At issue is the Trump administration’s much-criticized deportations policy, specifically efforts by Marco Rubio and the State Department to revoke visas of students and other foreigners deemed threats. Trump officials in February announced an intention to “root out” those guilty of “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” and Rubio followed up in March with an announcement that he’d personally revoked over 300 visas. “We do it every day,” Rubio said. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Using a seemingly Charlie Murphy-inspired metaphor many Trump supporters found convincing, Rubio added:
We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to be a social activist that comes in and tears up our university campuses…
If you invite me into your home because I say, “Oh, I want to go to your house for dinner,” and I come into your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray-painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re going to kick me out.
The signature cases involved activist Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose presence Rubio said would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, who aroused displeasure via an editorial she wrote for the Tufts Daily demanding that the school “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” Both cases aroused massive media furor, with video of agents grabbing Öztürk off the streets going viral, triggering instant comparisons to a smorgasbord of secret police regimes. Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton told the Boston Globe, “It’s like the Gestapo. That’s what the Gestapo was established to do.” Joe Rogan, bashed as a Nazi-booster by MSNBC in March, came back into the station’s good graces when he ripped the deportations as “fucking crazy.” Amid the frenzy, few commentators noted the controversial policy’s unusual legal genesis.