The greatest threat to free speech since McCarthyism
On Saturday, immigration agents showed at the apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and told him his student visa had been revoked and that he was being detained. Khalil is married to an American, and his lawyer, speaking to the agents by phone, informed them that he had a green card, but they said that had been revoked as well. He was taken away, and as of this writing appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.
In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump made it clear that Khalil was snatched because of his activism. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Like many things done by Trump’s administration, Khalil’s arrest was shocking but not surprising. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly said he was going to deport anti-Israel student activists. Just last week, Axios reported on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to use A.I. to comb the social media accounts of student visa holders in a search for ostensible terrorist sympathies. The administration seems particularly determined to make an example of Columbia, announcing last week that it was canceling $400 million in grants and contracts with the school due to claims of ongoing anti-Jewish harassment.
But the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming shouldn’t obscure how serious Khalil’s detention is. If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.
“This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threats to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years,” said Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a direct attempt to punish speech because of the viewpoint it espouses.”
Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, hasn’t been charged with any crime. A dossier on him compiled by Canary Mission, a right-wing group that tracks anti-Zionist campus activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just demands for divestment from Israel. Last year Khalil was suspended from his graduate program for his role in the campus demonstrations, but the suspension was reversed soon after, apparently for lack of evidence, and he completed his degree. The Department of Homeland Security claimed he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” but that’s an impossibly vague, legally meaningless charge.
It’s true that, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, any foreigner who “endorses or espouses” terrorist activity is considered inadmissible to the United States. But Margo Schlanger, a law professor who served as head of civil rights in the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, points out that that provision is hardly ever used, especially against people already in the country, who largely have the same free speech protections as citizens.
You don’t need to take this from a liberal law scholar: During Trump’s first term, a legal analysis from Immigration and Customs Enforcement concluded the same thing. “Generally, aliens who reside within the territory of the United States stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens to assert First Amendment liberties,” it said. Khalil’s arrest, said Schlanger, “seems like an incredible overreach in light of the First Amendment concerns that even the government in the last Trump administration documented.” [Continue reading…]
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move.
“Violating rule of law, actually,” AOC wrote on Monday, responding to an assertion from Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, that Khalil’s kidnapping was mere “rule of law.”
“You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.
“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone—left, right, or center—who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.” [Continue reading…]
As hundreds of demonstrators rallied in New York City on Monday to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a federal judge just steps away blocked the Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate’s removal from the United States.
Judge Jesse M. Furman said Khalil is to remain in the U.S. “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction” as the court weighs a filing challenging his arrest and planned deportation. A hearing was scheduled for Wednesday at federal court in New York City. [Continue reading…]
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration will revoke “visas and/or green cards” of what he called “Hamas supporters” to expedite their deportation. ICE’s bureaucratic parent, the preeminent post-9/11 creation called the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said that Khalil was in fact “arrested” for leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”
“Activities aligned to… a designated terrorist organization” is a construction previously unheard of in the generation-long history of tortured official circumlocutions designed to obscure lawlessness in the guise of counterterrorism. When Israel’s genocide in Gaza began and accordingly provoked campus protests against it last fall, the Anti-Defamation League urged administrators to investigate protesters for the absurd claim of providing material support to terrorism. Thinking about this for 10 seconds unravels it: what material thing is a broke college student demanding their university divest from Israel supposed to be providing Hamas, whose funding Israel itself facilitated? But what DHS said Sunday night goes far, far further. Now the detainable/arrestable offense is anything “aligned” to the presumed prerogatives of a designated terrorist organization. In this case, that’s a series of protests on behalf of the position that Palestinians have the right to stay alive. And advocacy for Palestinians here is deliberately indistinguishable from “activities aligned to” Hamas. [Continue reading…]