Trump Wasn't First to Order Middle East Students Deported, And POTUS Who Did Was Democratic Hero
It’s a plan to deport students from a foreign country that might have sympathies for extremists. It’s faced trouble in court.
And it was put forward by the administration of President Donald Trump? Actually, no.
Try James Earl Carter.
When Jimmy Carter died in December at the age of 100, he’d lived longer than any former president in this country’s history. The left paid their tributes, both to the job he’d done in office (which can now be rehabilitated in some leftist eyes) and the job he’d done after he left office as a knight errant of foreign policy (almost universally in favor of some of the world’s worst people, including — especially — Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat).
Then-President Joe Biden, who was ushered off-stage prematurely by his party earlier in the year and who was being ushered out of the White House, period full stop, said, “The world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” when Carter died. Bill and Hillary Clinton said, they were “proud, early supporters” of Carter’s. “I will always be proud to have presented the Medal of Freedom to him and Rosalynn in 1999, and to have worked with him in the years after he left the White House,” Bill added.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote that Carter “embodied decency and integrity throughout his life of public service.” Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather said Carter was “a tireless advocate for peace, hope, and healing” and was “far ahead of his time on many issues, especially the environment.”
It was left to the rest of the media to note how Carter been ushered off the stage in the presidential election of 1980 after ruining America’s economy at home and image abroad. Of particular consideration was how Carter handled the Iran hostage crisis, when a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran left more than 50 Americans in the hands of the most fanatical supporters of the Iranian revolution.
Carter’s general impotence in the face of the crisis was the final straw for many Americans; it was one thing to have lines at the pump and double-digit inflation if America was strong abroad, but prostrating ourselves before the world economically, politically, and militarily wasn’t something voters were going to stand for.
Even impotent Jimmy Carter, however, realized that students who were partisan to the revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeini were trouble — which is why he ordered those with sympathies to the revolution to lose their visas.
As the Washington Times noted in a Monday piece, there are echoes of the policy being pursued by President Trump in response to a more mephitic threat on college campuses — namely, pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic student hordes, sometimes led by student visa holders.
“It sounds like President Trump, but he is following a path blazed 46 years ago. During the Iran hostage crisis, President Carter ordered his administration to review the status of tens of thousands of Iranian students to determine whether they should be deported,” the Times’ Stephen Dinan wrote.
And yes, they sued, too — and lost. Maybe Dan Rather was right for once; Carter was “far ahead of his time.”
In the case which tested the federal regulation set by Carter’s attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, the plaintiffs argued that the restrictions — which required them to provide immigration officers with certain information as a prerequisite for keeping their visas — violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by targeting a specific nationality.
Narenji v. Civiletti, as the case was known, was initially found in favor of the plaintiffs in district court, with the judge citing “an impermissible distinction made on the basis of national origin.”
However, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in the administration’s favor, with Judge Roger Robb finding that the attorney general and administration had broad powers under the Immigration and Nationality Act that didn’t need to be specifically delegated via statute, and that distinctions among nationalities were permissible unless they were “wholly irrational.”
“Certainly, in a case such as the one presented here, it is not the business of courts to pass judgment on the decisions of the president in the field of foreign policy,” Robb’s decision read.
“Judges are not expert in that field and they lack the information necessary for the formation of an opinion. The president on the other hand has the opportunity of knowing the conditions which prevail in foreign countries, he has his confidential sources of information and his agents in the form of diplomatic, consular and other officials.”
The Supreme Court declined to take the case up, and thus the precedent was set.
“At that point, out of some 50,000 Iranian students in the U.S., the Justice Department determined that 7,000 were deportable and started removal cases against roughly 5,000,” Dinan wrote. “Only 19 were deported; hundreds chose to self-deport.”
And, according to experts that Dinan talked to, this is precisely what the current president is doing.
“It’s the exact same thing,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, a group which supports immigration restrictions.
“It’s a specific delegation of authority to the secretary of state,” added Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project.
Of course, the deportation cases against several hundred individuals rumored to be involved in the protests has drawn backlash — and lawsuits.
“By design, the agencies’ policy has created a climate of repression and fear on university campuses,” wrote lawyers for the American Association of University Professors, which is challenging the new policy, in a court filing.
It’s also drawn the ire of Democratic politicians, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“Our federal immigration focus needs to be on dangerous criminals, and in this particular case the facts are not clear,” she said regarding the deportation case against pro-Hamas Columbia University rabblement-rouser Mahmoud Khalil, a case in which the facts are very clear.
“Here in New York, unlike the president, we actually respect rule of law, so I’m waiting to see what the judge says about this,” she added.
Yes, that’s right: The same Kathy Hochul who was praising Jimmy Carter when he died, like most Democrats, is arguing against a precedent he set.
We know what the judges have said about this. We know what the rule of law is. We know it because Jimmy Carter did it. And, make no mistake: Hamas is infinitely worse than the threat we faced from pro-Khomeini students in the late 1970s.
Carter was a Democratic hero, but not for a particularly good reason. In office, he wasn’t just weak and ineffectual, but he was the kind of weak and ineffectual leader who insists on micromanaging. So, not only did he screw up everything he touched, he touched pretty much everything he could.
To the extent that he became lionized for his post-presidential activities, that lionization was only such because he was an America-last emblem of the dying New Left who would repeatedly throw anti-Semitic spanners into the machinery of Middle East peace, then run away and hide behind the specter of the houses he erected for Habitat for Humanity once the thing blew up and parts were flying everywhere. This is laudable, not loathsome, in the modern Democratic Party, which is part of the reason why Carter went out a hero.
However — and we’re already seeing it with Hochul — the same people who shouted Carter’s praises are going to be the same people who line up against the same sensible student visa regulations he championed being used by a Republican president. This is another unfortunate feature of the Democrats: They’re only anti-terror so long as it’s publicly expedient, and then for the absolute minimum amount of time.
Jimmy had an Iran problem and wanted to handle it. He took action on the homefront — really, the least he could do — and that action held up in court. It was mostly symbolic, but it was something that should have been done.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have had to deal with a Hamas problem. Biden basically coddled these infantile collegiate guerrillas. Trump is cracking down on them in myriad ways, including sending the ones who aren’t citizens back to where they are citizens. The left, for some reason, is furious. They’re literally trying to help the people who want to slaughter Jews. And yet, they call MAGA a fascist movement in virtually the same breath.
If Democrats have a problem with this, they should try a seance with Jimmy Carter’s ghost. It’s not like he has anything to do, after all — and if you think his post-presidency was long, a stay in eternity (whichever subdivision he’s in) is longer. He’s got time on his hands. Maybe he can explain Narenji v. Civiletti to them, since their legal advisers seem woefully unable to.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
