“We provided hundreds of names to the Trump administration of visa holders and naturalized Middle Easterners and foreigners who have no free speech in their countries [then] come to the West to rage against America and support US-designated terrorist organisations,” Betar spokesman Daniel Levy told The National via email. Betar, a Zionist activist group, calls the pro-Palestinian protesters “jihadis”. Once on their blacklist, it is almost impossible to get off. Mr Levy also stated that his group has reason to believe that Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York City, and the award-winning Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha will shortly be detained and deported.
Mr Abu Toha, who is in the US on a visa from Syracuse University, said on Friday that he has cancelled all his US speaking events because he “felt unsafe travelling, especially after watching students and university professors abducted on the street just in front of other people”. Tufts graduate Rumeysa Ozturk was also on Betar’s list. She was arrested last week, a year after she co-authored a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper and was flagged for anti-Israel activism.