Palestine Legal: Trump's Executive Order Aims to Punish Protests of Israel's Genocide in Gaza, Promotes Anti-Palestinian Discrimination

CONTACT: Palestine Legal Media | media@palestinelegal.org 

January 30th, 2025 — Yesterday, Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting university students who participate in protests or speech activity critical of Israel's genocide. The order reaffirms and expands on Trump’s 2019 executive order that directed government agencies to consider the distorted and politicized IHRA definition of antisemitism, which brands virtually all speech critical of Israel as anti-Jewish, when investigating federal civil rights complaints.  

The order follows a January 20th "expanded travel ban" executive order that calls for extensive vetting, including ideological litmus tests, to justify banning entry to or removing non-citizen students and others who support Palestinian rights or critique U.S. policy.

The January 29th executive order directs government agencies to report on possible civil and criminal actions they can take "to curb or combat antisemitism." It also calls on government agencies to recommend trainings for universities to be able to identify, monitor, and report on non-citizen students and staff based on broadly defined security-related inadmissibility grounds, including any "unlawful activity." Its wider impact will be to sow a climate of fear and suspicion on campus, and to chill speech critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights. Alongside ongoing efforts by the government to strong-arm universities into policing and punishing Palestine scholarship and activism, this new Trump directive aims to further co-opt universities as arms of the surveillance state and will disproportionately impact Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and other students of color.

Dima Khalidi, Palestine Legal Director:

"This order is the latest in a growing list of dangerous, authoritarian measures aimed at enforcing an ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students into silence about Israel's genocide in Gaza with threats of prosecution and deportation.

It strikes at the heart of students' free speech rights. It's true goal is not to stop antisemitism - in which Trump and his sycophants frequently traffic - but to stop the growing support in this country for Palestinian liberation.

Targeting Palestine rights activists for punishment violates the First Amendment. The executive order is racist at its core, and reaffirms Trump's anti-Palestinian bigotry and his close cooperation with pro-Israel groups that have long encouraged discriminatory targeting of Palestinians and Palestine supporters. The executive order tells Palestinians and allies that voicing opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians can be grounds to deport or punish them.

The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement. It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump's agenda, and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches. It is imperative that universities protect the rights of their students, refuse to cooperate with Trump's efforts to silence and criminalize dissent, and end the McCarthyite crackdowns of students speaking out for Palestinian rights."

Since October 2023, Palestine Legal has documented a surge of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship across colleges and universities. The scale of repression and violence targeting students for exercising their First Amendment-protected expression and association has been unprecedented. U.S. elected officials and university leaders disingenuously accuse students and professors of antisemitism to justify the McCarthyite targeting of Palestinians and their allies. This Executive Order builds on the decades-long effort of anti-Palestinian groups and lawmakers to censor criticism of Israel on college campuses, and appears to follow recommendations in right-wing authoritarian playbooks for this administration to isolate, purge and punish individuals who dare call for Israel's and its US backers' accountability for genocide and war crimes.