The battle over speech on our campus has taken a dangerous turn.

External organizations have begun publishing “dossiers” on Columbia students and calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport them under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. One group, Betar, reports that it has “already submitted names of hundreds of terror supporters to the Trump administration.” On X, Betar declared that a Palestinian student who “showed support for the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia” will “leave America.” Not to be outdone, Eretz Israel announced that this individual “has been officially entered into the deportation database.”

This weaponization of deportation is the latest in a series of increasingly virulent online attacks on Columbia students. Although many of these attacks claim to be combating antisemitism, others have targeted Jewish and Israeli students. Betar itself recently posted that a Jewish first-year who chose to attend Barnard “must enjoy abuse” and shouldn’t “be shocked when terrible things happen” to her.

As colleagues at the Law School who also happen to be Jewish, we have disagreed about a number of issues on campus over the past year, including then-University President Minouche Shafik’s response to the encampment and the role of the University trustees in shaping Columbia’s policies on protest. Nonetheless, we are unified in our commitment to the shared values that allow our academic community to flourish.

One of those values is that the University respects and protects its students, and therefore resolves allegations of misconduct through disciplinary processes that are fair and legitimate. This model of self-governance is jeopardized when outside agitators single out specific students, or groups of students, for public humiliation or targeted punishment. In light of centuries of pogroms against the Jewish people, Jewish members of the University ought to be particularly wary of such efforts—and particularly steadfast in refusing to cooperate with them.

To be sure, we may disagree on exactly what kinds of speech the University should allow. One of us, for example, has argued that “hate speech and calls for violence have no place at Columbia.” The other has suggested that an antidiscrimination bureaucracy designed to limit universities’ liability under federal civil rights law is a poor tool for policing speech on matters of public concern. These are difficult questions that universities across the country are struggling with; reasonable people may come to different conclusions in good faith.

But we at Columbia must seek to resolve these questions ourselves. Otherwise, as professors Brent Stockwell and Andreas Wimmer explained in a Spectator op-ed last summer, we will become “a playground for external political interests and lose the capacity to regulate our affairs in a way that accommodates the diverse viewpoints characterizing our campuses and our society.” That risk is even greater now that authoritarianism is surging worldwide and student speech has been linked to deportation.

We also believe that the new executive order is of questionable legality. Providing material support to a terrorist organization has been grounds for deportation since 1990. The Supreme Court has made clear, however, that noncitizens enjoy free speech rights when they are in the United States and that government policies that treat people differently based on the content of their speech are subject to strict scrutiny. For these reasons, First Amendment lawyers broadly agree that any attempt to deport foreign students or cancel their visas on account of their pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel statements would be unconstitutional. And while we recognize that the executive order is limited by its terms to actions “consistent with applicable law,” we cannot be sure that its implementation will remain within these constitutional boundaries.

Even if the executive order were to be upheld in court, threatening students with deportation for participating in peaceful protests or voicing inflammatory opinions is itself a threat to Columbia’s academic mission. The notion that the government might seek to use its coercive authority to silence one side in a heated campus debate chills free inquiry and expression, shuts down dialogue, and divides our community. No university can thrive under such conditions.

Columbia’s leadership may not be able to control what happens in Washington, but they can condemn attacks on our students, affirm the importance of academic freedom, and repudiate the notion that deportation is an appropriate answer to the challenges we face. All of us can do the same. Rather than let Columbia serve as a playground for external political interests, now is the time to come together in defense of the norms and ideals that define our University.