by Charles Siegel
On April 30th my firm joined the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslim Advocates, and the CLEAR Project to file a habeas corpus petition in federal court, seeking the release of our client Leqaa Kordia, a New Jersey resident who has been held for over two months at an ICE detention center 40 miles southwest of Dallas. Attorneys for Palestinian student protestor held in North Texas file challenge in court | KERA News.
Ms. Kordia is Palestinian, and she has lost many family members to Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza. In April 2024 she attended a peaceful demonstration at Columbia University, joining others in chanting “ceasefire now!” She was one of dozens cited for violating a local ordinance, but the citation was swiftly dismissed. Nearly a year later, the administration announced that it would be taking enforcement action against noncitizens who exercised their First Amendment rights by publicly supporting the Palestinian cause. As a result, Ms. Kordia was detained by the federal government and transferred 1500 miles from her home. Her health has suffered in detention, and her rights to pray according to her faith and observe a halal diet have been repeatedly frustrated. An immigration judge reviewed her case and determined she should be released pending the payment of a bond, which her family promptly posted. Even though it very rarely appeals such decisions, the government appealed this one, resulting in her continued detention. Her ongoing confinement is a consequence of nothing other than the exercise of her First Amendment right to speak, and the Trump administration’s campaign to “combat antisemitism.”
Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump said of students protesting the Gaza war, “we ought to get them all out of the country. They’re troublemakers, agitators. They don’t love our country. We ought to get them the hell out.” In a court filing in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a student who helped lead protests at Columbia, Secretary of State Rubio stated that the presence of persons with “beliefs, statements, or associations” he deems to be counter to U.S. foreign policy, undermines U.S. policy to combat antisemitism around the world and to protect “Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States,” and is enough to justify deportation. This ignores entirely, of course, the fact that many campus protesters are Jewish, and that one need not be antisemitic at all to deplore some of the ways in which Israel has conducted the war and is now needlessly prolonging it.
Using the same excuse, the administration has also drastically cut funding to leading universities, most prominently Harvard. On April 14th, the president’s “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” announced “a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract value to Harvard.” Just last week, another $450 million in grants were cut, with no further explanation.
It is highly doubtful whether these grant cuts are motivated by any genuine concerns about antisemitism, at Harvard or anywhere else. Northwestern also had $790 million in federal funds frozen, even though it had recently implemented measures that, according to the New York Times, “closely tracked with a list of demands the administration had recently given to Columbia,” the first school to have funding cut. And Harvard itself had taken several such steps, including forbidding protests in classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and offices, or anywhere else that would interfere with normal activities or the flow of vehicles or pedestrian traffic. The school also prohibited any protests involving tents or even “excessive noise,” suspended library access for dozens of students and faculty who have violated these policies, fired an employee who tore down pictures of Israeli hostages, and suspended the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.
While the administration repeatedly invokes antisemitism, its rhetoric often slides into other familiar territory. For instance, Trump’s campaign website announced his plan to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left and Marxist maniacs,” including by threatening to “take the billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments” from “Harvard and other once-respected universities.” A month ago, he posted that “Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges. Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate & Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” So is it the rampant antisemitism, or the “radical Left and Marxist maniacs?”
What happens when universities suddenly lose their grant funding? At Harvard, just focusing on the roughly $2.2 billion already cut, there will be devastating impacts on basic scientific research. Its School of Public Health, a premier institution, receives almost half of its assets from federal funding. In one of the endless ironies of the new administration, a professor of health economics at the School is a frequent expert for the government and whistleblowers seeking to recover federal funds lost to healthcare fraud. We once engaged her for a case, and she is a uniquely qualified and effective witness. Trump endlessly claims to want to eliminate “waste fraud and abuse,” but is gutting the academic home of someone who helps do just this.
The programs affected thus far include a $60 million, seven-year effort to study how the immune system controls tuberculosis, by “bringing together the very best researchers from around the county and the world to bring the very best cutting-edge technology, the very best science to understand TB immunity.” Another project, now halted, involved “a large consortium of laboratories to study the immune system and its ability to respond to different coronaviruses as preparation for future pandemics.”
And these are just examples of grants for projects overseen by Harvard professors. The university works with numerous other prominent institutions. As stated in Harvard’s recent lawsuit against the administration, “the government threatened to terminate up to $8.7 billion in federal funding not just to Harvard, but also to preeminent Boston hospitals such as Massachusetts General, Beth Israel Deaconess, Brigham & Women’s, Boston Children’s and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. These hospitals are independent corporate entities with their own boards of directors or trustees and their own separate management. They are not under Harvard’s control.”
There are many equally galling examples from other universities. At Cornell, a biomedical engineering professor has been developing a new device to boost blood flow in infants with heart defects. His work has received several grants over the years from NIH and the Department of Defense. On March 30th, DOD awarded another $6.7 million to help ramp up production and testing of the device. One week later, however, DOD sent a stop-work order, with no explanation beyond that it was “at the direction of the administration.” Cornell will soon need to terminate lab staff, and Ph.D. students will need to shift their research focus.
I am Jewish. I grew up in an observant family. My father was the gabbai (a sort of sexton who helps keep services running smoothly) of our congregation for 25 years. My mother was chair of the education committee. Judaism was the centerpiece of her life.
It’s never been the centerpiece of my own life, but it still is an important part of my identity. My three children all went to Jewish day school, and one of them to the affiliated high school as well. All three of them were bar- or bat-mitzvahed, and they’ve all been to Israel. I’ve been there three times myself.
