On January 29, Palestinian organizers in New York City gathered at a park for a vigil to mourn the one-year anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old killed last year alongside her family and paramedics by the Israeli military in Gaza. At Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, attendees laid candles, alongside photos and art of Rajab.
That same day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” that “demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws” and calls on the Department of Justice to “protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” It comes on the heels of an earlier anti-immigration order signed during Trump’s first day in office that called for increased vetting and crackdowns on visa holders and people trying to enter the U.S. based on their political and cultural views.
Emboldened by the pair of orders, Betar U.S., the American branch of an international organization founded by the early Zionist writer and settler colonialist Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1923, took to social media ahead of the vigil for Rajab, which it derogatorily dismissed as a “Jihad rally.” Betar invited its supporters to show up and “assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts,” promising to “document all attendees” to submit to the Trump administration as a part of his recent orders.
At the vigil, a small group heckled attendees, yelling, “Show us your faces so we could get you deported” and “We’re with ICE,” then repeatedly chanting, “ICE, ICE, ICE,” according to video posted on the group’s accounts.
“We’re here for a 6-year-old girl,” one vigil attendee pleaded to an NYPD officer, before being drowned out by counter-protesters accusing them of a “fake genocide” and using “human shields.” After the vigil concluded, Betar claimed on social media to have identified the attendee using face-recognition technology and said it had reported him to the Department of Homeland Security.
Free speech experts and Muslim and Palestine solidarity advocates worry that such harassment and discrimination from Betar and other far-right groups will only spread thanks to Trump’s recent orders. Amid growing calls to deport political foes and defenders of human rights, they fear a new climate where political speech is silenced — and those brave enough to speak out risk severe punishment.
“These policies have nothing to do with Jewish safety.”
This conflation of speech critical to Israel with antisemitism or support of Hamas will do little to protect Jews in the United States from hate, said Jonah Rubin, with Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive Jewish American group that advocates for Palestinian human rights.
“These policies have nothing to do with Jewish safety,” Rubin said. “The idea that these are about Jewish safety rather than about widespread censorship and attempt to shut down any and all dissent — whether it’s about Palestine, whether it’s about human rights, or whether it’s about other movements for social justice — this doesn’t hold up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny.”
The premise behind Trump’s more recent order is rooted in Project Esther: a treatise by the authors of Project 2025. The document was billed as “a blueprint to counter antisemitism” and offered strategies to target and silence critics of Israel, including deportation. A fact sheet about the executive order related by the Trump administration mirrored language from Project Esther and laid bare the order’s intent to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,” vowing to deport “all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests.”
Such ideas are increasingly gaining purchase in conservative discourse. Pledges to deport supporters of Palestinian rights were a key part of the Republican Party’s platform. A congressional bill introduced last May called for similar measures.
Academia is a key focus of Project Esther and Trump’s executive orders. While the most recent order instructs all agencies within the executive branch to take part in the crackdown, it encourages surveillance in specific areas, such as universities and even K-12 schools, where administrators are being told to monitor and report international students for possible deportation.
On Monday, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights launched investigations into five schools — Columbia University; University of California, Berkley; Northwestern University; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Portland State University — for antisemitism, the first use of the executive order.
“Americans and college students that visit the United States should be able to protest the Israeli government’s human rights violations in the same way that the United United Nations, the International Criminal Court, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other respected institutions have for the past several years, without fear of retaliation,” said Robert McCaw, a leader with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who heads the government affairs department. He decried the order’s fact sheet of peddling anti-Muslim terms such as “pro-Jihad.”
Trump’s efforts have inspired a grassroots campaign to identify possible targets for deportation. On social media, groups such as Mothers Against College Antisemitism and the Chicago Jewish Alliance have shared links to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and called on people to report “foreign students and faculty who support Hamas” and “students on visas who are suspected of engaging in pro-terror activities,” respectively.
Betar’s attempt to build a list has perhaps gotten the most attention.
