Mahmoud Khalil

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    Mahmoud Khalil: US judge denies release of detained Palestinian activist

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    A federal judge declined to order the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a setback for the former Columbia University student days after a major ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to keep him detained.Khalil, a green-card holder who has not been charged with a crime, is one of the most high-profile people targeted by the US government’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism. Despite key rulings in his favor, Khalil has been detained since March, missing the birth of his son.His advocates were hopeful earlier in the week that he was close to walking free. On Wednesday, Judge Michael E Farbiarz ruled the Trump administration could no longer detain Khalil on the basis of claims that he posed a threat to US foreign policy. The federal judge in New Jersey said efforts to deport him based on those grounds were likely unconstitutional.Farbiarz had given the US government until Friday morning to appeal against the order, which the Trump administration did not do. Khalil’s lawyers then argued he must be released immediately, but the government said it would keep him detained in a remote detention facility in Louisiana. The administration argued it was authorized to continue detaining him based on alternative grounds – its allegations that he lied on his green-card application.On Friday, Farbiarz said Khalil’s lawyers had failed to present enough evidence that detention based on the green-card claims was unlawful, suggesting attorneys for the 30-year-old activist could seek bail from a Louisiana immigration judge.Khalil’s have strongly rejected the government’s assertions about problems with his green-card application, arguing the claims were a pretext to keep him detained.“Mahmoud Khalil was detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Amy Greer, one of his attorneys, said in a statement on Friday evening.“The government is now using cruel, transparent delay tactics to keep him away from his wife and newborn son ahead of their first Father’s Day as a family. Instead of celebrating together, he is languishing in [immigration] detention as punishment for his advocacy on behalf of his fellow Palestinians. It is unjust, it is shocking, and it is disgraceful.”Khalil has previously disputed the notion that he omitted information on his application.In a filing last week, he maintained he was never employed by or served as an “officer” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, as the administration claims, but completed an internship approved by the university as part of his graduate studies.Khalil said he also stopped working for the British embassy in Beirut in December 2022, when he moved to the US, despite the administration’s claims that he had worked in the embassy’s Syria office longer.The Friday ruling prolonging his detention came the same day a group of celebrity fathers filmed a video reading Khalil’s letter to his newborn son. The Father’s Day campaign, published by the American Civil Liberties Union, called for Khalil’s freedom and included actors Mark Ruffalo, Mahershala Ali, Arian Moayed and Alex Winter.Earlier in the week, when there was a ruling in Khalil’s favor, Dr Noor Abdalla, his wife, released a statement, saying: “True justice would mean Mahmoud was never taken away from us in the first place, that no Palestinian father, from New York to Gaza, would have to endure the painful separation of prison walls like Mahmoud has. I will not rest until Mahmoud is free.”Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has previously claimed Khalil must be expelled because his continued presence would harm American foreign policy, an effort that civil rights advocates said was a blatant crackdown on lawful free speech. More

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      Judge says Trump’s bid to deport Mahmoud Khalil is unconstitutional

