NBC News
Jean Lee and Simone Weichselbaum
November 4, 2023
As campuses across the country continue to erupt in protests over the Israel-Hamas war, a little-known 2019 presidential executive order is expected to fuel a flood of student legal claims against universities.
Attorneys — from a mix of white-shoe corporate firms to Jewish advocacy groups — are meeting with students who say their schools are failing to protect them from antisemitic or anti-Israel conduct.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump signed an order instructing federal officials to expand the interpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism” as a form of discrimination based on race, color and national origin — prohibited behavior for programs that get federal funding. Trump signed the order amid a series of violent incidents against Jews, including the 2018 killing of 11 congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue and a 2019 attack that killed three inside a Kosher supermarket in New Jersey.
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