The Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held a “Know Your Rights with ICE on Campus” webinar Wednesday night, during which an attorney on the panel accused the Trump administration of using antisemitism as a “ruse” to crack down on freedom of speech.
Immigration attorney Hassan Ahmad also advised students listening in on the CAIR panel to wipe their phone memory when traveling internationally to avoid allowing immigration officials to search their data.
This comes amid a multi-agency plan by the Trump administration to “root out” antisemitism across U.S. college campuses following several years of widespread protests in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has arrested a slew of foreign-born students who have been involved with pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas demonstrations, and who the administration has accused of being terrorist sympathizers and threats to national security.
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Most notably, the administration arrested Mahmoud Khalil, who played a major role in the protests against Israel at Columbia University, and met with university officials on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group of student groups urging the university to divest from Israel.
On Monday, DHS agents arrested another Columbia student, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-born green card holder in Colchester, Vermont. Mahdawi co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at Columbia with Khalil.
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During the Wednesday webinar, Ahmad suggested the Trump administration’s crackdown is motivated by racism and said that “it is clear the administration is using antisemitism as a ruse to clamp down on free speech and that’s why they’re targeting a lot of the Palestinian activists or pro-Palestinians.”
“I won’t even call them activists,” he went on, “people who acknowledge the humanity of the Palestinian people, that’s all it takes.”
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The attorney went on to decry U.S. law, bizarrely suggesting that the Trump administration could be using AI to pick its targets for deportation.
“Honestly, part of me thinks that the rumors are true and that the State Department is using AI to identify people,” he said. “The way these laws are written right now, especially the foreign policy ground … it’s very broadly worded, it allows [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio to ChatGPT a reason to why somebody is bad for the foreign policy of the United States and there’s very little, if any, judicial review questioning as to what his reasoning was.”
Ahmad also cautioned noncitizen students to take steps to hide their phone data from the government.
“Don’t travel, don’t cross international lines with your phone with all the data on it,” he said. “Make sure there’s nothing on it. If it has to be your phone, you need to take steps to delete all of the apps and re-download them from the cloud after you safely cross the border.”
