“The fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi was crystal clear in his condemnation of antisemitism during his 2023 “60 Minutes” interview. “To be antisemitic is unjust,” the student activist plainly stated, denouncing anyone who uses antisemitic rhetoric when protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.
On Monday, Donald Trump’s administration arrested Mahdawi after sadistically luring him to an immigration office by implying his citizenship application process was complete. The excuse offered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio is that Mahdawi needs to be deported to halt the spread of antisemitism. But Rubio’s team offered no evidence that Mahdawi is antisemitic, and did not bother to acknowledge his very public denunciation of antisemitism.
Similar accusations have been leveled at Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and green card holder arrested for participating in the Gaza protests, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student on a visa from Turkey, arrested for signing an op-ed opposing the war. There has been no evidence produced of antisemitism from either, however. On the contrary, the Washington Post reports that an internal State Department memo written before Ozturk’s arrest found no evidence to support the accusation. Mikey Barat, Mahdawi’s Israeli friend, told The Intercept that while they “do not agree on everything,” Mahdawi “has denounced violence” and seeks “coexistence.”
Antisemitism is a real problem, and, as Mahdawi stated clearly in his denunciation of it, a few Gaza protesters unfortunately engaged in it. But it’s preposterous to pretend that Trump has any sincere objection to it, especially as he and his allies routinely use the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory to stoke white nationalist fervor. It’s instead employed as an empty pretext to wage war on foreign students. In the process, the Trump administration is making a mockery of both the law and of genuine concerns about antisemitism, harmfully associating the issue with the bad faith of fascists.
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Under Rubio, there have been over a thousand student visas revoked all over the country, so it’s telling that even in the three most prominent cases, the government can’t produce real evidence of antisemitism. Rubio, like most in the Trump administration, uses hyperbolic and accusatory language towards his victims, calling them “lunatics.” But when journalists look into the actual students, many of whom are being held in detention centers, it quickly becomes clear that’s not the case at all.
On Friday, the New York Times reported on Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old biology student who fled Russia after protesting her country’s invasion of Ukraine. She’s been held for over two months in a Louisiana detention center with 90 other women “sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.” Her alleged infraction? Forgetting to declare a bag of frog embryos to customs agents at the airport, work materials for her research at Harvard University.
“President Trump’s immigration crackdown ensnared Kseniia Petrova, a scientist who fled Russia after protesting its invasion of Ukraine.”
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— Saeed Jones (@theferocity.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Trump’s White House, unsurprisingly, refuses to talk about the real reasons behind most of the visa revocations, but one can bet if they had a real-life case of someone who said or did something antisemitic, they’d be blasting that story from every corner. They’ve made a spectacle out of Khalil, Ozturk, and Mahdawi because they know all three read as “Muslim” — though Mahdawi is Buddhist — and that’s all the “evidence” that the MAGA base needs. But some journalists have dug up some of the other stories. One student is being deported for drunk driving. Others had speeding tickets.
Last month, Vice President JD Vance let slip what is likely the real reason for this crackdown when he claimed that foreign students are “bad for the American dream.” He argued that international students are bad “for American kids who want to go to a nice university but can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student.” Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney, told NBC News that this is Trump targeting “the small and the weak — people who don’t have as many resources to defend themselves,” as part of a larger anti-immigration agenda.
Vance’s ploy is cheap and transparent, though there are no doubt plenty of Trump voters with bad SAT scores who want to believe the only reason they didn’t get into Harvard was that a foreign student took “their” spot. The chip on Vance’s shoulder is real enough, though. As Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times pointed out, diversity initiatives at Yale likely helped Vance get into their law school, because “a promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’.”
Diversity goals, such as those that likely helped Vance, aren’t about charity, but about improving the overall educational experience for all students. It’s doubly true when it comes to schools recruiting foreign students. Bringing in talented people from all over the world leads to better research and other academic work. It’s a major reason American universities are held in such high regard and why the United States is a world leader in scientific research. Even Republican voters might not be so keen on the purge-them-all attitude if they realized it meant expelling all this talent that helps the larger economy. They might be especially perturbed when reminded that the high quality of American health care depends largely on the influx of medical doctors and researchers from around the world.
These tensions flared up in December, when billionaire Elon Musk defended H1B visa holders from attacks from the louder white nationalist influencers calling for Trump to kick them all out. Silicon Valley depends heavily on these highly skilled workers, and Musk wasn’t inaccurate in his skepticism that the U.S. will produce enough homegrown engineers to take all those jobs overnight. He got roasted by MAGA bigwigs like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer for this, and the issue was never really resolved.
The flimsy “antisemitism” excuse suggests the Trump administration is trying to have it both ways. They want to appease the MAGA idiots who all think they’d get into Harvard, if there weren’t some Palestinians and Russians in their way. But they don’t want to alarm their wealthy donors, who don’t want to see the supply of highly skilled workers shrink dramatically, reducing the value of their investments, especially in fields like tech and medicine. Pretending they’re only going after a few “troublemakers” gets them there. The base gets their racist red meat, while the elite get to tell themselves that most of the foreign workforce is safe.
The elites, however, are fooling themselves if they fall for this. Trump and his lackey, Stephen Miller, who appears to be operating as his real chief of staff, are true believers when it comes to hating immigrants. Both men, possessing mediocre intelligence at best, no doubt resent it when those foreigners are far smarter or more accomplished than they will ever be. This attack on foreign students isn’t a feint. There are too many of them who are being picked up or deported, too quickly. It’s also sending the intended message to other foreign students not to come to the U.S. Competitors in Europe and Asia will benefit from the brain drain into their countries. It’s just one more way Trump is making the United States less influential and poorer.
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