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The Verge
17-07-2025
- Politics
- The Verge
Right-wing orgs put pro-Palestinian students on an ICE ‘hit list'
For nearly two years, students at Columbia University have warned that they're being targeted — and put in serious danger — by right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission and Betar US. Canary Mission's goal was initially to 'expose' students it deemed antisemitic, ideally in the hopes that they'd be denied jobs and other opportunities. In the aftermath of October 7th, students who were targeted by Canary Mission and similar groups said they experienced a surge of online harassment that increasingly spilled over into real life. The stakes were raised further upon Donald Trump's reelection. Under Trump's brutal immigration enforcement regime, these doxing databases have turned into tools of the state, making protesters visible and vulnerable to immigration enforcement. A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official has appeared to confirm that the students were right. Peter Hatch, the assistant director of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, testified in court last Wednesday and Thursday that the Trump administration is using lists compiled by private groups to go after activists. In March, he said, his unit was told to urgently review a list of over 5,000 people to evaluate for deportation. The workload required moving analysts who typically work on counterterrorism and cybercrime to a 'tiger team' dedicated solely to pro-Palestine protesters. At least 75 percent of the names had been provided by Canary Mission, Hatch said. (Canary Mission did not immediately reply to The Verge's request for comment.) If it seemed like too much attention was paid to the protests at one specific Ivy League campus last year, the tensions at Columbia turned out to be a bellwether of what would soon happen across the country. The program Hatch described appears to be an unprecedentedly sweeping and high-stakes example of a growing pipeline between private harassment and government action. For years, Republicans have drawn political fodder from online outrage. Congressional Republicans released tech executives' internal communications to support their claim that social media platforms censored conservative voices online. Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, graduated from siccing her X, TikTok, and Instagram followers on LGBTQ students and teachers to advising Oklahoma's Department of Education. Before his public falling out with Trump, Elon Musk directed harassment campaigns against federal employees whose jobs he believed should be cut by the Department of Government Efficiency. ICE's reliance on information gleaned from — and at times manipulated or misrepresented by — far-right Zionist groups is an escalation that Columbia students have been warning about for years. 'There's been absolutely no recourse this entire time,' said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who graduated from Columbia this year and was involved in campus activism before and after Israel's invasion of Gaza. In her time at Columbia, Alwan was subject to harassment from a coterie of individuals and organizations, including Canary Mission, an anonymous X page called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, and former Columbia professor Shai Davidai. 'It really causes this sense of fear, especially among Palestinian students. They tend to go after Palestinian students the most.' Upon Trump's reelection, some of these groups began identifying noncitizen activists who could be targeted for deportation. In his two-day testimony, Hatch said that senior officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency that houses ICE, urged him to expedite the tiger team's research into and reports on student activists. The first step was combing through the names on the list, which included both citizens and noncitizens, to determine who was deportable. HSI ultimately submitted between 100 and 200 reports to the State Department. The anonymously run Canary Mission website has been active for nearly a decade, but its efforts intensified after Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel and the long, brutal invasion of the Gaza strip that followed. Its website claims to document and denounce people who 'promote hatred of the US, Israel, and Jews' and includes thousands of names and allegations of antisemitism. They range from chanting 'from the river to the sea' and writing op-eds to 'providing material support for terror groups,' though Alwan said she and several of her friends have been baselessly accused of the latter. Canary Mission deliberately conflates any pro-Palestinian stances with antisemitism. Overall, the list amounts to a smear campaign against pro-Palestinian activists, including those involved in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns. Canary Mission's database, alongside similar lists from other groups, provides an easy pool of harassment targets. In the fall of 2023, a box truck covered in LED screens started driving around Columbia's campus in Morningside Heights. The truck, which had been paid for by the conservative nonprofit Accuracy in Media, showed the names and photos of dozens of students it deemed 'Columbia's Leading Antisemites,' gathered from a list of students who were current or former members of organizations that signed onto a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians. 