Foreign students and professors have played a leading role in fomenting pro-terror and anti-Semitic demonstrations on U.S. college campuses. Now, many of them could face federal investigation or deportation following an executive order from President Donald Trump that calls on federal agencies to identify foreign "Hamas sympathizers on college campuses."
"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you," a fact sheet accompanying the order states.
Legal experts say foreign students and professors could now see their visas revoked for expressing support for terrorist groups or committing illegal activities as part of anti-Israel campus demonstrations. Betar USA, an anti-Semitism watchdog group, said it has identified a list of pro-Hamas student visa holders who could be subject to deportation and is assisting the Trump administration with its efforts.
"We're having people throughout the country, North America, reaching out to us, professors, administrators, and sharing with us some of their concerns with certain individuals," a representative for Betar USA told the Washington Free Beacon. "Our specific focus in this conversation is the students, and the takeover of universities throughout this country [that are] fomenting this very dangerous narrative." Here are some of the names Betar submitted to the Trump administration:
Momodou Taal
Affiliation: Cornell University
Role: Graduate student
Countries of Origin: Gambia and the United Kingdom
Taal, who disclosed his F-1 visa status in an October interview with Inside Higher Ed, has repeatedly advocated for "armed resistance" and praised the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. While leading an anti-Israel campus demonstration last year, Taal announced that he took his "cue from the armed resistance in Palestine."
"We are in solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine from the river to the sea," he said.
Just hours after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, Taal praised the Hamas attacks on social media.
"The dialect demands: That wherever you have oppression, you will find those who are fighting against it. Glory to the resistance!" he wrote on X.
Taal drew national media attention in October when he was suspended for "escalating, egregious behavior and a disregard for the university policies," including an anti-Israel demonstration that shut down a school career fair. Cornell planned to disenroll him, a move that would have brought about his deportation, but the school reversed course after pressure from anti-Israel groups.
"I don't think they anticipated the level of backlash," Taal said of Cornell. Prior to his suspension, he taught a course titled, "What Is Blackness? Race and Processes of Racialization." After Cornell ruled in his favor, allowing him to retain his F-1 visa, Taal said in a statement, "There will never come a time where I say to myself that I went too hard for Gaza."
Mohsen Mahdawi
Affiliation: Columbia University
Territory of Origin: West Bank
Role: Graduate student
Mahdawi, who has disclosed in media interviews that he "grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp," has served as a leader in anti-Israel campus groups since first moving to the United States more than a decade ago. He is now in his mid-30s.
Most recently, Mahdawi served as co-president of Columbia's Palestinian Students Union, a coalition of anti-Israel student groups, including Columbia's suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters. The union has organized protests calling for Columbia's divestment from Israel alongside Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student organization behind the illegal encampments that plagued the school in the spring and led to the violent storming of a campus building, Hamilton Hall.
In public statements, Mahdawi has called for the destruction of Israel and blamed the Oct. 7 slaughter on the Jewish state.
"Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation," he told a New England newspaper two weeks after the terror attack. Mahdawi, according to the newspaper, also helped pen an Oct. 14 statement issued by anti-Israel groups at Columbia that said the "Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land."
"If every political avenue available to Palestinians is blocked, we should not be surprised when resistance and violence breaks out."
Mahmoud Khalil
Affiliation: Columbia University
Country of Origin: Canada
Role: Graduate student
Khalil, an activist with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, served as a lead negotiator for the group during Columbia's illegal anti-Israel encampment last spring. At the time, he vowed that the group would "remain in this encampment until we achieve all of our demands," which included a boycott of Israel.
"We have been negotiating since last night for more than 11 hours with the university to meet our demands regarding the cutting of economic and academic ties with Israeli universities and the universities involved in slaughtering our Palestinian people," Khalil said in an interview.
Around that time, in April 2024, Khalil confirmed to Al Jazeera that he is "in the United States on an F-1 student visa." He was suspended from Columbia for his role in the encampment, though the school quickly dropped the disciplinary measure, allowing Khalil to stay in the United States.
From there, Khalil plotted with fellow Columbia University Apartheid Divest members to carry out anti-Israel protests when they came back to campus in the fall. On the first day of classes, in September, student radicals blocked the entrance to the school, praised Hamas, vandalized a campus statue, and clashed with police.
"What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they've done in conventional and unconventional ways," Khalil told the Hill one month prior in August. "So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any—any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from Israel."
"And we've been working all this summer on our plans, on what's next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history."
Last year, Khalil reportedly served as an intern at UNRWA, a United Nations program tied to Palestinian terrorism, which the Trump administration recently stopped funding.
Mosab Abu Toha
Affiliation: Syracuse University
Role: Professor
Territory of Origin: Gaza
A month after the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli officials detained and questioned Toha, a poet in Gaza, over ties to Hamas. Although he was released after a day, he claimed he was beaten and tortured.
In response to his unsubstantiated allegations, in November 2023, Syracuse bestowed Toha with a visiting faculty appointment through its "Scholars at Risk" program.
Since then, Toha has called for "boycotting Israeli cultural institutions and anyone coming from that part," suggested the Oct. 7 attacks were Palestinians "retaliating" for Israel’s establishment in 1948, and denounced anyone who mentions Hamas’s mass slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7.
"If one wants to talk about retaliating what happened on October 7, can we at the same time talk about retaliating [for] the massacres of 1948 [and] the ensuing mass exodus of 800,000 people?" he wrote in one X post.
In another post, he wrote: "If anyone mentions to you the words ‘October 7’ or ‘Hostages,’ spit the blood of Gaza kids in their faces."
Toha confirmed his visa status in an August 2024 Instagram post, which included a poem he said he wrote "right after my visa interview at the American embassy in Jordan."
The Betar spokesman homed in on Toha, calling him "the poster child of exactly who the Trump administration must immediately deport from America."
"The Israeli military detained him for activities connected to terrorism shortly after the October 7th massacres, and a few weeks later an American university hired him and brought him to America," he told the Free Beacon. "Since then, he incites against Jews and America calling for revolutions and regular anti-American and Anti-Israel activities."
The schools mentioned above did not respond to requests for comment.