Purdue Student Newspaper Deletes Names of Anti-Israel Protesters to Protect Students From Trump
“will no longer be a place where that government will be able to find the names of its targets”
I have a feeling that the Trump administration will find out who these students are if they really want to know.
The College Fix reports:
Purdue newspaper deletes names of pro-Palestinian protesters to protect students from Trump
Purdue University’s student newspaper is scrubbing the names and photos of pro-Palestinian protesters from its website, a decision its editors announced Monday in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The decision struck one journalism professor as “unusual,” but he told The College Fix that “the newspaper has every right to do it.”
“The effort to protect the pro-Palestinian students could be characterized as sensible to some extent, but the paper might also consider the need to protect the identities of pro-Israel students as well, given that they, too, could be subject to harassment, not necessarily from the government, but from other students,” DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall said Tuesday in an email.
In an editorial Monday, editors of the Purdue Exponent said they want to protect international students from deportation when their “only crime has been to raise their voices” in support of Palestine.
The impetus for their decision was an executive order from the Trump administration last week that aims to combat antisemitism on college campuses. It directs the federal government 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.”
A White House fact sheet that accompanied the executive order also suggested the Trump administration would revoke student visas and deport “Hamas sympathizers.”
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump stated in the fact sheet.
The Exponent editors expressed concerns the order will be used to target students just for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.
The editors said they refuse “to be party to such a blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of potentially hundreds of Purdue students.”
“Our newspaper will never be able to stop such an assault backed by the might of the federal government. But purdueexponent.org will no longer be a place where that government will be able to find the names of its targets.”
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Comments
Deporting foreigners on visas who support terrorists doesn’t violate the First Amendment. The government isn’t violating their right to free speech: they’re not being fined, jailed, or censored. Rather, their *privilege* (not right!) to be in the US is being revoked because they’re supporting a US-designated terror organization. The US wouldn’t have granted a visa in the first place had they supported a terror organization before coming to the US,
Newspaper editors who think this is a First Amendment issue need to learn their Constitution better.
Actually you need to learn your constitution better. It is unconstitutional for the government to take ANY action against someone, or deny someone ANY otherwise-available benefit, because they exercised a constitutional right. Just as it is unconstitutional to cut someone’s government grant because of their protected speech, even though the grant didn’t have to be made in the first place, so it is to revoke their visa, even though it didn’t have to be granted in the first place.
It is true that the US wouldn’t have granted a visa in the first place had they supported a terror organization before coming to the US. True but irrelevant. The only reason the government is allowed to deny someone a visa for expressing an opinion it doesn’t like is because the constitution doesn’t protect foreigners’ rights when they are abroad. It does protect their rights while they are here.
An alien abroad has every right to express his opinions, but the US constitution doesn’t protect that right; the moment he sets foot in the USA it does. And therefore he can’t be punished for his speech here by revoking or denying him a benefit he would otherwise have received.
But that doesn’t include the right to shout down speakers, commit battery, damage property, block access to a public street or building, or threaten violence in a manner that would constitute assault. The newspaper seems to be conflating such activities with speaking out.
Wrong again. I don’t know why you love terrorists so much that you continue to make false posts on the subject. I even corrected you with the relevant Statute on this. Please stop.
This raises an interesting question- where is the line between speech and action? Certainly protesters have the right to speak and to march while they speak, but if they block traffic or occupy a building or threaten people. aren’t those illegal actions albeit minor ones?
Can visas be cancelled for any breach of law? The fact that you are engaging in otherwise legal speech won’t protect you will it? The fact that prosecutorial discretion has been exercised in the past for minor offenses is moot in my understanding
Ahad, exactly. This article, and csprof’s uninformed comment, is only about punishing people for expressing support for terrorists. People who have committed actual crimes are not the topic here.
Diver64, you continue to be wrong. I don’t know why you hate our fundamental freedoms so much. No statute explicitly says what you claim; your claim emerges from one statute referring to another one. Well, that statute, as applied in the manner you seek to apply it, is unconstitutional and invalid, and thus is not a law. Regardless of what any statute claims, it is unlawful for the government to punish someone in any way for exercising a constitutional right. That is firmly established by any number of court decisions.
Hodge, the first amendment doesn’t mean that you can commit any crime you like so long as you happen to be protesting something at the time. If you shoot someone while shouting “Black Lives Matter”, your crime is exactly the same as if you had shouted “Happy birthday”, or remained totally silent. Likewise there is no right to block traffic, and the fact that you’re holding a placard while doing so doesn’t change that. You can’t be deported for the slogans you’re chanting or the placards you’re holding, but you can be for the crime you’re committing.
Can we also punish newspapers that suppress the names of cops and other government employees for committing crimes for which any of the rest of us would have our names published?
Speaking as a Purdue alum myself, this move by the Exponent kids is a cute stunt. However, if Tom Homan wants to find HamaSS-hugging foreign students on the Purdue campus, he’ll have little, if any, trouble doing so.
Could this be destroying evidence? Interfering with a government function by destroying documents that the person knows an investigation will be after? (That’s the obnoxious provision in Sarbanes-Oxley that the J6 prosecutors infamously misinterpreted. But it seems to me that it might actually apply in this case.)
Does there need to be a request for the information first, or at least a notice to preserve?
My impression is that there doesn’t need to be, so long as you are aware of the investigation and that the document you’re destroying would be likely to be sought by that investigation. It was prompted by the Enron case, where their accountants destroyed a bunch of documents as soon as they heard there was going to be an inquiry.
I refer the editors to the Monty Python skit on “How Not to be Seen.” Standing up and yelling “over here” is not a good opening move.
From the river to the see, the western larch is the only solution.
The internet is forever.