As the Trump administration’s “Catch and Revoke” effort spreads, kicking up plumes of intimidating fear in its wake, among its many blunt tools of repression are the very civil rights policies meant to guard against such instances of targeted racism. On full display in the administration’s investigations of universities is its willingness to instrumentalize civil rights infrastructure toward fascist aims, including disappearing international students from their campuses, threatening students to “self-deport,” and broadly subjecting universities to educational authoritarianism. Done in the name of “Combating Antisemitism,” there is perhaps no better evidence of the weaponization of antisemitism toward far right aims than what is unfolding now.
On March 10, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 universities informing them that the institutions were under investigation for “Antisemitic Discrimination and Harassment.” While the high profile case of Columbia—meant to set a chilling precedent—would imply that the universities were chosen because of their widely publicized encampments and other anti-genocide actions, this does not appear to be true.
Rather, a review of public documentation reveals that virtually all of the universities on the list have been subjected to complaints—whether Title VI, legal, or, often, both—by Israel advocacy organizations StandWithUs, Hillel, Campus Reform, and the Brandeis Center as well as the far right organizations Defense of Freedom Institute, and the ACLJ.
In fact, this closer look at the list of 60 universities finds that what unites them—far more than a history of campus protests or even individual student complaints about antisemitism—is the instrumentalization of civil rights complaints by Israel advocacy and Christian nationalist organizations.
Such targeting by outside advocacy groups has paved the way for the Trump administration to hit the ground running with their aims to dismantle DEI initiatives and criminalize political protests. For example, the House Committee on Education and Workforce’s recent letters to five of the universities under investigation show that the Committee is actively mining Title VI data to fuel a far-right deportation, criminalization, and repression agenda, for instance by demanding “lists of student disciplinary or conduct cases relating to alleged antisemitism.” The letters also demonstrate that they are doing so, at least in part, by relying on notoriously repressive orgs like Canary Mission, which—as a “key intelligence asset” for Israel—keeps a McCarthyite blacklist of scholars who have criticized Israel.
These groups are now effectively operationalizing the goals of Project Esther, a McCarthyist blueprint to weaponize the state against Palestine solidarity groups. Echoing the flaws of many antisemitism task forces now cropping up on university campuses, which abrogate the serious consideration of antisemitism to Israel advocacy organizations, Project Esther’s antisemitism task force goes so far as to claim that “non-Jewish groups are better equipped to fight antisemitism,” even as it simultaneously denies that antisemitism is a problem on the American right. In other words, the Project is merely to cite antisemitism as a throwaway footnote in the larger plan to enact a repressive, white supremacist agenda.
The goal: the end of racial justice initiatives
The “backlog of complaints” supposedly prompting the investigation of the 60+ universities now facing ransom notes if they don’t comply with overtly repressive demands are actually generated by the far right. They aim to dismantle DEI, and to eradicate the principles of education and democracy in service of their own financial gain. Zachary Marschall of Campus Reform, who is directly responsible for filing at least 12 of the complaints at universities now under investigation (at Arizona State University; Boston University; Illinois Wesleyan; the University of Indiana- Bloomington; Johns Hopkins; Northwestern; Princeton; SUNY-Binghamton; Swarthmore; Temple; UMass-Amherst; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison), has openly declared the Title VI complaints as a tactic to “bring about the beginning of the end of DEI.” Marschall is joined in these efforts by Justin Samuels, a conservative Christian who is also suing Bryn Mawr for not admitting men, who “says his larger goal in targeting campus antisemitism is to go after DEI.”
Yet it is larger advocacy orgs, and not just individuals, who drive the complaints. While Samuels filed a Title VI complaint about UCSD, the university has also faced complaints from the conservative Christian organization the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which boasts about having sent a letter to Columbia, Harvard, UC San Diego, USC, UCLA, and the University of Michigan, all of which have faced investigation, on behalf of “Jewish students and Christians who support Israel” and “do not feel safe on campus in the wake of these vile anti-Israel protests.”
