President Donald Trump’s administration has mostly defended its efforts to deport visa-holding foreign students on the grounds that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows deportation of those whose actions might have “adverse foreign policy consequences.”

But the administration could do a better job of articulating squarely what adverse consequences, exactly, it fears from the actions of high-profile detainees like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, who engaged in and helped organize anti-Israel protests.

Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the INA renders deportable any alien “whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” (author’s emphasis) if the Secretary of State “personally determines that the alien’s beliefs, statements, and associations” would compromise U.S. foreign policy interests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a two-page April 11 court memorandum for the Khalil case, asserted that Khalil’s “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States, and therefore undermined “U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world.”