Berra Ince“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.”
So reads The White House web page dedicated to the executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on January 29. The order, according to the US administration, aims to take “forceful and unprecedented steps” to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses and in public spaces.
In the accompanying fact sheet, Trump accuses these “resident aliens” of “celebrating Hamas’ mass rape, kidnapping, and murder,” as well as obstructing synagogues, assaulting worshippers, and vandalising American monuments and statues.
Critics, however, argue that the sweeping language of the order and its implementation serve as a direct assault on pro-Palestinian activism and free speech rights in the US.
Targeted crackdown?
Just weeks after the order’s signing, on March 10, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at New York City's Columbia University, was detained.
Trump took to social media to brand Khalil, a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student”, despite the fact that Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, had not been formally charged with a crime.
His arrest was met with swift international backlash from civil liberties organisations, lawyers and academics, who condemned it as an alarming breach of First Amendment rights.
To date, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has offered only vague reasoning for Khalil’s detention.
A post on X alleges that “Khalil led activities aligned with Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation.”
The decision relies on a rarely-used immigration law that grants the Secretary of State the authority to deem a non-citizen’s presence in the US “incompatible with foreign policy,” thereby making them eligible for removal.
However, no concrete evidence has been presented by the White House against Khalil, and a federal judge has temporarily paused his deportation after ruling that the case lacked sufficient legal grounds.
While the federal government has taken an aggressive stance against pro-Palestinian student activism, much of the current climate on campuses has been shaped by the influence of powerful pro-Israel lobbying organisations.
One of the most prominent is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group widely recognised as the leading pro-Israel advocacy force in US domestic policy.
Just two days ahead of Khalil’s arrest, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt publicly stated that he had been “engaging directly” with Columbia University officials to address efforts to combat anti-Semitism on campus.
“Just yesterday I went to campus to meet firsthand with Jewish students and heard stories of harassment and intimidation,” Greenblatt wrote on X on March 8.
He further called on Columbia to collaborate more actively with state and federal law enforcement, ensuring that students accused of antisemitic behaviour face not only disciplinary action from the university but also “real-world consequences for breaking the law.”
Two days later, Khalil was arrested—raising questions about whether external lobbying efforts played a role in shaping the administration’s response to pro-Palestinian activism.
Secretive disciplinary system
At the time of his arrest, Khalil was already under investigation by Columbia’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) – a secretive disciplinary body established to address harassment and discrimination complaints.
However, numerous reports suggest the OIE functions less like a neutral body addressing discrimination and more like an internal prosecution system targeting student dissent on Israel-Palestine conflict.
On March 4, an investigation by Drop Site News revealed that students accused of misconduct were required to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to see the evidence against them, effectively silencing them from discussing their cases publicly.
That the OIE reinterpreted the Civil Rights Act, to treat criticism of Israel as a form of “discriminatory harassment,” speaks volumes about its alignments with the ADL's key policy goals.
ADL is the same organisation that has been a major proponent of adopting the controversial IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism which has been heavily criticised for equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
“The ADL for a long time now has conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. That's why many analysts and reporters are no longer even trusting the ADL's data because they conflate pro-Palestine protests, anti-genocide protest with anti-Semitism,” Zachary Foster, US-based historian of Palestine and the Middle East, told TRT World.
Foster argues that this influence has directly shaped Columbia University’s approach to policing student activism.
“It's extremely scary and it means that legitimate criticism of an apartheid state on trial for genocide at the [International Court of Justice] ICJ, is no longer tolerable at Columbia,” he said.
Public records confirm that the ADL has actively lobbied US lawmakers to enforce the controversial IHRA definition denounced by critics as “dangerous” and “politicised”.
According to the Drop Site News report, the OIE in Columbia targeted students simply for putting up posters, sharing social media posts, organising protests calling for the condemnation of Israel and labeling Israel’s actions as genocidal.
“The posters said things like ‘Condemn Israel,’ and ‘Israel is a Terrorist State’, which I am now being told by Columbia constitutes discriminatory harassment under Civil Rights Law. If one of them had said ‘Kill Zionists’ or something like that I would understand, but they were nothing like this,” the news website quoted a Columbia student as saying.
ADL’s history of surveillance
The ADL’s role in shaping campus policy is part of a longer history of surveillance and influence operations.
Since the 1970s, the organisation has promoted the idea of “new anti-Semitism,” a concept that classifies anti-Zionism and certain critiques of Israel as forms of anti-Semitism.
In 2022, Greenblatt himself declared that there was no difference between the two, drawing backlash from numerous Jewish groups as well as some members of ADL’s staff.
“Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” Greenblatt said during a speech at the ADL’s Virtual National Leadership Summit.
“Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage. It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy,” he claimed.
His speech also labelled Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as “radical left” extremists, arguing that they mirror the far right. Both groups have been barred from hosting events at Columbia University as of 2024.
ADL’s website openly states that it “shapes the work of policymakers” on the federal, state and local levels through “bipartisan advocacy”.
Further, the organisation significantly expanded its lobbying efforts, increasing its policy spending by 94% in 2004, bringing its total lobbying expenditures to $1.4 million, with the goal of advancing an ambitious “legislative agenda”.
These efforts come against the backdrop of past ADL controversies, including the 1993 ADL spying scandal, in which the organisation was caught illegally surveilling more than 10,000 individuals and 950 organisations across the political spectrum, including Arab-American groups, Black civil rights organisations like the NAACP, leftist activists, anti-apartheid organisers, and even progressive Jewish groups.
The unfolding crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University–and beyond–raises troubling questions about the extent to which pro-Israel lobbying influences US campus policies, free speech, and civil rights enforcement.
The line between combating anti-Semitism and suppressing political dissent is becoming dangerously blurred.
