Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) has called on the United States government to cancel the visas of international students who support Hamas and deport them as college protests continue around the nation.
“You cannot go around yelling ‘I am Hamas’ or ‘We are Hamas’ or ‘River to the Sea’ and pushing out Jewish students and have the university not step up,” Blackburn said in an interview with “The Hill” on CNN.
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“Now, in my opinion, for the students who are out protesting, shouting ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ and… being Hamas sympathizers, if they’re foreign students, I would pull their visa and deport them,” she said.
Blackburn continued by saying that she would cancel federal student loans for U.S. students because taxpayers paid for them.
Students at Columbia University seized possession of a campus facility early Tuesday morning. Demonstrators obstructed doors and hoisted a Palestinian flag from a window in Hamilton Hall, escalating what had previously been a nonviolent protest.
The movement has extended across the country, with many other college campuses hosting encampments and pro-Palestinian marches. Campus police have arrested more than 1,000 people for protesting.
Many student demonstrators have urged their schools to withdraw from Israel and support attempts for a cease-fire. The protests have condemned antisemitism and have not directly supported Hamas in the ongoing conflict, but a few incidents have become part of the greater debate surrounding the protests.
Columbia barred a student protest organizer from school who stated, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Khymani James, a demonstration organizer, stated in a video earlier this year that people should be grateful that he does not go around “murdering Zionists.” James apologized for his remarks.
Blackburn stated that if somebody is “looking into the camera and saying, ‘I am Hamas,’ we should believe them” and put them on the terrorist watch list and no-fly list.
“You cannot sit by and just let this activity continue and put Jewish students in harm’s way,” she went on to say.