'We were very adamant in trying to make the administration aware of our safety concerns, but we realized they weren't going to do anything. They just stonewalled,' Alwan said. Columbia announced it was putting together a 'doxing resource group' that November, but Alwan said it amounted to letting students input their information into a scrubbing site. 'They did not ever take any action against the students or the faculty that were constantly doxxing us,' she added. When Trump returned to office, he threw the power of the state behind these efforts. In March, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia graduate student who had negotiated with the university on students' behalf. Khalil has a green card and no criminal background. To justify his arrest, ICE and the State Department claimed that Khalil's mere presence in the United States is harmful to the US's foreign policy interests. Just one day before ICE showed up at his door, Khalil emailed Columbia's interim president, saying he had been the victim of a 'vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign' led by a Columbia professor. Khalil's arrest was a harbinger of more to come — and the other students and activists ICE arrested were also targeted by Canary Mission and other groups. Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested for writing an op-ed asking the university to 'acknowledge the Palestinian genocide' and divest its endowment from companies with ties to Israel, which the Department of Homeland Security claimed was proof that she had 'engaged in activities in support of Hamas.' Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was arrested outside his home in Virginia. Columbia graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested during a naturalization interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Other students were also targeted. DHS posted a video of Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia doctoral candidate who was in the country on an F-1 student visa, 'self-deporting' after she learned that ICE agents had been looking for her. Öztürk's dossier, unveiled in court proceedings, included her op-ed in the student newspaper and her Canary Mission page. Khalil's dossier included news clips about his involvement in Columbia's protests, as well as his Canary Mission page. The Trump administration has in fact warned of the risks of doxxing — of its own armed, masked, and unidentified ICE agents. The agents who detained Öztürk were masked; the agents who arrested Khalil did not initially identify themselves by name. In other words, the government is relying on dox lists to arrest noncitizens for exercising free speech while also claiming that ICE agents should remain unidentified for their safety. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sued the Trump administration over its arrests of student activists, claiming it's chilled political speech and violated the First Amendment with an'ideological deportation policy.' Whatever the outcome, though, the campaign of fear has already been effective. J., a Columbia graduate student who asked to be referred to by their first initial because they fear retribution against noncitizen family members, told The Verge they were initially hesitant to get involved in campus protests because other students had been doxed. 'I kind of stayed away because of how militarized and surveilled our campus was,' J. said, ultimately changing their mind in the spring of 2025 after ICE arrested Khalil and other noncitizen students. 'I was like, 'Screw it. This is something bigger than me,'' said J., who is a US citizen. J. was one of the students who occupied Columbia's library in May — and was doxxed shortly afterward. Canary Mission posted the students' names and photos. The conservative Washington Free Beacon wrote a story on the nonbinary 'they-tifada' that stormed the library. By that point, J. said, a lot of students who were in the country on visas or green cards had 'started to minimize the space they take up in the advocacy world for fear of repercussions,' including the threat of deportation. 'The federal government is obviously taking an approach that is quite effective in scaring people into submission.' George Wang, a staff attorney at Columbia's Knight First Amendment Institute — which filed the suit against the Trump administration alongside the AAUP and Columbia's Middle East Studies Association — said the recent wave of arrests amounts to a major escalation against student protesters. 'For a long time — and especially the last year and a half — there have been plenty of reasons why people who have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy may have felt chilled, particularly on college campuses,' Wang said. But doxxing trucks and disciplinary action are 'an entirely different category of harm than the potential of being arrested, detained, moved to detention in Louisiana, and possibly deported for engaging in that speech. The threat of deportation weighs so much more heavily on people than any threat of doxxing ever could.' Alwan said the same groups who have called for the deportation of student activists are now engaging in lawfare against US citizens. She is one of four defendants in a lawsuit claiming that campus activists had foreknowledge of the October 7th attack and were 'aiding and abetting Hamas' continuing acts of international activism.' 'This lawsuit is based off of the same doxxing and harassment that was created over a year ago,' Alwan said. 'Canary Mission is basically functioning as a hit list. We don't know who's funding it, there's no accountability, and a lot of what's on there is just completely made up in the first place.'
