palestinians who have endured unimaginable violence at the hands of the Israeli military," Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Salon. "They make common cause with neo-fascist militant and antisemitic groups like the Proud Boys. Betar endangers many communities including Jewish communities who oppose their violent supremacist ideology."

Fox likewise said that "Trump and his cronies do not care about Jewish safety," arguing that his executive order is more "a campaign against all those who are brave enough to challenge their power" rather than a genuine attempt to protect American Jews.

In addition to groups like Betar, the Trump administration may be able to count on the cooperation of universities, who throughout 2024 took actions to suspend or expel pro-Palestine protesters. In May, The Nation reported that Yale University and its police department used an array of surveillance tools to track down and reprimand student protesters, including those who apparently had not violated any university policies and procedures.

Critics accuse the Trump administration and its allies of trying to use state power to quash free speech.

"The First Amendment protects everyone in the United States, including foreign citizens studying at American universities," Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told Salon. "Government lawyers have already considered at length whether proposals to remove people from the country based on their political speech are constitutional, and their answer is almost certainly no. They’re right: Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”

Trump has long promised that he would target pro-Palestine activists as part of his mass deportation plan, telling a group of pro-Israel donors last spring that he would "set that movement back 25 or 30 years." Last week, he proposed to "just clean out" the entire Gaza Strip of Palestinians by scattering them across different countries.

Now that Trump is making good on his promise, activist groups are taking measures to protect students, staff and other protesters from deportation and other forms of punishment, starting with demands for university administrators to pledge non-cooperation with federal authorities. The effort to silence disfavored speech won't stop at college campuses, the groups warn.

"The [executive order] also goes far beyond campuses and is making the way for an authoritarian crackdown on all aspects of civil society," Fox said. "Every single federal and local elected official must make it their business to reject these orders and the far-right assault on democracy they represent."