The Defense of Freedom Institute, whose president has said that if Trump “targets a few [universities] through civil rights inquiries, others are likely to fall in line,” named Cornell, Columbia, Arizona State U, U Mass Amherst, Tulane, Harvard, Yale, U Penn (seven of which are on the list of 60) in a letter written in coalition with other conservatives, in which they decry “anti-American and anti-Israeli activism funded by American tax payers.” (Beyond this letter, the DFI has additionally directly filed Title VI complaints against Drexel U, Rutgers, and Yale). Aligned with the Trump administration’s recent demand that Columbia put its department of Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies into receivership, the current instrumentalization of civil rights machinery draws on a longer history of attacks on Title VI funding, also named in the DFI letter, that have targeted Middle East studies centers.
In fact, as these organizations well know, Columbia has been caught in the crosshairs of Israel advocacy for years. Columbia’s recent concessions build on the groundwork of far-right pro-Israel legal advocacy org, the Lawfare Project, which responded to Trump’s 2019 EO forcing the OCR to “consider” the IHRA definition of antisemitism by immediately filing a case against Columbia. Since then, the Lawfare Project has primed its “legal war room” by forming WhatsApp groups to coach students to file Title VI complaints. It’s no surprise that Columbia has served as a test case—among its current public Title VI complaints are those filed by the Lawfare Project as well as by the ACLJ and DFI.
The machinery operating now was already primed, built on the right-wing/Zionist campaign to weaponize antisemitism charges that predates Trump. Since 2016, Zionist organizations have been campaigning to codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines criticism of Israel and discussion of Israeli state violence as “discriminatory” and “antisemitic.” The IHRA definition has been widely discredited in scholarship, law, and community advocacy. Nonetheless, Trump’s 2019 executive order, on which the “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” builds, directed government agencies to consider the IHRA definition. The Biden administration continued to validate it, and officials even “encouraged Title VI cases,” going so far as to host a webinar on how to file complaints for prominent Israel advocacy groups including Hillel International, the ADL, Jewish Federations of North America and the American Jewish Committee. That training seems to have born fruit, including in Title VI complaints filed by Hillel at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Hawaii at Manoa (both now under investigation).
Private litigation combined with Title VI claims
Title VI claims are just one cog in a larger machinery fueling repression. As the full scope of the Trump administration’s assault on everyone and everything outside of a right-wing billionaire agenda shows, litigation is both the hammer and the lube. While private lawsuits have long worked in tandem with Title VI claims, the most recent EO on “Additional Measures” to Combat Antisemitism directly weaponizes such private litigation by requiring officials to “include an inventory and an analysis of all court cases, as of the date of the report, against or involving institutions of higher education alleging civil-rights violations related to or arising from post-October 7, 2023, campus anti-Semitism.”
Litigation also plays a role in the racialized targeting of visa holders, as officials are now deputized to “check Jewish students’ lawsuits highlighting foreign nationals allegedly engaging in antisemitism.” Here, too, the wheels have already been greased by Israel advocacy organizations, like the Brandeis Center, StandWithUs, and the Zionist Organization of America. While the Brandeis Center has directly filed Title VI claims against Chapman University and Wellesley College, it has more often brought legal action against universities, as in its cases against Harvard and Berkeley.
The case of Santa Monica College (SMC), a seemingly marginal institution on the national stage, demonstrates how litigation works in tandem with the Title VI mechanism. SMC was the target of Mothers Against College Antisemitism—an organization that began as a Facebook group and quickly grew to wage email campaigns against a range of universities, all of which are on the list of 60 universities under investigation (these also include Cornell; Stanford; UVA; SUNY-Binghamton; and the University of South Florida, where the Title VI complaint generated simply refers to the email campaign orchestrated by groups like MACA.) StandWithUs, an Israel advocacy group notorious for implementing smear campaigns that harass and silence pro-Palestine scholars, then filed a legal complaint that repeated the claims of the MACA campaign. StandWithUs has also joined the ADL and Brandeis Center in bringing litigation against Ohio State as well as directly filing Title VI claims against Lehigh; Middlebury College; UC Davis, UCLA and George Washington. Collectively, these cases encourage repressive legalism, calculating that the threat of litigation makes it much easier to get administrators to implement a policy than to get legislators to pass a law, particularly since efforts to codify the IHRA definition as federal legislation did not succeed, despite years of Zionist campaigning.
