In December, the department’s Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council, or HSAPC, sent a report to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining a plan to combat college campus unrest stemming from Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

At the end of October, administration officials said they were taking action to combat antisemitism on college campuses, assigning dozens of “cybersecurity and protective security experts at DHS to engage with schools.”

In 2006, an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit revealed that DHS was monitoring anti-war student groups at multiple California college and feeding that information to the Department of Defense.

According to documents the ACLU obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the intelligence collected on student groups was intended “to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues.”

The threat left unspoken in Mayorkas’s memo echoes one spoken out loud by then Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft in the months after 9/11, when the first traces of the government’s desire to forge a once unimaginable expansion into public life in America rose to the surface.

“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” Ashcroft told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

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