With President-elect Donald Trump promising to make mass deportation a top priority in 2025, one related campaign promise has fallen off the radar. During the campaign, Trump said several times that he would seek to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, which would be an obvious test of the new president’s willingness and ability to challenge long-established First Amendment rights.
Trump’s Agenda 47, his official platform for the 2024 election, lays out 20 planks, including promises to seal the border, stage mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and end inflation. Tucked away in the 18th bullet point, however, is a promise to crack down on campus protesters: “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN,” it reads.
That was hardly Trump’s only statement that appeared to support the potential deportation of American citizens. He has also said he plans to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, and to deport entire families, including U.S. citizens, when a family includes undocumented immigrants.
Matt Cameron, an immigration lawyer at Cameron Micheroni & Silvia, told Salon that deportation has been used throughout U.S. history to threaten or punish political dissidents. Perhaps the most famous example was the activist and writer Emma Goldman, who had immigrated to America as a teenager but was deported to Russia under the Anti-Anarchist Act in 1919.
Seeking to deport someone based on political speech would almost certainly violate the First Amendment. That doesn’t mean the Trump administration won’t try it.
Cameron said he expects Trump and his allies to rely on a statute that allows for non-citizen U.S. residents to be deported if they are found to have engaged in “material support” for “terrorism” — a category that Cameron described as problematically broad — or to have their visas denied if they are found to have endorsed or supported “terrorist activity.”
From the late 19th century “all the way through the McCarthy era” of the 1950s, Cameron said, the immigration system was used to “threaten” political dissidents.
An investigation by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University found that even government lawyers believed that removing people from the country based on their political speech would violate the First Amendment. But Cameron said that doesn’t mean the Trump administration won’t try it. Something as normal as a social media post or a visible presence at a high-profile protest could be used as potential evidence.
“I certainly believe them when they say they going to try this,” Cameron said. During the Trump era, he added, “We’re getting used to the idea that just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
For U.S. citizens, Cameron noted, any such proceedings would be more complicated. The Trump administration might seek to pursue a policy of “denaturalization,” a rare procedure under which someone is stripped of their citizenship. Although denaturalization was established in 1906, it is typically reserved for people accused of having obtained their citizenship through false statements.
Cameron said he suspects the Trump team may go after recently naturalized citizens, especially immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries, who express opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza or are critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East. There is no possible procedure for pursuing denaturalization en masse, Cameron added, and it could probably only be applied to movement leaders or high-profile individuals.
Esha Bhandari, the deputy director for speech at the American Civil Liberties Union, cautioned that while deporting U.S. citizens may prove too difficult even for Trump loyalists, the new administration could find other ways to stifle pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protest.
Protesters could potentially be charged with crimes unrelated to their political speech, for instance, which could make foreign citizens here on visas immediately deportable. The government could also pressure colleges and universities to suspend protesters, which could end or endanger their student visas. Private individuals could also take anti-activism efforts into their own hands and file strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits, which be expensive for defendants even if the cases have no merit.
“I think the point of these broad statements threatening pro-Palestinian activists on campus,” Bhandari said, “is to put people who might already be vulnerable because of their immigration status into a position where they will self-censor.”
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