Trump threatens to cut federal taxpayer dollars to universities that permit ‘illegal protests’
‘All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,’ President Trump wrote on Truth Social.
‘Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,’ he added.
President Donald Trump has warned universities and other schools that they will no longer receive federal dollars if they do nothing to stop “illegal protests.”
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” the president wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on [sic] the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
President Trump issued an executive order in his first days in office that could lead to the deportation of foreign students who express or give support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas.
The executive order came after Trump promised in 2024 during his campaign that “[w]e will deport the foreign jihad sympathizers, and we will deport them very quickly.”
Trump has also previously called disruptive protesters of the 2024 campus takeovers “raging lunatics” and stated: “To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately . . .Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in January that he favors revoking visas of foreigners who express or give support to Hamas.
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College and university campuses experienced widespread chaos and destruction in 2024 after an outbreak of vehement anti-Israel protests inspired by a campus takeover at Columbia University in New York.
The protests and general unrest were frequently marked by harassment of university leaders, physical assaults against Jewish students, and vandalism.
Many schools, such as Stanford University in California, responded by adopting more restrictive protest regulations to make sure that such campus takeovers and disruptions of academic life would not resume in 2025.
