Many Americans have grown weary of the impending threats to their rights in the days following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Trump’s notoriety for impeding on various freedoms during his first term — by way of anti-transgender laws in North Carolina and violating the First Amendment right to freedom of religion with the Muslim travel ban — has contributed to these fears. Chief among them is the worry that the Trump administration will attack First Amendment rights to protest and use the power of the federal government to attack those who express dissent — something he has done many times before. 

In 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Trump and his administration deployed thousands of National Guard troops to arrest protesters and journalists in major cities across the United States with excessive force. The results were catastrophic, leading to local and federal officers breaking protesters’ bones with batons, firing rubber bullets at crowds and using chemical weapons on the demonstrators. This was pure violence imposed onto largely non-violent protests. Though violent suppression of protest is treated as commonplace in the United States, this type of response violates the legal principle Posse Comitatus, where federal troops and law enforcement are not to be deployed during instances of mass protests. 

Mass protests have picked up again in the last year, this time pertaining to Israel’s ongoing siege in the Gaza Strip, with thousands of protests on college campuses since October 2023. These protests have faced unprecedented levels of discrimination and violence under the Biden-Harris administration, with students getting arrested, pepper sprayed, beaten by cops and pro-Israeli mobs, as well as having rubber bullets fired at them — quite reminiscent of how the Trump administration dealt with protesters. At NYU, over 100 members of the university community were arrested at the Gould Plaza encampment. Alarmingly, it seems the fate of protest under a newer and more abrasive Trump administration will escalate this violence.

On the campaign trail for the 2024 presidential election, Trump came out vehemently against student protesters, going as far as to threaten student protesters that aren’t U.S. citizens with deportation. 

“If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you,” Trump said at a rally in New Jersey. 

Trump has proposed to re-invoke the Insurrection Act of 1792, an act which would permit him as the president to deploy the military domestically as a means of law enforcement. This is a direct assault on American freedoms as they are outlined in the Constitution. Russell Vought — the former director of the United States Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s administration — claimed that re-installing and utilizing the Insurrection Act would allow Trump to further crack down to limit the number of protests, including those across campuses. 

In accompaniment with Republican-led states efforts to label mass protests as riots, the ability of college students to freely and safely protest might be more difficult in the next four years. Project 2025 explicitly draws attention to using force against journalists and protesters, which is a direct violation of the First Amendment. Project Esther, an extension of Project 2025, calls for using counterterrorism and immigration laws against leaders of a so-called “Hamas Support Network.”

In the upcoming four years, students will face stronger barriers against their ability to hold lawful protests. College protesters who already experience a lack of support from universities in their efforts to hold demonstrations will have to be even more vigilant. But the heightened opposition against our right to protest only makes it more important that we do — our right to speak out against injustice won’t be stripped from us without a fight.

WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. Opinions expressed in the house editorial reflect the views of WSN’s Editorial Board.

Contact Leila Olukoga at [email protected].