Al Jazeera
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Canary Mission: How US uses a ‘hate group' to target Palestine advocates
Washington, DC – The United States government has acknowledged its use of Canary Mission — a shadowy pro-Israel website — to identify pro-Palestine students for deportation, sparking anger and concern by rights advocates. Activists have long suspected that the administration of US President Donald Trump is gathering information from the Canary Mission website to target students and professors. But on Wednesday, that suspicion was confirmed when a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official testified in a court case challenging Trump's efforts to deport pro-Palestinian student protesters. Peter Hatch, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said the department had assembled a specialised group — dubbed a 'tiger team' — to work on removing pro-Palestine college students from the country. He indicated to the court that some tips about students were communicated verbally, before explaining that the team had also combed through the nearly 5,000 profiles Canary Mission had compiled of Israel's critics. 'You mean someone said, 'Here is a list that the Canary Mission has put together?'' Judge William Young asked Hatch, according to court transcripts. The official answered with a simple 'yes'. Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), said the government's reliance on an online blacklist that posts personal information to harm and intimidate activists is 'absurd and fascist'. 'Canary Mission is a doxxing website that specifically targets people for language that they deem to be pro-Palestinian and therefore, they've decided, is anti-Semitic. Its sole purpose is to target and harass people,' Gowayed told Al Jazeera. 'How do you use a hate group … to identify people for whether or not they have the right to be present in the country?' The crackdown As demonstrations opposing the Israeli atrocities in Gaza swept college campuses last year, Israel's advocates portrayed the protest movement as anti-Semitic and a threat to the safety of Jewish students. While activists pushed back against the accusations, saying that the protests were aimed at combatting human rights abuses against Palestinians, conservative leaders called to crush the demonstrations and penalise the participants. Shortly after returning to the White House in January, Trump himself signed a series of executive orders that laid the groundwork for targeting non-citizens who took part in the student protests for deportation. 'It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously,' one of the orders read. It called on government officials to create systems to 'monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff'. In March, Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil — a permanent resident married to a US citizen — became the first prominent victim of Trump's campaign. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a seldom-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act to order Khalil's removal, on the basis that the Columbia student's presence has 'adverse' effects on American foreign policy. After Khalil, many other students were detained by immigration authorities. Some left the country voluntarily to avoid imprisonment. Others, like Khalil, continue to fight their deportation. Free speech advocates decried the campaign as a blatant violation of constitutionally protected freedoms. But the Trump administration asserted that the issue is an immigration matter that falls under its mandate. Before last year's presidential elections, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank, released a policy document titled Project Esther designed to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement in the US. Project Esther called for identifying students and professors critical of Israel who are in violation of their visas, and it cited Canary Mission extensively. A 'witch hunt' against students For years, Palestinian rights advocates have condemned Canary Mission for publishing identifying information about activists — their names, photos and employment histories — while keeping its own staff anonymous. In its ongoing deportation campaign against student activists, the Trump administration has said that it is targeting students who engaged in violent conduct, promoted anti-Semitism and had ties to 'terrorist' groups. But none of the prominent students detained by ICE have been charged with a crime, and some only engaged in mild criticism of Israel. For example, the only accusation against Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish scholar at Tufts University, is that she co-authored an op-ed asking her school to honour a student resolution calling for divestment from Israeli companies. That column, published in the university's student newspaper, landed Ozturk on the Canary Mission's blacklist, which appears to have led to the Trump administration's push to deport her. Andrew Ross, a New York University professor of social and cultural analysis, said the US administration's use of Canary Mission's data shows that the government's push is 'sloppy' and biased. He added that while Canary Mission appears well funded, its content is curated to paint its targets in a certain light. 