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      The Trump administration’s bid to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist, is likely unconstitutional, a US judge has said.In a lengthy order issued Wednesday, Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote that the government’s primary justification for removing Khalil – that his beliefs may pose a threat to US foreign policy – could open the door to vague and arbitrary enforcement.Still, Farbiarz stopped short of ordering Khalil released from a Louisiana jail, finding his attorneys had not sufficiently responded to another charge brought by the government: that Khalil did not properly disclose certain personal details in his permanent residency application.The judge said he planned to issue an order shortly outlining next steps in the case.Khalil, a legal US resident, was detained by federal immigration agents on 8 March in the lobby of his university-owned apartment, the first arrest under Donald Trump’s widening crackdown on students who joined campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.He has been held for nearly 12 weeks at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, missing the birth of his first child and his recent graduation from Columbia University.Attorneys for Khalil argue his detention is part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to suppress constitutionally protected free speech.In letters sent from the jail, Khalil has maintained that his arrest was “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza”.The federal government has not accused Khalil of breaking any laws. Instead, they have submitted a memo signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, arguing that Khalil’s presence in the US may pose a threat to US foreign policy interests.The government has offered the same justification to detain other pro-Palestinian activists, including another student at Columbia, Mohsen Mahdawi; a Tufts University student, Rümeysa Öztürk; and a Georgetown University scholar, Badar Khan Suri. All three have won their custody in recent weeks as they continue to fight their cases.In Khalil’s case, the government also said he withheld information from his residency application about his involvement in some organizations, including a United Nations agency that resettles Palestinian refugees and a Columbia protest group.The judge on Wednesday said attorneys for Khalil had not properly responded to those allegations, but would be permitted to address the issue in the future.Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called it a “mixed ruling” on Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, because the judge wrote that he “is likely to succeed on his First Amendment claim, but likely to lose on a residency application issue. For that reason, the judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction, pending further briefing on the First Amendment issue.”Farbiarz’s ruling marked the first time a federal judge had weighed in on the constitutionality of Trump’s use of a law granting the US secretary of state the power to seek the deportation of any non-citizen whose presence in the country is deemed adverse to US foreign policy interests.The Newark, New Jersey-based judge said the law, known as section 1227, was vague because people would have no way of knowing what might get them deported.“An ordinary person would have had no real inkling that a Section 1227 removal could go forward in this way – without the Secretary first determining that there has been an impact on American relations with another country,” Farbiarz said in a 101-page ruling.Khalil and his supporters say his arrest and attempted deportation are violations of his right to freedom of speech under the US constitution’s first amendment. Farbiarz has blocked officials from deporting Khalil while his challenge to the constitutionality of his arrest plays out.He wrote that he would not rule for now on whether Khalil’s first amendment rights had been violated.In a statement, Khalil’s legal team said it would give Farbiarz the additional argument he sought as quickly as possible.“Every day Mahmoud spends languishing in an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, is an affront to justice, and we won’t stop working until he is free,” his lawyers said. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil finally allowed to hold one-month-old son for the first time

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      Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and detained Palestinian activist, was finally allowed to hold his infant son for the first time Thursday – one month after he was born – thanks to a federal judge who blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a Plexiglass barrier.The visit came before a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has been detained in a Louisiana jail since 8 March.The question of whether Khalil would be permitted to hold his newborn child, Deen, or forced to meet him through a barrier had sparked days of legal fighting, triggering claims by Khalil’s attorneys that he is being subject to political retaliation by the government.On Wednesday night, a federal judge in New Jersey, Michael Farbiarz, intervened, allowing the meeting to go forward Thursday morning, according to Khalil’s attorneys.The judge’s order came after federal officials said this week they would oppose his attorney’s effort to secure what’s known as a “contact visit” among Khalil; his wife, Noor Abdalla; and their son.Instead, they said Khalil could be allowed a “non-contact” visit, meaning he would be separated from his wife and son by a plastic divider and not allowed to touch them.“Granting Khalil this relief of family visitation would effectively grant him a privilege that no other detainee receives,” justice department officials wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Allowing Dr Abdalla and a newborn to attend a legal meeting would turn a legal visitation into a family one.”Brian Acuna, acting director of the Ice field office in New Orleans, said in an accompanying affidavit that it would be “unsafe to allow Mr Khalil’s wife and newborn child into a secured part of the facility”.In their own legal filings, Khalil’s attorneys described the government’s refusal to grant the visit as “further evidence of the retaliatory motive behind Mr Khalil’s arrest and faraway detention”, adding that his wife and son were “the farthest thing from a security risk”.They noted that Abdalla had traveled nearly 1,500 miles (2,400km) to the remote detention center in hopes of introducing their son to his father.“This is not just heartless,” Abdalla said of the government’s position. “It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”Khalil was the first person to be arrested under Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on protesters against the war in Gaza and is one of the few who have remained in custody as his case winds its way through both immigration and federal court.Federal authorities have not accused Khalil of a crime, but they have sought to deport him on the basis that his prominent role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza may have undermined US foreign policy interests.His request to attend his son’s 21 April birth was denied last month by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.In a letter to his son published in the Guardian, Khalil wrote after the birth: “My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper.“My absence is not unique,” Khalil added. “Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life … The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations.”Farbiarz is currently considering Khalil’s petition for release as he appeals a Louisiana immigration judge’s ruling that he can be deported from the country.On Thursday, Khalil appeared before that immigration judge, Jamee Comans, as his attorneys presented testimony about the risks he would face if he were to be deported to Syria, where he grew up in a refugee camp, or Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative.His attorneys submitted testimony from Columbia University faculty and students attesting to Khalil’s character.In one declaration, Joseph Howley, a classics professor, said he had first introduced Khalil to a university administrator to serve as a spokesperson on behalf of campus protesters, describing him as an “upstanding, principled and well-respected member of our community.“I have never known Mahmoud to espouse any anti-Jewish sentiments or prejudices, and have heard him forcefully reject antisemitism on multiple occasions,” Howley wrote.No ruling regarding the appeal was made on Thursday. Comans gave lawyers in the case until 5pm 2 June to submit written closing arguments.Columbia’s interim president, Claire Shipman, acknowledged Mahmoud’s absence from Wednesday’s commencement ceremony and said many students were “mourning” that he couldn’t be present. Her speech drew loud boos from some graduates, along with chants of “free Mahmoud”.Abdalla accepted a diploma for Khalil on his behalf at an alternative graduation ceremony on Sunday.In the 75 days since his arrest, at least three other international college students have been released from detention after weeks of legal action by their attorneys. They include Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi and Badar Khan Suri.All three have been targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, and have challenged the legality of their detentions with a string of motions and legal briefs in federal district courts. The judges in all of their cases agreed to release them while their immigration court cases played out. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil blocked from holding son for first time by Ice, lawyers say

