US Jewish group targets anti-Israel protesters in hopes Trump will deport them

Members of the US branch of the Betar Zionist movement are trying a new tack against anti-Israel protesters on college campuses, using artificial intelligence facial recognition technology to identify foreign students involved in the protests in the hope that President-elect Donald Trump will eventually deport them from the United States.

The US office of Betar, a right-wing movement founded in 1923 by Zeev Jabotinsky, has amassed a large repository of video footage from college protests over the past year, Ross Glick, executive director of Betar US said. A team of professionals is using facial recognition software and relationship databases to identify foreign students appearing in the videos.

So far, Glick said, they have created a list of dozens of students from Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as several Arab countries, identified at top schools like Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

“The next step,” Glick said, “is waiting until Trump’s inauguration on January 20 to hand over the information.”

While US citizens are entitled under the First Amendment to express pro-Hamas or anti-Israel views, Trump has promised to deport students with foreign visas who demonstrate against democratic values.

It is not clear how many foreign students have been involved in the protests, but sources said in August that only four foreign students were known to have been arrested, expelled, or barred from graduating due to their participation in protests since the war began.