The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and the Struggle Ahead
Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0
We are in uncharted waters where Trump is criminalizing free speech even as he has ended Israel’s genocidal war, for now.
1) First and foremost, we need to build as militant, strong, and broad a movement as possible to defend Mahmoud Khalil. I will leave the legal issues to others, but the terrain that “we,” meaning unwavering socialists and communists, fight on is social.
2) This is a galvanizing moment. Defending free speech and the right to dissent gives us the high ground. It’s a chance to organize. This means bringing in new people, not merely mobilizing those who already agree with us. We need to win people to the left, such as those who are alienated by politics or liberals who are frustrated or disgusted by liberal elite capitulation to Trump.
A galvanizing moment is when we can unite people with a clear purpose. It is a precursor to a disruptive moment, like Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, the George Floyd movement, and the student encampments for Gaza. In all those cases, the left shifted politics in their direction. Of course, the results have been a mixed bag but that is not the fault of the disruptive moments. They are necessary for the left to achieve meaningful social change.
3) Speaking of liberals, liberal elites paved the way for Trump with the Democratic Party’s full-metal backing of Israel’s genocide. Harris dehumanized and demeaned Palestinians during her campaign. She promoted Israel’s Jim Crow-style rape hoax that was one of the primary motivators for the genocide, she embraced the genocide, and that is why she lost.
4) But in the end Harris capitulated and said she would end the war in Gaza. It was too little, too late, two days before the election. But Palestinian- and Muslim-Americans and leftists who held firm are a model we should emulate in how to wield power from below.
5) Liberal media and liberal universities also paved the way, such as CNN’s Dana Bash who in May 2024 likened peaceful student protesters at UCLA to Nazi Germany AFTER the students were attacked by a mob of violent Ziofascists. And Columbia University will never appease Trump, but it will continue cooperating with him to try to crush and criminalize students, faculty, and staff exercising 1A freedoms.
6) AOC shows why Democrats are The Enemy. Remember AOC’s shocking primary victory in 2018? She quickly threw Palestinians under the bus. She likened creeping Zionist genocide in the West Bank to gentrification, saying, “settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.”
At the 2024 DNC she covered for the genocide, spewing a lie that Harris was working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Notice how AOC did not sign the letter demanding the release of Khalil, and that only 14 out of 214 Democrats in the House did? (Apparently AOC did sign another letter calling for Khalil’s immediate release with 41 other politicians from NY State, but that is the bare minimum.)
7) Let me talk strategy. Anyone talking about working within the Democratic Party is siding with the enemy. Few leftists realize that Dems don’t need our votes. The left is far too weak, scattered, and disorganized to tilt elections. Dems need our silence. The left has a singular ability to analyze, historicize, and critique why and how Dems betray their base, do the dirty work of the right, and exist only to function as a graveyard for social movements. So Dems need us to shut up, especially right before elections, when we can potentially force Dems to the left by influencing voters with our ideas and critiques. The answer is the more they try to shut us down, the louder we need to become.
8) We need a complete break from the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean third party. We need revolutionary parties of the left. Yeah, that is a huge order, but all the strategies of working within the Democratic Party, trying to take it over, or other parliamentary strategies have failed. Build power to pressure whoever is in office, but stop worrying about electoral politics and third parties.
If a third electoral party does form, it will evolve out of powerful working-class and social movements. Then, to be viable, a third party needs an existing party to break up. In this case, a wing of the Democrats will become a third party, which will then supplant the old Democratic Party as a new second party. This is extremely unlikely any time soon. I am just explaining the likeliest path to success.
9) The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil speaks to the failure of the left to unite to end the genocide. Many people warned in 2024, myself included, that support for the genocide was going to cost the Dems the election. Leftists who sided with Harris need to learn from this. They got the worst of all possible worlds: genocide and Trump.
10) If a critical mass of the left had thrown its energy into ending the genocide, damn the election, we would have a more powerful movement now to confront the fascist strategy behind arresting Khalil because we would have had a year of movement building under our belts. Just as important, we would have had the political high ground for taking the correct position that genocide was not a single issue. It was the ONLY issue.
11) Don’t forget Occupied Palestine, which includes the Ziofascist regime. Trump has his own cynical, self-interested, and avaricious agenda, so he has no love of Israel. It’s clear Trump and Netanyahu have an agreement that Israel can intensify its ethnic cleansing and murder in the West Bank in return for an end to the active genocide in Gaza. (The slow-motion genocide continues, as does Israel’s illegal war in and occupation of Syria and Lebanon.
