Protesters rally outside the Rhode Island State House in support of deported Brown University Dr. Rasha Alawieh, Monday, March 17, 2025, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Protesters rally outside the Rhode Island State House in support of deported Brown University Dr. Rasha Alawieh, Monday, March 17, 2025, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
A president signs an executive order sending immigration officers out to track down foreign students amid unrest in the Middle East, getting some to leave on their own and threatening to deport others.
Sounds like President Trump, but he’s actually following a path first blazed 46 years ago by President Carter, who during the Iranian hostage crisis ordered his administration to review the status of tens of thousands of Iranian students to see if they should be deported.
Then, like today, the targets sued to try to block Mr. Carter.
The president lost at the lowest court but won at an appeals court. The decision cautioned judges to show restraint when seeking to block presidential action when immigration is being used as a tool of foreign policy.
“Certainly in a case such as the one presented here it is not the business of courts to pass judgment on the decisions of the president in the field of foreign policy,” U.S. Circuit Judge Roger Robb wrote for the court.
He added: “Judges are not expert in that field and they lack the information necessary for the formation of an opinion. The president on the other hand has the opportunity of knowing the conditions which prevail in foreign countries, he has his confidential sources of information and his agents in the form of diplomatic, consular and other officials.”
The Iranian students in 1980 asked the Supreme Court to hear their cases but the justices declined.
At that point, out of some 50,000 Iranian students here, the Justice Department had determined that 7,000 were deportable and had started removal cases against roughly 5,000. But only 19 had been deported, while hundreds had chosen to self-deport.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge who’s now with the Center for Immigration Studies, said the parallel to Mr. Trump’s actions is clear. In both cases a president is trying to weed out foreign actors deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy.
“It’s the exact same thing,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s Executive Order 14188, signed in late January, called on federal agencies to prosecute or deport “perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
That then triggered a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the State Department to revoke visas of foreigners deemed a threat to national security or U.S. foreign policy interests.
“It’s a specific delegation of authority to the secretary of state,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project.
But the moves have drawn fierce denunciations from immigration activists, Islamic groups and some civil liberties organizations, who say the administration is trying to shut down pro-Palestinian voices.
“By design, the agencies’ policy has created a climate of repression and fear on university campuses,” the American Association of University Professors argued in a lawsuit last week.
Arrests have sparked new campus demonstrations and protests.
Video of the arrest last week of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, quickly went viral.
“This alarming act of repression is a direct assault on free speech and academic freedom,” said Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
U.S. officials said Ms. Ozturk had shown “support of Hamas.”
One wrinkle for Mr. Trump is that the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of hostages were described as “violent lawless acts against the United States” by the court.
“The status of Iranian aliens cannot be disassociated from their connection with their mother country since the alien,” Judge George MacKinnon wrote.
Whether the status of students protesting Israel, with varying degrees of lawlessness, rises to that level remains to be seen.
Indeed, lawyers for the students Mr. Trump targeted over the last few months say their clients are being targeted for their speech and viewpoints, which the lawyers say are protected by the First Amendment.
The Trump team, though, argues that the issue is aberrant behavior, and protesting isn’t a viable reason to obtain a student visa.
The legal wrangling over Mr. Trump’s moves is very early, though at least one court has issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from detaining or deporting Yunseo Chung, a South Korean immigrant who is here as a legal permanent resident.
Ms. Chung, a Columbia University student, was at a March 5 protest that seems to have drawn authorities’ attention.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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