President Donald Trump’s Jan. 30 executive order to cancel the student visas of Hamas sympathizers on college campuses is being met with resistance.
The editorial board at the Exponent, Purdue University’s student newspaper, said it “refuses to be party to such a blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of potentially hundreds of Purdue students.”
“That’s why, to protect the identities of pro-Palestinian students, we are removing the names, images and likenesses of every such student from our website published since Oct. 7, 2023,” the editorial board wrote on Feb. 3. “Further, in future coverage, no such information or images will be published online or in print by the Exponent — no exceptions — until this autocratic attack on free speech is overturned.”
Executive Order 13899 aims to combat the “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence against our citizens, especially in our schools and on our campuses” since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas first attacked Israel, sparking the beginning of a 15-month war that has left tens of thousands of people dead.
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“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” the president said in a Jan. 30 fact sheet on the executive order. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization that the Department of National Intelligence (DNI) describes as “the largest and most capable militant group in the Palestinian territories and one of the territories’ two major political parties.”
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“HAMAS is committed to armed resistance against Israel and to the creation of a Palestinian state, and the group has engaged in several rounds of violent conflict with Israel,” according to DNI. “The most recent began on 7 October 2023, when HAMAS launched a massive surprise attack against Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people.”
The Exponent’s editorial board said it expects “no distinction” to be made between “‘pro-jihadist’ and pro-Palestinian” when it comes to revoking student visas.
“Anti-war can only now mean ‘pro-Hamas,’” the student board wrote.
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“Such twisting of language to be used as a weapon is contrary to the First Amendment, which gives the Exponent its right to exist just as much as it gives the right to students to protest as they see fit. It is the opinion of the Exponent that standing back while our website is potentially used to identify the state’s enemies would be directly against those principles,” the board continued.
The board added that pro-Palestine protests at Purdue will continue into 2025, but the students they interview at protests “will no longer have their identities published.”
Hamas and Israel’s recent ceasefire deal, which paused the deadly war, has led Hamas to release 10 Israeli hostages and five Thai nationals abducted on Oct. 7, 2023, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and increased humanitarian aid into Gaza. Six Americans remain in Gaza.
More than 46,000 Palestinians died in the war, half of whom are believed to be women and children, though that number could be higher, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. More than 90% of the roughly two million Palestinians living in Gaza were displaced during the war.
Fox News Digital’s Efrat Lachter and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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