In addition to threatening students with imprisonment, the U.S. president said he would end federal funding for any college, school, or university that allows “illegal protests.”
Brown University Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Providence, R.I., April 29, 2024. (Kenneth C. Zirkel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
In a move that one critic said was likely preemptively targeted at “protests against the long list of horrific measures” President Donald Trump plans to impose, as well as Palestinian rights demonstrations, the president on Tuesday threatened students with imprisonment if they take part in “illegal protests” on campus.
Trump didn’t cite any law or executive authority that would permit him to order the arrest of students who exercise their First Amendment right to participate in protests, noted Enzo Rossi of the University of Amsterdam.
“What does “‘illegal’ mean?” wrote Rossi on X. “An occupation? A sit-in? Ignoring arbitrary police commands?”
In addition to threatening students with imprisonment, the president [on TruthSocial] said he would end federal funding for “any college, school, or university that allows illegal protests.”
[The New Yorker magazine reported Tuesday: “’There’s no university in the country that could survive the loss of federal money,’” a philosophy and law professor at the University of Chicago explained. The future of this country’s greatest universities—long the jewels of the American century—is in question, and the stakes are high.”]
The threat came nearly a year after nationwide campus protests began over Israel’s U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza, with students assembling on their campuses and setting up encampments to demand that administrators divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies profiting from Israel’s apartheid policies and attacks on Palestinians.
Those protests, though protected under the U.S. Constitution, were the subject of major crackdowns by police in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and other cities, with more than 3,100 students, faculty members, and supporters arrested for demonstrating against the U.S. government’s broadly unpopular support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.
Former U.S. President Joe Biden said last year that he supported non-violent protests but suggested student demonstrators were causing “chaos” and signaled support for the nationwide police crackdown.
An analysis last May by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that 97 percent of the demonstrations were non-violent—but pro-Israel academics and politicians from both sides of the aisle repeatedly condemned the protests.
On April 25, 2024, hundreds of students from Temple, Drexel and UPenn marched in solidarity with Palestine to UPenn’s campus, where professors walked out of classes. Students also set up tents in solidarity with the Columbia University student encampment in New York. (Joe Piette, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, said on BlueSky that, “This is a blatant violation of the 1st Amendment but a lot of cowards in academia will use [Trump’s directive] as an excuse to crack down on campus protest,” as many university officials did last year.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out right-wing policymakers’ and commentators’ frequent claims that they aim to defend “free speech on campus” is a rallying cry that tends to target progressive ideologies.
“If Trump or [Vice President] JD Vance or any of these hypocrites who claim to be free speech warriors actually believed in free speech, they would vociferously defend speech they hate, including pro-Palestine/anti-genocide speech,” said Scahill on BlueSky. “But they don’t. This has been the con from the start with that crowd.”
Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutists” like Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk “would be going mad” if Biden had suggested protests “by conservative students or pro-life groups” were illegal, added journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Trump here is is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals. But just imagine if this was Biden referring to ‘illegal protests’ by conservative students or pro-life groups. Free speech brigade would be going mad! pic.twitter.com/was84v9PBJ
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 4, 2025
Trump’s statement came weeks after he signed an executive order that was purported to “combat anti-semitism” by threatening international students with deportation if they join campus protests that the president characterized as consisting of “pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation.”
Reviewing Federal Grants to Columbia
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the U.S. General Services Administration announced they were reviewing $51.4 million in federal contracts for Columbia University, which was a center of the student protests last year.
Students occupied school buildings last spring to demand Columbia divest from Israel. The Trump administration on Tuesday accused administrators of “ongoing inaction” against antisemitism on campus.
The agencies were acting under Trump’s executive order, which also created a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-semitism.
Author Jeff Sharlet said college professors should speak out against Trump’s latest threat in their classrooms, and suggested the president’s ultimate goal is to militarize university campuses.
“This is targeted first at international students, but it’s deliberately broad enough to lay groundwork for a scene Trump and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth have fantasized: troops on campus.”
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Did free speech absolutist Elon Musk approve of Trump’s post?
Well, I guess the president, like any American, has an unalienable right to free speech and he exercised it with the message shown.
Now if his administration actually tries to follow through with actions indicated by the message, then that would be the time to challenge those specific actions in court and lobby against their implementation by the universities and schools. Let us not die until we are truly killed!
All of us need to demonstrate. They can arrest 35 college kids, but they can’t really deal with forty million of us protesting at once and all over.
Finally bullet proof logic, the only way to deal with total ineptness. Put on your walking shoes!
The bullies taking over…respectfully, of course.
This is an extremely crucial fight right now: free speech rights in America vs Zio power. We absolutely must fight back against the billionaire Zios’ push to squelch criticism of Israel in every venue in the U.S. We cannot afford to lose.
Norman Finkelstein envisions a spring resurgence of campus activism, with students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Free Gaza, Free Speech.”
Quite extraordinary, and also quite terrifying, that a tiny little ‘state’ thousands of miles away should have such a tight stranglehold on the politics of one of the world’s largest powers. And, most of its western allies (vassal states)!
This goes far deeper than mere corruption – as in politicians being bought off, it is somehow embedded in the psyche of those politicians as well. To such an extent that they willingly turn a blind eye to horrendous atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by this tiny little state, Israel.
The few voices that speak up are attacked, vilified, persecuted and even prosecuted. Merely, for speaking up against these horrendous crimes that the rest of the world can plainly see, and verify.
Excellent comment!
Same ol’ abuses of power, same institutional corruption, different senile freak in the WH. No matter who “wins” sham Elections Inc., the policies continue. The gullible masses still “believe” in US democracy, when oligarchy is in our faces.
Where are all the DT supporters who said that we will have “free speech” rainbows, unicorns and cotton candy?
We need more excuses and more wishful thinking.
We need Trump standing before a tribunal for the clot-shot bioweapon and murder (Soleimani). We need Trump standing before a tribunal for genocide in Gaza and West Bank (now on low simmer) and for too many crimes against humanity to count in Palestine. Biden needs to be standing right next to him for the same things.
The regime in Washington is not our government. Our republic was overthown in stages some time ago.
So much for the “free speech” plank of the Trump platform. Display this “Israel Exception” alongside the Israel Exception to his “man of peace” plank of his platform – totally hypocrisy!
I am surprised that Consortium News seems to be the only outlet covering this ‘executive order’ which is clearly unconstitutional since there is plenty of existing law on this subject and 2oo+ years of Supreme Court rulings. There is no constitutional provision for the executive branch to make new laws. But it should also be a major rallying point for those who are sick of hearing from people promoting Trump as a champion of free speech. People like Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who are cashing in on their growing MAGA audiences, should face the music of their wishful thinking. This tells the whole story of Trump and the Republican Party when it comes to free speech, just as the Democrats censorship under the banner of halting ‘Misinformation ‘ and the rigging of all search engines to only cover legacy media opinions shows the fascistic tendencies of the tech sector and Democrats..
Move over , here comes the “BMOC”