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american-arab anti-discrimination committee
Cornell Students, Professor Sue Trump For Targeting Palestine Defenders
"The First Amendment does not come with a 'Palestine Exception,'" said the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which filed the suit.
Mar 17, 2025
A lawsuit filed Saturday on behalf of two Cornell University graduates students and one professor at the Ivy League school in Upstate New York is challenging what plaintiffs are calling "the Trump administration's unconstitutional campaign against free speech—particularly as it targets international students and scholars who protest or express support for Palestinian rights."
"The lawsuit seeks a nationwide injunction of executive orders used by the administration to target and deport international students advocating for Palestinian freedom, rights, and liberation under the guise of protecting national security," explained the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which sued on behalf of Ph.D. students Momodou Taal and Sriram Parasurama and professor Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ.
Taal, a British-Gambian national, is facing possible deportation for his pro-Palestine activism on campus. Parasurama was arrested last October for protesting Israel's annihilation of Gaza at a career fair and was subsequently de-enrolled from Cornell and banned from the university's campus in Ithaca, New York for three years. Wa Ngũgĩ is a professor of literature who works with Taal. Parasurama and Wa Ngũgĩ are U.S. citizens.
"Defendants' attempt to bar non-citizens from criticizing the U.S. government, its institutions, American culture, or the government of Israel—and to prohibit citizens from hearing those views—serves no legitimate government interest in preventing terrorism or enforcing immigration laws," the lawsuit states. "The justifications offered are pretextual and dangerous. Criticism of the U.S. government does not constitute terrorism, and criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism."
Taal said in a statement that "the U.S. government claims to be zealous about free speech—except when it comes to Palestine."
"We've been here before: McCarthyism to civil rights to Vietnam, times when this country has deviated from its stated commitments to free speech," he continued. "This is another generational moment, another hour of reckoning. Why is there a Palestine exception?"
"Only in a dictatorship can the leader jail and banish political opponents for criticizing his administration" Taal added. "A nationwide injunction is therefore necessary while the court considers the merits."
Parasurama said: "These draconian executive orders aim to crack down on those willing to protest against our country's active role in the genocide of the Palestinian people. They are part of a broader moral crisis our nation is grappling with. This lawsuit allows us to recover our basic rights and protect international students like Momodou Taal."
Wa Ngũgĩ said that "I was born in the U.S. but grew up under the [Daniel arap] Moi dictatorship in Kenya in the 1980s. Students and people of conscience in Kenya were being detained, tortured, exiled or killed. My own family experienced the full brunt of this oppressive society. When I moved back to the U.S. in the early 1990s I could not foresee this attempt to chill free speech and directly attack our universities."
The Trump administration has invoked the president's January executive order authorizing the arrest, detention, and deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's assault on Gaza, which has left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to local and international agencies. Israel's conduct in the war is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa.
Last week, immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent who helped Gaza protests at Columbia University while he was a graduate student there. Trump called Khalil's detention "the first arrest of many to come."
Pro-Israel activists played a role in Khalil's arrest. Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia who was temporarily banned from campus last year after harassing university employees, and Columbia student David Lederer have waged what Khalil called "a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign" against him and other activists. The group Canary Mission last week released a video naming five other international students it says are "linked to campus extremism at Columbia."
The Department of Justice announced Friday that it is investigating whether pro-Palestinian demonstrators at over 60 colleges and universities including Columbia and Cornell violated federal anti-terrorism laws.
On Monday, ADC legal director and case co-counsel Chris Godshall-Bennett said that "this is one of those times people will look back on and ask what we did."
"We will not stand idly by while the government disappears its political opponents," he continued. "My family fled European antisemitism and came to the United States where our Constitution protects us from tyranny. My Jewish identity won't be used as an excuse to persecute the Palestinian people and its allies without a fight."
"This is one of those times people will look back on and ask what we did."
"Through this litigation, we seek both immediate and long-term relief to protect non-citizens from deportation and citizens from prosecution based on their constitutionally protected speech," Godshall-Bennett added.
Lead plaintiffs' counsel Eric Lee said that "this lawsuit aims to vindicate the rights of all non-citizens and citizens in the U.S., but the courthouse is only one arena in this fight."
