Mahmoud Khalil

On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, was apprehended from university housing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Khalil, a Palestinian and student leader at the Columbia encampments last year, was told by the arresting officers that his green card had been “revoked”, an action that only an immigration judge can decide. It has since been revealed that he is in Ice custody in La Salle, Louisiana, a detention site notorious for abuse.On Truth Social, Donald Trump celebrated the apprehension of Khalil, whom he called “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and bragged of more arrests to come.Khalil has not been accused, by anyone, of violating the law. Instead, his apprehension is a dangerous example of deportation as a retaliation for first amendment-protected speech. Simply put, Khalil was punished for protesting against US complicity in what is widely recognized as a genocide in Gaza. The Trump administration has exploited anti-Palestinian racism as a means to test its mass deportation goals: whitening the nation by eliminating immigrants and insisting that those who are here not challenge those in authority. Khalil’s arrest and detention reveals the fragility of our first amendment protections, of who does and does not have a voice in our nation.As a professor, I am troubled by the central role that academia, which in its ideal form is a bastion of free speech and critical thought, is playing in this assault on human rights. Universities and colleges have become consumed by a politics of consent, where to appease donors and politicians, leadership has collaborated in the targeting of their own students, and faculty largely remain silent in the face of assaults on them.As Israel began its bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, students across the nation set up encampments on their campuses, reminiscent of the anti-apartheid movement of decades past. The Gaza protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, with like-minded students from all backgrounds sharing meals and community.View image in fullscreenColumbia University administrators, for their part, called the the New York City police department to brutalize and arrest their students, criminalizing them. They have since sealed off the public spaces on their campus and restricted access to them, including illegally closing the 116th through street rather than risk any protest on the campus lawn. The brutality is ongoing: just last week, nine students from Barnard were arrested in a new escalation.Much has been written about the “Palestine exception” – the idea that advocating for Palestine is excluded from free speech protections. Well before 7 October 2023, people had been fired, sanctioned, or retaliated against for their writing and speech on issues related to the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Since then, the number has ballooned to thousands of cases as repression has intensified.In the lead-up to his arrest by Ice, Khalil reached out to Columbia twice asking for help, describing a “dehumanizing doxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer” including a tweet by Davidai, a faculty member at Columbia, who called Khalil a “terror supporter” and tagged Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, to demand his deportation.Rubio deployed the racialized language of “terrorism” to announce that he would target international students for “visa denial or revocation, and deportation”. The announcement was applauded by Senator Tom Cotton and the House committee on foreign affairs, which tweeted from its official account: “Terrorist sympathizers are not welcome in the United States of America. Thank you @SecRubio and @POTUS for your leadership. Deport them all!”The campaign against Khalil, which White House officials admit is a blueprint for targeting other students, was successful. It was later reported that Rubio himself signed the warrant for his arrest, using a little-known provision in the law that allows the secretary of state to unilaterally determine whose presence is warranted in the nation. It means that the fate of Palestinians such as Khalil is being left to those who would dox a student, to those who want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.Democratic politicians came to Khalil’s defense even as they continued to condemn the protests that he was a part of, even as they saw it fitting to use the power of the federal government to sanction students for daring to speak out. In a statement criticizing the arrest, Hakeem Jeffries still felt compelled to describe Khalil exercising his right to protest as creating “an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students”.Columbia has not issued any statement of support for Khalil or for other immigrant students. Instead, the school updated its website stating that Ice could enter campus property without a judicial warrant in the case of “risk of imminent harm to people or property”. In other words, Columbia is endorsing that deportation – the torturous and forcible removal of a person from their life – is a fitting consequence for protest. It instructed its faculty to continue operating as “usual”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe implications of this are extraordinary and alarming. It means that as the country takes an authoritarian turn, as the laws become more McCarthyist, more draconian, this university and others are choosing to align themselves with that turn, to go above and beyond to apply the “law”, even if it means greenlighting the abduction of their students.To be sure, Columbia is not the only campus guilty of silencing pro-Palestinian voices. Last year I protested outside the City College of New York as my own students were loaded into police vans at the behest of chancellor of the City University of New York. In February, an advertisement for a Palestine studies position was removed from our hiring platform due to the intervention of the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who deemed it to be “antisemitic” because it included the words “genocide” and “apartheid”.I am regularly in conversation with faculty who have lost their jobs, with students who have been expelled from their institutions for protest, with people across universities, across the country, who have been doxed and sanctioned and reprimanded for their voice.The tools of oppression, wielded against those students and faculty whose opinions run contrary to those who are in power, are now undermining the very foundations of this democracy. The freedom of Khalil – who is not a political symbol, but an expectant father – the freedom of everyone who raises their voice for Palestine, and the freedom of Palestinians themselves are tethered to all of our freedoms. Khalil’s safety is tied to that of every immigrant, whether on a student or an H1-B visa, or a permanent resident, or even a naturalized citizen. His freedom is tethered to everyone who cares about their right to free expression.As his case is adjudicated in the courts, which considers its legal dimensions, it is not just Mahmoud Khalil who is on trial, but the entirety of a nation teetering on the edge of authoritarianism. More