Last month, President Trump signed an executive order promising “immediate action”––including canceling student visas and deporting students––against noncitizen college students who participate in pro-Palestine protests.
JONAH RUBIN; jonah@jewishvoiceforpeace.org
Rubin is Senior Manager of Campus Organizing for Jewish Voice for Peace.
Rubin told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “A ton has changed already [since the executive order went out]. Health and Human Services launched investigations into four medical schools” for pro-Palestine messaging from students, including “displaying the Palestinian flag at graduations or wearing keffiyeh. Those simple expressions are being taken as acts of antisemitism by the federal government. There is an attempt to erase all signs of Palestine and Palestinians from American public life.
“Even more worrisome is that we have already seen prominent universities voluntarily and dramatically change their policies, in what is being called ‘anticipatory obedience.’ Harvard canceled a medical school lecture in which speakers were going to testify about the medical situation in Gaza. We also saw the forced resignation of the leader of the Religion and Public Life program at Harvard Divinity School. They are going above and beyond what is in the text of the executive order in order to appease an unconstitutional attack on higher education. We need these colleges and universities to fulfill their mission to stand up for professors and students, free inquiry, speech and protest––instead of running to fulfill Project Esther and Project 2025 ideas that they are not even legally required to fulfill.”
But Jewish Voice for Peace, alongside other grassroots organizations, is “mobilizing. We are rolling out a campaign to ask colleges and universities to stand up against this: to assure students that [institutions] will not voluntarily share information with ICE or federal authorities; to destroy disciplinary records [of students] taking part in social justice protests, which they are allowed to do; to designate multiple private areas on campuses that ICE agents aren’t allowed to enter without a judicial warrant; to do Know Your Rights trainings.
“For understandable reasons, the focus so far has been on the executive orders. They are certainly horrible. But more focus should be paid to the ways that large cultural institutions and universities are not only doing what they legally need to do, following the letter of the law, but are going above and beyond what they need to do––voluntarily taking up and extending the attacks on DEI, Palestine solidarity, LGBTQ+ [populations], and immigrants. Trump is laying out goals and taking the first steps in creating an illegal framework to force compliance. But so many institutions think that they’re going to protect themselves by attacking vulnerable people.
“This is not just an attack on Palestine solidarity or on immigrants, but also on the principles of higher education. For their own interests, if not for the right of good, these institutions need to stand up and put in place protective measures that will make it harder for the federal government to do this vast, oppressive overreach.”