"We appeal to the population: Stand up and exercise your First Amendment rights by actively and vigorously opposing the danger of dictatorship," Lee added. "As we prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution next year, recall the words from the Declaration of Independence: 'That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.'"
Pro-Palestine demonstrations continue at Cornell and on campuses across the nation and around the world. Last week, 17 activists led by the group Students for Justice in Palestine were
detained by police after interrupting a Cornell panel on the history of the so-called Israel-Palestine "conflict," whose members included former Israeli foreign minister and alleged war criminal Tzipi Livni.
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Outrage Over Trump Use of AI to Revoke Visas of Students Deemed 'Hamas Supporters'
"Those pushing for this repression will come to realize the dangerous precedent it will set for freedom of speech," warned one critic.
Mar 07, 2025
In what one critic called "a dangerous new front in the Trump administration's multi-pronged assault on First Amendment rights," the U.S. State Department is launching an artificial intelligence-powered "catch and revoke" program to cancel the visas of international students deemed supportive of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
The State Department is working with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security in what one senior official called a "whole of government and whole of authority approach" to identify and proscribe foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other groups the U.S. has designated as "terrorist organizations," Axiosfirst reported.
According to Axios' Marc Caputo, the effort includes "AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders' social media accounts," and "marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government's policing of foreign nationals' conduct and speech."
The free speech administration, if they like what you say: www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...
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— Nora Benavidez (@attorneynora.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Explaining the new policy, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday: "We see people marching at our universities and in the streets of our country... calling for intifada, celebrating what Hamas has done... Those people need to go."
Responding to the news, Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said in a statement that "this should concern all Americans."
"This is a First Amendment and freedom of speech issue and the administration will overplay its hand," Ayoub added. "Americans won't like this. They'll view this as capitulating free speech rights for a foreign nation."
ADC said:
By employing AI to track and flag individuals for potential visa revocation and/or deportation, the administration is effectively criminalizing peaceful political expression and dissent. Not since the aftermath of 9/11 has such wide-scale surveillance been directed at noncitizen communities, and the reliance on AI tools only magnifies the likelihood of errors, misidentifications, and abuses of discretion. This raises profound questions about privacy and constitutional protections—who is controlling this data, how is it being used, and where is the human oversight?
Progressive podcaster Brian Allen said on the social media site X, "Let's be clear: This is state surveillance on steroids."
"The Trump [administration] is using AI to monitor foreign students' social media and punishing them for political speech," he continued. "So much for 'free speech absolutism'—guess that only applies if you're a billionaire or a Republican."
"The message is loud and clear: Dissent will be crushed," Allen added. "The crackdown is here."
AI tools can't be trusted as experts on the First Amendment or the nuances of speech. Using AI to scour visa holders’ social media for “pro-Hamas” posts and report them to an administration threatening to deport international students for protected speech will undoubtedly encourage self-censorship.
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— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Journalist Laila Al-Arian warned that "those pushing for this repression will come to realize the dangerous precedent it will set for freedom of speech."
The launch of "catch and revoke" follows a January executive order by President Donald Trump authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's assault on Gaza, which left the coastal strip flattened and more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; and around 2 million more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to local and international agencies.
"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice," Trump said at the time. "We will find you, and we will deport you."
Earlier this week, Trump also threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that allow what he dubiously called "illegal protests."
"Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came," the president said on social media. "American students will be permanently expelled or... arrested."
The ACLU responded to Trump's threats by publishing an open letter to colleges and universities nationwide on Tuesday "urging them to reject any federal pressure to surveil or punish international students and faculty based on constitutionally protected speech."
ACLU legal director Cecilia Wang said: "It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly. We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus."
"Trump's latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities," Wang added, referring to the extreme repression during the Second Red Scare of the 1940s and '50s.
Israel's war on Gaza sparked the largest wave of nationwide protests—a significant number of them led by Jewish groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow—since the Black Lives Matter movement. According to an analysis by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, 97% of the 553 campus protests it studied were nonviolent.
