Commentator Ann Coulter may have finally found a deportation she can’t support.
The hard-right columnist expressed concern on Monday over whether the Trump administration’s move to deport critics of Israel is at odds with the First Amendment.
Coulter reposted a tweet from a journalist at the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post boasting of an article he published last year titled: “Zionist org preps list of foreign pro-Hamas students, hoping Trump will deport them.”
In her re-post, Coulter commented: “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?”
The pundit’s comments come in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to deport U.S. Green Card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with independent observers asserting that Israel’s actions amount to war crimes, if not a genocidal campaign. Israeli soldiers have boasted on social media of killing Palestinian civilians — including young children.
The Case of Khalil
Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked an obscure clause of the 1952 Nationality Act to justify the deportation.
In a post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump called Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student” [SIC] and pledged, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
However, in an interview with CNN last year, Khalil condemned anti-Semitism and told the network that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined.”
In a statement released on Monday, Ben Wizner of the ACLU described Khalil’s arrest as “unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” asserting that “the First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S.”
In 2024, Trump received over $100 million in contributions from Miriam Adelson, who has pressured the president to recognize Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory, in violation of international law. Trump complied with Adelson’s demands in his first administration. Now she wants him to recognize a potential Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank.
Trump said of the Adelsons, “As soon as I’d give them something, always for Israel…they’d want something else.”
ADL Allies With Far-Right Group It Condemns
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has supported Trump’s moves to deport critics of Israel. However, it also lists the group spearheading the effort to compile names of students for deportation, Betar USA, as a hate group.
The ADL says Betar USA “openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.”
The paramilitary extremist Betar Movement was founded in 1923 by the Russia-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who called for the “Zionist colonization” of Palestine and placing its “native population behind an iron wall” they “cannot breach.”
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