Trump antisemitism executive order invokes anti-KKK law and targets ‘leftist, anti-American’ universities
President Donald Trump signed an order focused on countering raucous demonstrations against Israel ‘on our campuses and in our streets’
President Donald Trump shows an executive order regarding antisemitism during a Hanukkah reception at the White House on Dec. 11, 2019. He is expected to sign a new order addressing antisemitism Wednesday. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld January 29, 2025
President Donald Trump’s executive order on antisemitism encourages the attorney general to use a federal law created to target the Klu Klux Klan, and will direct federal agencies to tell colleges and universities to “monitor” and “report activities” by foreign students, staff and faculty for activities related to terrorism, according to a draft of the order obtained by the Forward.
“Immediate action will be taken by the Department of Justice to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities,” a separate White House fact sheet about the order circulating Wednesday stated.
It adds that the executive order “demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment and it is unclear who the administration worked with in crafting the order. The Anti-Defamation League said it was consulted and praised it in a statement. But sources familiar with the matter said that the American Jewish Committee and Hillel International, two major Jewish organizations that have spent the past year campaigning against antisemitism, were not involved, nor were the Reform or Conservative movements, or Agudath Israel of America, which represents Haredi Jews. The Jewish Federations of North America declined to say whether they had been consulted.
The response from centrist Jewish groups was muted. The AJC said it endorsed some aspects of the order, but cautioned that provisions that “have the potential to be broadly interpreted to threaten certain ethnic and religious groups be implemented with strict adherence to existing law.”
The order expands on a 2019 executive order from Trump’s first term that directed federal agencies to interpret a crucial provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering antisemitism, and endorsed the widespread but controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which includes many expressions of anti-Zionism.
The new order “reaffirms” the previous order, which was never fully implemented, and states that federal policy will be to use “all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
Specifically, the new order calls on every federal agency to identify any powers they can use to “curb or combat anti-Semitism” and to inventory all pending administrative complaints against colleges and universities alleging civil rights violations “related to or arising from post-October 7, 2023, campus antisemitism.”
In addition, it says that the attorney general is “encouraged” to use the federal “conspiracy against rights” law “to combat antisemitism.” The measure was originally passed to combat KKK violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, and has since been used to prosecute civil rights violations related to elections. Trump himself was charged with violating the law in relation to his alleged attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
The last major element of the order is an instruction for the Departments of State, Education and Homeland Security to come up with recommendations for “familiarizing” colleges and universities with the section of federal immigration law on “inadmissible aliens” dealing with foreign citizens who have ties to terrorist organizations.
The order states that the goal is for higher education institutions to “monitor for and report activities by alien students” and that “such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.”
Last executive order had muted impact
Trump’s 2019 order was less broad in its scope — it was tailored to clarify Education Department investigations into antisemitism — and although it generated a flurry of attention, its ultimate impact was limited, in part because the Trump administration never fully implemented it. President Joe Biden left the order in place, but similarly never converted it from a presidential decree into the kind of regulations that federal employees need for applying an order to their everyday work.
But the policy landscape has changed significantly over the past six years, and especially since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war 15 months ago sparked an increase in both antisemitism and raucous demonstrations against Israel, particularly on university campuses.
The Anti-Defamation League has called for more aggressive action against students protesting Israel, including asking school presidents to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine chapters for providing material support to terrorist organizations. The Secure Community Network — the main organization providing security advice to synagogues and Jewish organizations in the United States — recently called for the country to “expel any non-citizen alien who supports terrorism,” including protesters.
Republicans have focused almost all of their attention on what they believe is antisemitism coming from left-wing activists and critics of Israel. The Heritage Foundation released a blueprint for the Trump administration to fight antisemitism called Project Esther that discussed how to dismantle a “Hamas Support Network” composed of progressive advocacy groups and foundations, while the author of that report said that he was not concerned with addressing the threat posed by white supremacists.
The White House fact sheet, which listed education adviser Eric Bledsoe as the author, also stated that immediately following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals began a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America.”
“Celebrating Hamas’ mass rape, kidnapping, and murder, they physically blocked Jewish Americans from attending college classes, obstructed synagogues and assaulted worshippers, and vandalized American monuments and statues,” while the “Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this coordinated assault on public order; it simply refused to protect the civil rights of Jewish Americans, especially students.”
Trump’s 2019 executive order was greeted with both support and consternation in the Jewish community at the time.
Supporters, including establishment groups like the ADL, hailed the order, saying it was “designed to give the federal government more tools to protect Jews from antisemitism.” Skeptics worried that it was too focused on stanching criticism of Israel, while others focused on the order’s apparent classification of Jews as an ethnic group, collapsing the complexity of Jewish identity.
Civil rights investigators at the Department of Education were trained on the order and told to consider the IHRA definition when investigating cases, although the failure to codify it into an official regulation meant it was never used to determine the final results of a case.
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