On Tuesday, four senior Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents testified before the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a case challenging the Trump administration’s targeting of noncitizens on the basis of their pro-Palestinian activism. As Politico reported, the agents—including those who supervised the teams responsible for apprehending Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk—said they received “top-down” instructions to detain the Palestinian rights activists. One HSI agent testified that the request “was not something that I had much experience with, if any.”
In a July 16 filing obtained by the Prospect, attorneys representing the plaintiffs argued the agents “each testified as to their understanding that a decision was made at the highest levels of government to prioritize the arrests of the targeted non-citizens, but not a single one of them knew why.”
HSI has broad discretion over which federal crimes it investigates, but Trump’s return to office has marked a notable shift in HSI’s priorities, as is true across numerous federal law enforcement agencies. “I’m still in touch with heads of federal agencies … and they are just flabbergasted that they’re all being tasked to become border agents and immigration agents, and they haven’t been trained for that,” a former top official at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told the Prospect. “They’re keeping their heads down because this regime [will] fire you if you express any opposition.” Agencies dragooned into immigration enforcement include the DEA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Fish and Wildlife Service, Postal Inspection Service, and the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
The First Amendment applies to all persons in the U.S., regardless of citizenship status. Opposing American foreign-policy interests is not a crime, but as the former top DEA official observed, the Trump administration has been seeking to deport political dissidents who are “here on a green card or visa” for exercising their constitutional rights.
The plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case filed a motion this week to compel additional witnesses in the case, also requesting emails, notes, or other documents “from January 2025 onwards related to the need for HSI to prioritize immigration enforcement,” court documents seen by the Prospect reveal. That request was pending as of Thursday.
THE LACK OF DUE PROCESS IS A COMMON THREAD between the detention of international student activists and backlash against university professors who oppose Israel’s total war campaign in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives. A growing number of college administrations have capitulated to the demands of politicians whose allegiance to Israel seems to take precedence over the First Amendment, and who have weaponized federal funding as well as law enforcement toward those ends.
University administrations from coast to coast have been punishing faculty and students for engaging in Palestinian advocacy. For example, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) suspended Brook Haley, a humanities lecturer and outspoken critic of the institution’s administration, for two weeks in May after campus police arrested him on felony charges for vandalism at a Students for Justice in Palestine rally. He was held overnight in jail and denies the charges against him.
In an interview with the Prospect, Haley asserted that his arrest and subsequent suspension were acts of retaliation. Accordingly, Howard Gillman, the UCI chancellor whom Haley cosplayed as at the height of the encampments last year (the first time he was arrested at a pro-Palestine protest), “has a reputation of being retaliatory.” Gillman, a Constitution scholar and expert, serves as co-chair of the advisory board for the university system’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. In February, he spoke at an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) panel about rising antisemitism “in the wake of the terrorist massacre” orchestrated by Hamas in October 2023. No video or transcript for the panel discussion was immediately available by press time, but given the ADL’s conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, it’s safe to assume the conversation followed a familiar set of political contours.
A growing number of college administrations have capitulated to the demands of politicians whose allegiance to Israel seems to take precedence over the First Amendment.
Haley, whose May arrest came in the midst of finals season, was only permitted to teach over Zoom, which he described as a “sub-standard instruction method.” Had it not been for the “magnanimity” of a UCI dean whose name Haley did not reveal, he would have not been able to teach at all. At the time, Haley’s students were working on 36 individual research projects focusing on humanistic inquiry. He said having to teach over Zoom made it much more difficult to support his students, an expected outcome of the ongoing McCarthyite campaign to undermine higher education.
On the East Coast, the City University of New York’s faculty rallied in Lower Manhattan this week, protesting alleged retaliation against four adjunct faculty professors at Brooklyn College over their support for Palestinian rights. In June, CUNY informed three of the professors it would not be reappointing them to their positions, later firing the fourth adjunct faculty member.
Professor James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC)—the 30,000-strong CUNY faculty and staff union—likened this to extortion. “The universities whose representatives are at the table feel like they have to give ground on some component of the ideological agenda that this administration has,” he told the Prospect.
