Mixed Jewish feelings about deporting anti Israel activists

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Robert Remes, a retired immigration lawyer, was expecting the Trump administration to crack down on migrants after the election. He was still surprised by the circumstances surrounding the detention of Columbia University anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil last month.

“The fact that such a person could be picked up goes against everything that immigration lawyers know to be true,” said Remes, who is Jewish and lives in Washington, DC. “That was one of the first indications that these people were really out of control.”

Remes is one of a swath of Jewish Americans who are concerned about the Trump administration’s deportations and visa revocations, even though the effort is being done in the name of fighting antisemitism. Jewish community members, leaders and historians said the lack of transparency and due process related to the crackdown posed a threat to Jews as a vulnerable minority in the United States, especially due to Jews’ history of persecution.

The deportations started when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Khalil, a green card holder and protest leader, outside his apartment last month, shortly after his protest group distributed Hamas material at a demonstration he attended on campus. The arrest set off furious backlash and protests outside a US district court in New York City. Khalil’s case is subject to an ongoing legal battle, with rights groups claiming his detention is unconstitutional. The debates hinge on immigration rights and free speech protections.

The crackdown has continued apace. This week, the Trump administration canceled the visas of students across the University of California school system. On Tuesday, New York University said in a campus-wide email that some community members had been affected.

The process and reasoning for the deportations have, in many instances, been opaque. Nearly 300 students have had their visas revoked, many with scant evidence against them. In one incident that Jewish community members described as especially worrying, a Turkish student at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, was apprehended by ICE agents after leaving her home to attend a Ramadan iftar dinner. Video of her arrest showed a man in a hoodie approach her on a street, grab her wrists and cuff her hands behind her back. The man and other plainclothes individuals then escorted her to an unmarked vehicle.

The US Department of Homeland Security said she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” without specifying those activities. Her arrest came a year after Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized the university’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” Tufts University’s pro-Israel student group came out against her detention, calling the arrest “plain wrong.”

“That’s pretty frightening, to have masked people come and grab you off the street,” Remes said, adding that the deportation of immigrants from El Salvador was, for him, also particularly upsetting. Remes grew up in the Jewish community in the New York suburbs and practiced immigration law for 47 years until he retired last April. He now serves on the board of a Virginia nonprofit that helps immigrant youths attend college.

Some Jewish community members took a nuanced view of the policies, saying they were supportive of much-needed measures to combat antisemitism, and opposed to protesters’ rhetoric, but concerned about the perceived lack of due process afforded to the administration’s targets.

Khalil, for example, has not been charged with a crime. The US alleges Khalil’s presence or activities in the country would have serious foreign policy consequences and that he withheld that he worked for the United Nations Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, in his visa application.

US immigration law bars non-citizens from espousing support for terrorist groups. Khalil’s protest group also backed violence against “Zionists,” called for the “eradication of Western civilization,” took over buildings on campus, clashed with police and caused extensive property damage.

The Anti-Defamation League issued early praise for Khalil’s detention, while urging an adherence to due process. The group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, later warned of a “disturbing pattern” of opaque enforcement as the crackdown progressed. Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman also said the group was concerned. The Biden administration envoy for antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, has said she is torn over the Trump administration policies.

After Khalil’s arrest, the White House celebrated, writing “SHALOM MAHMOUD” on social media. US President Donald Trump vowed further arrests of those “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

Leaders of the Reform movement, the largest US Jewish denomination, sought to balance concerns about antisemitism with fears related to the rule of law.

“I think Jews need to keep two central principles in mind at all times. Number one, antisemitism is a virus that can kill society. It’s dangerous not only to Jews but to the host community,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, a leading pro-Israel voice in the Reform community. “At the same time, among the foundational principles of America, one of the things that makes America exceptional is that we don’t simply grab people off the street.”


Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. (Courtesy)
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, echoed that sentiment.

US Jews “are deeply concerned about the antisemitic threat that is real, and the democratic institutions that will protect us,” he said.

Both community leaders drew on their family history to illustrate their concerns. Hirsch said his grandfather was taken from his apartment in Stalinist Russia and never seen again. Pesner said his grandmother, Fannie, escaped Russia for the US to live in a land that upheld “the civil rights protections of all people.”

“This was the historical experience of many Jews who were persecuted and ended up fleeing, arriving here or in Israel. So the idea that somebody could be grabbed off the street without adequate legal foundation and without receiving due process should be frightening to everybody, especially Jews,” Hirsch said, adding that he supported some government measures pressuring universities to protect Jewish students.

“The rule of law protects all of us,” he said. “The ironclad law of Jewish history is that it comes back to the Jewish community.”

Hirsch said he was hearing from congregants “all the time” about the issue. Many members of his community are looking to obtain foreign passports for the option of a haven abroad, due to both antisemitism and the perceived erosion of liberal institutions and the rule of law.

Columbia’s campus has also been divided on the issue. After Kahlil’s detention, some Jewish community members backed the arrest as part of a long-needed response to campus antisemitism, while around 50 Jewish students protested on campus, urging the university to come to Khalil’s defense.

“What I see happening is a Trump administration weaponizing Jewish concerns about antisemitism to enact what is quite simply a fascist agenda,” said Aharon Dardik, a leftist American-Israeli undergrad who helped organize the rally. “That, obviously, does not make Jews any safer. We know how this plays out.”

Not all Jewish communities are conflicted over the Trump administration crackdown. On the right, groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition have been broadly supportive. On the left, groups critical of Israel like IfNotNow have unequivocally opposed the deportations from the start. Right-wing Jews who voted for Trump cited his support for deportations as a reason for their vote, although most US Jews supported Kamala Harris.

Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, said he supported legal immigration and non-citizens needed to be granted due process, but he had no qualms about non-citizens being deported for terror support.

“If you’re not a citizen, you support murdering every Jew, you support Hamas-Nazis and praise October 7, I certainly am not happy to have them in my country. I’m certainly comfortable to remove non-citizens who chant those chants,” he said.

Klein was born to Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in post-war Germany and immigrated to the US at age 4. For him, that history was a reason to support deportations.

“I lost most of my family because of the Holocaust, because of people screaming for the murder of every Jew. I don’t want non-citizens who call for the murder of every Jew to remain in this country,” he said. Non-citizens supporting Hamas “endanger my life and my family,” he added.

Klein did not express unreserved support for all of the deportations. He was not closely familiar with Ozturk’s case, but said that writing a nonviolent op-ed “should not be enough to remove a person from the country, unless they lied on their visa application.”

It was unclear where the majority of US Jews stand on the issue. Ira Sheskin, a professor at Florida’s University of Miami who studies Jewish community demographics, said he was not aware of any polling about US Jewry’s stance toward the crackdown.

Lila Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, said the deportations “strike a nerve.” Much of the Jewish historical experience in pre-World War II Europe was about “people who thought they had legal status in a country being stripped of that legal status” and then being deported or deprived of due process, she said.

“Without those kinds of rights, the pathway toward political annihilation and then just annihilation was unfortunately so perilously clear,” said Berman, who is working on a book about American Jewish citizenship.

Berman said that after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, one of his first acts was to strip people who thought they had the right to live in Germany of that right. She resisited drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and the US due to the vast contextual differences, but said Nazi persecution had established the importance of protecting individuals’ legal rights.

“Witnessing a government, our government, treating people who have legally protected status to be here as if they don’t, it’s just so eerie,” she said. “To me, it’s not about the parallel, it’s the principle.”

Jews in the US have been subject to high-profile citizenship battles in the past, in both politically motivated deportations and court battles that expanded citizenship rights. In some of those cases, authorities adhered to due process to carry out political aims.

Emma Goldman, a Jewish anarchist and social activist, moved to New York and married a Jewish immigrant citizen in 1887 but soon divorced. She was arrested repeatedly for her activism, and after she organized resistance to the World War I draft, was imprisoned for two years. Weeks after her release, she was arrested again as an “enemy alien.” Goldman held that she was a citizen because of her short-lived marriage, but the government said she had relinquished her citizenship with her divorce. She was deported to Russia in 1919.

“The American government clearly had the intention of getting rid of her,” Berman said. “Even in that case, and that’s a textbook case of deportation, it’s notable how scrupulous they tried to be about due process.”

In another prominent case, naturalized US citizen Beys Afroyim moved to Israel in 1950 and voted in an Israeli election. When he returned to the US in 1960, the State Department attempted to revoke his citizenship under a law that mandated the loss of citizenship for measures including voting in a foreign election. Afroyim challenged the ruling as unconstitutional in a case that landed in the Supreme Court. The court ruled in Afroyim’s favor in a 5-4 decision in 1967. The decision held that US citizens could not have their citizenship involuntarily stripped, reinforcing the rights of dual citizenship in the US.

Berman said most US Jews have assumed that once granted citizenship, it was “a done deal,” and they were secure, but in reality, citizenship is a “legal construct that has a lot of give to it.” Citizenship laws, and their legal interpretations and applications, are constantly shifting, including in the US, she said.

“A particular government can come in and upend many of the things that we thought were certain about how citizenship and legal protections work,” she said. “I think for Jews, the experience of WWII, seeing how quickly the disregard for citizenship and legal protections, how quickly that can turn people into credible enemies of the state, it’s just very chilling.”

