Politico: Trump Admin's 'Anti-Semitism' Crackdown Mirrors Project 2025's 'Project Esther'

The Trump administration's intensifying crackdown on universities and pro-Palestinian protesters closely mirrors a lesser-known blueprint from the same creators of Project 2025.

Quietly unveiled last fall before the election, the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther offered a roadmap for deploying anti-terror, hate speech and immigration laws to "exploit" the vulnerabilities of what it deems to be an antisemitic and "anti-American" pro-Palestinian movement. It's a playbook the White House appears to be following as it pulls university funding and strips students and professors of legal status — an effort that has launched the administration's aggressive immigration crackdown into a more controversial, politically dicier territory.

People involved with Project Esther are close allies of President Donald Trump, and some now have roles in the administration. And according to a POLITICO analysis of the 33-page document, of the 47 points it lays out, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have already moved in their rhetoric or policy to make at least 27 reality.

Those include calls to deport pro-Palestinian activists who are in the country legally, revoke the visas of international students and faculty who have supported pro-Palestinian causes, defund organizations that aid them and discredit the broader movement by branding its backers as supporters of Hamas.

"As we were watching our campuses burn, as we were watching Jewish students that were locking themselves inside of their rooms because they were afraid to leave, [Trump] made promises to our community," said Bryan Leib, a member of the task force behind Project Esther. "Here we are in April — and promises made and promises kept."

[...] Some of the co-chairs of the task force are closely aligned with the president. Mario Bramnick, a Florida-based, far-right evangelical pastor, has had the ear of Trump, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And another co-chair, Ellie Cohanim, who served as the State Department's deputy envoy to combat antisemitism during Trump's first term, is on his shortlist to replace Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as U.N. ambassador after Trump withdrew her nomination. Bramnick and Cohanim did not respond to requests for comment.

[...] Leo Terrell, an attorney and former Fox News contributor in Trump's Justice Department, is heading the administration's task force, separate from the group that put out Project Esther. Terrell has quickly gained acclaim among the groups that backed Project Esther, and he and other administration officials continue to seek outside counsel as they roll out policy, said Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, which provided some guidance for the blueprint. Klein praised Terrell's work and said the Trump administration is putting universities "on notice."

"They've even asked me which universities do we think are the ones they should concentrate on — which are the ones we found very problematic," Klein said. "So we gave them that information."

[...] Several of Project Esther's recommendations have already made their way into the Trump administration's policy, most notably its calls for pro-Palestinian activists who are foreign students, faculty and staff at universities to be "in violation of visa requirements" and either "voluntarily depart" or be deported from the U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that the administration had revoked at least 300 visas from students, visitors and others, including Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts whose arrest went viral in a video reposted by the State Department. But he declined to say how they've identified the specific cases.

[...] Project Esther also calls for groups they call "Hamas Supporting Organizations" to lose eligibility for public funds, and to undermine the credibility of pro-Palestinian university faculty and staff, with the ultimate goal of revoking their "credentials" and "affiliation with campuses."

The administration has followed those lines with gusto, announcing the latest action Tuesday: the suspension of $210 million in research grants to Princeton University as part of an ongoing investigation into antisemitism on campus. That followed the cancellation of $400 million to Columbia University last month and the review of more than $9 billion in contracts and grants at Harvard University. Project Esther names each of those schools as places where professors "had openly advocated or supported" pro-Palestinian groups, citing Canary Mission, a website accused of doxxing critics of Israel.

[...] The project's ultimate goal is to leave pro-Palestinian activists "unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests" and bar them from the country's "open society."