Should Violent Foreign Students Be Deported?

In case you have not noticed, the Joe Biden administration is much different than the Donald Trump administration. One big difference is how they treat violent foreign “students” who support Hamas. Biden refused to do anything about them, but Trump is revoking their visas and deporting them.

In an article published in The Daily Signal, Hans von Spakovsky states that such “students” should be counting their blessings. He reasons that the Biden administration should have criminally prosecuted them. 

These foreign actors staged violent protests at American colleges, cheering the vicious massacre, rapes, assaults, and kidnappings on Oct. 7, 2023. Masquerading as students, these antisemitic, hate-filled agitators assaulted, intimidated, and threatened other students. They blocked access to classes and damaged property and buildings. Yet the Justice Department never criminally prosecuted them, even though their conspiratorial actions were designed to support Hamas, which the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism has designated a terrorist organization since 1997.

Engaging in such physical altercations and clashes is not free speech or protected by the First Amendment.

A federal statute is designed to stop such virulent, malicious misbehavior. To no one’s surprise, the anti-Israel Biden Justice Department refused to use it.

The statute dates to May 1870, when Congress approved the Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to give federal prosecutors the authority to go after the Klan and its masked members, who were assaulting, intimidating, and killing black Americans.

Today, this act is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 241, and it’s particularly applicable to these Hamas supporters because of their routine practice of hiding behind masks.

Section 241 is enforced, or it’s supposed to be, by the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where I served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

The law makes it a felony for “two or more persons” to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Under federal civil rights law, college students have the right to peaceful, unimpeded access to the educational process, meaning anyone who deprives them of that right is violating Section 241.

This statute prohibits going “in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured.”

All the masked terrorism supporters infesting Columbia and our college campuses were “in disguise” and, therefore, could be prosecuted, at least to the extent any of them had the “intent to prevent or hinder” other students from receiving their rightful education.

Punishment under Section 241 is severe: heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison. Video footage at schools could have provided extensive evidence for prosecutors to review.

Von Spakovsky continued by explaining that the Biden administration did not use this statute to prosecute the protesters. However, “the Biden administration used Section 241 to justify special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump.”