“I Am Not Afraid”

As a longtime environmental activist, Phillips was no stranger to protest. This spring, when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began detaining international students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, who had participated in advocacy campaigns to end the war in Gaza, Phillips placed handwritten signs in the window of his fourth-floor office, demanding their release. In March, he staged a campus demonstration in response to President Donald Trump’s threats to cut funding from colleges and universities that allow ​“illegal protests”—vague language that could apply to almost any action. But Phillips’ activism dates back farther. In the mid-2010s, he joined a student-led campaign to divest from fossil fuels. In 2020, he went on a two-week hunger strike to protest the construction of a natural gas compressor station outside of Boston that raised public health and safety concerns.

But in all his years of protest, Phillips was unprepared for the response to his recent actions. 

On March 6, FBI agents showed up at his home in Newton, Mass., in what appeared to be part of a broader dragnet targeting local environmental activists. (The FBI declined to comment on why it questioned Phillips, but agents also contacted at least six other people loosely affiliated with the direct-action climate change group Extinction Rebellion.) Phillips was doxed by MAGA trolls who falsely claimed he had ​“threatened” Musk and has ties to ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising behemoth that has become a target of the Trump administration. At work, campus police challenged Phillips’ right to protest on university grounds; other university staff entered his office after hours on at least seven occasions to remove signs from his window reading ​“Free Mahmoud” and ​“Free Rümeysa.”

The FBI knocked on Phillips’ door just as the Tesla protests were ramping up, presaging a much broader crackdown to come. In mid-March, the Trump administration seized on several incidents of anti-Tesla vandalism and property destruction around the country — from graffiti on Tesla charging docks to the attempted arson of Texas showrooms — to vilify the larger campaign and equate damage to Tesla products or property with domestic terrorism, a designation that can lead to stiff penalties and allows the federal government to open wide-ranging investigations into activist groups. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed that the Department of Justice would aggressively pursue those involved in the ​“swarm of violent attacks” against Tesla, along with their supposed funders. Trump, during a surreal White House publicity event designed to boost Tesla sales, said that anyone taking part in such property destruction would ​“go through hell.” And the FBI established a task force to investigate and ​“crack down on violent Tesla attacks.” 

Moves like these come as the Trump administration has already begun using state power to undermine civic institutions, from law firms to public media, and criminalize certain forms of speech. Trump has wielded funding cuts to compel universities to bend to his will and threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of certain nonprofits, like the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, if they don’t soften their criticism of the administration. Meanwhile, international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism have been detained and threatened with deportation for engaging in First Amendment-protected activity.

“The administration is showing flagrant disregard for basic First Amendment principles and abusing the power of the government to go after perceived ideological enemies,” says Brian Hauss, a senior ACLU staff attorney and a member of Khalil’s and Öztürk’s defense. 

Jeff Feuer, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has represented climate activists and protesters for 35 years — including some of the Boston-area activists recently questioned by the FBI — says he’s never seen the agency engage in this kind of behavior with his clients: targeting individuals who either have no criminal record or who are not accused of committing a crime on federal property. 

“I think this is part of a campaign to suppress dissent,” Feuer says. ​“The FBI — just like the Justice Department, just like ICE and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] — is being used as a weapon by the Trump administration to solidify his power and to advance the agenda of the administration.”

These government pressure tactics work hand in hand with far-right internet campaigns intended not only to inundate activists and their supporters with targeted harassment and death threats, but to frame organizers and their movements as directly responsible for isolated crimes committed during large protests, as a way to deprive them of funding and institutional support. And, ultimately, to silence them. 

“It comes at us from all angles,” says Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the A.J. Muste Foundation for Peace and Justice, which serves as both a fiscal sponsor and funder for various activist groups. Ticking off the ways organizers are being targeted — from attacks on their speech and reputations to starving them of funding or threatening their tax status — Boghosian says the impact on social movements may be wide-ranging. 

“My nonprofit is feeling vulnerable,” she adds, ​“as I’m sure hundreds and thousands of other groups are.”

