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Trump launches ‘October 7 Joint Task Force’, as war on Palestine protesters widens

Michael ArriaMarch 24, 2025

President-elect of the United States Donald Trump speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia)

Last week the Trump administration announced the formation of a joint task force that it said is meant to hold Hamas leaders accountable for the October 7 attack. But many fear it will be yet another weapon the administration will use to target activists within the United States. 

The Joint Task Force October 7 (JTF 10-7) will “investigate acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies, and their affiliates” which is similar to work that began under the Biden administration. The new task force however is also targeting “acts of antisemitism by these groups,” which the administration has indicated refers to campus activism for Palestine.

“The victims of Hamas’s decades-long violent campaign of terrorism against Israel will always have the support of the U.S. government, and the Department will no longer permit illegal support of Hamas on our campuses and elsewhere in the homeland,” said Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement. “Antisemitic acts of terrorism – whether here or abroad – will never go unpunished.” 

The move comes amid a deepening crackdown, as multiple protesters have been detained over their activism, including Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S resident and prominent participant in last spring’s Gaza encampment, is currently being held at a detention facility in Louisiana while his case gets heard in a New Jersey court.

“The legal risks are real,” write attorneys Thomas Anthony Durkin and Bernard E Harcourt in The Guardian. “They are perilous, and they are alarming. Where a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) – such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or related organizations such as the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – is concerned, the line separating political advocacy from material support to terrorism can be razor thin, and any doubt tends to be resolved against those engaged in the political advocacy.”

Groups like Samidoun have already faced government attacks. Last October the organization was slapped with sanctions as part of a joint action undertaken by Biden’s Treasury Department and the Canadian government.

“We see it as a part of this campaign against the Palestinian people, against the Palestinian diaspora, against the Arab and Muslim community, against the solidarity movement with Palestine,” Samidoun’s Europe Coordinator Mohammed Khatib told Mondoweiss at the time. We’ve seen these forms of repression against the student movement, against the queer movement, against the Jewish community for standing up for Palestine. So we are part of this package.”

While the targeting of Palestine activists and organizations isn’t new, Trump has expanded domestic repression to levels reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Student protesters like Khalil and Leqaa Kordia, who is currently being held at a Texas detention center after being arrested in Newark, have been scooped by ICE agents, not for specific crimes, but for allegedly threatening the foreign policy interests of the United States.

On March 17, Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University professor and postdoctoral scholar on religion, was ambushed by ICE officers near his home and Virginia outside his home in Virginia and taken into custody despite not being charged with a crime. He was informed that the federal government had revoked his visa.

“Ripping someone from their home and family, stripping them of their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint is a clear attempt by President Trump to silence dissent,” said ACLU of Virginia Senior Immigrants’ Rights Attorney Sophia Gregg in a statement on the case. “That is patently unconstitutional.”

Multiple lawsuits challenging Trump’s overreach have been launched in recent days.

Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia University student and legal permanent resident is suing Trump and other administration officials for trying to arrest and deport her. Chung was active in the school’s Gaza protests but was seemingly not as involved as Khalil.

“Her lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan shows the extensive, if so far unsuccessful, efforts by U.S. immigration officials to arrest her,” notes the New York Times. “Agents historically prefer to pick up immigrants in jail or prisons. Other types of arrests are more difficult, often requiring hours of research, surveillance and other investigative resources.”

The administration is also being sued by two Cornell graduate students and a Cornell professor. That lawsuit seeks a national injunction to block enforcement of two Trump Executive Orders.

One of the student plaintiffs is Momodou Taal, who almost had his visa revoked last year after a school suspension over his activism. Shortly after his legal effort was announced, it was revoked.

“We anticipated some serious backlash, but not to this extent,” Taal told Mondoweiss. “We thought that in a country that prides itself on the so-called rule of law, that claims to govern the world based on law and democracy, the courts would intervene before ICE and the FBI started showing up at people’s houses.”

After Khalil was detained, Trump announced that there were many more to come.

“I don’t have an estimate,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told a reporter when asked how many arrests to expect.  “I do know that DHS, based on very good intel that they have gathered at the direction of the president’s executive order, which made it very clear to the Department of Homeland Security that engaging, as I said, in anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.”