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      Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, was not allowed to hold his newborn son after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials refused to allow a contact visit between him and his family, his lawyers said on Wednesday.Instead, Khalil, 30, was forced to meet his month-old baby for the first time behind glass, after his wife, Noor Abdalla, traveled from New York to the Louisiana detention facility where he has been detained since March, his legal team said.Ice officials and a private prison contractor denied the family’s request for a contact visit, citing the detention center’s no-contact visitation policy and unspecified “security concerns”, lawyers said.Abdalla, a US citizen who gave birth to their first child last month while Khalil was in detention, said she was “furious at the cruelty and inhumanity of this system that dares to call itself just”.“After flying over a thousand miles to Louisiana with our newborn son, his very first flight, all so his father could finally hold him in his arms, Ice has denied us even this most basic human right,” she said in a statement.“This is not just heartless. It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse.”The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The department had previously denied Khalil’s request to be at his wife’s side to attend the birth of their son in New York, a move that Abdalla described as “a purposeful decision by Ice to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer”. Instead, he was only able to experience his child’s birth via a telephone call.Khalil, a legal permanent resident, or US green-card holder, was arrested in New York on 8 March in the first in a string of Ice arrests targeting pro-Palestinian students and scholars, and put in detention without due process.In a letter to his son published in the Guardian, Khalil wrote shortly after the birth: “My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper.”“My absence is not unique,” he continued. “Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life … The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations.”The current president of Columbia University in New York, Claire Shipman, where Khalil had been finishing up his graduate studies, was booed and heckled on both Tuesday and Wednesday by graduates at their commencement ceremonies who also were furious that Khalil was in detention. Many chanted “free Mahmoud”, as Shipman acknowledged their frustration.The Trump administration is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases such as Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. Khalil is Palestinian and was born in a refugee camp in Syria. His wife accepted a graduate diploma on his behalf at an alternative graduation ceremony in New York on Sunday, while holding their baby. More

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      To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction | Mahmoud Khalil