International students have been arrested for expressing political beliefs the Trump administration claims undermine U.S. foreign policy. Some have been deprived of due process and shipped off to detention centers in Louisiana. In another case, Indian doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan, at Columbia University, was chased out of the country after having her visa revoked for the apparent transgressions of liking and sharing posts about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and signing an open academic letter calling for ​“Palestinian liberation” — actions that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem cast as advocating ​“violence and terrorism.” 

The targeting of international students is happening against the backdrop of frightening developments in Trump’s broader mass deportation campaign. The administration has renditioned more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison known, according to Human Rights Watch, for its use of ​“torture, ill treatment, incommunicado detention … and inhumane conditions.” It has also openly defied multiple court orders — including a unanimous Supreme Court ruling — demanding the return of one of those immigrants, Kilmar Ábrego García, whom government officials admit was mistakenly deported. Meanwhile, Trump has publicly speculated about the legality of sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons and has repeatedly said, most recently in an interview with NBC News, that he doesn’t know whether he needs to uphold the Constitution. And Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, has said the administration is considering the extreme measure of suspending the writ of habeas corpus — essentially stripping citizens and noncitizens of basic constitutional protections — which only Congress has the power to do.

Paul Hoffman, director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clinic at the University of California, Irvine, says the immigrant community in Orange County, where they’ve held workshops to inform people of their rights, is consumed by fear. 

“Everybody you talk to, they’re afraid that their kids are going to get taken at school, or at church or mosque,” Hoffman says, noting that ​“Border Czar” Thomas Homan has publicly suggested that ​“Know Your Rights” clinics are legally suspect. (“They call it ​‘Know Your Rights,’ ” Homan told CNN in January. ​“I call it ​‘How to Escape Arrest.’”) 

But it’s not only the legal landscape that has changed; activists are now frequently subject to online misinformation campaigns or the threat of being doxed. And this is all happening as influential pro-Israel groups — such as Canary Mission and Betar, known for their online harassment campaigns — have sent ​“deportation lists” naming thousands of student activists to top government officials, amplified by the right-wing echo chamber. (Betar, which was banned from Meta in 2024 after directing death threats at pro-Palestinian lawmakers and campus protesters, has flourished on social media since Trump’s reelection.) 

Musk and his army of loyalists are using similar tactics to wage their own war against Tesla protest organizers. In a March 8 post on X, Musk identified five ​“ActBlue-funded” groups he claimed were responsible for the Tesla actions, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Indivisible. A political action committee founded in 2004, ActBlue has become one of Democrats’ primary fundraising vehicles, hauling in more than $16 billion over the past two decades. It’s also become a target; the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have alleged — with no credible evidence — that ActBlue has violated campaign finance laws and supported organizations connected to terrorist groups. In a recent episode of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast, recorded at the White House, Musk referred to ActBlue and Arabella, an advocacy-oriented investment fund, as the ​“left-wing NGO cabal.” On April 24, Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue.

In a written statement, ActBlue says the administration is ​“weaponiz[ing] the instruments of federal power” as part of a broader assault on democracy and that the group will pursue all legal measures to defend itself. 

Musk and his allies have been just as eager to go after small, largely volunteer-run groups. Far-right activist Laura Loomer and the anonymous, conspiracy theorist X account KanekoaTheGreat — who, together, have more than 2.5 million followers — have doxed individual activists and made baseless claims that the Tesla Takedown movement is advocating violence and property destruction. 

The day after Musk’s ActBlue post made the rounds, Loomer posted a thread identifying one of the fiscal sponsors of the youth-led group Planet over Profit (POP), which helped organize a protest outside of Tesla’s Manhattan showroom on March 8. During the action, police arrested six POP activists, including the group’s co-founder, Alice Hu, charging them with disorderly conduct for entering the showroom. Loomer then broadcast the false claim that the group was arrested for vandalizing the store. She further claimed, also falsely, that POP was ​“backed” by the tech-oriented nonprofit Hack Club, which had received $4 million from the Musk Foundation in 2023, concocting an outrage narrative for right-wing readers: that Tesla attacks were being paid for by a group Musk had donated to.

