POINT: Deport immigrants who are advocating evil

George Fishman, InsideSources.com on Apr 3, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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In then-President Joe Biden’s words, Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians was an act of “pure, unadulterated evil,” resulting in “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” with “more than 1,000 civilians slaughtered,” “stomach-turning reports of … babies being killed.”

Yet, over the last year and a half, we have witnessed brazen celebrations on our college campuses of Hamas’ slaughter, with foreign students playing a lead role. For instance, according to the White House, Mahmoud Khalil “organized group protests (at Columbia University) that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers.”

In October, Swarthmore College needed to send a message “condemning” the Swarthmore chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine’s internet post, “Happy October 7th everyone! In honor of this glorious day and all our martyred revolutionaries …” Swarthmore stated that “celebrating the killing of innocent people is shocking and reprehensible.”

It seems like a pretty commonsense proposition that a nation need not tolerate guests who celebrate and advocate mass murder. As Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has written, “While American citizens may have a First Amendment right to speak disgusting vitriol if they so choose, no foreign national has a right to advocate for terrorism in the United States.”

Fortunately, federal law provides powerful tools enabling the removal of immigrants who advocate terrorism and incite genocide. The REAL ID Act of 2005 provides for the deportation of immigrants who endorse or espouse terrorism. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 provides for the deportation of immigrants who incite genocide. The Immigration Act of 1990 provides for the deportation of immigrants “whose presence or activities in the (U.S.) the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

What about the First Amendment “rights” of foreign students? Simply put, immigrants do not have the same level of First Amendment rights as American citizens.

Consider that in 2012, before joining the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh concluded while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that “the (Supreme) Court has further indicated that immigrants’ First Amendment rights might be less robust than those of citizens in certain discrete areas,” noting the court’s ruling that, in Kavanaugh’s words, the “First Amendment does not protect immigrants from deportation because of membership in the Communist Party.”

Consider that in 2010, liberal Supreme Court justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor concluded that “the Government routinely places special restrictions on the speech rights of (among other groups) foreigners” and “when such restrictions are justified by a legitimate governmental interest, they do not necessarily raise constitutional problems.”

Consider that in 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Government does not offend the Constitution by deporting (an undocumented immigrant) for the additional reason that it believes him to be a member of an organization that supports terrorist activity.” Following that decision, the soon-to-be executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association proclaimed, “What the decision boils down to is one simple, clear message: Immigrants have no First Amendment rights.”

Despite the availability of powerful statutory tools, and despite President Biden’s professions of revulsion to Hamas, his secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken took no action to seek the removal of international students advocating terrorism or genocide. To their shame, it took President Donald Trump to get the Homeland Security and State departments to heed calls to seek the removal of immigrants advocating evil.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

George Fishman is a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He previously served as acting chief counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the first Trump administration. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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