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      Yaba Deen,* it has been two weeks since you were born, and these are my first words to you.In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch. I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience. Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?Since that morning, I have come to recognize the look in the eyes of every father in this detention center. I sit here contemplating the immensity of your birth and wonder how many more firsts will be sacrificed to the whims of the US government, which denied me even the chance of furlough to attend your birth. How is it that the same politicians who preach “family values” are the ones tearing families apart?Deen, my heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper. I am sorry that I was not there to hold your mother’s hand or to recite the adhan, or call to prayer, in your ear. But my absence is not unique. Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life. Babies are born every day without their fathers – not because their fathers chose to leave, but because they are taken by war, by bombs, by prison cells and by the cold machinery of occupation. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations.View image in fullscreenDeen, it was not a gap in the law that made me a political prisoner in Louisiana. It was my firm belief that our people deserve to be free, that their lives are worth more than the televised massacre we are witnessing in Gaza, and that the displacement that began in 1948 and culminated in the current genocide must finally end. This mere belief is what made the state scramble to detain me. No matter where I am when you read this – whether I’m in this country or another – I want to impress upon you one lesson:The struggle for Palestinian liberation is not a burden; it is a duty and an honor we carry with pride. So at every turning point in my life, you will find me choosing Palestine. Palestine over ease. Palestine over comfort. Palestine over self. This struggle is sweeter than a life without dignity. The tyrants want us to submit, to obey, to be perfect victims. But we are free, and we will remain free. I hope you feel this as deeply as I do.Deen, as a Palestinian refugee, I inherited a kind of exile that followed me to every border, every airport, every form. Borders mean something to me that they may not mean to you. Each crossing required me to prove my docility, my identity and my very right to exist. You were born an American citizen. You may never feel that weight. You may never have to translate your humanity through paperwork, countless visa applications and interview appointments. I hope you use this not to separate yourself from others, but to uplift those who live under the same circumstances that once constrained me. But I won’t pretend this citizenship protects you. Not completely. Not when you have my name. Not when those in power still see our people as threats.One day, you might ask why people are punished for standing up for Palestine, why truth and compassion feel dangerous to power. These are hard questions, but I hope our story shows you this: the world needs more courage, not less. It needs people who choose justice over convenience.It is nothing but the dehumanization and racist disregard for Palestinians that renders their lives forgettable and that dares describe Palestinian fathers who love their sons as “terrorists”. Perhaps that is why the world so quickly forgot the killing of four-month-old Iman Hijjo in Gaza in 2001. Why did Ahmed Abu Artema’s beloved son Abdullah die hungry for bread? Who recalls the children lost in the Flour Massacre? Where is the justice for the fathers in the West Bank who carefully dress their sons for prison? Why does liberty not visit the bodies of Palestinian children whose limbs are missing, whose ribs are exposed under thin skin and who are born lovingly only to die under an Israeli bomb?On this first Mother’s Day for Noor, I dream of a world where all families are reunited to celebrate the incredible women in their lives. Many years ago, on one of our very first dates, I had asked your mother what she would change in the world if she could. Her simple response was: “I just want people to be nicer to each other.” Deen, you were born to a mother as gentle as she is fierce. I pray that you live in a world shaped by that kindness. I hope, with all my heart, that you will not witness the oppression that I’ve known. I hope that you never need to chant for Palestine, because it has long been free with dignity and prosperity for all. Should that day come, know that it was ushered in through the courage of those who came before you. I am certain that in this new world, you and I will visit Tiberias together, drink from the river and marvel at the sea. There, in a free and just Palestine, you will see the fruits of our struggle.Deen, my love for you is deeper than anything I have ever known. Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It is liberation itself. I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost – starting with this one, writing to you with all the love in my heart.*Yaba Deen: “Yaba” (يابا ) is an affectionate term meaning “dad” in Arabic. In Palestinian Arabic, yaba is often used self-referentially to center the father-son bond in the greeting itself. So when a father says “yaba”, he’s using a tender, fatherly voice to address his child, somewhat like saying: “From your dad, Deen” or “My son, from your yaba (dad)”.

