President Trump is obviously clamping down broadly on dissent using the tools of the federal government. Now, the administration has put the pressure on universities themselves to crack down on student protesters. Increasingly, for example, one is seeing that colleges are using surveillance videos and search warrants to investigate students involved in pro-Palestinian protests. Some experts believe that it’s this new frontier in campus security that could threaten civil liberties.
In addition, it has been pointed out in the media that some colleges, such as the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, George Mason University, University of California, Indiana University Bloomington, and University of North Carolina to name a few, have had the university police obtain warrants to search personal property such as a student’s car, laptop or cellphone. In most cases, no actual crime has been committed by the affected student.
Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group, reportedly notes that university police have sometimes even cited social media posts to justify warrant requests. But as he states, such posts are constitutionally protected speech, and he goes on further to stipulate that such campus police tactics could very likely chill free expression. Furthermore, lawyers representing affected students argue that a college seeking a search warrant against one of its own students is not because that student committed a crime, but purely because in many cases a student attended a protest and was filmed at the protest. In most cases so far, few students end up not even being charged. In some cases, the university may simply threaten them with possible suspensions should they continue to participate in protests, including those that are peaceful.
In addition, for months now, President Trump has been threatening to deport foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Apparently, investigators from a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have begun scouring the internet for social media posts and videos that the Trump administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas. Curious indeed since ICE typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers for possible deportation. As in the recent arrest by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, a young U. of Columbia graduate student with a green card living in New York, the government is using an old provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to argue that his actions during protests at Columbia University harmed U.S. foreign policy interests by fomenting anti-Semitism. As of yet he has not been charged with an actual crime. The Act was passed in the context of Cold War-era fears and suspicions of infiltrating Soviet and communist spies and sympathizers within American institutions and federal government. Anticommunist sentiment was associated at the time with McCarthyism in the U.S., led by an administration aiming to push for selective immigration to preserve national security. Since then, there have been very few cases where similar powers were cited in deportation proceedings under the Act. Its current use would certainly be difficult to defend in the courts.
While some search warrants may be related to an ongoing campus vandalism investigation, few of the campus police seizures have actually resulted in charges being laid. Indeed, without just cause I would argue that such search and seizure practices by campus police endanger free speech and the civil liberties of those affected university students. As was the case in the 1930s Nazi Germany, today it’s students, but tomorrow it could be anyone; including those living, studying and working legally in the U.S. This new reality certainly meets the definition of a police state.
FROLITICKS 