A federal judge in California recently ruled the Trump administration trampled First and Fifth Amendment rights while deporting student visa holders for criticizing Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. This legal defeat adds to growing evidence the administration has degraded civil rights law under the guise of enforcing it. The piece argues the administration is hypervigilant about antisemitism while remaining indifferent to discrimination against other minority groups.

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protecting vulnerable minorities evolved with consistent standards, but this administration has abandoned decades-old protocols. The Trump administration read the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions not just as a rebuke to affirmative action but as a ban on any campus program acknowledging race. It raised the threshold for unlawful discrimination while pillorying diversity, equity and inclusion as reverse racism.

The government has withheld billions from higher education, dismissed roughly 90 percent of education-related civil rights complaints, and implemented detention and deportation policies abandoning due process. In a contradictory move, the administration has demanded what amounts to D. E.

I. for Jews: mandatory antisemitism sensitivity trainings and targeted measures to promote an inclusive climate. When schools are accused of discriminating against Jews, penalties are wildly out of scale, such as slashing hundreds of millions in funding for medical and scientific research. The hypocrisy is the point, turning civil rights law into a political protection racket to attack higher education and other perceived enemies.

The disturbing excesses of Gaza war protests alone do not explain why Jews were selected for this special protected status. The simple truth is mounting this initiative served the Trump administration's cynical political aims. The largest campaign against antisemitism in American history has also been its supreme trivialization.