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      Democratic lawmakers call for release of Tufts student from Ice detention

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      A group of high-profile Democratic lawmakers has called on the Donald Trump administration to immediately release the Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, praised her “unwavering spirit” and warned that the White House is engaging in “repression”.In a New York Times essay published on Friday morning, the US senator Ed Markey and representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, who all represent Massachusetts, where Tufts is based, shared more details from their visit to Öztürk this week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, where she has been held since her arrest last month.“She was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations” and has “suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication” the lawmakers wrote.“Despite all this” they added, “we were struck by her unwavering spirit.”The lawmakers were part of a delegation of congressional Democratic lawmakers who traveled to Louisiana this week to visit both Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist who is also being held in Ice custody at a separate facility in Louisiana.Öztürk, who co-authored an opinion essay last year in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, was detained in late March and transferred to Louisiana. Neither she nor Khalil have been charged with any crimes and appear to have been targeted solely for their political views in a Trump administration crackdown that goes far beyond the undocumented immigrant communities that Trump pledged to expel when he was running for a second term.View image in fullscreen“This is not immigration enforcement” the lawmakers wrote. “This is repression. This is authoritarianism.”They warned that Öztürk’s case “is not an isolated one.“This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations,” they wrote.The lawmakers cautioned that each case “chips away at the rule of law”, “makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed”, and “brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.“When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly,” they wrote.They called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release Öztürk immediately, to drop any proceedings against her and to investigate the conditions at the detention center where she is being held.They also urged their Republican colleagues “to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law.“And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight,” they conclude. “The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.”Also, in Khalil’s case, lawyers for DHS disclosed in court documents that they did not have a warrant when they arrested him last month.The attorneys representing the administration argued on Thursday that “officers had exigent circumstances to conduct the warrantless arrest” and said that agents believed Khalil would “escape before they could obtain a warrant”.Khalil’s legal team has argued that Khalil’s removal proceedings should be terminated since he was arrested without a warrant. His lawyers also stated that Khalil had no plans to flee or leave the country, and emphasized that he “fully complied with the agents arresting him, despite the fact that after repeated requests by Khalil, his pregnant wife, and his lawyer, they never showed him a warrant”. His wife has since given birth while Khalil was not released for the event. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla gives birth as Ice denies his request to attend

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      Noor Abdalla, the wife of detained Columbia university graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, has announced the birth of their son.In a statement released on Monday evening, Abdalla wrote: “I welcomed our son into the world earlier today without Mahmoud by my side. Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”The Department of Homeland Security denied Khalil the opportunity to attend the birth of his first child, which he was only able to experience via a telephone call. Khalil is being held in a Louisiana detention facility more than 1,000 miles away from the New York hospital where his son was delivered.Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist who lives in New York, and her son, who was born early Monday morning, are both in good health.Abdalla is a US citizen who was born and raised in Michigan. Her parents immigrated to the US from Syria about 40 years ago.According to emails reviewed by the New York Times, Khalil’s lawyers suggested several ways in which he could have attended the birth, including allowing him a two-week furlough while wearing an ankle monitor and requiring scheduled check-ins.“A two-week furlough in this civil detention matter would be both reasonable and humane so that both parents can be present for the birth of their first child,” the lawyers wrote.The request was denied by the New Orleans field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Khalil was arrested on 8 March on grounds that he is considered to be a threat to US foreign policy. Earlier this month, an immigration judge ruled that Khalil is eligible to be deported from the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbdalla has fought for her husband’s release since the day of his arrest, maintaining that the Trump administration is “trying to silence” anyone who speaks up for Palestinian rights.“We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children – until Palestine is free,” she wrote on 8 April.In her statement shortly after her son’s birth, Abdalla vowed to continue to fight for Khalil’s release. “I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us. I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad.” More

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      What is a ‘criminal’ immigrant? The word is an American rhetorical trap | Jonathan Ben-Menachem

