Pro-Palestine Student Protests in Washington, on October 14, 2023.   (Photo> AP)

Washington, February 1 (RHC)-- U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order, rife with Islamophobic phrases, which conflates being pro-Palestinian with terrorism, targeting the visa eligibility of foreign students and faculty who have participated in pro-Gaza protests.

The executive order does not directly cancel visas, but it pushes schools to monitor and report any protest activity by foreign students and staff in order to possibly investigate and deport them.

At this previously planned demonstration against NATO and for Palestine, many were only just learning about the latest controversial, seemingly unconstitutional, and clearly human rights denying, executive order from Trump.

One protester responded: "The first step for any academic institution is to protect freedom of speech and to report on students, to inform and collaborate with federal agencies is a way to destroy that entirely, and that's what they want.

"They want to repress pro-Palestinian viewpoints.  They want to repress and remove Muslim and Arab communities from this campus, so for faculty to do that would destroy the integrity of this as an academic institution, as well as just be morally awful. I really hope that that's not the case, but we have seen the way that faculty have attacked students in the past.

We've seen at Columbia how faculty have [sic] participated in doxing students."

The US government has resorted to brutal measures not only to suppress the growing student movement but also to demonize it labeling protesters as “criminals” and “terrorists.”

The anti-genocide protest movement after October 7, 2023, has grown into the nation's second-largest protest movement in 50 years.  It has been attended by countless anti-Zionist Jews and protesters are still regularly marching for Palestinian safety and freedom.

Deportation is a long, clearly defined, bureaucratic process and the impact of Trump's latest executive order appears to come down to how many university faculty and civil servants will become collaborators.

This executive order is the latest shockingly pro-Israeli move by Washington which effectively tries to make visas contingent on pleasing the Trump administration's political views and would deny legal immigrants the national rights to free speech and free assembly, and it ignores previous court decisions that have upheld these rights.

[ SOURCE:  PRESS TV and NEWS AGENCIES ]