'They're looking for material and content that they can manipulate and spin and present as if the person being profiled is anti-Semitic basically,' said Ross, who has his own Canary Mission profile for criticising Israel. The professor accused the Trump administration of 'fundamental dishonesty', describing the deportation campaign as a 'witch hunt'. How does Canary Mission work? While Canary Mission does not appear to fabricate data, it portrays criticism of Israel as bigoted and dangerous. Some profiles denounce individuals for actions as innocuous as sharing materials from Amnesty International condemning Israeli abuses. The profiles seem to be optimised for internet searches. So, even if the accusations lack merit, targeted individuals often report that their Canary Mission profiles sit at the top of online searches for their names. Advocates say the tactic can have a detrimental impact on careers, mental health and safety. 'It has caused people to lose jobs. It has caused people all kinds of adverse effects,' Gowayed said. For his part, Ross said he has received hate mail because of Canary Mission. He worries the website can be especially harmful for marginalised groups. 'Those, as we are seeing, who don't have full citizenship status are particularly vulnerable at this point in time. But it could be anyone,' he said. The website was founded in 2015, and it has been expanding since. Nevertheless, barring a few media leaks over the years, the operators and funders of Canary Mission remain anonymous. In 2018, Haaretz reported that Israeli authorities have relied on the website to detain people and bar them from entering the country. That same year, the outlet The Forward found that Canary Mission is linked to an Israel-based non-profit called Megamot Shalom. Since then, media reports have revealed the names of a few wealthy American donors who have made contributions to the website through a network of Jewish charities. 'Silencing dissent' On Thursday, Palestine Legal, an advocacy group, accused the Trump administration of racism for relying on the website. 'Under Trump, ICE has now publicly admitted they are abducting pro-Palestinian student activists based on an anonymously-run blacklist site,' Palestine Legal said in a social media post. 'Both the mass deportation machine, and these horrific blacklists, clearly run on racism.' J Street, a group that describes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace, also decried the government's use of the website. 'Canary Mission is feeding the Trump Administration's agenda, weaponizing antisemitism to surveil and attempt to deport student activists,' it said. 'This isn't about protecting Jews — it's about silencing dissent.' The State Department did not respond to Al Jazeera's query on the government's use of Canary Mission. Instead, a department spokesperson referred to a statement by Secretary of State Rubio from May. 'The bottom line is, if you're coming here to stir up trouble on our campuses, we will deny you a visa. And if you have a visa, and we find you, we will revoke it,' it said. DHS did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. But the Trump administration may also be using more extreme sources than Canary Mission to deport students. At Wednesday's court hearing, Hatch was asked about other sources the government is using. He replied that there was one other website he could not recall. The court asked Hatch if it might be Betar, a far-right, Islamophobic group with links to the violent Kahanist movement in Israel. According to transcripts, Hatch replied, 'That sounds right.' Gowayed, the City University of New York professor, called the government's approach an 'egregious overstep and distortion of any kind of notion of justice or legality'. But she added: 'What is more troubling to me is they don't know which hate group they used.'
Associated Press
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
A recap of the trial over the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protesters
BOSTON (AP) — Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's campaign of arresting and deporting college faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations spent the first few days of the trial showing how the crackdown silenced scholars and targeted more than 5,000 protesters. The lawsuit, filed by several university associations, is one of the first against President Donald Trump and members of his administration to go to trial. Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge William Young to rule that the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations. The government argues that no such policy exists and that it is enforcing immigration laws legally to protect national security. Investigating protesters One of the key witnesses was Peter Hatch, who works for the Homeland Security Investigations unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over two days of testimony, Hatch told the court how a 'Tiger Team' was formed in March to investigate people who took part in the protests. Its formation followed two executive orders issued by Trump that addressed terrorism and combating antisemitism. Hatch detailed how the team received as many as 5,000 names of protesters and wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law. The reports, several of which were shown in court Thursday, included biographical information, criminal history, travel history, affiliations with pro-Palestinian groups as well as press clips and social media posts on their activism or allegations of their affiliation with Hamas or other anti-Israel groups. Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation. 'It was anything that may relate to national security or public safety issues, things like: Were any of the protesters violent or inciting violence? I think that's a clear, obvious one,' Hatch testified. 