Three South Alabama Students Charged With Threatening Trump Before Mobile Rally

Three University of South Alabama students were arrested Friday and charged with threatening President Donald Trump over social-media posts made in the days before his rally on the Mobile campus, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News.

The federal cases were unsealed Friday afternoon, hours before Trump was scheduled to take the stage at the university’s Mitchell Center, Lagniappe reported. Each student was charged with threatening the president.

Federal investigators found the posts during social-media checks ahead of the visit and identified the writers through emergency disclosure requests and information from University of South Alabama police, according to FBI affidavits cited by Lagniappe. One student allegedly wrote a threatening remark about Trump under a TikTok post about the campus visit. Another allegedly posted on X that people would “remember the University of South Alabama the same way they remember Utah Valley University.” Investigators noted that Utah Valley University is where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot last year. A third student allegedly replied to a TikTok post about the appearance.

Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch said earlier in the week that his office was assisting federal authorities monitoring social media tied to the visit. The university said the rally was not a campus event. The Mitchell Center had been rented by the Republican National Committee.

“The University of South Alabama unequivocally condemns any form of threats directed at elected officials or any individual with whom we disagree,” the university said in a statement to Fox News Digital. It said disagreement is part of a campus community, and that “there is a clear line between exercising free expression and engaging in intimidation or unlawful conduct.”

Trump spoke Friday evening as planned. He returned to Mobile about 11 years after the August 2015 rally that marked the first large crowd of his first campaign. “It sort of all began here,” he told the audience. He recognized Burch and University of South Alabama President Jo Bonner from the stage.

Fox News Digital said it had asked the Justice Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the university for more information. The students were not named in the initial Fox report.

The arrests sit against a separate security record the White House has been running all year. A University of Chicago survey released in September found 25 percent of adults, and 44 percent of Democrats, saying force would be justified to stop Trump from serving. That survey is not evidence in these cases. The evidence described in the affidavits is three posts, reviewed before a sitting president walked into a rented arena.

The Mobile stop is one piece of a multi-state swing. Trump campaigned Thursday in Texas and Oklahoma and is scheduled tonight in Dayton, Ohio, with Nebraska to follow. The White House has said he plans to cover 17 states before Nov. 3.

Threatening the president is a federal offense. A charge is not a conviction. What Friday established is that three students at the host campus were in federal custody, on that statute, before the speech began.