The Palestine Exception
HVDSA member Gen Paczewski has done an incredible job writing about a phenomenon called "The Palestine Exception", which they describe as "the trend of powerful institutions punishing those who organize for Palestine, and the phenomenon of tolerating and excusing the violation of first amendment rights for those who support Palestine." The full article is written below!
The Palestine Exception
By Gen Paczewski
At the start of its tenure, the Trump administration made no secret of its disdain for immigrants, and in fact made the promise to deport people a major leg of its election campaign. They've certainly been trying to deliver on that promise, and anyone reading recent news will have seen the rash of ICE raids targeting people with visas, some of whom have been U.S. residents most of their lives. Journalists and activists have described the ways ICE is targeting people, often literally grabbing them off the street and shoving them into vans, dressed in civilian clothing, wearing masks, with no badge or identifying uniforms and no way for the people they are grabbing to know whether they're legitimate law enforcement officers.
Many of them are being denied due process and access to lawyers while being held in ICE detentions centers whose conditions are overcrowded and inhumane. The Independent reports that 48 New Mexico residents were disappeared by ICE. A federal complaint filed by ACLU lawyers in New Mexico says that ICE “has not indicated where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them.”
The trend of powerful institutions punishing those who organize for Palestine, and the phenomenon of tolerating and excusing the violation of first amendment rights for those who support Palestine, gave rise to the phrase “The Palestine Exception”. Al Jazeera writes that even before 2023, Palestine activists faced “doxxing. Blacklists. Terminations. Investigations. Hate mail and death threats. And accusations of anti-semitism and material support for Hamas.” Palestine Legal coined the phrase in a report they authored alongside the Center for Constitutional Rights, and defines it as “A documented pattern of institutional discrimination and selective enforcement of policies…to specifically target and restrict Palestinian voices, scholarship and advocacy in western academic and media institutions.”
This level of targeted harassment by ICE and other law enforcement agencies is an escalation, but not entirely new to Palestine activists. In 2023 and 2024, students who participated in Palestine protests were arrested, suspended or banned from their university campuses, given citations, or faced disciplinary actions like being required to write a letter of apology for their political activity. Mamayan Jabateh, a student at University of Chicago, was arrested, and later suspended and banned from their campus. People in the encampments on various universities were tear gassed and assaulted by police during arrests. Al Jazeera reports that seven students at the University of Minnesota are being threatened with two and a half years suspension and repaying $5000 of alleged damage after staging a library sit-in. Two tenured faculty members, employees of University of Minnesota, are now barred from entering some campus buildings for attending the sit-in. The New York Times reports that Harvard University banned dozens of students and faculty members from the library after they held silent study-ins, and Indiana University referred students to a disciplinary committee for holding candlelit vigils for the dead in Gaza. AP news reports that when Florida theatre O Cinema aired the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land”, the mayor threatened to end the lease and cut off all financial support to the theatre.
Our local students here in Ann Arbor ran afoul of The Palestine Exception when they staged a 30-day-long encampment on the University of Michigan Diag. Tahrir Coalition is the student organization who staged the protest to “demand divestment of the over $6 billion of the university’s endowment invested in weapons manufacturers and war profiteers complicit in the genocide on Palestine,” per a statement issued in a September 13, 2024 statement. The encampment was raided by police on May 21, 2024. Tahrir Coalition reports that during the raid, University of Michigan police “armed with “Deep Freeze” (a combination of pepper spray and teargas, described as the “most intense, incapacitating agent available today”), body armor, and batons, assaulted and pepper sprayed protestors, hospitalizing at least three people and violently arresting four protestors now facing felony and misdemeanor charges”. A year later, Attorney General Dana Nessel approved an FBI raid of the homes of three pro-Palestine activists in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton. Coalition reports that during the raid, three people were briefly detained and electronics were confiscated. Video posted to the Coalition X social media account showed officers busting down the front door of one activists’ home. Coalition also reported that officers were slow to produce a warrant when asked, and that the warrants did not list probable cause. This means that the students being raided, and their legal counsel, weren’t even aware of what crime they were being accused of. AG Nessel said the Raid was not associated with protest activity, but was part of a vandalism investigation. The charges against seven Coalition students were dropped on May 5, 2025.
Trump is racist and anti-immigrant, and his administration has been staffed with others who share similar racist, anti-immigrant opinions. Additionally, Trump and ICE are utilizing the Palestine exception to justify grabbing activists doing political and organizing work they dislike. One of the most prominent examples is the arrest of farm worker and labor organizer Alfredo Juarez Zeferino. Zeferino, who goes by Lelo, has been a volunteer organizer with Community to Community (C2C), a food justice organization operating in Washington. Lelo has been working as a farm worker since he was 12-years-old. He also is a prominent union member of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farm worker union founded in 2013. He was taken while driving his partner to work. Similarly, another labor activist, Jeanette Vizguerra, was taken from a Target parking lot under a deportation order that was issued in 2013, but previously rescinded by a judge. She had previously joined protests outside of ICE facilities.
Individuals who ICE has taken and imprisoned under the Palestine exception are Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rumeysa Ozturk, Rasha Alawieh, Momodou Taal, and Yunseo Chung. All of these people are non-citizen university students, graduate students or assistant professors in the country on work visas, green cards or student visas , and have been accused of “activities aligned to Hamas”. However, all they've done is write op-eds in favor of their university divesting from Palestine (Ozturk); attend and/or help organize protests (Khalil, Chung, Suri, and Taal); or attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, an event that was attended by an estimated tens of thousands of people (Alawieh). The administration is clearly using the threat of deportation to try to silence pro-palestinian activists and stop the groundswell of protest activity that has been happening during 2023-2025.
This open and enthusiastic denial and violation of rights should concern everyone, no matter what your views on Palestine are. It is clear the point is to foster an aura of fear and uncertainty such that nobody will organize against the government and its actions. When an administration is willing to violate the rights of people who had visas and green cards, who were supposed to have legal and constitutional rights, and there are no consequences for it, why would they stop there? When any person is considered expendable and acceptable to sacrifice, then everyone is. The fascist actions of the administration have started with non-citizens, but if they get away with it, it won't stop there. If plainclothes officers wearing masks and refusing to show badges or warrants can abduct one class of person and get away with it, they can do it to anyone. When there’s an exception carved out for violating people’s rights in this one case, that case can and will be extended whenever powerful actors decide it should be. Either we all have inalienable rights, or none of us do. We can and will keep each other safe by continuing to organize and work together, and refusing to let these suppressive tactics stymie the real, vital and important work so many of our comrades are doing.
Here’s how we can help: DSA chapters in some states run, or have access to organizations that run, training sessions about immigrant rights, ICE warning systems, and other ways to help keep your community safe. Also, check out your local area for immigrant support organizations that you could help support. In Michigan, we have One Michigan, who describe themselves as an “immigrant youth led” group. Palestinian Youth Movement and the Party for Socialism and Liberation chapters also run training sessions/networks in many communities. Friends and family of Vizguerra ask that people sign this petition. You can donate to fundraisers for Ozturk, Khalil, and Zeferino here.