'Were any of them supporting terrorist organizations? Were any of them involved in obstruction or unlawful activity in the protests?' Among the report subjects were Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was released last month after 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump's clampdown on the protests. Another was Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was released in May from a Louisiana facility. She spent six weeks in detention after she was arrested while walking on the street of a Boston suburb. She says she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school's response to the war in Gaza. Hatch also acknowledged that most of the names came from Canary Mission, a group that says it documents people who 'promote hatred of the U.S.A., Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.' Hatch said the right-wing Jewish group Betar was another source. 'It's true many of the names, even most of the names, came from that website, but we were getting names and leads from many different sources,' he testified Wednesday. On Thursday he said he does not know who runs the website nor does he know anyone with the group. Hatch conceded that his team was not instructed to focus solely on leads from Canary Mission. Hatch said most of the leads were dropped when investigators could not find ties to protests and the investigations were not inspired by a new policy but rather a procedure in place at least since he took up the job in 2019. What is Canary Mission? Weeks before Khalil's arrest, a spokesman for Betar told The Associated Press that the activist topped a list of foreign students and faculty from nine universities that it submitted to officials, including then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who made the decision to revoke Khalil's visa. The Department of Homeland Security said at the time that it was not 'working with' Betar and refused to answer questions about how it was treating reports from outside groups. In March, speculation grew that administration officials were using Canary Mission to identify and target student protesters. That's when immigration agents arrested Ozturk. Canary Mission has denied working with administration officials, while noting the speculation that its reports led to that arrest and others. While Canary Mission prides itself on outing anyone it labels as antisemitic, its leaders refuse to identify themselves, and its operations are secretive. News reports and tax filings have linked the site to a nonprofit based in the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh. But journalists who have visited the group's address, listed in documents filed with Israeli authorities, have found a locked and seemingly empty building. In recent years news organizations have reported that several wealthy Jewish Americans have made cash contributions to support Canary Mission, disclosed in tax paperwork filed by their personal foundations. But most of the group's funding remains opaque, funneled through a New York-based fund that acts as a conduit for Israeli causes. Scholars scared by the crackdown The trial opened with Megan Hyska, a green card holder from Canada who is a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. She detailed how efforts to deport Khalil and Ozturk prompted her to scale back her activism, which had included supporting student encampments and protesting in support of Palestinians. 'It became apparent to me, after I became aware of a couple of high-profile detentions of political activists, that my engaging in public political dissent would potentially endanger my immigration status,' Hyska said. The second witness, Nadje Al-Ali, a green card holder from Germany and professor at Brown University, said that after the arrests of Khalil and Ozturk, she canceled a planned research trip and a fellowship to Iraq and Lebanon, fearing that 'stamps from those two countries would raise red flags' upon her return. She also declined to take part in anti-Trump protests and dropped plans to write an article that was to be a feminist critique of Hamas. 'I felt it was too risky,' Al-Ali said. ___ Associated Press writer Adam Geller in New York contributed.
Egypt Independent
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Egypt Independent
Pro-Israel website was used to find names of student protesters to investigate, senior ICE official says
CNN — 'Most' of the names of student protesters Immigration and Customs Enforcement was asked to investigate earlier this year were plucked from a pro-Israel website that aims to blacklist pro-Palestinian students and academics, an agency official told a federal court Wednesday. The testimony from Peter Hatch, a senior official in ICE's Homeland Security Investigations, came during the third day in a trial in Boston over the Trump administration's so-called ideological deportation policy, which a group of university professors say has chilled their protected political speech. Hatch said during questioning from a lawyer for the professors that in early March he was given a list of names of students for his agency to investigate and that 'most' of those names came from the website Canary Mission, but also from other places. The list was produced by a Department of Homeland Security team created in March to gather reports on people involved in student protests to submit to the State Department. 