The PSC responded to the firings by passing a resolution in defense of academic freedom and against the firings. Davis also wrote a letter to CUNY chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, urging him to reinstate the professors and provide an explanation for the university system’s decision.
In a statement, Brooklyn College said that it “does not make personnel decisions based on political beliefs but based on conduct. As this is an ongoing personnel matter, we are unable to comment further. No classes will be cancelled.”
“We need due process here at CUNY,” Lincoln Restler, a New York City councilmember, said Monday at the press conference, in front of a podium with the words “NO TO THE NEW MCCARTHYISM!” inscribed on a white placard in bold type. “We need to make sure that when professors are being let go, it is not happening unilaterally.” New York City comptroller Brad Lander quipped at hecklers who tried to derail the event before speaking to the matter at hand. “Faculty members are not going to be intimidated by aspiring brownshirts, and they’re not going to be intimidated by an administration that won’t stand up for their constitutional rights,” he said.
THE DAY AFTER THE CUNY FACULTY RALLY, Columbia University acting president Claire Shipman released a statement announcing the school’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the IHRA’s definition is premised on racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, and conflates opposition to Zionism, a political ideology, with antisemitism.
Khalil cut through this conflation in his remarks to hundreds of supporters outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan on June 22: “The Palestine movement is diverse. There’s no place for any kind of hatred, whether it is anti-Blackness, antisemitism, or any sort of hate.” A federal court ordered his release from an immigration detention center just two days earlier. (Khalil and attorney Ramzi Kassem reportedly drove through the night to catch the first flight to Newark Airport.)
Redefining antisemitism has proven to be a bipartisan endeavor. Back in May, the House overwhelmingly voted in favor of passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify the IHRA definition into law. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee postponed a final vote on whether to approve the measure for floor consideration, so it remains in limbo for now. In any case, the push to distort the meaning of antisemitism appears to be originating from the highest levels of government.
On Tuesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee held its ninth hearing on antisemitism in 18 months. University leaders once again faced sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers for not doing enough to combat it, while repeatedly conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitic hate. Matos Rodríguez testified at the hearing, alongside Rich Lyons, chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Robert Groves, interim president of Georgetown University.
House Democrats called out the Trump administration for purging the Department of Education and weakening the agency’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which investigates antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. They also urged their Republican colleagues to “condemn antisemitism in their own party and at the highest levels of government,” as Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) said while referring to a derogatory term president Trump used at a recent rally. She went on to describe the committee hearing as a “political sideshow.”
“My colleagues are weaponizing the real problems of the Jewish community, a community I am an active member of, in furtherance of their attacks on and plans to defund colleges and universities,” Bonamici said.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who has led the charge against universities and free expression for years, launched a particularly vociferous diatribe against Matos Rodríguez. The chancellor seemed ill-prepared for her line of questioning into Ramzi Kassem, founding director of CUNY’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project and chief attorney for the Mahmoud Khalil Defense Fund.
“CUNY CLEAR? I’m not familiar with that,” Matos Rodríguez said. Rep. Stefanik pressed the chancellor further, asking whether it concerns him that “New York taxpayers are paying” Kassem’s salary before smearing Khalil (who is now seeking $20 million in damages or an apology from the Trump administration for its actions) and the Palestinian rights movement as antisemitic.
The committee hearings on antisemitism, which Davis says are “nominally” concerned with devising solutions to the problem, have done much to set the tone on how university administrations respond to pro-Palestinian activism and little to protect Jewish communities. “These colleges are key economic engines, but they’re also critical to an operating, working democracy, and that’s what’s really at stake in these hearings. The Republicans in Congress don’t want a working democracy. This is a feature. It’s not a bug of their governing strategy,” he said. If Sen. Tim Walberg (R-MI), chair of the committee, is to be believed, faculty and student groups, unions, Middle East study centers, foreign funding, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs all enable antisemitism, at least the kind covered by the IHRA’s definition.
Michelle Fine, distinguished professor of psychology at CUNY, attested that she and other Jewish members of the campus community do not feel unsafe. “We will not permit a resounding global critique of Israel to be weaponized as antisemitic speech,” Fine said. “CUNY is a force of nature, and we can’t be stopped.”