In an irony, Remes’s family history in Nazi Germany could provide his family a haven abroad. His late mother-in-law had her citizenship stripped in Germany because she was Jewish and came to the US as a refugee. Remes’s wife acquired a German passport under laws that allow descendants of German Jews persecuted in the Nazi era to obtain citizenship. The couple is considering using the passport to move to Europe if the US deteriorates further, he said.

“I can really imagine things becoming so horrible that staying here is unacceptable. Who would have ever thought that I or anyone else would say things like that?” he said.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump’s administration has pointed to the fight against antisemitism as one reason it is threatening to pull hundreds of millions in funding from Ivy League universities and attempting to deport international student activists who protested against Israel’s war in Gaza.

In some instances, Jewish organizations have cheered what they view as Trump’s crackdown on the antisemitism that has swelled since the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza. But in many other cases, leading Jewish groups and advocates have expressed deep discomfort with what the government professes to do in the name of Jewish safety.

The divide echoes some of the internal political divisions among Jewish Americans over the last 18 months.

Rabbi Sharon Brous, the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community based in Los Angeles, succinctly captured that unease with a sermon she delivered to her nondenominational congregation on March 8. It was titled, “I Am Not Your Pawn.”

“What may feel, today, like a welcomed embrace is actually putting us at even greater danger,” Brous said, according to a copy of her sermon published on IKAR’s website. “We, the Jews, are being used to advance a political agenda that will cause grave harm to the social fabric, and to the institutions that are best suited to protect Jews and all minorities.”

“We are being used. Our pain, our trauma, is being exploited to eviscerate the dream of a multiracial democracy, while advancing the goal of a white Christian nation,” Brous added.

Brous is not alone in voicing displeasure with the Trump administration’s tactics and strategy. In a joint statement Tuesday, a coalition of 10 organizations representing a wide swath of American Jewry flatly rejected what they characterized as “the false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy.”

The organizations — assembled by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a pro-democracy group — made clear they believe that antisemitism has become more “visible, chilling, and increasingly normalized,” and “requires urgent and consistent action.” But they forcefully criticized the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on universities and pro-Palestinian protesters.

“In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding,” the 10 organizations said. “Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally-protected speech.”

“Universities have an obligation to protect Jewish students, and the federal government has an important role to play in that effort; however, sweeping draconian funding cuts will weaken the free academic inquiry that strengthens democracy and society, rather than productively counter antisemitism on campus,” the groups added. “These actions do not make Jews — or any community — safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.”

The groups behind the message included the National Council of Jewish Women, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Union for Reform Judaism.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the most prominent Jewish elected official in the country and the author of a recent book about antisemitism, blasted the White House for “making unprecedented demands of universities aimed at undermining or even destroying these vital institutions.”

Schumer, who is a Harvard graduate, said Monday that institutions of higher learning “must do more to fight antisemitism on campus,” but applauded the nation’s best-known Ivy League school for bucking Trump’s demands: “Harvard is right to resist.”

The American Jewish Committee, an influential advocacy group, recently reiterated calls for universities to “take action to counter and prevent antisemitism on their campuses.” But the organization took issue with what it called “the broad, sweeping, and devastating cuts in federal funding that a growing number of American research universities have been subjected to in recent weeks.”

The organization added that the administration’s cuts, initiated “under the auspices of combating antisemitism, will damage America’s standing as a center of innovation and research excellence.”

But crucially, some Jewish organizations have vocally supported Trump’s second-term agenda, while others have refrained from harshly criticizing the president.

Nathan Diament, the executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization, said in an interview Tuesday that his constituents were pleased that the White House appears to be taking antisemitism seriously.

“I would say, overall, without getting into each individual instance, certainly the segment of the American Jewish community that we represent appreciates that President Trump and his team are being much more aggressive in fighting the surge of antisemitism that we’ve seen for more than a year and a half,” Diament said.

He said his organization had repeatedly lobbied the Biden administration to take a tougher line on antisemitism, adding that while he recognized that the previous White House “took some steps,” he was glad to see Trump’s more bellicose approach.

Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said his organization “enthusiastically applauds the Trump administration for taking bold, decisive action to combat anti-Americanism and antisemitism in higher education after years of weakness and appeasement of the campus mobs by the Biden-Harris administration.”

“There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Donald J. Trump,” Brooks added.

The Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation's foremost Jewish advocacy groups, drew criticism after it backed the March 8 arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who played a prominent role in the sprawling protests last year against Israel at Columbia University.

“We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism — and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions,” the ADL wrote in part in a March 9 post on X.

“Obviously, any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections,” the ADL added. “We also hope that this action serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.”

