Harry Truman, Donald Trump, and the Columbia protesters

The famously plainspoken President Harry Truman (“Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” to his supporters) was a particular hero of my parents and other Jewish Americans of their generation, and deservedly so. Batting down the objections of his own State Department, he championed the creation of the modern State of Israel, and made the U.S. the first country to recognize it.

He also vigorously campaigned to reverse the shameful exclusion of European Jews fleeing Nazism from our shores. In 1948, Truman signed a long-delayed Displaced Persons Act, which promised to reopen some immigration. But he had to sign it “reluctantly,” as he wrote, and he bluntly called out the fact that “the bill discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith” by continuing a biased “national origins formula” (quotas).

Pitted against Truman and his allyship with Jewish Americans was a powerful Nevada Senator named Patrick McCarran, who was an anti-New Deal Democrat and isolationist. McCarran, like the infamous Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, with whom he often sided, was obsessed with the real and sometimes exaggerated threat of Communism and what he called “a flood of undesirables” — those were immigrants like many of our own ancestors. He was completely opposed to admitting Holocaust survivors to our country due to his antisemitism. “Eighty-seven percent [of the survivors] are of one blood, one race, one religion,” he complained to an assistant.

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McCarran engineered a big legislative defeat for Truman with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952  — the McCarran-Walter Act. Drawing on Cold War hysteria, McCarran successfully overrode Truman’s veto of the bill, which continued to grossly restrict the immigration of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were attempting to flee. The implications of this law were not lost on our brethren. The list of active Jewish opponents of the McCarran-Walter bill reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary Jewish public organizations, like the American Jewish Committee, and prominent Jewish political leaders like the former New York Democratic Governor and then Senator Herbert Lehman, his Republican colleague Jacob Javits, and Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler.

The McCarran-Walter immigration law had several other onerous provisions, like handing the president and secretary of state vaguely defined powers to override the normal immigration process to deport people whose presence they might deem would “have potentially adverse foreign policy consequences.” There have been a number of large changes to our national immigration policies since 1952, but little did we know that the McCarran-Walters law would continue to be weaponized so many decades later.

We are at a historical inflection point in our state and country now. President Donald Trump is using maximum scare tactics on the issue of immigration and against free speech on college campuses as the tip of his spear to seize unprecedented power. It’s a movie Jewish Americans have seen before.

One particular cause for alarm is the now well-known case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and legal permanent resident Trump is trying to deport over Khalil’s involvement in last year’s controversial campus protests related to the Gaza war. Seeing and reading about the protest encampments, whose general theme has been anti-Israel, has been an emotional trigger for most of us, including me. We know there were some antisemitic incidents in the course of these many months of demonstrations, and certain protestors celebrated the Hamas-led massacre of the 1,200 Israeli civilian men, women, and children on October 7, 2023, that precipitated the war. We lack reliable information about exactly what role Mr. Khalil — who admits to being a negotiator and sometimes a leader for the encampment — may have played in any of this. But tellingly, the Trump team, while claiming Khalil is antisemitic (despite no evidence), has not accused him of any crime.

It has now been almost four weeks since Khalil was seized in his apartment building by plainclothes government agents who reportedly refused to identify themselves. Khalil was almost immediately transferred on the evening of his detention from New York to a site in Elizabeth, and then just as quickly whisked away to a Louisiana deportation facility. (Jerseyans take note: Federal Judge Jesse Furman, who coincidentally is an observant Jew, has ordered that Khalil’s case be brought back to our state.)

There has been no suggestion that the administration is ready to give this young man the due process that anyone here deserves under a democracy, much less respect the presumption that all U.S. citizens and permanent residents legally have free speech under our constitution. (Judge Furman’s order cited those very concerns.) Instead, Trump officials are citing the obscure, vague provisions of the Cold War McCarran-Walter Act, the same law that was birthed in extreme antisemitism.

The basic unseriousness of the Trump administration about actually fighting antisemitism is indicated by the number of right-wing antisemites Trump and his team have hired and publicly promoted. Moreover, they are trying to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, including its office of civil rights, a key resource for Jewish college students seeking protection on campuses. The daily catalog of anti-democratic power grabs we are seeing should be a big clue that Trump is not likely to do American Jews any favors.

I hope we see the kind of due process and respect for free speech in this case that is basic to who we are as a people, as Americans and Jews. For me, this is an issue well beyond Mr. Kahlil himself, and for that matter, beyond Palestinian student protesters.

Will I trust Donald Trump and his yes-men appointees to protect our rights? Give ’Em Hell, Harry Truman. That was a man the Jews could trust.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair is recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.