'Witch hunt': Attorneys alarmed as Trump administration now seeks protesters' info

Donald Trump's administration wants the names and nationalities of campus protesters, and civil rights attorneys are concerned about what they'll do with that information.

Federal civil rights attorneys launched investigations last month into university responses to campus antisemitism, but they noticed an unusual order from higher-ranking officials in the Department of Education, reported The Washington Post.

"An early step in civil rights investigations is always a letter to the university demanding certain information," the Post reported. "Typically, the department asks how many discrimination complaints were received, and what school officials did in response."

The Trump administration, however, directed attorneys working on the cases to collect the names and nationalities of students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty, and three attorneys with the Office for Civil Rights told the Post they were concerned the list could be used to target or deport foreign students who participated in protests.

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“My first thought was, ‘This is a witch hunt,’” one attorney said.

The president has made clear his administration would aggressively investigate universities for their handling of antisemitism on campus, saying pro-Palestinian demonstrations infringed on the rights of Jewish students, and the administration canceled $400 million grants and contracts with Columbia University and moved to deport graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in a protest there.

"Administration officials say [the targeted students] advocated for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, and for violence," the Post reported. "The Education Department’s demand for the names and ethnicities of students followed a Feb. 3 notice that the agency’s Office for Civil Rights planned to investigate five universities 'where widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported.' They were Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities."

The letters sent to universities included a standard list of questions and data requests, but they also included a broad request for the names of students potentially involved in harassment of Jewish students and demanded their “national origin/ethnicity/shared ancestry."

“There is no investigative reason for us to be asking for that information," said an attorney familiar with the process.

That attorney said the request for that information could be a violation of civil rights law and was outside the scope of the Office for Civil Rights, which is tasked with investigating whether schools properly handled complaints of discrimination and harassment and was not responsible for disciplining individual students.

“There is no doubt that it can be used improperly,” another attorney said.