There were, however, numerous reports of pro-Israel counter-protesters and police attacking pro-Palestine demonstrators and encampments, including Jewish religious structures.
While few student protesters have endorsed Hamas—which for years was nurtured by Israel as a counterbalance to the Palestinian National Authority—or the October 7 attack, more have voiced support for Palestinian liberation "by any means necessary," including by armed struggle, a legitimate right under international law.
The United States and around two dozen other nations—all but one of them European or the result of European settler-colonialism—consider Hamas, whose political arm governs Gaza, a terrorist organization. Most of the Arab and wider Muslim world views Hamas, whose military wing led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as a legitimate movement for national liberation.
Meanwhile, scores of Global South countries, either directly or via regional blocs, and Ireland are backing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The Trump administration has hit South Africa, as well as the International Criminal Court—which last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity—with punitive sanctions.
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In Possible Hate Crime, 3 Palestinian Students Shot in Vermont
"The surge in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiment we are experiencing is unprecedented, and this is another example of that hate turning violent," one advocate said.
Nov 26, 2023
Three university students of Palestinian descent were shot and wounded Saturday night in Burlington, Vermont.
The students were identified as Brown University student Hisham Awartani, Haverford College student Kinnan Abdel Hamid, and Trinity College student Tahseen Ahmed. In a Sunday morning statement posted on social media, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said they had "reason to believe that the shooting was motivated by the three victims being Arab."
"We are praying for a full recovery of the victims, and will support the families in any way that is needed," ADC executive director Abed A. Ayoub said in a statement. "Given the information collected and provided, it is clear that the hate was a motivating factor in this shooting. We call on law enforcement to investigate it as such."
"The surge in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiment we are experiencing is unprecedented, and this is another example of that hate turning violent," Ayoub continued.
The three 20-year-olds were visiting one of the trio's family members in Burlington for Thanksgiving, police said, as the Burlington Free Press reported. They were walking along a residential street near the University of Vermont campus around 6:30 pm Eastern Time when a white man confronted them, according to Seven Days.
"The suspect was on foot in the area. Without speaking, he discharged at least four rounds from the pistol and is believed to have fled on foot," police said, as the Burlington Free Press reported.
Police said that two of the men were wearing keffiyehs at the time of the shooting, while ADC said that all three were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic. Police, however, said they did not yet know the shooter's motives.
"The hate crimes against Palestinians must stop. Palestinians everywhere need protection."
"My deepest condolences go out to the victims and their families," Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said in a statement reported by the Burlington Free Press. "In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime. And I have already been in touch with federal investigatory and prosecutorial partners to prepare for that if it's proven."
The three men were taken to the University of Vermont Medical Center where two are stable and one "has sustained much more serious injuries," police told Seven Days on Sunday.
Two of the students are U.S. citizens and the third is a legal resident.
The families of the three men circulated a statement through the nonprofit Institute for Middle East Understanding.
"We call on law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation, including treating this as a hate crime," the statement read in part. "We will not be comfortable until the shooter is brought to justice."
"We need to ensure that our children are protected, and this heinous crime is not repeated. No family should ever have to endure this pain and agony," the families continued.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it was offering $10,000 to anyone providing information that led to the arrest or conviction of the shooter or shooters, and the FBI said it was aware of the incident and prepared to investigate if local police found evidence of a federal crime, according to The Associated Press.
The head of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom, Husam Zomlot, linked the shootings to the killing of six-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume last month, a Palestinian boy who was stabbed 26 times by his family's landlord in Chicago.
"The hate crimes against Palestinians must stop," Zomlot tweeted. "Palestinians everywhere need protection."
Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also issued a statement.
"It is shocking and deeply upsetting that three young Palestinians were shot here in Burlington, Vermont," Sanders said on social media. "Hate has no place here, or anywhere. I look forward to a full investigation. My thoughts are with them and their families."
In the wake of Hamas' October 7 attacks on Israel and Israel's bombardment of Gaza afterword, both Islamophobic and antisemitic incidents have increased in the U.S., The Guardian reported. CAIR said it had received 1,283 reports of discrimination and petitions for help between early October and early November, a 216% increase from the same time period last year.
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