Student protesters at Barnard College were arrested Wednesday afternoon for refusing to leave the campus’s library when asked by police, who were clearing the building due to a bomb threat, The New York Times reported. The students were protesting the recent expulsions of three student demonstrators.
Protesters gathered for a sit-in in the Milstein Center at around 1 p.m. Wednesday. Several hours later, administrators shared that they had received a bomb threat, and police began evacuating the building. The New York Police Department posted on social media that “anyone who refuses to leave the location is subject to arrest.” (The bomb threat was later found to be false.)
Many students initially refused to leave, continuing to chant above the sound of a fire alarm, until police began pushing students out of the building. Eventually, nine students were taken into custody for resisting police.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian activist group, as well as the college’s student government, condemned Barnard’s leaders for calling on NYPD officers to remove students from the building.
“Barnard College has broken a long-standing promise. SGA has been explicitly told by President [Laura] Rosenbury, in the presence of other senior staff, that the College would never invite the NYPD onto campus,” student government members wrote in an email to the Barnard community. “To go against this commitment blatantly violates a precedent that was meant to protect our students.”
Rosenbury defended the decision to bring NYPD officers to campus, saying it was necessary to protect protesters from injury after they refused to follow staff members’ instructions to leave the Milstein Center. (Copies of both the SGA’s and Rosenbury’s emails were shared in an article by Bwog, an independent student newspaper at Columbia.)
“For the safety of our entire community—including the safety of the masked disrupters—Barnard made the necessary decision to request NYPD assistance so they could evacuate the building to reduce the risk of harm … The decision to request NYPD assistance was guided and informed entirely by the absolute obligation we have to keep every member of our community safe,” Rosenbury said via email.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order on antisemitism that directs leaders of agencies, including the secretary of homeland security, to familiarize universities with grounds for inadmissibility for foreign nationals “so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds.” Those reports will then lead “to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”
This development should worry all Americans, regardless of their position on the Israel-Hamas war.
The order implies that universities should be monitoring and reporting students for scrutiny by immigration officials, including for speech that is protected by the First Amendment. It follows last week’s executive order threatening denial of entry to foreign nationals, or even deportation of those currently in the country, who “espouse hateful ideology.”
Free Speech Dispatch
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The Free Speech Dispatch is a new regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression.
Student visa holders in the U.S. already risk deportation by engaging in criminal activity, and did so long before the enactment of this order. Students who commit crimes — including vandalism, threats or violence — must face consequences, including potential revocation of visas when appropriate.
The First Amendment does not protect violence, for visitors and citizens alike, and an executive order narrowly confined to targeting illegal acts would not implicate First Amendment rights.
But a fact sheet released by the White House alongside the executive order goes well beyond criminal grounds for removal of foreign nationals to instead threaten viewpoint-motivated deportations. “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,” Trump said. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
If that’s what the Trump White House expects agencies to read into its formal orders, this development should worry all Americans, regardless of their position on the Israel-Hamas war.
Advocates of ideological deportation today should not be surprised to see it used against ideas they support in the future.
Our nation’s campuses are intended to be places of learning and debate that facilitate a wide range of views, even ones that some consider hateful or offensive.
This openness, albeit unpleasant or controversial at times, is a defining strength of American higher education. It’s one of the features attractive to students traveling from abroad who may hope to take part in the speech protections Americans have worked so hard to preserve. These are protections that they may very well be denied in their home countries.
We won’t protect freedom on campus by making it inaccessible to the international students who study there. But, given the warning accompanying the order, international students will now be rightfully afraid that their words — not just their conduct — are under a microscope.
There are already signs that critics of campus demonstrations expect the administration will expel protesters from the country. In the lead-up to the signing of this latest order, pro-Israel advocates claimed to be in contact with officials in the incoming Trump administration concerning lists of student protesters they hope to see deported. One group, Betar, told the New York Post it’s “using a combination of facial recognition software and ‘relationship database technology’” to identify protest attendees who are foreign nationals.
Freedom of speech was never meant to be easy.
At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I work, we have seen firsthand the many speech-related controversies that have plagued higher education over the decades. In every case, adhering to viewpoint-neutral principles, rather than censorship, has been the proper solution.
If we open the door to expelling foreign students who peacefully express ideas out of step with the current administration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should expect it to swing wider to encompass other viewpoints too. Today it may be alleged “Hamas sympathizers” facing threats of deportation for their political expression. Who could it be in four years? In eight?
Advocates of ideological deportation today should not be surprised to see it used against ideas they support in the future.
Why (most) calls for genocide are protected speech
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Creating a “genocide” exception to free speech only opens the door to more speech restrictions and selective enforcement.
In Bridges v. Wixon, the Supreme Court’s 1945 decision rejecting the deportation of Australian immigrant Harry Bridges over alleged Communist Party connections, Justice William Douglas wrote, “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”
Later decisions from the court complicate the question. The federal government retains significant authority over those who may enter and stay in the country. But the court’s reasoning in Wixon should provide lasting guidance.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Frank Murphy stated that he “cannot agree that the framers of the Constitution meant to make such an empty mockery of human freedom” by allowing the government to deport an alien over speech for which it could not imprison him.
Freedom of speech was never meant to be easy. But it allows us the space we need to work through thorny social and political challenges, even when it’s fraught with friction and discomfort. The United States should preserve this freedom on our campuses — spaces for free learning that set us apart from more authoritarian nations around the world — not make an “empty mockery” of it.
A fact sheet on the order pledged to take “forceful and unprecedented steps” to “combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets” since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
“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,” the fact sheet said.
Its direct order to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses” has sparked fear among international students who participated in the pro-Palestine protests that swept US college campuses last year.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called the order a “dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attack on both free speech and the humanity of Palestinians”.
“Free speech is a cornerstone of our Constitution that no president can wipe away with an executive order,” it said, adding that the protests had been “overwhelmingly peaceful”.
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
Trump Administration
The order pledges immediate action, “using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence”.
Its third section sets out specific measures to “combat campus antisemitism”, requiring agency leaders to recommend to the White House within 60 days all civil and criminal powers that can be used to combat antisemitism.
It requires attorney generals to submit a full analysis of court cases involving K-12 schools, colleges and universities and alleged civil rights violations associated with pro-Palestinian protests. If warranted, such reports could lead to the removal of “alien students and staff”.
While US institutions are required to report to immigration services any information deemed relevant to student visa determinations, federal efforts to impose an obligation to investigate and report on students are unprecedented and would raise serious legal questions, according to O’Melveny law practice.
The measures have alarmed many students and faculty on colleges campuses, but experts have said that the directive would likely draw legal challenges for violating free speech rights protected by the Constitution.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) issued a statement welcoming the Trump Administration’s commitment to “combatting antisemitism vigorously”.
Student visa holders “who have been found to provide material support or resources to designated terror organisations – as defined by the Supreme Court and distinguished from the exercise of free speech – are clearly in violation of the law and are therefore unworthy of the privilege of being in this country,” said AJC.
However, many pro-Palestinian protesters denied supporting Hamas, saying that they were demonstrating against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 47,000, according to health authorities.
In a letter representing students from the University of California’s 10 campuses, students argued that the order inaccurately conflated “pro-Palestine advocacy with antisemitism” and set a “scary precedent of censorship for the student community”.
The threat of visas being revoked and students being removed was heightened after legislation was passed earlier this month allowing immigration officers to carry out raids in “sensitive locations” including churches, schools and college campuses that were formerly protected.