The use of civil rights law to silence dissent
The OCR’s new priorities are not actual concerns for students’ experiences of discrimination or even a desire to ensure civil rights—they are campaigns to silence and repress political dissent in the strongest and most terrifying terms. Trump is making good on his promise to compel universities to “collect the names and nationalities of students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty” and these McCarthyite efforts are significantly aided by Israel advocacy organizations.
For instance, the administration’s recent letter to Pomona cites the ADL’s assigned grade of “F” and all 5 letters cite the ADL’s claim that 83% of Jewish students on college campuses have witnessed an antisemitic incident. Yet despite claiming that the statistic is based on witnessing antisemitic incidents, by their own account: “Of the incidents asked about, the most frequently cited was hearing problematic comments about Israel,” and the survey results are based on only 2170 responses from students across 128 universities. Despite this hardly representative sample and faulty categorization of antisemitism, this past March the ADL released an updated report card(™), seemingly working hand-in-glove with the administration’s investigative efforts.
Among the many dire consequences of this weaponization of Title VI are that it accelerates momentum toward making “Zionist” a protected category, despite the fact that Zionism is an ideology, not a people and adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, both of which overtly aim to repress Palestine advocacy speech. For example, as George Mason’s response to the notice of investigation shows, the university has already adopted the IHRA definition, capitulating to the logic that “Zionist” can stand in as a proxy for Jewish identity.
And of course, when Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, directed “the OCR to prioritize and address the disgraceful backlog of antisemitism cases that the Biden administration allowed to linger with no answer,” the office was simultaneously ignoring those complaints on file that list in great detail the harassment, including doxxing, violence, and discrimination that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students have faced on campuses, including at six of the same universities now under investigation for antisemitism (U Mass Amherst, Harvard, Rutgers, Columbia University, UNC, and Portland State University). Likewise, the OCR’s claim to prioritize combating antisemitism is dubious at best considering that the administration’s sweeping cuts simultaneously slashed more than half of the investigative staff members of the OCR.
But perhaps most terrifyingly, the weaponization of Title VI has allowed a mechanism for the Trump administration, working together with far-right Zionist organizations who secretly create blacklists, to sanction individual students and act on deportation threats. This includes the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, whose name, photograph and work history were published by Canary Mission after she co-authored an Op-Ed calling for her university to recognize the genocide Tufts. It also includes Betar U.S., which even the ADL describes as extremist, an organization that has openly declared and even boasted about keeping a blacklist of students to be deported, and taken credit for Momodou Taal’s targeting by ICE. Betar openly admits to using the chilling surveillance tactics of “tips from students, faculty and staff on these campuses, along with social media research” that “includes facial-recognition based AI technology” to create its blacklist. Such secretive targeting is replicated in the case of Helyeh Doutaghi, who was suspended and then dismissed from her position at Yale after AI-generated allegations about her connection to Samidoun, recently designated as a “sham charity” by the U.S. and Canada. Her alleged affiliation with the organization were revealed by the secretive Jewish Onliner, a publication established Dec. 12, 2024 and its automated dragnet methods are aligned with the State Department’s own plans to use AI to revoke visas for students who “appear” to support Hamas.
The redefinition of antisemitism that drives these repressive policies “isn’t simply a policy shift—it’s part of a deeper transformation of American democracy,” and an incredibly alarming one at that. As leading scholars and academic organizations have pointed out, silence is not a strategy in the face of repressive authoritarianism, and capitulation to it has only invited more repression.
As the horrifying authoritarian implications of Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction and detention demonstrate, the escalating repression is inextricably tied to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While we fight against the fascist aims that seek to silence us, we must stay grounded in Khalil’s electrifying statement that “struggling for Palestinian liberation is like breathing.” In the recently released documentary The Encampments, his fellow Columbia student movement leaders Sueda Polat and Naye Idriss also issue the rallying call “we are just getting started,” because they know from experience that repression only makes the movement stronger. Let us all now urgently and collectively continue to breathe life into it.
Amira Jarmakani, she/they, is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty with the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of two books – An Imperialist Love Story and Imagining Arab Womanhood, and co-editor of Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies.