UPDATED
By Silky Shah
March 16, 2025
Source: Truthout
Image by SWinxy, Creative Commons 4.0
When news broke that Mahmoud Khalil — a recently graduated Palestinian student activist at Columbia University — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a firestorm of media coverage, social media posts and protests followed.
Groups focused on issues ranging from Palestine solidarity to immigrant justice and civil rights are organizing to demand his immediate release. Khalil’s detention is an attack on free speech masquerading as an immigration enforcement action that should be seen as an inflection point in the rising authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s regime. It also reflects the everyday realities of ICE’s detention and deportation machinery, underscoring why cross movement organizing and solidarity is critical to combating this administration’s war on immigrants.
What happened to Khalil should alarm every single one of us, not only because it portends the ways Trump is ramping up the targeting of activists to silence political opposition, but also because Khalil’s encounter with ICE is all too familiar to the thousands of people who come into contact with the agency every week.
Khalil was arrested outside his home, detained in New Jersey and then swiftly transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center (Jena) in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away from his eight-months pregnant wife.
This story is sadly common — ICE routinely arrests immigrants at their homes, their places of worship and their workplaces. ICE also purposefully transfers people from immigration jail to immigration jail to disconnect them from their loved ones and community support.
Khalil’s arrest has also been called a disappearance or kidnapping. While he was soon located, the language of “kidnapping” is not hyperbolic — in reality that is what it feels like to be abducted by ICE, and for families who spend hours or days not knowing where their loved ones have been taken or when they will see them again (if ever).
Many people have also expressed outraged surprise at the fact that Khalil was taken without a warrant. This terrible and illegal practice is actually widespread: The Department of Homeland Security routinely lies about having warrants during raids. Just this week, ICE agents scooped up two brothers, Jeison and Cesar Ruiz Rodriguez, in Spokane Valley, Washington, by violently breaking their car windows with Jeison’s seven-months pregnant wife also in the car. When asked if they had a warrant, the agents “said they had an ‘order,’ but they did not produce it.”
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Khalil’s arrest is that he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, but unfortunately green cards do not fully protect someone from deportation. Since 1996, immigrants with legal permanent residency have increasingly been detained and put in deportation proceedings. Clinton-era changes to immigration and criminal law widened the scope of who could be detained and deported and eliminated due process rights for large categories of immigrants, meaning they were no longer entitled to a fair trial. Like Khalil, other immigrants swept up into the detention system have family and community ties and, as noted above, can be detained even if they are pregnant or are an expectant parent.
With all of this in mind, it is still important to underscore that Khalil’s story deviates from daily ICE actions in a significant and alarming way: The Trump regime is now using the immigration enforcement apparatus to target people who criticize its policies or support ideas that it doesn’t approve of. It is indeed terrible that Khalil was arrested and detained despite not having been charged with a crime, but that part of his story is not a departure from the violent status quo that existed before Trump. What is new here is the way in which Trump is attempting to change the scope of what is considered “criminal” in order to target and detain (i.e. jail) more people, particularly those who oppose his agenda.
Over the last several decades both Republicans and Democrats have built and expanded the immigration enforcement system, including the largest immigration jail system in the world. Both parties have largely accepted a hyper-enforcement mentality that has only resulted in more and more dehumanization of immigrant communities, and in turn harsher anti-immigrant laws. Some people accept ICE’s tactics because of their belief that it is “legal” to arrest and lock up someone who is an immigrant, especially if they “broke the law.” Now, Trump is capitalizing on this normalization of incarcerating immigrants to enforce his creeping fascist agenda. This moment implores us to recognize how the existing deportation machine and prison-industrial complex enable Trump’s agenda, in addition to calling out the attacks on free speech and political dissent. As abolitionist scholars have pointed out, “Fascism is maintained by force, and in the contemporary U.S. that force is implemented through the prison industrial complex.” In the modern age, prisons aren’t merely sites of punishment for an ever-expanding list of criminal offenses, they are a machinery of repression that can be unleashed on those who hold unpopular opinions.
Trump ran his campaign by repeating lies about “migrant crime” and scapegoating immigrants for myriad problems, including the housing crisis, opioid crisis and inflation. From demonizing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, to exploiting the tragic killing of Laken Riley, the entire goal was to push immigrants out of the public sphere and out of public life. Now he and his administration are extending the framework to target Palestinians over thought crimes under the guise of immigration enforcement. Marco Rubio even told reporters, “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.” It is no coincidence that both groups in question, immigrants and Palestinians, have been heavily and grossly demonized. Going after immigrants and pro-Palestine activists is a strategy to appeal to Trump’s base, eroding the inclusion and rights of immigrants and others on the receiving end of American foreign policy — such as Palestinians (or Haitians).
Similar to the response to the Muslim ban in 2017, the outrage over Khalil’s arrest has been palpable and inspiring. The heightened attention provides an opportunity to deepen our analysis and bridge across our movements for social change. In the early days of the war on Gaza over 100 immigrant justice organizations signed on to a statement calling for a ceasefire, noting the connections between these struggles, including “that many surveillance technologies and other ‘systems of control’ originally designed by the state of Israel for the occupied Palestinian territories have been deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
In recent news, the Trump administration’s announcement of a registration requirement for immigrants harkens back to the post 9/11 “Special Registration” program that required predominantly Arab and Muslim men to register with the federal government, leading to 13,000 people being placed in deportation proceedings.
These examples barely scratch the surface of how the war on immigrants and “war on terror” created the conditions for Mahmoud Khalil’s detention. This case reinforces why we must fight for everyone, regardless of their immigration status or whether they’ve had contact with the criminal legal system. When you accept that some people are deserving of detention and deportation, the scope of who is eligible is always under threat of expanding. We must see immigration and abolition struggles as interconnected and organize to undo systems of state violence as we fight against Trump’s agenda.
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the U.S. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison-industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over 20 years.
Image by SWinxy, Creative Commons 4.0
When news broke that Mahmoud Khalil — a recently graduated Palestinian student activist at Columbia University — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a firestorm of media coverage, social media posts and protests followed.
Groups focused on issues ranging from Palestine solidarity to immigrant justice and civil rights are organizing to demand his immediate release. Khalil’s detention is an attack on free speech masquerading as an immigration enforcement action that should be seen as an inflection point in the rising authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s regime. It also reflects the everyday realities of ICE’s detention and deportation machinery, underscoring why cross movement organizing and solidarity is critical to combating this administration’s war on immigrants.
What happened to Khalil should alarm every single one of us, not only because it portends the ways Trump is ramping up the targeting of activists to silence political opposition, but also because Khalil’s encounter with ICE is all too familiar to the thousands of people who come into contact with the agency every week.
Khalil was arrested outside his home, detained in New Jersey and then swiftly transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center (Jena) in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away from his eight-months pregnant wife.
This story is sadly common — ICE routinely arrests immigrants at their homes, their places of worship and their workplaces. ICE also purposefully transfers people from immigration jail to immigration jail to disconnect them from their loved ones and community support.
Khalil’s arrest has also been called a disappearance or kidnapping. While he was soon located, the language of “kidnapping” is not hyperbolic — in reality that is what it feels like to be abducted by ICE, and for families who spend hours or days not knowing where their loved ones have been taken or when they will see them again (if ever).
Many people have also expressed outraged surprise at the fact that Khalil was taken without a warrant. This terrible and illegal practice is actually widespread: The Department of Homeland Security routinely lies about having warrants during raids. Just this week, ICE agents scooped up two brothers, Jeison and Cesar Ruiz Rodriguez, in Spokane Valley, Washington, by violently breaking their car windows with Jeison’s seven-months pregnant wife also in the car. When asked if they had a warrant, the agents “said they had an ‘order,’ but they did not produce it.”
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Khalil’s arrest is that he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, but unfortunately green cards do not fully protect someone from deportation. Since 1996, immigrants with legal permanent residency have increasingly been detained and put in deportation proceedings. Clinton-era changes to immigration and criminal law widened the scope of who could be detained and deported and eliminated due process rights for large categories of immigrants, meaning they were no longer entitled to a fair trial. Like Khalil, other immigrants swept up into the detention system have family and community ties and, as noted above, can be detained even if they are pregnant or are an expectant parent.
With all of this in mind, it is still important to underscore that Khalil’s story deviates from daily ICE actions in a significant and alarming way: The Trump regime is now using the immigration enforcement apparatus to target people who criticize its policies or support ideas that it doesn’t approve of. It is indeed terrible that Khalil was arrested and detained despite not having been charged with a crime, but that part of his story is not a departure from the violent status quo that existed before Trump. What is new here is the way in which Trump is attempting to change the scope of what is considered “criminal” in order to target and detain (i.e. jail) more people, particularly those who oppose his agenda.
Over the last several decades both Republicans and Democrats have built and expanded the immigration enforcement system, including the largest immigration jail system in the world. Both parties have largely accepted a hyper-enforcement mentality that has only resulted in more and more dehumanization of immigrant communities, and in turn harsher anti-immigrant laws. Some people accept ICE’s tactics because of their belief that it is “legal” to arrest and lock up someone who is an immigrant, especially if they “broke the law.” Now, Trump is capitalizing on this normalization of incarcerating immigrants to enforce his creeping fascist agenda. This moment implores us to recognize how the existing deportation machine and prison-industrial complex enable Trump’s agenda, in addition to calling out the attacks on free speech and political dissent. As abolitionist scholars have pointed out, “Fascism is maintained by force, and in the contemporary U.S. that force is implemented through the prison industrial complex.” In the modern age, prisons aren’t merely sites of punishment for an ever-expanding list of criminal offenses, they are a machinery of repression that can be unleashed on those who hold unpopular opinions.
Trump ran his campaign by repeating lies about “migrant crime” and scapegoating immigrants for myriad problems, including the housing crisis, opioid crisis and inflation. From demonizing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, to exploiting the tragic killing of Laken Riley, the entire goal was to push immigrants out of the public sphere and out of public life. Now he and his administration are extending the framework to target Palestinians over thought crimes under the guise of immigration enforcement. Marco Rubio even told reporters, “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.” It is no coincidence that both groups in question, immigrants and Palestinians, have been heavily and grossly demonized. Going after immigrants and pro-Palestine activists is a strategy to appeal to Trump’s base, eroding the inclusion and rights of immigrants and others on the receiving end of American foreign policy — such as Palestinians (or Haitians).
Similar to the response to the Muslim ban in 2017, the outrage over Khalil’s arrest has been palpable and inspiring. The heightened attention provides an opportunity to deepen our analysis and bridge across our movements for social change. In the early days of the war on Gaza over 100 immigrant justice organizations signed on to a statement calling for a ceasefire, noting the connections between these struggles, including “that many surveillance technologies and other ‘systems of control’ originally designed by the state of Israel for the occupied Palestinian territories have been deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
In recent news, the Trump administration’s announcement of a registration requirement for immigrants harkens back to the post 9/11 “Special Registration” program that required predominantly Arab and Muslim men to register with the federal government, leading to 13,000 people being placed in deportation proceedings.
These examples barely scratch the surface of how the war on immigrants and “war on terror” created the conditions for Mahmoud Khalil’s detention. This case reinforces why we must fight for everyone, regardless of their immigration status or whether they’ve had contact with the criminal legal system. When you accept that some people are deserving of detention and deportation, the scope of who is eligible is always under threat of expanding. We must see immigration and abolition struggles as interconnected and organize to undo systems of state violence as we fight against Trump’s agenda.
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the U.S. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison-industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over 20 years.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Abduction is a Fascist Move — and Universities Must Respond
Schools across the United States have a choice: defend their students against Trump or be complicit in his crimes.
By Dima Khalidi
March 17, 2025
Source: +972 Magazine
Students from inside the gates of Columbia University wave Palestinian flags through the bars, April 22, 2024. (SWinxy/Wikimedia Commons)
On Saturday, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian lawful permanent resident of the United States who was active as a negotiator between Columbia University and students protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at his Columbia housing and in front of his pregnant wife. He was quickly shipped to an infamous detention facility in Louisiana. President Trump celebrated Khalil’s detention, promising that his was the “first arrest of many to come.” On Monday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked any attempt to deport Khalil, but his legal fight is far from over.
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.
Since his inauguration, in a whirlwind power grab designed to shock and awe, Trump has signed dozens of executive orders, many attacking fundamental constitutional rights and already marginalized communities. Now his loyal attack dogs at ICE, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and other agencies are implementing them — with a particular emphasis on criminalizing the student movement that accelerated on campuses across America after October 7, when thousands of students and faculty rose up against Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine and wars against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In a Jan. 29 executive order, for instance, Trump directed government agencies to target pro-Palestine students and staff for deportation and prosecution, in part by enlisting universities as censors and snitches. The administration then announced that it would cut $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia for supposedly failing to protect against antisemitism, threatening other schools with the same.
These are straightforward attacks on students’ free speech rights to criticize Israeli and American policy, and universities that opt to meaningfully support their students would have a strong defense to mount against these abuses. But to their eternal discredit, many universities have so far been rolling out the red carpet for the fascist tendencies and policies that Trump and his acolytes proudly promote, obeying even before he took office.
Under pressure from politicians, donors, trustees, and pro-Israel lobby groups, most universities have responded to the student movement against Israel’s genocide with rampant anti-Palestinian racism, abandoning principles of free speech, academic freedom, and shared governance. They have sacrificed their own students and faculty to political grandstanding in McCarthyist congressional hearings, racist and militarized law enforcement, and draconian disciplinary processes. Outside normal procedures, they have passed ever-more-restrictive speech codes and anti-protest policies.
Over 300 workers, students and community members rallied for Palestine in a march ended at the UPenn encampment for Gaza in Philadelphia, May 8, 2024. (Joe Piette/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
These decisions have not ended the Palestine movement. Nor have they mollified Trump and his followers in Congress. Instead, they have helped turn students into prime targets for fascist government repression. There is a reason, after all, that Mahmoud Khalil was on Trump’s radar. Columbia had already made an example of him and other Palestinian and allied students, hitting them with ever-more-draconian disciplinary processes long before he was abducted. Right-wing pro-Israel groups also publicly urged Trump officials to target him, as did Columbia board members, according to The Forward.
Columbia knew Khalil was under threat; just a day before his abduction, Khalil himself had told the university that he feared that “ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.”
But it’s not just Columbia that is failing its students so thoroughly. My organization, Palestine Legal, has received an avalanche of over 3,500 requests for legal support since October 2023, many from students facing censorship of events, and absurd accusations and sanctions for protests typical of student activism.
Among hundreds of examples, Pomona College’s president suspended our clients without evidence or due process for allegedly occupying a building. George Mason police and administrators subjected students to FBI-led raids of their home because of spray-painted graffiti. University of Chicago police evicted a student from campus housing after arresting them at a demonstration. New York University administrators suspended students simply for being in the library during a peaceful sit-in. Universities have similarly punished faculty through investigations, suspensions, and firings. The stories are endless and harrowing.
As Trump implements ever-harsher crackdowns on Palestine advocates and on higher education as we know it in the United States, universities must see that capitulating to his threats will not release them from the administration’s crosshairs. (Columbia has learned that lesson 400 million times over.) Rather, they are surrendering a primary arena for critical inquiry, debate, and resistance to those whose primary agenda is to crush it. The question is: will they reverse course and fight for the rights and freedoms of the students and faculty who make them vibrant, diverse places to imagine and build a just and viable future?
To do the latter, universities must make some fundamental shifts.
A protest encampment for Palestine at Columbia University, New York, April 23, 2024. (Pamela Drew/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
The thin edge of the wedge
First, universities must recognize how anti-Palestinian racism threatens all of us. One manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism is universities’ denial and ignorance of what has been clear to majorities of their students and faculty — and the international community — for over a year: that Israel is committing, even with a fragile ceasefire in place, a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and throughout Palestine. Administrators should be more concerned with the mass slaughter of Palestinians than with policing protests and slogans due to complaints from people who don’t believe that Palestinians deserve freedom in their homeland.
The now widespread rhetoric that labels protesters of genocide like Khalil as “Hamas supporters,” and villainizes advocates for justice in Palestine as supporters of terrorism and antisemites, is also an example of anti-Palestinian racism that helps give Trump a pretext for his actions. So are the laws and policies legislators and institutions pass to suppress Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian freedom. All of these bring us closer to an undemocratic, fascist society where none of us have the power to address the issues most important to our survival and wellbeing.
Moreover, universities’ censorship of all things Palestine is the thin edge of the wedge, paving the way to the dismantling of core constitutional and academic freedom principles designed to stop government and special interests from dictating what can and can’t be said and taught. Instituting policies that create ideological and intellectual strangulation on Palestine — which get more bipartisan support than any other issue — provides the blueprint for doing the same to discourse, scholarship, and teaching on race, gender, climate, and other critical issues that Trump and his allies are already targeting.
Indeed, the attack on advocacy and academic activity on Palestine is complimentary to right-wing crusades — from K-12 through higher education — against ethnic studies, queer studies, and Black studies.
Universities must value the lives and voices of their Palestinian and associated students and faculty, engage them as critical members of the community, and resist political pressures to dispose of and silence them as they mourn and protest a live-streamed genocide. To do this, they must abide by free speech and anti-discrimination principles for all (as the Department of Education instructed George Washington University in a resolution of an anti-Palestinian discrimination complaint last year). They must do so not only because the law requires it but also to prevent a landslide of censorship that would destroy academia.
Second, universities must reject the idea that student demands for Palestinian survival, freedom, and self-determination somehow constitute support for terrorism. They must also reject the false binary promoted by Israel-aligned groups, which posit that freedom and safety for Jews is only possible in an apartheid State of Israel, at the expense of freedom and safety for Palestinians. Relying on this false binary is the widely rejected conflation of Judaism, a religious and ethnic identity, with Zionism, a political ideology that has required in practice the mass murder, dispossession, occupation, and oppression of Palestinians to create Israel as a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine.
Students protest at a pro-Palestine encampment at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, United States, April 30, 2024. (Heather Sharona Weiss/Activestills)
This conflation of support for Israel or Zionism with Judaism, and by extension anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is central to the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism that pro-Israel groups lobby for in legislation and university policies, and that Trump just reaffirmed in his order. But the definition, which categorizes calling Israel a “racist endeavor” as antisemitic, does not protect pro-Israel students from anti-Jewish discrimination or harassment. It protects them from ideological opposition, from any disruption to an inculcated belief that Israel and its actions are necessary for Jewish safety.
Universities must not legitimize the idea that ideological disruption is akin to discrimination. Trump and the white supremacist promoters of attacks on so-called critical race theory (CRT) instruction and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures make a twin argument. They claim that white students are harmed by the teaching of “divisive concepts” like slavery because they will be made to feel guilty for the actions of white ancestors, and that it is anti-white to teach about systemic racism. Both IHRA and anti-CRT/anti-DEI efforts not only aim to prevent educators and institutions from acknowledging and teaching about the racist roots and impacts of ideologies and states. They also perversely use anti-discrimination principles to punish those that do.
Rejecting the Palestine exception
Third, universities must challenge the McCarthyist tactics of right-wing and pro-Israel groups, which are using red-baiting and the politicized label of antisemitism to justify purging people who oppose not only Israel’s policies but also U.S. support for them. Such red-baiting typifies the right’s attack on higher education in general.
Like their McCarthyist precursors, the congressional hearings and attacks led by Trump allies — and the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” manual for the new administration — demonize supporters of Palestinian freedom as “un-American,” communist, and unpatriotic. To circumvent pro-Palestine activists’ First Amendment-protected speech and assembly rights, Project Esther proposes criminalizing activism using laws related to counterterrorism, hate speech, organized crime, and immigration, including by deporting non-citizen student activists. Trump’s executive orders have empowered federal agencies to engage in just such targeting.
To understand what’s at stake, one need only ask: if students and academics are prohibited from questioning the patently criminal acts of a foreign government, what about their ability to question the acts of our own — just when that right most needs to be exercised and protected?
Rather than doing the censors’ work for them, universities must be firm in rejecting a racist “Palestine exception” to speech and anti-discrimination laws, which are but a Trojan horse for rising authoritarianism. Instead, universities must vigorously and without bias protect free speech and academic freedom, including by ceasing persecution of their own students for speech activities critical of Israel. And they must refuse cooperation with ICE and other government agencies and congressional investigations that are counting on cowing universities into silent obedience.
Finally, universities must reckon with their historical and present roles in oppressive and destructive systems, including those complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Student uprisings over decades — including movements against apartheid South Africa, for climate justice, Black Lives, and now Palestine — have demanded that institutions to which they pay increasingly obscene tuitions and rent disclose and divest their vast holdings from military, fossil fuel, prison, police, and other industries complicit in oppression, death, and destruction. Universities have heeded these calls before and must do so now, defying threats to punish divestment via inapplicable and unconstitutional state laws.
Ultimately, we can only protect democracy by enacting it, not by mirroring authoritarian tendencies. So to do all this and resist Trump’s broader reactionary agenda requires rejecting the encroaching corporatization and centralization that has made universities politically and financially vulnerable to coercion. Embracing the democratic practices of shared governance would position them to withstand the unprecedented attacks and protect faculty and student rights.
As in past eras of domestic and global upheaval, students are the bellwether of undeniable political shifts. Universities should embrace their role as facilitators of those shifts rather than being the authors of their own ruin by serving as handmaidens of a Trumpian agenda. If they don’t, we will only have them to blame for their complicity in the political persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and the many others being targeted for their political dissent.
A version of this article first appeared in The Nation. Read it here.
Students from inside the gates of Columbia University wave Palestinian flags through the bars, April 22, 2024. (SWinxy/Wikimedia Commons)
On Saturday, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian lawful permanent resident of the United States who was active as a negotiator between Columbia University and students protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at his Columbia housing and in front of his pregnant wife. He was quickly shipped to an infamous detention facility in Louisiana. President Trump celebrated Khalil’s detention, promising that his was the “first arrest of many to come.” On Monday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked any attempt to deport Khalil, but his legal fight is far from over.
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.
Since his inauguration, in a whirlwind power grab designed to shock and awe, Trump has signed dozens of executive orders, many attacking fundamental constitutional rights and already marginalized communities. Now his loyal attack dogs at ICE, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and other agencies are implementing them — with a particular emphasis on criminalizing the student movement that accelerated on campuses across America after October 7, when thousands of students and faculty rose up against Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine and wars against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In a Jan. 29 executive order, for instance, Trump directed government agencies to target pro-Palestine students and staff for deportation and prosecution, in part by enlisting universities as censors and snitches. The administration then announced that it would cut $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia for supposedly failing to protect against antisemitism, threatening other schools with the same.
These are straightforward attacks on students’ free speech rights to criticize Israeli and American policy, and universities that opt to meaningfully support their students would have a strong defense to mount against these abuses. But to their eternal discredit, many universities have so far been rolling out the red carpet for the fascist tendencies and policies that Trump and his acolytes proudly promote, obeying even before he took office.
Under pressure from politicians, donors, trustees, and pro-Israel lobby groups, most universities have responded to the student movement against Israel’s genocide with rampant anti-Palestinian racism, abandoning principles of free speech, academic freedom, and shared governance. They have sacrificed their own students and faculty to political grandstanding in McCarthyist congressional hearings, racist and militarized law enforcement, and draconian disciplinary processes. Outside normal procedures, they have passed ever-more-restrictive speech codes and anti-protest policies.
Over 300 workers, students and community members rallied for Palestine in a march ended at the UPenn encampment for Gaza in Philadelphia, May 8, 2024. (Joe Piette/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
These decisions have not ended the Palestine movement. Nor have they mollified Trump and his followers in Congress. Instead, they have helped turn students into prime targets for fascist government repression. There is a reason, after all, that Mahmoud Khalil was on Trump’s radar. Columbia had already made an example of him and other Palestinian and allied students, hitting them with ever-more-draconian disciplinary processes long before he was abducted. Right-wing pro-Israel groups also publicly urged Trump officials to target him, as did Columbia board members, according to The Forward.
Columbia knew Khalil was under threat; just a day before his abduction, Khalil himself had told the university that he feared that “ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.”
But it’s not just Columbia that is failing its students so thoroughly. My organization, Palestine Legal, has received an avalanche of over 3,500 requests for legal support since October 2023, many from students facing censorship of events, and absurd accusations and sanctions for protests typical of student activism.
Among hundreds of examples, Pomona College’s president suspended our clients without evidence or due process for allegedly occupying a building. George Mason police and administrators subjected students to FBI-led raids of their home because of spray-painted graffiti. University of Chicago police evicted a student from campus housing after arresting them at a demonstration. New York University administrators suspended students simply for being in the library during a peaceful sit-in. Universities have similarly punished faculty through investigations, suspensions, and firings. The stories are endless and harrowing.
As Trump implements ever-harsher crackdowns on Palestine advocates and on higher education as we know it in the United States, universities must see that capitulating to his threats will not release them from the administration’s crosshairs. (Columbia has learned that lesson 400 million times over.) Rather, they are surrendering a primary arena for critical inquiry, debate, and resistance to those whose primary agenda is to crush it. The question is: will they reverse course and fight for the rights and freedoms of the students and faculty who make them vibrant, diverse places to imagine and build a just and viable future?
To do the latter, universities must make some fundamental shifts.
A protest encampment for Palestine at Columbia University, New York, April 23, 2024. (Pamela Drew/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
The thin edge of the wedge
First, universities must recognize how anti-Palestinian racism threatens all of us. One manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism is universities’ denial and ignorance of what has been clear to majorities of their students and faculty — and the international community — for over a year: that Israel is committing, even with a fragile ceasefire in place, a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and throughout Palestine. Administrators should be more concerned with the mass slaughter of Palestinians than with policing protests and slogans due to complaints from people who don’t believe that Palestinians deserve freedom in their homeland.
The now widespread rhetoric that labels protesters of genocide like Khalil as “Hamas supporters,” and villainizes advocates for justice in Palestine as supporters of terrorism and antisemites, is also an example of anti-Palestinian racism that helps give Trump a pretext for his actions. So are the laws and policies legislators and institutions pass to suppress Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian freedom. All of these bring us closer to an undemocratic, fascist society where none of us have the power to address the issues most important to our survival and wellbeing.
Moreover, universities’ censorship of all things Palestine is the thin edge of the wedge, paving the way to the dismantling of core constitutional and academic freedom principles designed to stop government and special interests from dictating what can and can’t be said and taught. Instituting policies that create ideological and intellectual strangulation on Palestine — which get more bipartisan support than any other issue — provides the blueprint for doing the same to discourse, scholarship, and teaching on race, gender, climate, and other critical issues that Trump and his allies are already targeting.
Indeed, the attack on advocacy and academic activity on Palestine is complimentary to right-wing crusades — from K-12 through higher education — against ethnic studies, queer studies, and Black studies.
Universities must value the lives and voices of their Palestinian and associated students and faculty, engage them as critical members of the community, and resist political pressures to dispose of and silence them as they mourn and protest a live-streamed genocide. To do this, they must abide by free speech and anti-discrimination principles for all (as the Department of Education instructed George Washington University in a resolution of an anti-Palestinian discrimination complaint last year). They must do so not only because the law requires it but also to prevent a landslide of censorship that would destroy academia.
