I asked Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard, how vulnerable foreign students are right now. “The government cannot remove or deport you without your having violated the conditions of your visa in some way,” he told me. “They can’t just say, ‘Because of what you’ve said, we’re kicking you out.’” It’s true that students who have violated the conditions of their visa can be deported, but there’s nothing new in that.
Nevertheless, FIRE’s Alex Morey told The Forward that the order could still do a lot of damage to the campus-speech environment: “Schools are often in risk Whack-a-Mole. Right now the threat to federal funding — or some federal investigation — is much more pronounced. Nobody is suing them on First Amendment grounds yet.” And if college administrators suspend or expel foreign students for activist speech suddenly deemed unacceptable, those students would obviously be at risk of losing their visas. The real threat is not that the federal government will suddenly start rounding up and deporting foreign students for disfavored political speech, but that college administrators, spooked by the Trump administration and prone to overcompliance with federal regulations, will impose prophylactic restrictions on speech critical of Israel.
If so, the sharp edge of those restrictions will first be felt by noncitizens like Momodou Taal, of the U.K., who last year was suspended from Cornell for protesting after curfew, thereby risking visa loss and deportation. (Cornell later reversed Taal’s suspension.) But Feldman told me that he expects “the overwhelming majority of universities will bend over backwards not to cooperate with some attempt by the Trump administration to target students who are here on visas based on their views.”
Whether or not they will face such attempts from the Trump administration, they will certainly face them from activists. As The Intercept’s Akela Lacy reported last week, the activist group Mothers Against College Antisemitism (MACA), which seems to have exerted significant influence at NYU, is already strategizing about how to use Trump’s executive order to increase pressure on colleges. “Please tell everyone you know,” MACA’s founder, Elizabeth Rand, told its 62,000 Facebook members, “...to file complaints about foreign students and faculty who support Hamas.”