‘The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending anti-Semitism in our schools,’ task force head Leo Terrell says
The Trump administration is forming a multi-agency task force “to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” the Department of Justice announced Monday.
The task force stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed last week intended to take “forceful and unprecedented steps to combat anti-Semitism.” It requires federal agencies and department leaders to report the legal tools they could use to fight anti-Semitism.
Leo Terrell, the senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, will lead the task force. It will be coordinated through the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and will include representatives from the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, along with other agencies as the task force develops.
“Anti-Semitism in any environment is repugnant to this Nation’s ideals,” Terrell said in a statement. “The Department takes seriously our responsibility to eradicate this hatred wherever it is found. The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism is the first step in giving life to President Trump’s renewed commitment to ending anti-Semitism in our schools.”
The announcement comes as anti-Semitism continues to grip college campuses across the world. Ivy League institutions, particularly Columbia and Harvard, have become the face of anti-Israel demonstrations since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Hillel reported that anti-Semitic incidents on campus rose 700 percent between 2022 and 2023. As of Monday, there have been over 1,000 anti-Semitic acts across college campuses.
The task force was announced just two weeks after Trump took office. He began making good on his campaign promise to combat anti-Semitism last Wednesday when he signed an executive order that directed federal agencies to look into deporting anti-Semitic resident aliens, including student visa holders, who broke U.S. law.
On Jan. 21, the day after Trump was sworn in, Harvard settled a lawsuit with six students accusing the elite university of “deliberate indifference” and “enabling” rampant anti-Semitism on campus. The university agreed to expand its non-discrimination guidelines to discipline students who target Zionists and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.
By contrast, the Biden administration’s Department of Education reached toothless agreements with the University of California, Rutgers University, and Johns Hopkins University over complaints of anti-Semitism. Those settlements, resolved just weeks before Trump’s inauguration, allowed those universities facing civil rights violations to escape punishment and significant mandatory reforms.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell warned that the Islamic advocacy group may sue the Trump administration over the task force depending on how it operates. If the task force “weaponizes the power of the federal government to suppress the speech of college kids who have advocated for Palestinian rights, then that is going to run into a wall called the U.S. Constitution,” Mitchell said.
Several weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, assault, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad said he was “happy to see” Hamas kill Jews in the terror attack.