Second, universities must reject the idea that student demands for Palestinian survival, freedom, and self-determination somehow constitute support for terrorism. They must also reject the false binary promoted by Israel-aligned groups, which posit that freedom and safety for Jews is only possible in an apartheid State of Israel, at the expense of freedom and safety for Palestinians. Relying on this false binary is the widely rejected conflation of Judaism, a religious and ethnic identity, with Zionism, a political ideology that has required in practice the mass murder, dispossession, occupation, and oppression of Palestinians to create Israel as a “Jewish state” in historic Palestine.
Students protest at a pro-Palestine encampment at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, United States, April 30, 2024. (Heather Sharona Weiss/Activestills)
This conflation of support for Israel or Zionism with Judaism, and by extension anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is central to the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism that pro-Israel groups lobby for in legislation and university policies, and that Trump just reaffirmed in his order. But the definition, which categorizes calling Israel a “racist endeavor” as antisemitic, does not protect pro-Israel students from anti-Jewish discrimination or harassment. It protects them from ideological opposition, from any disruption to an inculcated belief that Israel and its actions are necessary for Jewish safety.
Universities must not legitimize the idea that ideological disruption is akin to discrimination. Trump and the white supremacist promoters of attacks on so-called critical race theory (CRT) instruction and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures make a twin argument. They claim that white students are harmed by the teaching of “divisive concepts” like slavery because they will be made to feel guilty for the actions of white ancestors, and that it is anti-white to teach about systemic racism. Both IHRA and anti-CRT/anti-DEI efforts not only aim to prevent educators and institutions from acknowledging and teaching about the racist roots and impacts of ideologies and states. They also perversely use anti-discrimination principles to punish those that do.
Rejecting the Palestine exception
Third, universities must challenge the McCarthyist tactics of right-wing and pro-Israel groups, which are using red-baiting and the politicized label of antisemitism to justify purging people who oppose not only Israel’s policies but also U.S. support for them. Such red-baiting typifies the right’s attack on higher education in general.
Like their McCarthyist precursors, the congressional hearings and attacks led by Trump allies — and the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” manual for the new administration — demonize supporters of Palestinian freedom as “un-American,” communist, and unpatriotic. To circumvent pro-Palestine activists’ First Amendment-protected speech and assembly rights, Project Esther proposes criminalizing activism using laws related to counterterrorism, hate speech, organized crime, and immigration, including by deporting non-citizen student activists. Trump’s executive orders have empowered federal agencies to engage in just such targeting.
To understand what’s at stake, one need only ask: if students and academics are prohibited from questioning the patently criminal acts of a foreign government, what about their ability to question the acts of our own — just when that right most needs to be exercised and protected?
Rather than doing the censors’ work for them, universities must be firm in rejecting a racist “Palestine exception” to speech and anti-discrimination laws, which are but a Trojan horse for rising authoritarianism. Instead, universities must vigorously and without bias protect free speech and academic freedom, including by ceasing persecution of their own students for speech activities critical of Israel. And they must refuse cooperation with ICE and other government agencies and congressional investigations that are counting on cowing universities into silent obedience.
Finally, universities must reckon with their historical and present roles in oppressive and destructive systems, including those complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Student uprisings over decades — including movements against apartheid South Africa, for climate justice, Black Lives, and now Palestine — have demanded that institutions to which they pay increasingly obscene tuitions and rent disclose and divest their vast holdings from military, fossil fuel, prison, police, and other industries complicit in oppression, death, and destruction. Universities have heeded these calls before and must do so now, defying threats to punish divestment via inapplicable and unconstitutional state laws.
Ultimately, we can only protect democracy by enacting it, not by mirroring authoritarian tendencies. So to do all this and resist Trump’s broader reactionary agenda requires rejecting the encroaching corporatization and centralization that has made universities politically and financially vulnerable to coercion. Embracing the democratic practices of shared governance would position them to withstand the unprecedented attacks and protect faculty and student rights.
As in past eras of domestic and global upheaval, students are the bellwether of undeniable political shifts. Universities should embrace their role as facilitators of those shifts rather than being the authors of their own ruin by serving as handmaidens of a Trumpian agenda. If they don’t, we will only have them to blame for their complicity in the political persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and the many others being targeted for their political dissent.
A version of this article first appeared in The Nation. Read it here.
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