Pro-Palestinian protestors in front of the 15th District Court Building in Ann Arbor, demanding charges filed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel be dropped. Sept. 20, 2024. Photo by Jon King
President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week aimed at canceling the student visas of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses last year.
Michigan was home to dozens of such protests, particularly in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Detroit and the University of Michigan, which resulted in dozens of arrests and police clearing out a large encampment in May 2024.
Israel declared war against the militant group Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise terrorist attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage. As the war dragged on through January, more than 47,000 Palestinians were killed and about 112,000 were injured, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health authority.
Four arrested as U of M sends in police to remove pro-Palestinian encampment
The war became a major flashpoint in the 2024 presidential election, with many pro-Palestinian groups blasting Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and the Biden administration for supporting Israel. While the prominent group Abandon Harris endorsed Green Party nominee Jill Stein, many other Arab-American leaders backed Donald Trump, including Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib.
Trump said on Wednesday in a fact sheet about the order that he would “quickly cancel” the student visas “of all Hamas sympathizers” on college campuses, which he said “have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
“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.
While individuals already in the U.S. have First Amendment protections — including foreign students — those without legal citizenship status may face increased scrutiny and potential deportation, even if they entered the country lawfully, said Ruby Robinson, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC).
International students in the country as an F-1 nonimmigrant would normally have to be convicted of a crime in order to be subject to deportation. But terrorism related grounds of deportation are broader.
“If the department believes that you endanger public safety or national security, or that you intend to overthrow the government by force, violence or other unlawful means, that is sufficient to initiate deportation against that person,” Robinson said. “Or if they have done certain things that support a terrorist organization, that can also make them deportable, even if they’re lawfully here.”
Under federal immigration law, anyone who is an “officer, official, representative or spokesman” of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) cannot be granted a visa to enter the United States unless a waiver is issued.
There are no other terrorist organizations specifically named directly in the statute, Robinson said.
Kay Jarvis, a spokesperson for the University of Michigan, said that the university is “carefully reviewing all of the executive orders to understand their implications on the institution and students.”
The university has set up a webpage to offer updates related to how federal orders may impact the university, which so far mentions four categories: funding and grants; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; international students, employees and scholars; and undocumented individuals.
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Trump previously laid the groundwork for such a move with the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” order and the “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats” order.
“The executive order that talks about an ‘invasion’ of the United States is the broadest thing I have ever seen coming out of any administration,” Alden said.
Ruby Robinson, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC), said that the language in the executive orders is “overly broad, verbose and bombastic … to support a narrative.”
“But just because it says it in the executive order doesn’t necessarily make it so,” Robinson said.
Alden compared Trump’s executive orders to the FBI’s use of extensive powers under immigration laws in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“There were serious, serious abuses in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and if you’re creating this environment of emergency, and fear and invasion, and crisis, then it’s a pretty small step to begin doing again what we did in that environment of emergency, fear and crisis after Sept. 11,” Alden said.
“I would not be surprised to see this administration dust off that playbook and go after people in the pro-Palestinian communities, among other places, to try to say these people pose some kind of danger, to look for immigration violations if they could find them,” Alden said.
Challenging Trump’s orders could prove difficult since the U.S. Supreme Court previously upheld broad powers for the president under immigration laws when he imposed restrictions on entering the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, Alden said.
“The authorities under immigration law are pretty powerful and not subject to a lot of oversight by the courts,” Alden said. “It’s almost a blank check for the administration to target anyone here on a temporary visa if they have reasons that they wish to do so.”
The court cases relating to the 2017 travel ban also mean that “this administration learned from the mistakes they made during the first time they were in power,” Robinson said.
A new challenge would likely incorporate more First Amendment analysis as opposed to focusing solely on immigration analysis, Robinson said.
“The chilling effect on speech is very real in this circumstance,” Robinson said.
Even if charges brought against immigrants can be disproven, Alden said that they could end up being wrongfully detained for long periods of time due to a backlog of cases in the immigration court system, which is housed within the Department of Justice.
“There are far more safeguards in the criminal justice system than there are in the immigration justice system,” Alden said.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump vowed to sign an even broader travel ban than the one he issued during his first term.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) has expressed concern that Trump has been laying the groundwork for a new, expanded so-called “Muslim ban” through some of the executive orders he has signed during his first days in office.
“We’re laying the groundwork already, he’s already doing it, for the Muslim ban,” Tlaib said in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House last week. “Many of my neighbors, my family, myself, all of us, even though it’s not directly targeted towards us, attacking a whole faith is un-American.”
Alden said that Trump’s orders have “created the conditions in which a travel ban could be imposed at any time.”
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told CBS News on Monday that Michigan has “done a lot of planning … for a number of different scenarios” but that the state has not yet seen raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents increase in the state.
Whitmer declined to say whether she would have Michigan State Police assist federal law enforcement in detaining people living in the state without legal citizenship status.
“I think that as we see this continue to play out, we’ll continue to assess how we conduct ourselves in the state of Michigan, but I do think that there’s a lot of legitimate fears and concerns that are happening and I think we should treat all people with dignity at the very minimum,” Whitmer said.
Trump suggested last weekend that Egypt and Jordan take in Palestinian refugees from the Gaza Strip so that “we just clean out the whole thing.”
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said.
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