At the same time, Trump’s White House is negotiating directly with Hamas. It has sidelined Netanyahu by having its operatives speak directly to Israeli media, and Trump’s hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, said out loud that the US was “not an agent of Israel.”
Trump is doing things that many leftists claimed Biden and Harris could never do.
12) Even as Trump criminalizes dissent and the Palestine Solidarity Movement at home, he has stopped Israel’s active genocide of Gaza for nearly two months. It is more proof that the excuses by many leftists that Biden and Harris were powerless to end the genocide was simply an unconscionable surrender to a rotten idea that the road to socialism runs through the Democratic Party.
13) No gods, no masters. No fear, no favor.
This piece first appeared on Arun News.
Protesting Trump’s Unlawful Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil
Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0
As chants of ‘No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA!’ echoed through downtown Manhattan on 10 March 2025, I spoke to a person named Richard who had been marching just ahead of me. He declined to give his last name but was eager to speak his piece.
‘We need to be out in the streets and say “This will not fly. This will not happen on our watch”’, he said.
The state kidnapping and imminent deportation of recently graduated Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil had brought both Richard and me out into those streets.
Khalil was detained by the U.S. government on Saturday, 8 March, at his university-owned residence after returning from an Iftar dinner with his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant. According to information from the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), Khalil was being held in a detention centre in Jena, Louisiana, as of 11 March 2025.
The Palestinian student, born in 1995, was a visible participant throughout 2024 in the Columbia students’ protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a result, he has now been accused of ‘pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity’ by the president of the United States on the social media platform the latter owns.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s indecency until at least 12 March 2025 but Khalil’s future in the United States beyond that is uncertain.
‘We need to remember what Mahmoud was harassed by Zionists and then arrested by [the Department of Homeland Security] for. It was for protesting Israel’s genocide of his own people, of the Palestinian people,’ Miriam Osman, an organiser with Palestinian Youth Movement, told Al Jazeera. The Department of Homeland Security is the cabinet-level body in the US that houses ICE.
Khalil’s arrest comes amidst an alarming rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that many link to the US president’s words and actions and land sales in the West Bank by Zionist organizations targeting US citizens.
The Trump administration is attempting to deport Khalil, who graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024. This is despite the fact that Khalil holds permanent residence in the United States.
According to anonymous government sources cited by the New York Times, he is accused of “presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” an obscure provision in the primary US immigration law that practitioners have not seen used to justify a deportation in living memory.
An hour previous to the march, framed by the austere government buildings that surround downtown New York City’s Federal Plaza, about 1,000 people had gathered for a demonstration.
The numbers in Federal Plaza were not themselves massive by the standards of the past two years of Palestine protests in New York City. But those assembled represented a much larger group of people; over 2 million have signed a petition as of 11 March 2025 to ‘demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from [immigration] detention and a reversal to Columbia University’s protocol permitting [immigration enforcement agents] on campus without a warrant.’
Moreover, the protest brought out a wider swathe of community and movement organisations than many pro-Palestine protests in the New York City area, ranging from anti-Zionist organisations like Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace to political groups like ANSWER Coalition and Democratic Socialists of America to local immigrant rights bodies. These groups have been active in the protests that began since October 2023 against the genocide in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil was part of those protests.
‘The Trump regime… is endangering Jewish people and using the guise of fighting antisemitism to dismantle our Constitutionally protected rights to free speech and dissent’, said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on its website.
Numerous speakers at the rally emphasised the need to organise against Zionism and against Trump in daily life. One protester was already living that; she declined to be formally interviewed but said that she had been on her way home from a doctor’s appointment when she learned of the demonstration and felt compelled to attend.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
"Khalil's abduction, in its cruelty and unlawfulness, has horrified people around the country. Let us be clear: This is what fascism looks like, and it is part of a much broader campaign," said the director of Palestine Legal.
Pro-Palestine demonstrators gather outside Gracie Mansion to demand the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil in New York City, U.S., March 11, 2025.
(Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Eloise Goldsmith
Mar 12, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
When legal resident and Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents on Saturday, his 8-months pregnant wife was with him. In a statement released Tuesday, Khalil's wife recounted the couple's encounter with DHS and begged for her husband's release.
"I demand the U.S. government release him, reinstate his green card, and bring him home," said Khalil's wife, who is not named in the statement.
Khalil, who completed his graduate coursework at Columbia University in December and played a prominent role in pro-Palestine protests at the campus last year, was confronted by immigration agents on March 8 who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke his student visa. Khalil's lawyer told the agents that Khalil has a green card, and the agents said that that had been revoked, too, according to Khalil's attorney.
"This last week has been a nightmare," said Khalil's wife, who said that Mahmoud had emailed Columbia University the day before his arrest and asked the university for legal support because he had been the target of an "intense and targeted doxxing campaign." That email went unanswered, she said.
"Anti-Palestinian organizations were spreading false claims about my husband that were simply not based in reality," she said.
The couple was confronted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after coming home from an Iftar dinner in the later evening on Saturday. An officer told Khalil's wife to go upstairs, but she refused, according to the statement.
"The officers later barricaded Mahmoud from me," she said. "We were not shown any warrant and the ICE officers hung up the phone on our lawyer. When my husband attempted to give me his phone so I could speak with our lawyer, the officers got increasingly aggressive, despite Mahmoud being fully cooperative."
She said that the officers handcuffed Khalil and forced him into an unmarked vehicle. "Watching this play out in front of me was traumatizing: It felt like a scene from a movie I never signed up to watch," she said. "I am pleading with the world to continue to speak up against his unjust and horrific detention by the Trump administration."
After Khalil was arrested on Saturday he was transferred multiple states away to an ICEprocessing center in Jena, Louisiana.
A federal judge on Monday temporarily halted the Trump administration's effort to deport Khalil, and on Wednesday Khalil's legal defense is set to appear in court for a hearing before that same judge.
"Khalil's abduction, in its cruelty and unlawfulness, has horrified people around the country. Let us be clear: This is what fascism looks like, and it is part of a much broader campaign," said Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Palestine Legal, in an article for The Nation published Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who has pledged to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters on university campuses, said Khalil's arrest is "the first arrest of many to come."
The administration accuses Khalil of supporting Hamas, but neither White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, DHS, nor ICE have provided evidence to support their accusations against Khalil, according to CNN.
Reuters reported that the judge could order Khalil's release, but deportation proceedings could still continue in a separate immigration court, teeing up a test of "where immigration courts draw the line between protected free speech and alleged support for groups the United States calls terrorists."
By AFP
March 12, 2025
Protesters rally outside the New York courthouse where a preliminary hearing over Mahmoud Khalil's deportation was held - Copyright AFP CHARLY TRIBALLEAU
A leader of US student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza slated for removal has been denied legal advice, a judge heard Wednesday, after US President Donald Trump vowed to deport foreign pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, one of the most prominent faces of the protest movement that erupted in response to Israel’s conduct of the war, was arrested and taken to Louisiana over the weekend, sparking protests.
The government has not accused Khalil of breaking any laws, suggesting instead that his permanent residency was being revoked over his involvement in the protests.
His arrest has triggered outrage from critics of the Trump administration as well as free speech advocates, including some on the political right, who say such a move has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
Khalil had only spoken to lawyers on a monitored phone line from Louisiana and had not yet had a privileged conversation with them, his attorney Ramzi Kaseem told a federal court in New York Wednesday.
He was “taken at night as he walked home with his wife and taken 1,000 miles away to Louisiana,” Kaseem told the court, noting Khalil’s wife, a US citizen, is eight months pregnant with their first child.
Khalil was “detained and processed for deportation… because he was in advocacy of Palestinian rights.”
“Help us gain more regular access — we have not been able to confer — our access to our client is severely limited.”
Judge Jesse Furman ordered that Khalil receive a daily call protected by client-attorney privilege, meaning the authorities cannot monitor its content.
– ‘Prohibiting anti-Semitism’ –
There was no immediate decision on deportation, or on the legal question of where the case should be heard, with the government arguing it should be either New Jersey, where Khalil was processed, or Louisiana.
Judge Furman set a deadline of Friday for the government to submit arguments to the court with a decision due on Monday.
Outside the hearing, hundreds protested in support of Khalil, flying Palestinian flags and holding up banners, while actress Susan Sarandon was at court to back the detained man.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied Wednesday that the arrest was an attack on free speech.
“Once you’re in this country on such a (student) visa, we will revoke it” for alleged support of Hamas, he said in Ireland on the way to a G7 meeting of foreign ministers.
“And if you end up having a green card, not citizenship, but a green card as a result of that visa, while you’re here (doing) those activities, we’re going to kick you out. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security, in announcing Khalil’s arrest, said it had acted “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State.”
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said authorities had supplied a list of other Columbia students that officers were seeking to deport over their alleged participation in protests.
The university — which has already seen $400 million in federal funding cut over accusations of not sufficiently addressing anti-Semitism — was not cooperating, she added.
Campuses across the country were rocked last year by student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, with some resulting in violent clashes involving police and pro-Israel counter-protesters.
Trump and other Republicans have broadly accused the protesters of supporting Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group whose deadly attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel sparked the war.
Erik De La Garza
March 12, 2025
People demonstrate outside Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, on the day of a hearing on the detention of Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, in New York City, U.S., March 12, 2025. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
The Saturday night immigration arrest of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil raises a multitude of legal questions – but none as important as how the “kidnapping” of President Donald Trump’s “first political prisoner” was allowed to unfold.
That’s according to attorney and columnist for The Nation Elie Mystal, who warned readers in an opinion piece on Wednesday that while Trump’s order to arrest the Palestinian activist was “technically legal,” it was permitted only because Trump’s MAGA base of supporters elevated him to the presidency a second time.
“This government can use its monopoly of force in this way because the American people elected a fascist wanna-be dictator to rule over them,” Mystal wrote. “That wanna-be dictator, Donald Trump, promised to do exactly what he is doing.”
He added: “The warrant for Khalil’s abduction was signed on November 5, 2024, by over 77 million people who voted for fascism, and 90 million eligible voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote against fascism. The government can do this because this is what people who support Trump want the government to do.”
But Mystal also devoted his Wednesday op-ed in The Nation to voice his belief that the right questions surrounding Khalil’s arrest have not been raised.
“The only relevant question is not ‘how can the government do this?’ It is ‘how can we who oppose this fascist regime stop them.’” And the law provides few answers, the legal expert pointed out.
“The law has always been inadequate in the face of the monopoly of force and a dictator willing to use it,” he said. “The law will always shift and change to accommodate and appease the men who rule with the guns.”
Mystal closed by telling readers that Khalil's “peaceful protest” is not a crime in this country but added: “At least it wasn’t until this country installed a deranged bigot in power.”
He concluded that “only a popular uprising can defeat fascist overlords,” and warned that the arrest of Khalil – who he referred to as “a political prisoner” – would not be the last if the public sits idly by and waits “for the courts to sort it out.”
Past administrations handed Trump the tools of fascism, from the Department of Homeland Security to mass surveillance.
Mahmoud Khalil did everything by the book. The 30-year-old Palestinian came to the United States to study, completed his master’s degree at an Ivy League school, married a U.S. citizen and obtained legal permanent residency. Last year, as students across the country called on their universities to divest from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Khalil led negotiations on behalf of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition. Fellow students said he was patient and strategic in conversations with administrators, and he spoke tactfully in interviews with the media. While elected officials decried student protesters for shielding their identities, Khalil often appeared unmasked, becoming a public face for CUAD’s demands.
These are the things that the Gaza solidarity movement’s critics have demanded from student protesters in order to win their respect. Khalil did them all. He exercised his constitutional right to free speech and has not been charged with any crime. And yet, on March 8, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at Khalil’s home and arrested him anyway. The agents told Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, that the State Department had revoked his student visa; when she informed them that he in fact holds a green card, the ICE officers said the State Department was canceling that instead.
Donald Trump made it clear that this moment was coming. He has repeatedly pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestine protests, falsely casting the protesters as “pro-jihadist.” On Monday, Trump declared that Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.” While a federal judge has stayed Khalil’s deportation, the Columbia graduate’s illegal arrest is a chilling milestone in the Trump administration’s draconian crackdown on dissent.
I emphasize Khalil’s mainstream respectability here, not because I believe there’s one single “right” way to protest, but because it underscores what human rights advocates have been warning about for decades: The systematic erosion of constitutional protections in the wake of 9/11 has always been a threat to everyone’s civil liberties, not just those engaged in acts of mass violence.
