The playbook Trump is following to deport protesters

The Trump administration has been arresting and detaining protesters who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. They have justified the action by calling those protesters — without evidence — “Hamas supporters.” In so doing, the administration appears to be following Project Esther, a plan from the Heritage Foundation with the stated purpose of cracking down on antisemitism. Published in October, it is seen as an addendum to Heritage’s better-known Project 2025. Project Esther — which appears to have been written by evangelical Christians with almost no Jewish input — asserts that the country is facing a collection of “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups” that it calls the “Hamas Support Network.” It names organizations like the left-leaning nonprofit Tides Foundation and Jewish Voice for Peace among the perpetrators. Project Esther calls for the administration to rebrand pro-Palestinian supporters as Hamas supporters. It suggests public firings of pro-Palestinian professors and the deportation of student visa and green-card holders who have spoken critically of Israel, and advocates using anti-racketeering laws to break up pro-Palestinian groups. To be very clear, there has been a rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the outset of the war in Gaza. But Project Esther suggests that any protest — any critique of Israel — is likely antisemitic and should be dealt with accordingly. While some Jewish groups have come out in support of Project Esther’s proposals, others have rejected it as a Christian nationalist project. Dove Kent is among those who reject Project Esther. Kent is the US senior director of the Diaspora Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to combat antisemitism and its distortion. Kent joined Noel King on Today, Explained to discuss her response to the plan — and why she thinks it will ultimately stoke antisemitism, not mitigate it. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. One thing that we’ve learned over the last 18 months or so is that there are different definitions of antisemitism. How do you and the Diaspora Alliance define it? Sure. What I’ll say is that there’s actually not a lot of difference in how most Jews or scholars define the basics of antisemitism. [From Diaspora Alliance: “The term antisemitism describes hostility, discrimination, prejudice, and violence toward Jews as Jews.”] What people disagree on is how and when that is applied to Israel. And so a lot of the fights over the definitions are actually proxy fights for people’s politics about Israel and Palestine. Okay, you nailed it there, the really important thing: There’s a spectrum of beliefs even within the Jewish community about how questioning Israel relates to antisemitism. Where do you personally fall on this spectrum? I think that whether speech or conduct about Zionism in Israel is antisemitic should be based on the standards for speech or conduct that apply to antisemitic behavior in general. But as a general rule, criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, nonviolent political action directed at the state of Israel or its policies are not inherently antisemitic. All right, let’s get into the topic at hand, which is Project Esther. Do you remember when you first heard about Project Esther? Yes. It was published on the one-year anniversary of October 7. So it was published on October 7, 2024, and right away, my colleagues and I were very alarmed by this plan. When Project Esther was rolled out, most Jewish institutions that you might imagine might be aligned with this had nothing to say because they’d never heard of it. There are basically no Jews involved in this plan to supposedly dismantle antisemitism: The Heritage Foundation is the core author and other allied organizations [contributed], many of them Christian nationalist organizations. Throughout the plan, they misuse Jewish text, they refer to Jewish groups with the wrong terms, they call Jewish positions on antisemitism “inexplicable.” In an interview with a member of the Heritage Foundation, they said something along the lines of, “If Jews were doing their job countering antisemitism, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now.” So the plan really derides Jews throughout it. Project Esther is named after a figure, Queen Esther. What’s Queen Esther’s story? The Book of Esther is a text the Jews read once a year on the holiday of Purim. In the story, Queen Esther makes an intervention with the king. [As a result], a mortal decree that the king’s adviser had made against the Jewish people is instead turned against the adviser. So the victims become the heroes. But within the story is also the idea that those lines are not so binary and that what is good and what is evil may change. The story of Esther has been repurposed by far-right Christian political movements. There’s a phrase from the text that Esther was “put into a position of power for such a time as this.” And that phrase has been used by extremist groups like Moms for Liberty, protesters at the US Capitol on January 6, the Esther Call to the Mall that brought hundreds of evangelical women to DC to protest reproductive rights. Queen Esther is invoked for this idea of spiritual warfare that must be waged against evil in the world, this battle against demonic forces that Christian nationalists believe they are in. So it makes sense that the Heritage Foundation would invoke this Christian nationalist frame for a kind of warfare against liberal