When ICE agents detained Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil in March, the start of an escalating Trump administration effort to deport foreign students deemed sympathetic to Hamas, some Jewish Democrats were concerned. 

Like President Donald Trump, they were worried about antisemitism on campus and took issue with Khalil’s leadership of Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment last spring. But they feared that deporting a green card holder for his activism would raise issues about due process and freedom of expression. They wanted Democrats to articulate that nuance — outspokenness against antisemitism combined with an embrace of liberal American values. Some Jewish Democrats, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), addressed that complexity, criticizing both Khalil and Trump’s immigration enforcement actions against him.

Others came to Khalil’s defense, including an account on X representing the Democrats on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Mahmoud Khalil exercises his First Amendment rights. But, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio didn’t agree with what he said,” the Judiciary Democrats wrote in a post describing Khalil’s arrest. “This should terrify everyone.” They turned him into a hero: “Free Mahmoud Khalil,” the Judiciary Democrats wrote, above a picture of him with his hands in his pockets, outside Columbia’s main gate. The posts quickly sparked backlash.

“I think the Senate Judiciary, the minority, is not doing a great job. You can be for due process for people without celebrating them and turning them into freedom fighters,” Jarrod Bernstein, an attorney and Democratic activist who served as former President Barack Obama’s liaison to the Jewish community, told Jewish Insider last week. 

Trump’s actions against Khalil and other foreign students — particularly Tufts University Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained by masked ICE agents on her way to an iftar dinner, and whose only public affiliation with the anti-Israel cause is her co-authorship of an op-ed demanding that Tufts divest from Israel — have prompted widespread condemnation from within the Democratic Party and beyond. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Trump “weaponized immigration enforcement to aggressively target students in a manner that appears wildly inconsistent with the United States Constitution.” The deportations have even faced criticism from outside liberal circles, with The Free Press editorial board raising concerns on Tuesday about the lack of evidence and due process provided by Trump for the alleged immigration violations. 

But most of the messages from senior Democratic leaders, like the tweets from the Senate Judiciary Democrats, have failed to acknowledge Jewish Democrats’ real concerns about antisemitism and campus protests, even if many of them, too, are unhappy with the deportations. 

“The smart move is to not rally around any one individual, but to rally around the overall concept and problem,” said Ilan Goldenberg, who served as the Jewish outreach director for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and who is now J Street’s chief policy officer. “Now we’ve seen that it’s not one individual.”

The Trump administration has issued scores of executive orders, making it hard for Democrats to respond with any one coherent message to his policy moves. It is easier to take a strong oppositional stance to the deportations than a more nuanced one. But Jewish Democratic strategists told JI the result is that Jewish Democrats don’t feel heard by their party. 

“I think it’s fair to say that, on the one hand, I think a lot of American Jews are troubled by what Trump is doing, and at the same time, they’re not feeling well-supported by Democrats,” said one longtime Democratic operative. 

Making a strong argument against Trump’s deportations — actions he says are meant to fight antisemitism and rid the U.S. of Hamas sympathizers — requires Democrats to clean house of extremist elements that have supported those protests, according to Jon Reinish, a public affairs executive and former Democratic congressional staffer.

“A start would be making it crystal clear that they categorically reject those who have targeted, threatened and terrorized Jews on college campuses and that they reject fringe factions of the party, like the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], who have trafficked in Jew-hatred for years and have exploited and encouraged it for their own warped political purposes,” Reinish said. “Without that moral clarity, trust will continue to be less strong than it could be.” 

Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and the president of Democratic Majority for Israel, said there is a “political argument to be made” that it would be in Democrats’ political interest to try to take back the mantle of fighting antisemitism from Trump, particularly in the swing districts that will decide control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. 

“If you look at some of the districts that are going to be most fought over, most contentious, come next year, some of them have significant proportions of Jewish voters,” said Mellman. “When Tom Suozzi won a district like that, there’s no question that his support for the Jewish community and for Israel was critical in his being able to win that race and hold that seat.” Suozzi, a Democrat, won a special election on Long Island last year, followed by a general election win in November.

The case for Democrats mounting a stronger response to Trump on antisemitism goes beyond just Jewish voters, argued Ken Baer, a former Obama administration official who now runs a communications firm. 

“Jews are 2% of the population. So who cares?” Baer asked. “Well, it ends up that there are a lot of people in America who don’t like when people put on masks in cafes and libraries, and sit and scream that they support terrorist organizations that killed Americans and American soldiers.” 

The Jewish Democratic Council of America has staked out a position against the deportations that also sharply criticizes the actions of anti-Israel protesters. JDCA CEO Halie Soifer urged Democrats to “continue to lean in on antisemitism in this moment” in their response to Trump’s actions. 

“Democrats should point out the clear hypocrisy of a White House that purports to care about Jewish Americans but whose actions suggest otherwise,” Soifer told JI.