The Plan to Silence Dissent
Building off a bipartisan push to punish pro-#Palestine protesters, #Trump has a broad crackdown ready to implement—including deportations.
by Sophie Hurwitz
November 15, 2024
"Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.
"Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against #immigrants and #transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: #protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on #AntiWar student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, #CivilDisobedience with increased force.
"In May, he promised a group of donors that 'any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.' Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. 'You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
"This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting 'international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.'
"In Trump’s first term, 'his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,' Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. 'It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various #demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the #EnemyWithin.'
"Given how it’s been under #Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.
"Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, #PalestinianRights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a #crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested."
#SilencingDissent #FreePalestine #StudentProtestors #FreeSpeech #Clampdown #HR9495 #StopHR9495 #CharacteristicsOfFascism #Fascism #Authoritanism #ProjectEsther #Project2025