President Donald Trump’s administration is considering rolling out plans to block specific colleges from taking in any foreign students if it deems too many of them are “pro-Hamas,” according to a report in Axios. The proposal, revealed to the news outlet by senior Justice and State Department officials, would see schools decertified from the Homeland Security program that permits them to accept people with student visas. The move would likely target schools where students have protested Israel’s 18-month siege of Gaza, which has led to the deaths of 50,000 Palestinians, according to the local Hamas-run health ministry. Axios reported that the schools Trump administration officials have most discussed are New York City’s Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles—both were the site of significant pro-Palestinian demonstrations by students last year. The inspiration for the idea, the news outlet said, was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s so-called “Catch and Revoke” program, which has canceled the visas of roughly 300 foreign students who the government claims have shown support for Hamas. Free speech critics are already out in full force. “Deemed ‘pro-Hamas’ by whom? This kind of explicitly viewpoint-driven decision-making is ripe for abuse and risks arbitrary enforcement,” Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Axios. “Everyone is fair game,” an administration official told the publication, referring to the 1.5 million people with student visas in the U.S.
