POLITICS: US should prosecute student protesters who commit illegal activity

When Governor George Wallace stood in the door at University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium in 1963 in a symbolic attempt to block of black students from entering following the US Supreme Court’s famous 1954 Brown v Board of Ed school desegregation ruling, President Lyndon B. Johnson called in the National Guard to enforce the equal protection order.

And today, if the Ku Klux Klan or similar bigoted organization overtook college buildings by force, declared no-go zones for black students on campus, assaulted and intimidated black students and advocated for their repatriation to Africa, politicians of every stripe — and especially Democrats en masse — would rain down on the perpetrators with the angry wrath of a thousand suns. And rightly so.

Substitute “Jews” for “blacks” and this is exactly what is happening on Columbia’s and other college campuses. For 18 months now, campus protesters — often barely literate on the conflict in Gaza and its history, but seemingly often coordinated by professional protest organizers — have assaulted and intimidated Jewish students, forcibly overtaken buildings and classrooms, declared “Zionist-free” no-go zones for Jews on campus grounds and insisted that Jews in Israel be deported to places like Poland.

These are violent actions not protected by the First Amendment, by anyone’s read. They are not only grounds for deportation, but they are grounds for criminal prosecution.

Thus far, the Trump administration’s response is to deport ringleaders of pro-Hamas organizations like Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s Mahmoud Khalil. CUAD repeatedly celebrated the Oct. 7 genocidal attack. It claims it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization” and has eagerly spread Hamas propaganda, directed death-wishes at Zionists and according to a new lawsuit, was part of a group of pro-Hamas organizations in the US that had advance knowledge and coordinated with Iran and Hamas on the Oct 7 attacks.

“Endorsing” or “espousing” terrorist activity is clear grounds for exclusion under the immigration laws, as the courts have recognized repeatedly.

But this is not where the story stops. Section 245 of Title 18 — the “hate crimes” section of the federal criminal code — creates criminal penalties for anyone who by “force or threat of force willfully injures, intimidates or interferes with, or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with” any person “participating in or enjoying the benefits of any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Schools like Columbia and most other campuses in question get oodles of taxpayer funds.

A related section 241 also criminalizes threats or intimidation against individuals exercising constitutionally protected rights. Criminal enforcement is especially important for citizens who can’t be deported.

As has been widely reported, CUAD was among other Hamasnik groups that organized last spring’s encampments at Columbia and forcibly stormed university buildings and held janitorial staff hostage, as well as defaced the buildings and smashed windows.

They created no-go zones for Jewish students and otherwise impeded movements of Jewish students. Jewish professors were blocked — Governor Wallace-style — from entering university buildings. Similar thug-like actions, reminiscent of anti-Semitic mobs in elite universities in 1938, occurred again in 2024 at once great universities like Yale and UCLA and even in places like the New York subways — all venues covered by federal hate crime laws.

When asked about this antisemitic campus violence last year, a hapless President Biden sheepishly shrugged, seemingly not wanting to offend the far-left protest class. Democratic officials were also mostly mum even though they would have filled the public square with pitchforks had the violence been directed at any other ethnic or racial minority. All the while, Democrats sanctimoniously preached to the nation that they were the defenders of democracy.

Protecting democracy and democratic rights means protecting the basic civil rights of all — and not just for favored “in-groups” to whom a party wants to pander for voters. Now it’s the Trump administration that can truly “score one for democracy” by fully enforcing equal protection under the law and prosecuting actions that appear clearly criminal. Few of the over 10,000 antisemitic attacks nationally since Oct. 7, according to the ADL, have been prosecuted.

When protest turns to violent bigotry, and then somehow tries to fly under the cover of a “liberation
movement” and free speech, we are being played as fools. That now has to stop.

Julian Epstein is the former Democratic chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.