Even before Trump took office, Betar announced that it was compiling a list of critics of Israel for the Trump administration to deport and has since said it shared the list of the “names of hundreds of terror supporters.” In the days since Trump’s inauguration, the New York nonprofit has been ramping up its calls for deportation. It said it planned to meet with “elected officials” in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to provide the names of “terrorist jihadis in America.”
Betar did not answer questions about its practices or policies, only responding to ask about this reporter’s citizenship status and whether they were born in the United States.
On social media, Betar this week criticized a separate investigation by The Intercept about Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism by describing its reporters as “jihadis masquerading as journalists.” Betar also drew a comparison to journalists in Gaza, many of whom have been targeted and killed by the Israeli military over the past year.
Betar’s onetime executive director, Ross Glick, who has since left the group, told Salon that Betar targets individuals who are “fomenting hatred against Israel.” It focuses, he said, on schools and specifically those in teaching roles. Glick was arrested in 2018 in a New York revenge porn case, according to the New York Post, and pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment. Betar posted on social media that it no longer employs Glick.
Though the group has a long history overseas, it only received U.S. tax-exempt nonprofit status in July 2024. It is fundraising on GoFundMe and has secured more than $30,000. It is actively recruiting for roles across the U.S. and has seen its online following explode on X in recent days, more than doubling from around 5,000 to more than 15,000 in a single week.
Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Rajab vigil in New York was not the first time Betar has disrupted a pro-Palestinian demonstration. During an October student protest for Palestine at the University of California, Los Angeles, Betar threatened to “organize groups of Jews” to “remove these thugs now” if police didn’t make arrests. Members of Betar in November threatened to hand student protesters beepers at the University of Pittsburgh, a reference to an attack in Lebanon in September in which the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers and handheld walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members, killing 42 people, including 12 civilians, and injuring more than 4,000 others. The thinly veiled threat got the group banned from Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram, but drew praise from Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) who said “I love it” when briefed on the “joke.”
Betar has offered bounties to hand people beepers, targeting prominent writers and activists, such as Peter Beinart, editor of Jewish Currents, and Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian American activist who heads Within Our Lifetime. Before the the Rajab vigil, which Kiswani’s group had helped organize, Betar offered a “reward to anyone who gives @NerdeenKiswani a” — beeper — “today.”
The following day, Betar doubled down and mentioned Kiswani in a tweet, writing, “You have terrorized america and new york for Much too long. We have had enough and we will not stop. You hate america you hate Jews and we are here and won’t be silent. 1800 dollars to anyone who hands that jihadi a beeper.”
Kiswani said she has been the target of far-right Zionist groups in the past, which have led doxing and cyberbullying campaigns in an attempt to get her fired from jobs and expelled while a student at the City University of New York School of Law. While she was met with support from her university peers and eventually her school’s administration, she said the online groups were able to boost their profile and fundraise by attacking her and other visibly Palestinian activists.
“It feels like what Betar is doing now is kind of similar to that playbook,” Kiswani said. Groups like Betar, she said, have long used such threats to intimidate protesters from showing up to actions.
“I always try to redirect that notoriety and attention they’re trying to bring towards me by bringing it back to Palestine,” she said.
Betar is not the only group to single out activists. Shirion Collective leads a similar doxing bounty system with offers of $250 – $15,000 to anyone who could identify certain students, doctors, or politicians protesting in support of Palestine. Shirion has published videos calling Kiswani a “domestic terrorist” and has been collaborating with Betar to add names of activists to its apparent deportation list. Shirion, funded by a Florida-based tech entrepreneur, built its following by sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation throughout Israel’s war on Gaza.
In a since-deleted post on X shared Friday evening, Shirion claimed that a UCLA graduate student from China had her visa revoked due to advocacy for Palestine, and credited Betar’s deportation list and Trump’s executive order for kicking the student out of the country. The tweet included a video clip from a May 2024 news broadcast showing a student being arrested by California Highway Patrol officers.