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      Last month, the Trump administration flew 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Federal officials alleged that the detainees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, calling them “heinous monsters” ,“criminal aliens”, “the worst of the worst”. The federal government has also revoked visas for a thousand international students over their alleged participation in protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Some were abducted, like Mahmoud Khalil, who has spent more than a month incarcerated in one of the worst jails in the US. Officials alleged that Mahmoud “sided with terrorists … who have killed innocent men, women, and children”.Media reports quickly revealed that the Trump administration is lying about “innocent” people to justify abducting them. But this raises a more important question: if Trump’s victims weren’t “innocent”, does that make them disposable? I worry that emphasizing the innocence of victims creates a rhetorical trap. It’s like carefully digging a pit that the fascists can shove us into.Instead, we should interrogate the fact that the Trump administration chose to target “gang members” and “terrorist supporters” in the first step of its ethnic cleansing project. Criminals and terrorists are the bogeymen animating bipartisan racism against Black, Latino and Arab people, and Trump is weaponizing these myths because many liberals have already written them off as less than human. The political context that enabled US residents to be shipped to El Salvador’s Cecot facility is a bipartisan project more than 50 years in the making, largely unquestioned by people who are rightfully horrified by recent escalations.Allegations of criminality have long been an effective pretext for anti-Black violence in the US – this is the “war on crime”. So long as there are “criminals” to fight, vicious police brutality becomes politically palatable. This is true in blue and red states alike. The gang member is the latest symbol used to dehumanize Black and Latino people, replacing the “superpredator”. In practice, police and prosecutors invoke the specter of monstrous gangs to continue targeting entire neighborhoods while evading allegations of explicit discrimination.You can be added to a gang database because of your tattoos, the color of the clothing you wear or even for using certain emojis on social media. These lists are riddled with errors, sometimes naming toddlers and elders. More commonly, gang databases index the thousands of people – often children – swept up by police because of where they live or whom they socialize with. The consequences of gang policing are devastating: it can lead to federal prosecution or potential deportation, not to mention a lifetime of state harassment.Gang membership isn’t the only tool the Trump administration can use to portray its victims as guilty. When the “war on crime” morphed into the “war on terror”, Arab and Muslim residents suffered from discriminatory surveillance and repression – the “terrorist” category matches the “gang member” category in that it justifies racist dragnet policing practices. The “counter-terrorism” net has already widened, targeting Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta. This problem is not limited to Republicans – liberal politicians and university stakeholders laid the groundwork for Trump’s deportation efforts. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called student Palestine activists proxies for Iran, and New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, smeared us as terrorist supporters to justify an incredibly violent police raid.The widening net of who is considered a criminal not only chills dissent among immigrants and activists. It further dehumanizes and renders disposable people who have genuinely committed harm.We must defend the rights of people who do have criminal records. No one deserves to be whisked away to a brutal prison that deprives them of basic human rights – no matter if it’s in El Salvador, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania or New York. Criminal records and bona fide gang membership don’t turn human beings into monsters. If Trump goes through with his plan of sending citizens to El Salvador, he could initially target people convicted of heinous crimes. This would allow federal officials to ask: “Why do liberals care about pedophiles and murderers?”We should be prepared to defend the basic rights of all of Trump’s targets with our full strength. If a single person becomes disposable, anyone could become the next target. Last week, Trump said he “loved” the idea of sending American “criminals” to El Salvador, and law professors are sounding the alarm about citizen student activists being subjected to terrorism prosecutions. First it will be the “migrant gang member” or “terrorist on a student visa” sent to Cecot. Next it will be the domestic gang member and the terrorist-supporting citizen. Eventually, perhaps any political opponent could be construed as a criminal-terrorist.Trump may not even need to rely on the justice department to criminalize his enemies – dozens of local cops joined the 6 January 2021 putsch at the US Capitol, and local prosecutors have eagerly charged student activists with felonies. This is another reason to avoid the innocence trap: many police love Trump, and law enforcement can very easily make their adversaries seem like criminals.The innocence trap is dangerous because allegations of criminality have always been deployed to justify state violence. If we only defend the “innocent”, the fascists will argue that their victim “was no angel”. An anti-fascist rhetoric that carves out exceptions for imperfect victims is a gift to our opponents.

      Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University, where he researches the politics of criminalization More

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      Trump’s already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens | Moira Donegan

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      They’re rounding people up, and you could be next. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with due process rights in deporting immigrants, who are now being targeted for their protected speech, having their visas or green cards summarily cancelled without process and sometimes without notice, and getting kidnapped off the streets and hustled into vans so that they can be shipped to “detention centers” too far away for their loved ones, or their lawyers, to visit them.Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an opinion that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to hold. But others the government seems to be seizing almost at random. More than 200 Venezuelan nationals have been seized and deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, rendered outside of US jurisdiction in defiance of judges’ orders demanding that their deportation flights be stopped. Of those Venezuelans, most had no criminal record. Other deportees, like the Maryland father and sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrego García, seem to have been deported by mistake; the Trump administration says that Abrego García, who they admit they did not mean to deport, will not be brought back to his family in the United States. Conveniently, the fact that they have deported him to a foreign prison is supposed, in the Trump administration’s logic, to absolve them of responsibility for putting him there. “We suggest the judge contact [Salvadoran] President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador,” the White House said, obnoxiously, after a judge ordered them to bring Abrego García back.Meanwhile, the sadism of the deportations, and the cruelty of the Salvadoran prison where the men are being kept, seem to hold a kind of aesthetic appeal for the Trump camp. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, recently flew to the El Salvador prison for a photoshoot with the captives there, where she stood in front of a crowd of men packed into a cell behind bars with her hair coiffed in long beachy waves.Now, the Trump administration may be seeking to extend the lawlessness and cruelty of its deportation regime to the next logical target: American citizens. The White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed on Tuesday that the Trump administration is considering pathways to deport citizens as well. “The president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He’s also discussed it privately. You’re referring to the president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported,” she said. “The president has said, if it’s legal, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure.”This would be illegal. But so is so much of what the Trump administration is doing with its deportation policies. It is illegal to cancel visas and green cards without due process, as the Trump administration has done and continues to do as part of a widening dragnet in its anti-immigrant purges. It is illegal to target immigrants for their speech, as the Trump administration has done to pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide activists, from Rümeysa Öztürk to Mahmoud Khalil. It is illegal to deport people to a foreign prison where they have no recourse to enforce their rights and no path to pursue their freedom – it is illegal to do this, as the Trump administration has done, specifically to prevent its victims from seeking to enforce their own rights in American courts. And it is illegal to ignore the binding orders of federal judges to stop all of this conduct in order to ensure that the deportations can continue, punishing innocent people, silencing protected speech, and scaring whole populations out of work, travel, political participation or any of the other daily dignities that they are supposed to be entitled to in this country.But the law, increasingly, is whatever the Trump administration decides it is. And there is no force that seems prepared to make them obey the law when their will does not incline them to do so.That is because the supreme court has been no help, and if anything has acted, so far, as all but an accomplice to Trump’s dismantling of the rule of law in his pursuit of anti-immigrant vengeance. Lower court judges have attempted to intervene on behalf of the disappeared immigrants, issuing orders commanding the Trump administration to stop deportations under a long-dormant 1798 wartime measure known as the Alien Enemies Act, and to return Abrego García to the US immediately. But the supreme court has stepped in to pause these orders, allowing the Trump administration’s deportation agenda to continue. In the Abrego García case, the court weakened a district court order to “effectuate” the innocent man’s freedom and return to a mere command that they “facilitate” it, and only in ways that don’t interfere with the executive branch’s foreign policy prerogatives – in practice, a weakening of the demand to bring Abrego García back home to a request that the Trump administration provide more plausible deniability when they refuse to do so. And while Brett Kavanaugh weighed in with a concurrence to make a pious declaration of the need for due process in deportation proceedings, the court’s actions speak louder than its words: they are allowing the kidnapping and deportation of US residents to continue without due process.The legal precedents being established in these immigration disappearance cases have no limiting principles: if visa holders, asylum seekers and legal permanent residents can be snatched and deported with effectively no practicable recourse to due process protections, then there is no reason why citizens can’t be. It is in the interest of every American citizen to take an active stand in defense of our immigrant neighbors. Because once the Trump administration decides that they have no rights, then neither do we. More