Trump targeted college students. Campuses went silent.

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The Trump administration's get-tough approach to pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses appears to have helped halt the encampments, marches and sometimes-violent confrontations seen a year ago.

Experts say the moves by President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress prompted university administrators to clamp down on protests and warn students to mind their behavior. And now a Trump administration push to deport or eject international students over allegations they are aligned with Hamas has further chilled campus activism.

In response, some activist groups have cautioned international students in particular to avoid being associated with any movements targeted by Trump. Free-speech experts worry about the long-term implications of silencing student protests.

"There's just as much reason to protest but there isn't as much room to protest," said Prof. Robert Cohen, a New York University expert on protest movements. "If you're a foreign student or someone on a green card, you're going to be very afraid to participate in this movement."

Student-led protests helped end the Vietnam War, pass the Civil Rights Amendment, and forced American universities and companies to divest from apartheid-era South Africa. Protesting ‒ including the peaceable assembly of people petitioning the government for change ‒ is specifically protected by the First Amendment.

But Trump and his allies have argued some pro-Palestinian campus protesters physically attacked or harassed Jewish students and community members last year, and accused university administrators of allowing antisemitism to flourish on campuses. Trump officials have slashed federal research funding for some of the universities they accuse of failing to protect Jewish students.

On April 9, the Trump administration said it would be scouring the social media posts of international students to see if they are in any way "endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity."

Said Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin: "There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here."

Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil detained for more than a month

A leader of student protests at Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained in March by ICE agents who said his green card had been revoked. University officials have not taken a strong stand to support him, and his detention drew scattered protests.

In an open letter to her husband, Khalil's wife, Noor Abdalla, said authorities are trying to stifle challenges to "their corrupt and oppressive systems." Both Khalil and Abdalla studied at Columbia, and were living in student housing when Khalil was detained.

"They are trying to silence anyone who dares to speak out against the atrocities happening in Palestine. But they will fail," she wrote. "We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children ‒ until Palestine is free."

Universities targeted for alleged antisemitism

In a January executive order, Trump vowed to target any international student or green card holder who participated in "pro-jihadist protests" and "all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before."

As part of his stated efforts to fight antisemitism, Trump has targeted 60 universities across the country for federal investigation, starting with Columbia, where large pro-Palestinian protests launched last spring. The university is now on its third president since Aug. 1, and administrators there have been accused of caving to Trump's demands, which included tougher student discipline, limiting where students are allowed to protest, and a requirement that protesters remove face coverings when asked by authorities.

"I think that the intimidation is just starting to take effect," said Syracuse University Prof. William C. Banks, a legal expert who studies governmental powers, asymmetric warfare and surveillance. "Trump's back and everybody knows it."

A coalition of journalism groups recently advised student journalists to consider whether they should be removing photos or news stories identifying specific protesters, and more consistently offering interview subjects the option to be quoted anonymously.

Trump was also hostile to many of the racial justice demonstrations that sprang up nationally following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and repeatedly deployed federal police and troops against protesters. He hasn't targeted protesters critical of him or the MAGA movement, but some experts say that could come next.

Some alumni groups, including one at Johns Hopkins University, have been angered by administrators' responses to Trump's demands, and are pushing their alma maters to strengthen protections for students, or to spend down their endowments to buy freedom from punitive budget cuts.

"That sent the message to other university presidents that if they didn't suppress these movements, they might lose their jobs," Cohen said. "If a Harvard president can lose their job, then anybody can lose their job."

How universities handled the protests has already cost several university presidents their jobs following Congressional hearings, including the president of Harvard who stepped down in early 2024.

Students quieted by visa revocations, spring crackdowns, exhaustion

Multiple university student-government associations did not respond to a request for comment from Paste BN.

Longtime immigration attorney Len Saunders, who works near the Canadian border in Washington state, said he's telling clients to keep a low profile because it's unclear exactly what Trump's administration is using to justify cancelling visas and target international students.

"If I had a kid here on a student vista I would say 'do not join any clubs, do not join any protests, do not get your name or face out there,'" he said.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR's deputy executive director, said he thinks the protests have largely calmed because protesters are simply exhausted ‒ but also because university officials clamped down so hard last spring, before Trump was elected.

"The last school year, numerous universities called in law enforcement to brutalize their students. That's how most encampments came to an end," he said. "The crackdown that universities launched certainly played a larger role than anything President Trump has done."

Trump officials in recent weeks have revoked the visas of more than 300 international students, in some cases citing their participation in pro-Palestinian protests. In response, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has recommended that international students keep a low profile.

Quieting the country's conscience

Banks, the Syracuse University professor, said chilling student protests risks quieting the country's conscience.

Protests might be sometimes-inconvenient or messy, but young people have long provided a valuable values check about what the United States stands for, he said.

"I think we will (eventually) see a return to activism but some courts are going to have to come along and say to the Trump administration, 'you can't summarily round people up, can't summarily tell people they can't protest,'" Banks said. "He's going to do it as long as he can get away with it."