Congress has provided the Department of Homeland Security with powerful tools to remove noncitizen immigrants who support terrorism or incite genocide.
The Biden administration refused to use these tools. Fortunately, the Trump administration thinks differently.
Hamas’s meticulously planned October 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians resulted, in then-President Biden’s words, in “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” with “more than 1,000 civilians slaughtered,” “parents butchered using their bodies to try to protect their children.” Biden concluded that Hamas’s act of “pure, unadulterated evil” had “reminded us all” that “silence is complicity.”
What, then, should we call not silence, but vocal celebration of Hamas’s mass murder? As Hamas would gladly kill every Jew in Israel if it had the opportunity, this is akin to the celebration of genocide.
Much of this celebration took place on Americans college campuses by foreign students during demonstrations apparently catalyzed by campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. The Anti-Defamation League reported that the group’s chapters giddily celebrated the massacres.
The group's Tufts University chapter proclaimed that “footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory [i.e. Israel] has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.” The Bard University chapter proclaimed that “Liberation ... requires confrontation by any means necessary. From the river to the sea, we will continue to fight.” And last October, Swarthmore's chapter wrote, “Happy October 7th everyone! In honor of this glorious day and all our martyred revolutionaries.” Swarthmore College at least pushed back, responding that “celebrating the killing of innocent people is shocking and reprehensible.”
This all calls to mind the incitements driving the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote Secretary of State Warren Christopher at that time of reports that “a private [radio] station affiliated with an extremist Hutu political party” was broadcasting messages urging the killing of "all remaining Tutsi children,” urging them, “‘Take up your machetes; the graves are only half full! Who will help us fill them?’” Kennedy warned that the broadcasts were “continuing to incite genocide of the Tutsi people” and pleaded with Christopher to help jam them.
Federal law provides powerful tools enabling the removal of noncitizen immigrants who advocate for terrorism and incite genocide. I should know — I had the honor of assisting House Judiciary Committee Chair F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. in his successful push for the inclusion of provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2001 and the REAL ID Act in 2005, providing for the deportation of immigrants who endorse or espouse terrorism.
One year earlier, Congress had made subject to deportation noncitizens who incite genocide. In 1990, Congress created a ground of deportation for immigrants “whose presence or activities in the [U.S.] the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to ...