When former President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” in 2001, his administration — largely with the support of Congress — ushered in a new era of expanded executive power and a blatant disregard for constitutional rights. Bush launched the President’s Surveillance Program in secret, which directed the National Security Agency to conduct illegal electronic spying on U.S. citizens, including warrantless phone-tapping and the mining of internet data. Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, with little to no debate, drastically expanding the government’s surveillance powers. Meanwhile, a parallel criminal legal system took shape, as Bush ordered the creation of secretive military tribunals with limited oversight to try detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Torture techniques were greenlit — by officials at some of the highest levels of government — in violation of international law. Throughout this, the Bush administration used the unitary executive theory to defend a broad interpretation of “executive privilege” and exempt its actions and deliberations from public view.
But creating a terrorism exception to the Constitution was always going to come back around to haunt dissenters. As Trump has made abundantly clear, accusations of terrorism can be levied baselessly to suppress dissent and consolidate political power. Thus far, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which was itself created during Bush’s tenure — has accused Khalil only of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terrorist organization, but has not clarified what those activities were or even what “aligned to” means in practice. Providing material support for terrorism is illegal, but this has a specific definition under U.S. law — supplying money, weapons, training, housing, and other resources to designated terrorist organizations. Even passing out flyers with Hamas logos — something the White House recently claimed, without evidence, that Khalil did — would not meet the “material support” bar.
Of course, the Bush legacy is also one of baseless terrorism accusations, particularly against Muslim and Arab men. The post-9/11 National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) required noncitizen men from more than two dozen, primarily Muslim-majority countries to register with the DHS before entering the U.S. and have their whereabouts tracked while in the country. The purported anti-terrorism effort surveilled more than 80,000 people yet never secured a single terrorism conviction in its 10 years of operation; about 13,000 people were, however, put through deportation proceedings.
NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and dismantled completely by 2016, but plenty of other federal government surveillance programs have cropped up to take its place. As The Verge reported, ICE can access the address data of most Americans through their utility records and sweep up personal information through a sprawling network of state, local and federal government databases. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law found that, since its founding in 2003, ICE has dramatically expanded its spying powers and now operates as a “domestic surveillance agency.”
“ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report’s authors note. “In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S.” ICE probably only needed to know Khalil’s name to locate him at his Columbia University-owned apartment.
When Barack Obama became president in 2008, he notably declined to walk back Bush-era surveillance powers or prosecute those involved in torturing detainees at Guantánamo, claiming he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Biden’s administration further entrenched and expanded the federal government’s power to conduct electronic surveillance.
Trump’s attempt to deport Khalil draws from and builds upon this legacy. This is the norm of presidential power in 2025 — drastic government overreach, mass warrantless surveillance, the weaponization of terrorism accusations to suppress First Amendment activity. With a fascist in office, attacks on civil liberties will be escalated, and Muslim and Arab communities will bear the brunt of the administration’s repression.
On March 11, Khalil’s wife issued a statement. It paints a picture of a scene that Trump has promised will soon play out again and again across the country. “U.S. immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle,” wrote Khalil’s wife. “Instead of putting together our nursery and washing baby clothes in anticipation of our first child, I am left sitting in our apartment, wondering when Mahmoud will get a chance to call me from a detention center.”
The law was originally used to target Jewish immigrants suspected of being Soviet sympathizers.
By Sharon Zhang ,
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked an obscure immigration provision enacted during the J. Edgar Hoover-era Red Scare to target pro-Palestine protesters, reports say as advocates for Palestinian rights warn that the crackdown on protests against Israel’s genocide is just the beginning of a wider suppression of free speech rights.
The State Department is using a provision established in 1952 — as federal officials were surveilling and prosecuting people on suspicion of them being communists or communist sympathizers — in the Immigration and Nationality Act to capture and revoke the visas of immigrants who have expressed support for Palestinian rights, reports have found, in a program called “Catch and Revoke.”
This provision was used in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday, a Palestinian Columbia University protester and green card holder, Zeteo reports. Rubio reportedly personally signed off on Khalil’s arrest and deportation, with officials seemingly believing at first that Khalil was in the U.S. on a visa, but later pivoting and saying that the administration will also revoke green cards after realizing Khalil’s status.
Legal experts have pointed out that, while green card holders do have more protections under the law from anti-immigrant actions, the Secretary of State does hold the authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to make personal determinations to remove green card holders if their presence in the country “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”
Legal expert Steve Vladeck has noted that Rubio is supposed to provide Congress with notification of the decision, but it’s unclear if he’s adhered to that process.