In the midst of the Trump administration’s flurry of activity, some Jewish voices have expressed a certain ambivalence about the White House’s confrontation with universities.

The publisher and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal, a publication based in Los Angeles that prints editorials from a conservative viewpoint, recently wrote he was “torn between two sentiments.”

“On the one hand, it’s good to see that our government is taking seriously the anti-Jewish onslaught that began on college campuses right after the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7,” David Suissa wrote in an editorial published April 2.

“But if the government goes too far and uses ‘antisemitism’ as an excuse to unlawfully kick out agitators, the effort will end up backfiring on the Jews. The last thing we need is to be held responsible for the overreach of an overly aggressive government.”

Dozens of rabbis and cantors who graduated from Brown University have a message for their alma mater’s president: “Do not cede control to those who weaponize antisemitism.”

Their message comes in an open letter to President Christina Paxson as she weighs how to respond to a $500 million funding cut threatened by the Trump administration, ostensibly over Brown’s handling of antisemitism on campus.

Brown is one of a growing number of universities, many of them in the Ivy League, to be threatened with similar cuts by the Trump administration. As the list expands, and as the Trump administration moves to retaliate against Harvard for resisting its pressure, Jewish students, alumni and groups are openly rejecting moves that the White House says are meant to protect them.

In the past week, a chorus of dissent has come from Jewish community members at Harvard, Emerson College, Georgetown University and more.

At Harvard, over 100 Jewish students signed a letter decrying the Trump administration’s announcement earlier this month that it would review $9 billion in federal funding to the school. The letter was written before the administration froze $2.2 billion in funding this week and was rebuked by Harvard’s president.

“We are compelled to speak out because these actions are being taken in the name of protecting us — Harvard Jewish students — from antisemitism,” the students wrote, according to The Harvard Crimson. “But this crackdown will not protect us. On the contrary, we know that funding cuts will harm the campus community we are part of and care about deeply.”

Harvard Hillel said in a statement on Friday that the Trump administration’s actions are harming Jews on its campus.

“The current, escalating federal assault against Harvard — shuttering apolitical, life-saving research; targeting the university’s tax-exempt status; and threatening all student visas, including those of Israeli students who are proud veterans of the Israel Defense Forces and forceful advocates for Israel on campus — is neither focused nor measured, and stands to substantially harm the very Jewish students and scholars it purports to protect,” the statement said.

More than a dozen Jewish faculty members at Emerson signed a letter published in the Berkeley Beacon Wednesday that expressed concern over the “weaponization of antisemitism” to further the Trump administration’s agenda.

“This is a transparent move by the Trump administration to concentrate power and erode university independence under the offensive pretext of ‘protect[ing] Jewish students,’” the letter read.

At Georgetown, over 170 Jewish students, faculty, staff and alumni signed a letter condemning the detainment of Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri last month. His detainment was a part of a string of arrests of pro-Palestinian activists on campuses by the Trump administration to curtail campus antisemitism.

Dozens of Jewish groups recently joined an amicus brief in support of a Tufts University student who was detained over an op-ed she wrote in a student newspaper criticizing Israel.

The criticism is coming from Israel, too. On Thursday, over 170 Israeli academics also denounced the Trump administration’s detainments in an open letter, writing that “such draconian moves do not protect us” and lambasting the “cynical use of ‘combating antisemitism’” as an impetus for the administration’s actions.

And it’s not just people affiliated with universities who are pushing back on the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

Ten major Jewish organizations comprising leaders in the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements made a joint statement Tuesday rejecting what they called the “false choice” between Jewish safety on campuses and democracy.

“We reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of antisemitism and pit communities against one another; and we unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and/or the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful protest,” the statement read.

The Trump administration’s higher education moves have Jewish supporters, particularly when it comes to canceling the visas of students who have engaged in anti-Israel activism. Multiple activist groups have taken on the task of identifying students and reporting on them to the White House. The funding pressure has Jewish defenders, too.

But there are increasing signs that the funding cuts — billions of dollars are so far on the line — may have overshot the ambitions of even the most demanding critics of antisemitism on college campuses.

On Friday morning, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, sharpened earlier criticism of the Trump administration’s higher education agenda. While saying that Harvard and other schools have real challenges when it comes to antisemitism, he said they were more likely to improve with support than with steep punishments and that penalties, if applied in rare instances, should be narrowly targeted.

“The fight against antisemitism must be about antisemitism — nothing more, nothing less,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

“Resolving the very real crisis of antisemitism should not jeopardize the entire enterprise of our system of higher education,” he added. “We should be able to hold institutions accountable for protecting Jewish students, faculty, and staff while maintaining a commitment to academic freedom and independent inquiry. Again, nothing more, nothing less.”