The fact that these statements aren’t true — Hack Club has never funded POP, or any other group, but merely acted as its fiscal sponsor (accepting tax-deductible donations on POP’s behalf, as Hack Club has for nearly 2,000 other projects) — didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the fact that its sponsorship of POP had only just gotten underway. A Hack Club employee who worked with climate groups deleted his X account after being hounded by Loomer’s fanbase, and the organization promptly severed its ties to POP.

Since then, says Hu — who was also directly targeted by Loomer in a race-baiting post tagging Musk — POP has struggled to raise money and wasn’t able to process payroll for its four-person staff for seven weeks. 

The Trump administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are also using other methods, such as eliminating billions of dollars in grant programs to undermine nonprofits, which the Chronicle of Philanthropy estimates has already led to the loss of at least 10,000 jobs. Musk’s employees have gone after congressionally chartered nonprofits, too, including the U.S. Institute of Peace, the affordable housing advocacy group NeighborWorks, and the prison reform organization Vera Institute of Justice, whose president referred to DOGE’s attempt to oversee the organization as a ​“hostile takeover.”

A similar feeling has pervaded smaller activist groups, many of which are adopting a lower profile in hopes of staying out of the administration’s crosshairs. Two local grassroots groups involved in Tesla Takedown organizing declined to be interviewed for this story. But avoiding the spotlight can be harder to do online. The same day Loomer tweeted about Hack Club, KanekoaTheGreat posted a video clip of Val Costa, a 44-year-old Seattle organizer with the activist group the Troublemakers — one of the organizations Musk targeted in his post — discussing how the Tesla protests have helped people channel their discontent in the face of an onslaught meant to leave them feeling helpless.

In KanekoaTheGreat’s telling, though, Costa was a ​“far left activist” who had drawn inspiration from Luigi Mangione — the 27-year-old who allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — and was helping fuel a ​“spree of vandalism nationwide.” Musk reposted this misinformation to his audience of 219 million followers, along with his own fact-free claim that ​“Costa is committing crimes.” 

The fallout was swift. Costa spent two weeks in what she describes as ​“full crisis mode” and contemplated going into hiding. The Troublemakers received an email with nothing but Costa’s home address. She took down her business consulting website and deleted her X account. And she’s now considering putting security cameras outside her home — something she never previously imagined doing

“We’re hearing from a lot of people who are afraid to go outside,” says the ACLU’s Brian Hauss. ​“And a lot of people who are afraid to engage in any sort of protest or speech around Israel-Palestine.”

For both Khalil and Öztürk, the State Department relied on an obscure provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to subvert the rule of law and suppress constitutionally protected speech. The government has openly admitted in court filings that neither student has committed any crime; rather, the government alleges they engaged in speech that undermines U.S. foreign policy — a stipulation so broad it could render any criticism of U.S. activity abroad as cause for deportation. 

In a letter from the Jena, La., detention center, where he is still being held, Khalil described himself as a political prisoner — targeted for exercising his First Amendment rights ​“as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent.” In a six-page statement, Öztürk recounted being shuttled across multiple state lines en route to another Louisiana ICE facility and the numerous asthma attacks she’s suffered since being detained. She also recalled spending several hours in a state of near terror, convinced she’d been kidnapped by people affiliated with the doxing campaign. 

“They were all wearing civilian clothes,” she said of the agents who grabbed her. “[I] was sure they were going to kill me.” It wasn’t until the agents transporting her stopped at what appeared to be a police station in New Hampshire that she realized she’d been taken by law enforcement. 

But the crackdown has not been limited to individuals directly involved in protests and encampments. The State Department has also reportedly revoked the visas of more than 1,800 students through a program dubbed ​“Catch and Revoke,” which uses artificial intelligence to comb through social media posts in search of pro-Palestinian content. In many cases, DHS has revoked student visas without the knowledge of university administrators or students, a tactic clearly designed to instill fear in the wider community. (Facing a barrage of legal challenges and an inability to account for why some students are being targeted, the administration recently announced it was pausing the visa revocations while the program is reviewed.)