Trump Admin Reportedly Using AI to Label, Target Visa Holders as “Pro-Hamas”
Advocates for Palestinian rights raised alarm over the program, saying it is designed to chill dissent. By Sharon Zhang , Truthout March 7, 2025
Forward pointed out last week that the Immigration and Nationality Act codified the federal government’s ability to go after “subversives,” and particularly targeted “Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents,” the publication wrote.
As part of the “Catch and Revoke” program, the administration is reportedly using AI to identify and track pro-Palestine protesters and those who supposedly express sympathies for Hamas — code for those who support Palestinian rights.
The administration has already identified “multiple targets” like Khalil under the program, Zeteo reported on Tuesday, citing State Department officials familiar with the campaign.
This comes as numerous civil society groups, legal experts and progressive advocates have raised dire concern over the threat to free speech rights posed by Khalil’s detention — and the escalation of repressive, McCarthyist tactics being used against protesters on the left.
In November 2023 under the Biden administration, when he was a senator, Rubio had personally advocated for the State Department to use the Immigration and Nationality Act to target supposed “Hamas supporters,” saying that the agency has “broad authority … to revoke visas.”
The State Department responded to the letter shortly after it was sent confirming that the department does indeed hold that authority. The agency seemingly never invoked that power under President Joe Biden, though Biden did repeatedly condemn protesters and accuse them of having terrorist sympathies, as the Trump administration is doing.
Universities may sow their own demise if they continue to aid the suppression of pro-Palestine campus movements.
This past week has been punctuated by a series of horrifying events. Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia who was a mediator during last year’s encampments, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday and has now been transported to an “immigration holding facility” (ICE jail) in Jena, Louisiana.
In an unprecedented act, ICE claimed to “revoke” his green card, and for at least a day his lawyers and his wife, who is eight months pregnant, did not know his location.
Khalil is being targeted for participating in peaceful protests for the boycott, divestment, and sanction of the State of Israel for its genocide in Palestine. These protests were suppressed in the name of “combating antisemitism” and making campuses “safe” by administrators who invited police on campus to brutalize.
While Khalil’s detention is a horrifying, authoritarian escalation by the Trump administration, the path to it was greenlit by college administrators and politicians, many of whom describe themselves as liberals. This escalation was only possible because these liberals colluded to crush pro-Palestinian voices long before Trump took office, corroding the integrity of academic institutions and through it, the future of our nation as a whole.
On March 4, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This statement follows the announcement that a new “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” will be targeting 10 U.S. college campuses that had large encampments or Gaza solidarity protests last spring.
But prior to Trump taking office, colleges and universities were already surveilling our students. They were already arresting them: Last year, we protested outside of City College of New York as students were loaded into police vans. Tens of students across the country have been expelled. Faculty — including contingent, tenure track and tenured faculty — have been pushed out from their positions.
Related Story
Trump Wants Us to Fear ICE — Our Resistance Must Spread Solidarity, Not Panic
ICE arrived in unmarked vehicles to snatch our neighbors. Here’s how a North Carolina community organized in response. By Lewis Raven Wallace , Truthout February 21, 2025
Immigrant students have been targeted long before Trump. Last year, Cornell University threatened one of its own graduate students, who was on an F-1 visa, with expulsion due to his participation in peaceful pro-Palestine protests. This would have resulted in the student being deported, for loss of student status.
With each act of oppression, the bar for respect of human liberties and the freedom of academic spaces wanes.
Last week, in the lead-up to Mahmoud’s detention, nine students at Barnard College were arrested at a pro-Palestine sit-in on their campus, protesting the prior expulsion of three of their peers. The Trump administration also pulled $400 million in federal grants from Columbia for its alleged “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
And, the week before, in an incredible overstep in executive authority, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that our employer, City University of New York (CUNY) Hunter College, remove job postings for “Palestine Studies,” deeming their mention of “settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, and apartheid” as “hateful” and “antisemitic.” The CUNY chancellor and Board of Trustees concurred with her office’s position.
The pushback against these egregious violations of the rights of pro-Palestinian students was weak and muted. Meanwhile these infringements on academic freedom by campus administrators and politicians have created the conditions that an administration intent on enacting a segregationist vision for the U.S. can now exploit. This not only includes the continued suppression of pro-Palestine voices, but also the attack on critical race theory and all forms of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on our campuses, including (and particularly) on race and sexuality.
