Donald Trump may move to punish Palestinian-rights organizers as early as day one. Mother Jones illustration; Amy Katz/Zuma; Brigitte N. Brantley/Planet Pix/Zuma; Kelly Jordan,/Detroit Free Press/Zuma; Starmax/Newscom/Zuma

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to his planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and trans people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

Last May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.”

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress, and the Trump administration, actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy........

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