civil society. Your reaction on reading [Project Esther] is what, exactly? Do you think what they’re suggesting will work, would work? No. We cannot terrorize or incarcerate or deport or fire or infiltrate our way out of antisemitism. That’s just not how it works. And we certainly can’t dismantle constitutional protections as a way to combat antisemitism when we know that Jewish safety in the U.S. depends on constitutional democracy and minority protections. So deporting international students doesn’t combat antisemitism. Public firings don’t combat antisemitism. Withholding funds from research institutions doesn’t combat antisemitism, arresting activists doesn’t combat antisemitism. And there is no city or country in the world where these kinds of actions have been applied that have seen any increase in Jewish safety or decrease in antisemitic ideas or behaviors. We’ve seen the Trump administration come out and, for example, insist that Mahmoud Khalil is a supporter of Hamas. When asked for evidence, the administration hasn’t been able to provide anything. Now, Project Esther names a “Hamas Support Network” as the root of a lot of antisemitism. This is not a real organization. So what is the goal of saying Mahmoud Khalil and people like him are part of the “Hamas Support Network”? This phrase, “Hamas Support Network”, was made up by the Heritage Foundation and its allies as a smear for any organization that supports Palestinian rights and humanity. This is part of an effort to completely conflate support for Palestinian rights and humanity with support for Hamas. Project Esther’s scope extends well beyond these groups to target a wide spectrum of liberal donors, foundations, and organizations that also do not in any way support Hamas. The plan even names anti-capitalist groups, claiming that they align with America’s overseas enemies. All of this just sets the stage for guilt by association and exposes the true intent of Project Esther, which is dismantling civil society institutions such as universities and nonprofit organizations as a way to get rid of any domestic opposition to the administration, all under the guise of protecting Jews. There’s another important note here. What they’re doing with the term “Hamas Support Network” is trying to create in the minds of Americans a whole class of people who are associated with terrorism and violence and therefore do not deserve the protections of US law, including immigration law. So when the administration starts to detain and deport people through illegal means as they are currently doing, they are banking that Americans won’t protest. It’s directly connected to what they’re doing in sending immigrants to prison in El Salvador under the false premise that they’re all connected to a violent gang. One other thing I’ll say is that Project Esther has literally nothing to say about the firehose of antisemitism and conspiracy theories coming out of the far right in this country, which are the leading drivers of antisemitic violence in the US according to any and every serious study. So the sole target of this is pro-Palestinian groups and beyond who they accuse of being not just antisemitics but also anti-American. What does all of this mean for Jews in the United States? Well, the Trump administration’s initial attacks that we are seeing as the very clear rollout of Project Esther don’t just not work against antisemitism. They actively stoke antisemitism by making Jews the face of authoritarian crackdowns. People are losing their jobs. They’re losing funding for critical scientific research. They’re losing their freedoms, supposedly in our name. This feeds into antisemitic conspiracy theories about shadowy, outsized Jewish power and makes Jews the one to blame for the longtime Christian nationalist goal of dismantling higher education. So the immediate and long-term impact of Project Esther, ironically, is an increase in antisemitism across the country, on top of the incredible harm being done to international students, educators, researchers, and all of us who benefit from free speech and academic inquiry. This is an effective strategy by the right because they’re executing the policies they want to anyway, but they’re doing so in the name of fighting antisemitism. The erosion of those rights makes all communities less safe, including Jews, and any work to carve out exceptions, whoever they target or claim to protect, undermines the universal protection that actually makes us all safe. I’ll also say that it is abundantly clear that the Trump administration is not truly working on behalf of Jewish safety. Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, is working to dismantle the federal government while repopularizing the Nazi salute, running a platform rife with antisemitic conspiracies, and encouraging German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of power. The administration is filled with appointees who have long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories. They’ve defunded the Office of Civil Rights for universities, which is the very body that is tasked with reviewing and enforcing rules against antisemitism and other forms of discrimination on campus. It’s also clear that no one in this administration cares about bigotry or discrimination of any kind, unless it’s an invented and inverted anti-white or anti-Christian discrimination. And American Jews can see that this administration is not truly fighting for our safety.

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The playbook Trump is following to deport protesters