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold funds from universities, including Columbia and Harvard, if they refuse to further restrict and punish protest activity, sanction groups involved in pro-Palestinian organizing, and audit and ​“reform” their programs in Middle Eastern studies. On April 14, Harvard announced it would not submit to the administration’s demands, which it described as ​“assertions of power, unmoored from the law.” The following day, Trump’s Department of Education announced it was canceling $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard. Trump also threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, and, in a rambling May 5 letter, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said Harvard would no longer be eligible for federal funding, in part because it had brought in foreign students who ​“engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America.” 

Law enforcement agencies are also ratcheting up their attacks. In late April, the FBI, along with state and local police, raided the homes of pro-Palestinian student activists at the University of Michigan; in at least one instance, they smashed through a door while refusing to present a warrant. 

In many cases, universities are preemptively policing speech on Palestine to avoid being penalized by the administration (or drawing undue attention to their institution). On March 13, five days after Mahmoud Khalil was detained, Boston University professor Nathan Phillips posted a sign in his office window expressing solidarity with the Syrian born Palestinian activist. When Phillips returned to teach the following week, the sign had been removed. Over the next month, Phillips engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the administration, wherein he repeatedly put up new signs — including one supporting Öztürk and one for Mohsen Mahdawi, another international Columbia student detained by ICE — and the university took them all down. 

On April 15, Phillips began a hunger strike until federal authorities release Khalil and Öztürk, explaining to In These Times and Type Investigations via text message: ​“I am taking this action because none of us are free until they are free.” 

Phillips notes that Boston University seemed fine with other political signs he’s displayed over the years — even featuring a photo of one in online publications. As a private university, it can dictate when and where students and faculty can protest or post signs, but it’s supposed to apply those rules neutrally; selective enforcement that targets certain forms of speech — like expressing support for Palestinian activists — may violate First Amendment protections. 

“They are policing this based on viewpoint,” says Laura Beltz, director of policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. ​“That’s what we’re concerned about.”

Boston University’s executive director for media relations, Colin Riley, refused to speak about Phillips’ case and referred In These Times and Type Investigations to the university’s statement on academic freedom, which says nothing about posting signs but notes that ​“when a faculty member speaks or writes as a citizen, he or she should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.” 

Meanwhile, the immigration raids, funding cuts and internal repression have had a chilling effect, which several scholars have compared to the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. 

The Civil Rights Litigation Clinic’s Paul Hoffman — who worked on a case in the 1970s involving Frank Wilkinson, a leading critic of the House Un-American Activities Committee and founder of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation — sees the Trump administration following a queasily familiar playbook. And many institutions are falling in line.

“Like the McCarthy era, you have law firms bending the knee, Columbia bending the knee,” Hoffman says. ​“We all thought it was history. Now, it’s not.” 

Boston University law professor Jonathan Feingold says students at the school, particularly noncitizens, are living in a state of fear, heightened by unannounced ICE visits and at least one ​“self-deportation.” He’s had multiple conversations with law school students who ​“are pretty much afraid to say anything,” especially if it touches on the Gaza war. 

Hoffman has had similar conversations: ​“The students that we talk to, particularly students involved in the Palestinian rights movement, are scared to death.”

Broadly speaking, Feingold adds, universities have failed to adequately defend students who organize or speak out against U.S. foreign policy, particularly over the past year. If anything, as In These Times and Type Investigations reported in spring 2024, dozens of schools have modified their conduct policies to make it harder and riskier to protest. 

That trend has continued. In the fall of 2024, Northwestern University, near Chicago, implemented new restrictions on when and where students and faculty can protest. In October, when members of Jewish Voice for Peace set up a small Gaza solidarity sukkah in Deering Meadow — where encampments were staged the previous spring — university police tore the structure down. The students involved in erecting it have since faced disciplinary sanctions for violating a new policy prohibiting the installation of ​“3D displays” on school property without prior approval.

“There was an increased amount of repression on free speech and really clear attempts to silence any and all student protests, but particularly those standing in solidarity with Palestine,” says Isabelle, a Jewish Voice for Peace student organizer who asked to use only her first name out of fear of retaliation.

