Betar, a self-described Zionist group, wants to help Trump curtail pro-Palestine speech.
By Nicholas Liu, Salon
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to punish protesters who supported Palestine and called for an end to Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, including the potential deportation of non-citizen students and university staff. The escalation comes with the assistance of Betar, a far-right group whose stated mission is to “defend Zionism with clarity and courage,” which told Salon it has compiled a list of foreign students and teachers that it believes should be expelled from the country — and shared it with the Trump administration.
According to Trump’s executive order, federal authorities are now charged with identifying all civil and criminal actions within their respective jurisdictions “that might be used to curb or combat anti-Semitism.” This includes working with university administrators to monitor activities “by alien students and staff” and, “if warranted,” taking action “to remove such aliens.”
“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. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said in a “fact sheet” distributed by the White House.
Even before Trump’s victory last November, Betar had been using AI facial recognition technology and tip-offs to ascertain anti-Zionist protesters’ identities, hoping that authorities would eventually vet and use the information to deport “despicable, egregious people who openly support Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” spokesperson Daniel Levy said in a statement to Salon. According to Levy, such people “pose an immediate and present danger to this country.”
“The Zionist community in America has had enough, and while we vowed many months ago to build lists and have them deported, we are pleased that this will now begin,” Levy said. “We have already submitted names of hundreds of terror supporters to the Trump administration who proudly support terror and don’t belong in this country as they are here on visas.”
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