President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said during an interview just weeks after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that "ignorant" pro-Hamas college students in the United States "need to be taken out of our country."
"The thing that's really the most troubling to me [is] these students in universities in our country—whether they're here as Americans or if they're here on student visas—and they're out there saying, 'I support Hamas,'" Bondi said on Newsmax on Oct. 23, 2023. "Frankly, they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away."
After Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and kidnappings, protests quickly broke out on college campuses across the United States, with anti-Israel students blaming Israel for the attack and expressing solidarity with the terrorist group. Harvard University students, for example, released an October 8 statement that said the Jewish state is "entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" and the "apartheid regime is the only one to blame."
"There's a lot of things that can be done to stop … the anti-Semitism that's rampant throughout this country," Bondi, Florida's former attorney general, said at the time. "It's truly, truly heartbreaking to see what's happening to all of our Jewish friends in this country by really just, I think, a lot of ignorant kids and students and people who don't understand that Hamas equals terrorism."
Trump tapped Bondi just hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) withdrew his nomination for attorney general Thursday amid questions surrounding a House investigation into alleged sex-and-drug-fueled parties he attended and an alleged sexual encounter with an underaged girl. The Department of Justice last year closed a sex trafficking investigation into Gaetz without charges.
Bondi was elected as Florida's first female attorney general in 2010 and was reelected in 2014. She has long been a staunch supporter of Israel. In 2018, for example, she supported Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
"Israel is one of our—if not our—greatest ally in the world, and I'm so proud of what happened today," Bondi said at the time. "I've been to Israel twice as attorney general. And Jerusalem is the capital of Israel."