State Department plan to deport ‘pro-Hamas’ students relies on a 1952 law that targeted Jews
Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of Soviet sympathies were subject to the McCarran-Walter Act
Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College. Photo by Getty Images
By Andrew Silverstein March 7, 2025
The U.S. State Department is using a McCarthy-era antisemitic law to cancel visas of foreign students who it determines to be “pro-Hamas.”
The program, called “Catch and Revoke,” first reported by Axios on Thursday, will use artificial intelligence to scan social media, news reports of anti-Israel protests, and lawsuits by Jewish student groups alleging campus antisemitism.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the American Civil Liberties Union have raised alarms over the government’s apparent violation of First Amendment rights, but little attention has been given to the legal basis of the project.
“The Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 gives the secretary of state the authority to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat,” wrote Axios, citing senior State Department officials.
The 1952 law, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, codified immigration restrictions of “subversives” and communists. The act’s quotas and ideological litmus test were widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.
Nevada Senator Patrick McCarran, the law’s architect, used the “canard that Jews are disruptors” and “subversive rats that need to be kept out,” but with a new Cold War twist of portraying Jewish immigrants as Soviet agents, according to David Nasaw, professor emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center.
Nasaw, who wrote the 2020 book The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War, notes this was one of several instances of postwar immigration legislation that favored German, Irish and English immigrants while limiting immigration from Poland, where the Jews who survived World War II did so by fleeing into the Soviet Union or being liberated by the Red Army.
Jewish politicians fought the 1952 legislation, and President Harry Truman vetoed it. However, Congress overturned it with a two-thirds vote in both houses. The bill continued policies that made it almost impossible for Polish Jewish survivors to emigrate to the United States. Those who did, including Jared Kushner’s family, were forced to present themselves as German to American authorities.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” states a fact sheet published on the White House website along with President Donald Trump’s January executive order on antisemitism. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, making good on Trump’s executive order, is now apparently looking to use the Cold War immigration law to target students on foreign visas, who may not have committed a crime but whose beliefs are deemed pro-Hamas or antisemitic.
Already, Fox News reports that a pro-Palestinian activist student’s visa was revoked.
Nasaw said he is surprised that the State Department would look to the 1952 law, explaining it was used to keep out immigrants, not deport them.
Though Jews have been divided on the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics, Nasaw, who sees the Trump administration policy as an assault on campus free speech, notes that in 1952 Jewish groups were of one opinion. “The American Jewish Committee, everybody,” he said, “all the Jewish committees and Jewish legislators opposed their 1952 law.”
In a 1952 edition of The New York Times, then-Anti-Defamation League president Benjamin Epstein was quoted as saying that immigration regulations like the McCarran law were “examples of the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals.”
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