Trump Has a New Plan to Deal With Campus Protests

Speaking to donors earlier this month, former President Donald Trump laid out his plan for dealing with campus protests: Just deport the protesters.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” the presumptive Republican nominee for president said on May 14, according to The Washington Post.

The threat is classic Trump: vindictive, nonsensical, disproportionate, and based on the assumption that deportation is the answer to America’s problems. Protest is an essential element of American freedom and is not itself against the law. (Some protesters have been charged with crimes.) One would think it goes without saying that U.S. citizens cannot be deported for it. Although some of those protesting the war in Gaza and American support for it are international students, no evidence indicates that most or even a large minority of those protesting on campuses are non-U.S. citizens. (Foreign nationals can lose their student visa if they are suspended from school for any reason, political or otherwise.) In short, Trump is proposing a heavy-handed plan that wouldn’t solve the problem.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness]

Trump’s remarks about protesters follow a pattern seen elsewhere, in which he takes an idea already circulating in conservative circles and ratchets it up a notch. “I think the students, if they’re foreign students on visas, their visas should be canceled and they should be sent home,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last month. “For those international students who defied university orders, and police instruction, in favor of acting on pro-terrorist views, this should result in immediate expulsion from their host institution and our generous country,” Senator Marco Rubio wrote in a letter to administration officials in May. “No questions asked.”

Asked about the demand at the time, Biden White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “I would just tell you that you don’t have to agree with every sentiment that is expressed in a free country like this to stand by the First Amendment and the idea of peaceful protest.”

Calling DeSantis’s and Rubio’s statements nuanced would be incorrect, but Trump’s version is even more sweeping—no surprise from someone who has in the past reportedly suggested shooting protesters. He conflates all the protesters with international students, and proposes a penalty, deportation, not permitted for citizens. Americans can lose citizenship for treason, and naturalized citizens can be denaturalized for a small range of offenses, but protesting U.S. foreign policy is not one—which is good, because that would mean criminalizing dissent. But Trump has shown that although he fiercely resists even minor constraints on himself, he has no problem violating, or suggesting violating, the basic civil rights guaranteed for other people by the Constitution.