An organizer within UCLA who has been monitoring student disciplinary processes tied to campus protests disputed the group’s claim and said they knew of no UCLA student whose visa has been revoked. The individual depicted in the video is no longer a student at the school, the organizer said.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency has “nothing to support these claims as being true.”
Even so, the post and copycat posts were widely shared online across multiple social media platforms.
A Shirion spokesperson said in a statement the group is concerned that “laws are being broken,” citing various immigration policies noted in Trump’s executive orders, as well as a law barring material support for a group on the U.S. foreign terror list. The group said revealing the identity of “foreigners who openly express intentions to kill people is not just legal, it’s the bare minimum of what any real American should do.” The group did not respond to questions regarding the UCLA student.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rubin pointed out a contradiction of the Trump administration’s approach to fighting antisemitism. While the administration is pumping out executive orders and empowering far-right campaigns against perceived enemies of Israel, it has welcomed Elon Musk into the fold. Since Trump took office, he twice gave a Nazi-style salute, cheered the far-right Alternative for Germany party, and said Germany should “move beyond” the “past guilt” around the Holocaust.
“The best thing we can do to assure Jewish safety is to stand together in solidarity, holding hands and turn back this rising fascist tide,” Rubin said. “Antisemitism is real, we know that and we see it everyday.”
“The worst thing people can do to combat antisemitism is to pretend that human rights activism and people trying to stop a genocide are antisemitic,” he said, “but people giving Nazi salutes from the highest podiums in the land in front of the seal of the president of the United States are not.”
Like many of Trump’s executive orders, it’s unclear whether they will hold up in court. Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said that if federal authorities deport people based on their political speech, courts would likely deem it unconstitutional.
“The First Amendment does protect students who are here on student visas — it protects their political speech,” DeCell said. “Their participation in protests, standing alone, really can’t be a valid basis for their removal consistent with the First Amendment.”
During Trump’s first term, DeCell and the Knight Institute challenged Trump’s “extreme vetting” program, which looked to bar or remove noncitizens based on their speech, beliefs, and associations. The group sued the government to obtain memos from ICE in which the agency’s attorneys stated that individuals couldn’t be deported based solely on their beliefs due to free speech law.
“The memos squarely address what the Trump administration is seeking to do now,” DeCell said. “ICE lawyers themselves recognized that mere philosophical support for even terrorist activity or terrorist groups wouldn’t necessarily subject someone to removal.”
Even so, she recognized that Trump’s latest order is full of various tools he didn’t try in his first term. This time, he’s directing the Department of Justice to lean on a law originally intended to defend the civil rights of formerly enslaved African Americans against white supremacist attacks by the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. The Conspiracy Against Rights law has since been used to combat hate crimes and police brutality, and in 2023 was among the four counts used to prosecute Trump in relation to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Conviction under the law could carry heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison.
The order itself is also written vaguely, which may make it more difficult to challenge in court, DeCell said. This broad language is also what makes it so dangerous, leaving government officials and agencies to decide how to crack down specifically.
Over the past week, DeCell said she has heard from university students who are in the country on visas and are worried about whether they should continue to participate in protests for Palestinian human rights, or whether to delete previous social media posts or writings online.
Leaders at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Palestine Legal also said visa holders at universities are concerned about whether their involvement in protests will land them in trouble.
Dima Khalidi, head and founder of Palestine Legal, doubts this chilling effect will stifle protest altogether. “People will not be cowed into silence on the kind of mass level that one might expect.”
But with the federal government and far-right activists alike targeting students, universities must play a bigger role, she said, in protecting speech — rather than criminalizing it.
“What is going to be critical is how universities respond and if they capitulate and continue with the kind of path that they have been taking of cracking down on students, and cooperating with government agencies,” said Khalidi, who has spent the past several years defending students against anti-Palestinian crackdowns at schools. “Or are they going to have a backbone and protect their students?”
