US President Donald Trump (R) in the Oval of the White House in January 2025. Photo: Fortune via Reuters Connect

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday issued a highly anticipated executive order aimed at combating campus antisemitism and holding pro-terror extremists accountable for the harassment of Jewish students, fulfilling a promise he made while campaigning for a second term in office.

Continuing work started started during his first administration — when Trump issued Executive Order 13899 to ensure that civil rights law apply equally Jews — the “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” The order also requires each government agency to write a report explaining how it can be of help in carrying out its enforcement.

Additionally, it initiates a full review of the explosion of campus antisemitism on US colleges across the country after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a convulsive moment in American history to which the previous administration struggled to respond during the final year and a half of its tenure.

“The report submitted by the Attorney General under his section shall additionally include an inventory and analysis of all court cases, as of the date of the report, against or involving institutions of higher education alleging civil-rights violations related to arising from post-Oct. 7, 2023, campus antisemitism and indicate whether the Attorney General intends to or has taken any such action with respect to such matters, including filing statements of interests or intervention,” the order says. “The report submitted by the Secretary of Education under this section shall additionally include an inventory and an analysis of all Title VI complaints and administrative actions, including K-12 education, related to antisemitism — pending or resolved after Oct. 7, 2023 — within the Department’s Office for Civil Rights.”

Another major provision of the order calls for the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses.

US Jewish civil rights groups celebrated the action as progress towards ending a situation in higher education that has been described as everything from “Judenrein” to a “crisis” that is without precedent in the modern United States.

“We welcome this effort by President Trump to put the full force of the federal government against rising antisemitism in our country,” Anti-Defamation League chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Combating antisemitism requires a whole-of-government approach, and we are eager to see every federal agency and department take concrete measures to address this scourge.”

Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said: “These executive orders are a home run. They demonstrate that President Trump is fully committed to protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism. This bodes very well for the coming years.”

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) also commented on the news, saying, “We endorse without hesitation the instruction to identify statutes to prevent discrimination against Jews, and to apply all existing laws to address civil rights violations relating to antisemitism in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack against Israel.”

Campus antisemitism was the subject of a major recent report by several committees of the US House of Representatives that accused college officials of choosing to protect their brands over fighting anti-Jewish hatred.

“The committee found that so-called university leaders deliberately chose to withhold support from Jewish communities on campus, demonstrating a refusal to address the hostile environments at their institutions,” the report said. “Jewish students, faculty, and staff often felt abandoned by administrators’ passive and muted responses to the explosion of antisemitic hate on campus. The committee’s investigation found that these failures to act were not mere oversights but intentional decisions.”

The report added that some schools, such as the University of Pennsylvania, pantomimed corrective action to disruptive behavior, assuring the public that it took rules violations, including the commandeering of campus property with “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” seriously — but it punished very few students for misconduct and those it did were given slaps on the wrist, according to critics.

Egregious conduct which prompted civil litigation evaded disciplinary action, it continued, explaining that nearly 100 students who participated in an encampment which barred Jewish students from accessing sections of campus at the University of California, Los Angeles “signed resolution agreements allowing them to escape disciplinary consequences” and “none were disciplined.”

In Wednesday’s executive order, Trump denounced the previous administration for refusing to handle the problem.

“This failure is unacceptable and ends today,” he said. “It shall be the policy of the United States to combat antisemitism vigorously, using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.