'Because of the workload,' Hatch said, analysts were moved from working on counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrimes to join the group, known as the 'Tiger Team,' focused on writing reports about people involved in student protests. His comments are the first time an administration official has said in open court that the government relied on the website this year as it has targeted student protesters, including by moving to deport some alleged outspoken supporters of Palestinians. The anonymously run Canary Mission website says it 'documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American campuses and beyond.' It also says it will profile people who support efforts to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel or companies associating with Israel – which were among the demands of some campus pro-Palestinian protests last school year. CNN reported earlier this year that a separate but similar website said it shared with the government a list of noncitizen protesters and activists it believes should be deported, but the Department of Homeland Security denied at the time that it was working with either group. Hatch said in a deposition last month that among the entities providing names to his agency is the office of border czar Tom Homan but that he wasn't sure which of those entities specifically pulled their names from Canary Mission. During the deposition, he testified that 'more than 75%' of the names of student protesters his agency was asked to probe came from the website. The list from the Canary Mission website, Hatch said Wednesday, contained over 5,000 people that analysts from his Office of Intelligence and Analysis had to review. 'The Canary Mission wasn't the only group of students. It was most of it, yes,' Hatch said, noting that some were duplicated in multiple sources. 'But Canary Mission was the most inclusive.' Analysts would take the names from the Canary Mission and other sources and proceed to gather facts around the individual, including any information they deemed pertinent – like statements over Israel, support of terrorist leaders and so on, he said. If there was enough information about the person to warrant a report, the analysts would then write one up for the State Department. The third-party website, Hatch said, wasn't used as an authoritative source and his analysts didn't take information on the website at face value but instead conducted their own investigations on people on its list. The trial unfolding in a federal courthouse in Boston is intended to help a judge determine whether an actual ideological deportation policy exists. If one does, the judge must decide whether such a policy is unlawful.
NDTV
10-07-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
How Trump Administration Used Shadowy Website To Target Activists For Deportation
The Trump administration had taken the assistance of an anonymously-run pro-Israel website for identifying pro-Palestine academics, in order to deport them, according to newly unsealed court documents. The website has been accused of doxxing. The court records show that the Department of Homeland Security had assembled a "tiger team" of intelligence analysts that made a report of 100 foreign students and scholars that participated in pro-Palestine protests. Canary Mission, is a shadowy website whose goal is to expose anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment on college campuses. It also posts photos and social media profiles of pro-Palestinian academics and logs their protest activities. The website identified 75 of those people, per a deposition testimony. However, the website responded that it "had no contact with this administration or the previous administration", Politico reported. "We document individuals and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews. We investigate hatred across the political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists," the group said. Immigration lawyers and pro-Palestine activists feared that the Trump administration had not been doing independent research and just picking names from the Canary Mission. Peter Hatch, Homeland Security official testified that although the site was significant to dig out names, the information was independently verified. "Canary Mission is not a part of the U.S. government," he said. "It is not information that we would take as an authoritative source. We don't work with the individuals who create the website. I don't know who creates the website", he said. He also added that, "Many of the names or even most of the names came from that website, but we were getting names and leads from many different websites." Apart from Canary Mission, there was another group called Betar US, through which other leads came. The group also used the slogan "Jews fight back" and profiles pro-Palestinian activists on its website. The website on X had posted that they had provided a "deport list" to Trump officials, mere days after Trump returned to the White House in January. Mohammad khalil says Zionists don't deserve to live while he's on a visa @Columbia . It's 10 pm and @ICEgov is aware of his home address and whereabouts. We have provided all his information to multiple contacts. He's on our deport list! — Betar Worldwide (@Betar_USA) January 30, 2025 Trump aide Stephen Miller was deeply involved in the effort to revoke visas of pro-Palestinian academics, the court records reveal. Lawyers of Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate of Columbia University who was arrested and detained in an immigration facility for more than three months had filed Freedom of Information Act requests, that raised an enquiry about Canary Mission's role in detaining him. The seeked information to "document and expose the reported collaboration between federal officials and private, anti-Palestinian organisations who have identified, doxxed, and reported him and others for purposes of securing the deportation of student activists advocating on behalf of Palestinian human rights." According to the New York Times, Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Barnard College and Columbia, who said her own profile had been listed on the Canary Mission website, but since she was a US citizen, she was comfortable speaking in defence of the demonstrations. She also noted that during the Trump administration's crackdown in March, many students began to retreat from public life after their personal information and photos were listed on the website.
