Mother Jones illustration; Jimin Kim/SOPA Images/Zuma
In 2024, Trump repeatedly threatened to deport pro-Palestine students. “Any student that protests,” he told supporters, “I [will] throw them out of the country.”
That would include Momodou Taal, a British Gambian PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell. Last September, the university temporarily suspended him—which could have led to a revocation of his visa and deportation—after Taal and other students disrupted a career fair that featured weapons manufacturers that contract extensively with Israel. (The university alleged that Taal had shoved a police officer, a charge he denies.)
After a public pressure campaign, Cornell backed down. But conservative groups have said that Trump should still revoke his student visa and deport him, along with other international students who have engaged in Palestine advocacy. In one of Trump’s first-day executive orders, he established the groundwork to do so by laying out a set of justifications for deporting immigrants on ideological grounds. While deportations on the basis of protected speech are illegal, that does not mean they could not happen—and in raising the specter of on-campus ICE raids and labeling protesters as terrorists, Trump is trying to find a cheat-code for the First Amendment.
Since then, Trump has signed another executive order making his earlier threats of hyper-targeted deportation explicit. “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,” Trump said on January 29th of 2025.
I spoke with Taal before the new administration took office about how he thought about the threat of Trump.
In many ways, Trump is unpredictable. But given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target.
It’s disappointing. This is politically motivated—they’re trying to come down on someone who has particularly been outspoken on this issue.
If there were a harsher stance taken against deportation efforts generally, then I don’t think people would feel as emboldened to talk about throwing protesters out of the US.
Biden created the conditions for Trump and others to act, too. Too many people have been labeling students as terrorist sympathizers for being pro-Palestine and taking moral stances against genocide. We see this time and time again, throughout American history: the construction of the enemy from within. It gives life to this racial chauvinism. It allows for the drawing of lines against those who take different stances on government, particularly foreign policy. Campuses have long been a battleground for all of this. The logics of the war on terror are being re-inscribed—in this particular moment, the “enemy from within” is the Muslim.
I was never under any illusions about the United States of America. I was never starry-eyed. But I didn’t think it was this insane. Hopefully my case serves as a case study of…the ideal of what America says it is, versus what it actually is.
In any case, it’s funny, right? Because people will talk about cancel culture. People talk about the ways in which someone on the left is, like, a snowflake or something. But what greater way of canceling someone is there than trying to get them deported?
