Masked agents are hunting down and arresting American campus members while the government is demanding universities ban masks at protests.
There’s no public list of who’s had their visas and even green cards revoked, just a series of news reports that started with the “kidnapping” of Mahmoud Khalil from his Columbia University housing and then a drumbeat of stories about individual cases.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed to reporters that more than 300 visas have been pulled so far as he personally signs off on each one.
But Rubio hemmed and hawed about how “I’m trying to remember” when asked repeatedly whether those were mostly student visas, and related to pro-Palestine or anti-Israel protests.
“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa,” Rubio said.
“If you lie to us and get a visa then enter the United States, and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.”
But “participate in movements that are involved in doing things” is a camel’s nose for the government to ambush arrest an undergraduate visa holder who co-wrote a student paper op-ed for having thus “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
As the Trump administration races to replace due process with “just trust us,” Rubio is reportedly using AI to check social media posts, evoking China’s dystopian social credit scores, in this “catch and revoke” campaign.
“We’re going to err on the side of caution. We are not going to be importing activists into the United States. They’re here to study,” Rubio said. “They’re here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine our universities. I think it’s lunacy to continue to allow that.”
He boasted that “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
But even if you think that many universities allowed or encouraged the spread of a lunatic culture hostile to free inquiry, it’s crazy to trust this administration or any administration to shut down speech to protect you.
The editors of Tablet magazine — a Jewish publication deeply suspicious of what they saw as a frontal attack on free speech by the Biden and Obama administrations facilitated by social media giants like Facebook and elite institutions including universities— wrote a warning nearly a year ago that applies now.
Under the title “Not in Our Name,” they observed that “Jews in particular shouldn’t appeal to… powerful players, the government included, for protection. In a world in which people with minority opinions are increasingly subject to the full force of ‘the whole of government’ or ‘the whole of society’ being brought against them by a narrow group of powerful people, we have an existential interest as a people in supporting free speech and constitutional rights for others—on the historically sound principle that they will soon be coming for us.”
That’s why, the editors continued, “we must reject all proposals, even from well-meaning sources, that seek to empower government to address the issue of speech on our behalf — like when New York Congressman Ritchie Torres introduced a bill that would allow the Department of Education to subject universities that receive federal funding to ‘third-party antisemitism monitors’… His heart is in the right place. But this is lunacy. No one should support it.”
That’s no defense of higher ed from the editors, as “everything you’re seeing on college campuses these days — all the madness — in one way or another relates to speech, and these new, mangled ideas of it. The arc of censorship is long, but it bends toward Hamilton Hall.
“But these are all reasons to abandon universities. They are not reasons to abandon free speech… The answer is certainly not to give bad-faith actors at universities or the federal government even more power to police speech, in the hope that they will use it to ‘protect the Jews.’ They will not.”
Words worth returning to amid this un-American round-up as President Trump claims his political foes aren’t real Jews and tells American Jews “you have a big protector in me.”
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