Amid this repression, immigrant students, among the most vulnerable on our campuses, have been singled out for attack.
Mahmoud’s arrest followed a targeted campaign on social media by pro-Israeli groups and one of Columbia University’s own faculty members, Shai Davidai, who tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio on March 6, asking him to deport Khalil. It came after groups like Columbia Alumni for Israel, and right-wing hate groups like Mothers Against College Antisemitism (MACA), identified him and other students on social media for targeting.
Mahmoud Khalil has now been transported to an “immigration holding facility” (ICE jail) in Jena, Louisiana.
These groups were empowered by university administrators’ acquiescence to their demands, whether that be canceling the showing of the film Israelism at our own Hunter College in November of 2023, or the Office of the President of New York University reporting to MACA on the sanctioning of student protestors.
They celebrate the arrest of Mahmoud, because now, under an administration that has taken a deep authoritarian turn, these right-wing groups feel they have a say, literally, on who can be part of our nation.
In a January 29 executive order, as part of a broader policy on mass deportation, the Trump administration directed leaders of agencies including the Departments of Education and Homeland Security to familiarize institutions of higher education with immigration policy “so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and “if warranted, [take] actions to remove such aliens.”
The Trump administration will reportedly deploy AI technologies through a program of “catch and revoke” to catch students who are “pro-Hamas” and revoke their visas.
An adjoining fact sheet spelled it out further: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Another executive order laid the groundwork for deporting immigrants exhibiting “hostile attitudes” toward the United States in the name of combating terrorism.
The danger to our immigrant students is heightened not only by the Trump administration’s new policies, but also by the Laken Riley Act, passed with the support of many Democrats in the House and the Senate, that threatens to deport any immigrant on the accusation, and not conviction, of a variety of petty crimes or of assault on an officer — putting the stability of immigrants at the mercy of anyone who wants to report them to authorities.
The specter of deportation has long haunted student activists of all stripes, who have reason to be distrustful of law enforcement which has a history of targeting people of color, including those who are Muslim and Black.
The precedent set by the villainization of our students for their political views and identities aims to both desensitize us and lay the groundwork for the complete erosion of the independence and safety of academic institutions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the attack on federal funding, which predates this latest statement.
Already in the first month of Trump’s presidency, federal agencies froze payments on grants, shuttered entire research centers and circulated lists of words to be flagged for review. In issuing these orders, Trump and his administration have repeatedly cited “DEI” and “woke gender ideology” as justifications for ending federal funding. As these orders began circulating, many higher education institutions rushed to comply in advance, wiping the existence of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from their websites.
While academic institutions are deeply flawed, they are also, in their ideal form, bastions for thought and pedagogy. They are where students can make mistakes and learn from one another. They are also crucial spaces of learning for the citizenry. This is why they are the longtime targets of rightwing attack.
We, faculty, have watched in horror for months (really decades), as our colleges and universities, our administrators and colleagues, take steps toward quashing student activism often unprompted by political coercion or interference. “Agitators” have been punished and permanently expelled — even as they are agitating against genocide. By these actions, by their willingness to scapegoat and vilify the pro-Palestine student movement, these institutions have invited their enemies in, becoming testing grounds for the authoritarianism that threatens our nation.
We call on everyone on and off campus to dissent, to organize on behalf of those who are today’s targets, regardless of whether they are targeted by their own university’s administrations or by the federal government. We call on our colleagues to refuse to conduct their jobs as though it’s business as usual. To refuse to obey in advance, to recognize that the lives of our students, the future of our nation, is very much at stake. We must all insist, vocally and without fear, that colleges and universities recommit themselves to the principles of academic freedom and free expression before it is truly too late.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Heba Gowayed
Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. Her award-winning book Refuge takes readers into the lives of displaced Syrians who sought refuge in the U.S., Canada and Germany. She is currently working on her second book, The Cost of Borders. Her writing has also been published in The Guardian, In These Times, Slate, Al Jazeera English, The New Humanitarian and Teen Vogue.
Jessica Halliday Hardie
Jessica Halliday Hardie is a professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center. She is author of Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times. She can be found on Bluesky @jesshardie.
No comments:
Post a Comment