Trump’s return to office has only accelerated the crackdown on speech. This February, Northwestern announced that all students, faculty and staff must undergo mandatory antisemitism training. As part of the online training, students are required to click a box saying they will abide by the university’s discrimination policy, which the school has stated includes harassment based on antisemitism. Because Northwestern recently adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial definition of antisemitism— which equates criticism of the Israeli state with discrimination against Jewish people — Isabelle says some students fear they are now being compelled to agree to those terms, or face potential administrative actions, including a hold on their ability to register for classes. In a written statement, a university spokesperson said the IHRA definition is not part of the school’s discrimination policy and students are not being asked to abide by it. But the training mandate, issued several weeks after the Trump administration released an executive order on combating antisemitism, has only added to the sense of fear and uncertainty on campus. 

More recently, New York University School of Law barred nearly three dozen students who joined a sit-in this year from some campus facilities — referring to them in a letter as ​“personae non grata” — until they renounce their past involvement in protest activity.

The adoption of such repressive measures has left schools, once stalwart defenders of the First Amendment, especially vulnerable to the Trump administration’s assault on higher education. 

“Ideologically motivated deportations and the repression of speech are all connected to undermining the independence and autonomy of universities,” Feingold says, ​“given that we continue to be a potential line of defense against what is increasingly a fascist regime.”

For the Trump administration, international students represent low-hanging fruit: a highly vulnerable population with few legal protections who conveniently bridge the administration’s attacks on the Palestinian solidarity movement and its war on universities — which Vice President JD Vance infamously described, in 2021, as ​“the enemy.” 

Activists outside of the academy are keeping a close eye on what happens to hundreds of students including Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi. After all, as Val Costa warns, if the administration can lock students up for writing op-eds or participating in demonstrations, there’s little to stop them from going after U.S. citizens. 

Though she hopes she’s wrong in that fear, Costa adds, ​“It feels more like ​‘when’ and ​‘how’” than ​“if” these days. 

And yet, in many ways there are signs that the smear campaigns and legal harassment have backfired. Despite the headwinds facing student activists, Isabelle says, organizing is continuing behind the scenes. Since Trump took office, groups like the Troublemakers, Planet over Profit, Democratic Socialists of America, and the National Lawyers Guild have seen interest in their work surge. According to Hu, POP’s Instagram following has doubled, and the group recently opened a Bay Area chapter. DSA has seen a 10% increase in membership, which the group’s co-chair, Ashik Siddique, attributes to people looking for ways to fight back in the absence of strong Democratic leadership. Ría Thompson-Washington, president of the National Lawyers Guild, says there’s high demand for legal clinics as first-time protesters gear up for actions set to take place this summer. And Costa — who had been planning to step back from organizing after starting a new job — says her experience of being doxed by Musk only served to deepen her involvement in activism and her commitment to speaking out.

The courts, too, are beginning to push back. On April 30, Mahdawi, who cofounded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union along with Khalil, was released by Vermont Judge Geoffrey Crawford, whose order was accompanied by a withering indictment of the government’s assault on civil liberties. A week later, on May 7, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Öztürk must be transferred from Louisiana back to Vermont — where she was when her original habeas petition was filed — denying the government’s request for a stay; two days later, and before her transfer, another Vermont judge ordered that Öztürk be released immediately, arguing that her continued detention could effectively silence ​“millions and millions of” noncitizens. 

In the order that allows Mahdawi to return home while his immigration proceedings continue, Crawford compared our current political crisis to earlier periods of U.S. history, from the first Red Scare and Palmer Raids of the 1920s to the McCarthyite fervor of the 1950s, during which thousands of immigrants and dissidents were detained for their political beliefs. Today, Crawford noted, the country is living through another extraordinary moment premised on the denial of basic freedoms. 

If Mahdawi’s rights have been violated, allowing him to challenge the constitutionality of his detention is an essential first step, Crawford wrote, ​“not only for him but for others who wish to speak freely without fear of government retaliation.” 

Shortly after Crawford’s ruling, Mahdawi, wearing a keffiyeh around his neck as he spoke to a crowd outside the Burlington, Vt., courthouse, affirmed his commitment to the Palestinian struggle. Addressing the Trump administration directly, he added: ​“I am not afraid of you.”

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Adam Federman is a reporting fellow.