Masked Hamas Agitators at Universities Should Be Criminally Prosecuted

The Trump administration is finally doing what President Joe Biden refused: revoking visas and deporting violent Hamas-supporting foreign “students” once and for all. These agitators should count their blessings. They could have been and should have been criminally prosecuted by the Biden administration.

These foreign actors staged violent protests at American colleges, cheering the vicious massacre, rapes, assaults, and kidnappings on Oct. 7, 2023. Masquerading as students, these antisemitic, hate-filled agitators assaulted, intimidated, and threatened other students. They blocked access to classes and damaged property and buildings.

Yet the Justice Department never criminally prosecuted them, even though their conspiratorial actions were designed to support Hamas, which the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism has designated a terrorist organization since 1997.

Engaging in such physical altercations and clashes is not free speech or protected by the First Amendment.

A federal statute is designed to stop such virulent, malicious misbehavior. To no one’s surprise, the anti-Israel Biden Justice Department refused to use it.

The statute dates to May 1870, when Congress approved the Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to give federal prosecutors the authority to go after the Klan and its masked members, who were assaulting, intimidating, and killing black Americans.

Today, this act is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 241, and it’s particularly applicable to these Hamas supporters because of their routine practice of hiding behind masks.

Section 241 is enforced, or it’s supposed to be, by the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where I served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

The law makes it a felony for “two or more persons” to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Under federal civil rights law, college students have the right to peaceful, unimpeded access to the educational process, meaning anyone who deprives them of that right is violating Section 241.

This statute prohibits going “in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured.”

All the masked terrorism supporters infesting Columbia and our college campuses were “in disguise” and, therefore, could be prosecuted, at least to the extent any of them had the “intent to prevent or hinder” other students from receiving their rightful education.

Punishment under Section 241 is severe: heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison. Video footage at schools could have provided extensive evidence for prosecutors to review.

Did the Biden administration file a single criminal prosecution under Section 241 against any of these criminals? Not to my knowledge.

Instead, the Biden administration used Section 241 to justify special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump.

No, really. Biden used a law designed to halt the KKK to criminally prosecute Trump for contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. Using that same law to criminally prosecute masked Hamas supporters threatening, intimidating, and assaulting other students on college campuses in direct parallel to the tactics used by the KKK during the 1960s? Not interested.

That contrast is another example of the Biden Justice Department’s politicization and the direct threat it posed to the American public.

The Trump administration is now acting where Biden failed by moving to identify these people, probably by obtaining information from local law enforcement and campus security officers. The administration has already revoked one former student’s visa, suggesting some success in tracking culpable people.

The Trump administration is right to act. All foreign students involved in such behavior should have their visas revoked. They should also be criminally prosecuted for threatening, dangerous behavior.

After all that, we should consider dropping a note instructing the Department of Homeland Security to bar them from ever entering the United States again.

Originally published by The Washington Times

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