As a proud and committed Jew, then, I want to say to my government as clearly and unmistakably as possible: Don’t dare deport people, or defund universities, in my name. Invoking “antisemitism” as an excuse for deporting my client, or anyone else, or defunding an inexpensive program to help save babies’ lives, makes a grotesque mockery of the word.
First, there is a painfully obvious disconnect between antisemitism, on the one hand, and the actions being taken to “combat” it. Even assuming there is a major problem of antisemitism at Harvard, and assuming still further that the steps Harvard has recently taken in response are insufficient, Trump’s actions have nothing to do with it. How is defunding scientific research efforts to healthcare fraud, or projects to save infants with heart defects, at all related to antisemitism? As Harvard puts it in its lawsuit, “the government cannot identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Second, the hypocrisy on display here is extreme. Trump wants to eradicate antisemitism in “any environment”? Pentagon deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson posted on social media, within the last two years, attacks on Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager lynched in Georgia in 1915 for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, after a trial riven with antisemitism. She has supported the far-right German “Alternative for Deutschland” party, even praising it using the slogan “Ausländer Raus!” (“Foreigners Out”), used by neo-Nazis. This is no bureaucrat, working out of the public’s view; her job is to speak to the press. And J.D. Vance, speaking in Munich, said we should ease up on the AfD and not talk about the Nazi past.
Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s new liaison to the Department of Justice wrote (among other things) a Substack post entitled “Free Nick Fuentes” a few years ago, urging an end to Fuentes’ ban on Twitter. Fuentes is an avowed Holocaust denier who has said that “when we take power, evildoers need to be given the death penalty.” “Evildoers,” for him, includes “perfidious Jews.” Trump knows Fuentes — he’s had dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago. In 2022, Trump hosted Kanye West, himself a notorious antisemite; according to Trump, Fuentes unexpectedly showed up with West. According to a source quoted by Axios, Trump “seemed very taken and impressed” by Fuentes, and “there was a lot of fawning back and forth.”
Trump and Fuentes have another connection: the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Fuentes attended the rally, at which white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us!” Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the rally.
Another recent Mar-a-Lago guest is Enrique Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as “a right-wing extremist group with a history of using violence, targeted harassment and intimidation,” that “serves as a tent for misogynistic; anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ ideologies and other forms of hate – including antisemitism and white supremacy.” Tarrio was a leader of the Jan. 6th insurrection, and received the longest sentence of any offender. Trump pardoned him within hours of taking office. When Tarrio dined at Mar-a-Lago at the invitation of a club member, Trump spoke to him for ten minutes, and said “I love you guys.”
Just last week, Trump welcomed several dozen Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, absurdly asserting an ongoing “genocide” against white farmers while simultaneously, of course, doing everything he can to limit refugee status for people fleeing real, actual danger in Afghanistan, Venezuela and elsewhere. One of the new Afrikaner arrivals is Charl Kleinhaus, whose recent social media posts include such statements as “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group,” and “Israel is a terrorist state.” Gross antisemitism evidently is OK with the administration, as long as it’s voiced by white people.
Also last week, Trump traveled to the Middle East. One of his stops was Qatar, where he announced plans for a new Trump golf course, lavished praise on the royal family, and accepted their “gift” of a used 747 flying palace (a plane with enormous maintenance costs that the family has unsuccessfully tried to sell for five years). And yet Qatar has long been the leading patron and funder of Hamas. Trump himself called Qatar a “funder of terrorism” during his first term.
Beyond deportations and defunding, Trump has done nothing to combat actual antisemitism. To the contrary, he has closed over half of the regional offices of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which addresses actual complaints about antisemitism at colleges.
So forgive me if I don’t find the administration’s solicitude for Jews, and their wellbeing at leading universities, convincing. And finally, even granting that the administration really is concerned about, and wants to “combat,” antisemitism, what would this mean? As framed by Trump in these orders, it can only mean silencing speech, and curtailing the rights, of others, but Jews of all people know where that leads. We are not “protected” by diminishing others’ freedoms; the opposite is true. When any minority’s rights are not respected, no minority is safe — and Jews know this better than anyone.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Zionist Organization of America, support the deportations. I lament the fact that any Jew would condone, let alone support, the arrest and expulsion of any person who has committed no crime and whose only alleged offense is simply speaking their mind. I’m hardly the world’s most devout Jew, but I know our history. Does the ZOA?
Fortunately, other major organizations see it differently. A few weeks ago, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a nonpartisan coalition of groups of multiple denominations and areas of focus, issued a statement noting that our safety “has always been tied to the rule of law, to the safety of others, to the strength of civil society, and to the protection of rights and liberties for all.” It rejected the “false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy,” and condemned the “exploitation of real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights.”
And what about Jewish professors? Would they not have the most to fear, since their campuses are supposedly unsafe for Jews and crawling with Hamas supporters? Yet many of the nearly thousand professors at Harvard who have signed letters urging it to stand fast are Jewish. The same is true at Yale.
A month ago, over 200 Israeli academics, many of them living and teaching in the U.S., published a letter regarding their “deep concern about the recent actions undertaken by the U.S. administration against Columbia and other universities,” and their “alarm at the persecution of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students and faculty, including the illegal arrests and threats to deport activists without any specific charges or due process, at times in clear violation of court orders, especially under the pretext of combating antisemitism.” Such “draconian moves,” they said, “do not protect us…the same rhetoric can quickly turn on us or other groups if and when it serves the Administration’s interests.”
My father, the gabbai, was a historian. He knew very well what happens to any minority, when anyone’s rights begin to be taken away. Observant Jew though he was, he would have been sickened by the actions the administration is supposedly taking in our name.