Republican presidential primary candidates are coalescing around a plan to revoke the visas, particularly for foreign students, of Hamas sympathizers, making them eligible to be deported from the United States.
After Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) called on President Joe Biden’s top officials to revoke visas for foreign nationals who sympathize with the terrorist group Hamas — which is responsible for deadly attacks in Israel — several 2024 GOP candidates raised the issue on a national scale.
“In the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses,” Trump is set to tell voters in Clive, Iowa, on Monday:
Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities — and we will send them straight back home. [Emphasis added]
…
Under my administration, we will proactively send ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to pro-jihadist demonstrations to enforce our immigration laws and remove the violators from our country. [Emphasis added]
Likewise, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Guy Benson in an interview on Monday that he “absolutely” supports Rubio’s letter to Biden’s State Department that asks the agency to revoke visas for pro-Hamas visa holders in the U.S.
“Yes, absolutely. I mean, you don’t have a right to be here on a visa,” DeSantis said. “You don’t have a right to be studying in the United States. And we have a right to defend our people. And I think that having that is a huge problem.”
Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 2023. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
Students from Brooklyn College and supporters hold signs during a pro-Palestinian demonstration at the entrance of the campus. (Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) also said he backs such a plan.
“If any of those students on college campuses are foreign nationals on a visa, they should be sent back to their country,” Scott told Sean Hannity in an interview on Monday. “Anyone who stands up and who says they want to kill Jews, they support terrorism. They should have that visa revoked. [Emphasis added]”
Trump and DeSantis have similarly made clear that they oppose any resettlement of Palestinians to the U.S. — a policy that the Biden administration refuses to comment on. Trump has gone a step further and said he will suspend refugee resettlement altogether while Israel is at war.
“As President, I also suspended refugee resettlement when we entered office in 2017, and we will do it again,” Trump says in prepared remarks. “… we aren’t bringing in anyone from Gaza or Syria or Somalia or Yemen or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security.”
DeSantis has repeatedly said the U.S. has no obligation to import Palestinians.
“The Arab countries should take them. You have Egypt, you have Saudi, you have Jordan, you have Lebanon, you have others in North Africa, you have others in the Arabian Peninsula. They should take the Palestinian Arabs,” DeSantis told Guy Benson:
They’ve never been willing to do anything. And that’s the thing, they kind of use it as just like a political tool, but they’ve never been willing to do any of it. And that’s traditionally how refugees work. You don’t resettle refugees halfway around the world anyways. What you’re supposed to do is get them out of the conflict zone somewhere in the region. So that’s a no brainer. That should absolutely be the case. [Emphasis added]
And look, I have sympathy for some of these people caught up in this, but I think we also have to just be, we have to defend our own people and our own society. And if there is a toxicity that has developed, I think it’s unfortunate, but I think importing that to our country is an absolute no-go. And that would be something I would be very firm on. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley suggested she would support resettling Palestinians in American communities so long as the federal government “separate[s] civilians from terrorists.”
“There are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule,” Haley said of Palestinians.
Soon after the interview, a spokesperson for Haley told RealClearPolitics that the former South Carolina governor “opposes the U.S. taking in Gazans” and would like to see “Hamas-supporting countries like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey … take any refugees.”
In the House, Reps. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) and Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced legislation called the “GAZA Act” that would bar the Biden administration from resettling Palestinians in the U.S. through either its parole pipeline or refugee resettlement.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
