Trump threatens to cut federal funds for universities that allow ‘illegal protests’

US President Donald Trump said he wanted to cut the federal funding of colleges that allow what he called “illegal protests,” in a social media post that civil rights groups called an attack on the freedoms of speech and assembly.

The post on Tuesday appeared to repeat some of the ideas of executive orders he issued during his first term, in 2019, and on January 29, which described the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel student protest movement that swept college campuses last year as antisemitic.

“All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote on social media. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to questions about how the White House would define an illegal protest or how the government would imprison protesters. The US Constitution’s First Amendment protects the freedom of speech and assembly.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit group, said on Tuesday that Trump’s threat was “deeply chilling” and would make students “fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.”

“The president can’t force institutions to expel students,” the statement said.

The US government does not control either privately or publicly funded schools or colleges, although a president has a limited ability to encourage policy goals via federal funding disbursed through the US Department of Education.

Trump’s executive order in January restored a similar order he signed in 2019, instructing the Department of Education to investigate colleges that receive federal funding if they failed to protect Jewish students and staff from antisemitism.

Trump has also told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that he wants non-citizen protesters admitted to the US on student visas to be deported.

Protesters set up tent encampments on college campuses across the US and around the world last year to protest against Israel amid the war in Gaza sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror onslaught . Many of the protests centered on their school’s investments in companies that they said supported Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories.