Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell leaves the stage after speaking alongside President Donald Trump and golf legend Tiger Woods during a reception honoring Black History Month at the White House on February 20. Photo by Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld March 14, 2025

Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump administration’s task force on antisemitism, said he would consider creating a new group to combat what conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk described as “the anti-white bias we’re seeing on our college campuses.”

“Oh yes,” Terrell, a Black civil rights attorney, told Kirk on Wednesday during a brief appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show. “Anti-white bias, all this DEI nonsense, the attack on Christians, the attack on Catholics… all the president wants to do is make sure everybody is treated fairly.”

Terrell also invited Kirk, who has accused Jews of financing “anti-white causes,” to join the antisemitism task force on a tour of 10 universities the administration says experienced antisemitic incidents over the past year.

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“Treatment against white students has been terrible in recent years,” Kirk told Terrell before asking if he would consider creating a committee similar to the inter-agency task force on antisemitism that Terrell has been leading since February.

Terrell, a longtime Fox News fixture who blamed President Donald Trump for rising antisemitism before undergoing a political conversion in 2020, said that the current focus was on antisemitism but he also wanted to defend civil rights “for Catholics, for whites, for Christians, for everyone – Blacks, browns, yellow.”

Shortly after announcing the antisemitism task force, Trump also created one to address anti-Christian bias led by a more senior slate of officials. While Terrell is senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, the anti-Christian bias group is under Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The antisemitism task force has announced a series of trips to both the 10 colleges and universities and also to four cities that the Department of Justice described as having been “rocked by incidents of antisemitism”: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston.

Terrell also defended the administration’s decision to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, for his participation in protests against Israel. Without citing any evidence or specific incidents, he said that Khalil had “basically utilized the Columbia University campus as an arsenal to harass Jewish students and to support a terrorist organization.”

“This is a message to every protester who is here in this country on a student visa,” Terrell added, “if you’re going to participate in antisemitic, pro-Hamas activity you are subject to deportation.”

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