Mahmoud Khalil

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      ‘I could be next’: international students at Columbia University feel ‘targeted’ after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest

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      It was 4am and a Columbia University master’s student two months away from graduation lay awake in bed. His heart thumped so hard, his chest began to hurt. His hands got colder and colder; he was unable to speak. This had become an agonizing nightly routine for the 24-year-old from India since 8 March, when immigration officials handcuffed the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and took him into detention in Louisiana.“What scares me the most is that I would be fast asleep at home and I would hear a bang on my door and I’d be taken away in the middle of the night by Ice and nobody will ever know what happened to me,” said the student, who attended multiple protests to support Palestine around New York City. “It feels as if people are getting targeted for just speaking up for their political views last year.”Khalil was an organizer at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, part of a diverse community that ate, danced, prayed and protested together, demanding the university divest from corporations linked to Israel as violence in Gaza escalated.The federal immigration officers who arrested Khalil gained entry into the Columbia-owned building where he lived and told him his green card, which grants him permanent residence in the US, had been revoked. The Department of Homeland Security accused him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” and is attempting to deport him, but has not alleged he committed any crimes. His lawyers are challenging his detention and potential deportation, and said agents did not provide an arrest warrant. Khalil’s arrest came after Donald Trump vowed to deport student visa holders who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, a move legal experts have called a flagrant violation of free speech.Now, Columbia students who are not US citizens, some who have vocally supported Palestinian rights, told the Guardian they feel they must be careful who they speak to and censor what they say. They fear being questioned by Ice agents, having their visas revoked or being arrested and detained. Some feel like they are being watched while walking around Morningside Heights and on campus, while others are reluctant to visit family or friends overseas in case they are not permitted back in the country.View image in fullscreen“When I leave my apartment, when I go out, I’m just so much more aware and cautious of who’s around me,” said Seher Ahmed, a psychology master’s student from Pakistan. “I went for a run this morning, and I’ve never felt this way before, but I felt like everyone was, like, looking at me.”Another student who arrived at Columbia in August last year to study journalism had been inspired by student reporters’ coverage of campus protests. She photographed a vigil where journalism school students recited names of the more than 100 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed in Gaza. For a reporting class, the 21-year-old wrote about an anti-Trump rally on election night that called for an end to the Israel-Gaza war. She posted her work and discussed related issues on Instagram and X.But just days away from applying for a year-long work visa that would follow her expected graduation this May, she stopped posting her opinions and made her accounts private. She is reconsidering attending a friend’s wedding overseas in case she is not allowed back in the country. “I feel like I’m being paranoid, but I’m really scared,” she said.Ahmed, who attended women’s rights marches in Pakistan from the age of 15 with her mother, began an art piece after Khalil’s arrest: a meditation on the Urdu translation of the word freedom, with blue ink pen swept across white canvas. “I come from a Muslim country, so did he. I believe in the same things he does, freedom and basic human rights and just standing up for a place that needs our voice right now,” said Ahmed. Her paralyzing fear is rooted in the idea that the US government will misconstrue those values as “pro-Hamas” and revoke her student visa.“We’re not terrorists, or, like, supporting terrorists. We’re trying to prevent a genocide from happening,” said Ahmed.Imam, a graduate student, went to the encampment – once with his professor – to join protests, listen to speakers including journalist Motaz Azaiza and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attend Friday prayers. The 30-year-old has been attending classes over Zoom or skipping them altogether: he feels he “could be next” on Ice’s list, without having any knowledge of what he has done wrong. Two months away from graduation, he is conflicted about attending more protests, which have continued on and off campus in support of Khalil and Palestine. “I want to do something, I feel so hopeless,” he said. “But also everything I do is going to cost me a bigger risk.”On 11 March, three days after Ice arrested Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia PhD student from India who participated in campus protests, “self-deported” after her student visa had been revoked, DHS said. On 13 March, DHS presented warrants and searched two students’ dorm rooms on campus. In Newark, immigration agents arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, after saying her student visa had expired.That federal agents can target a student or recent graduate without charge is a chilling reminder of the oppressive environments that some international students left behind. For a 22-year-old master’s student from Russia who lives in university housing, Khalil’s arrest brought back memories of police knocking on doors to draft male citizens at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. She said the spirit of the university had changed; now it feels like “the police state is coming after you”.“Your home should be your safe space. But ever since the arrest, anytime I hear footsteps at night in the Columbia housing – the walls are super thin so you hear everything – I’m always like, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’” she said.This week, Yale Law School professors warned international students about an impending Trump travel ban, saying they should avoid leaving the US or return immediately to the US if abroad. Brown issued a similar warning to its international students.“People look at the global north thinking they have things so much better. There are better laws to protect your rights,” said Thien Miru, a post-graduate student from Indonesia. Now there is overwhelming concern that if a green card holder can be detained, a student visa holder has little protection.The Trump administration is intent on bringing Columbia to heel: last week it sent a letter to the university demanding measures such as a mask ban, winding down the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department and empowering campus law enforcement in exchange for any of the $400m federal funding it had clawed back after “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”, according to the administration.View image in fullscreenIn several emails to students and faculty, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, emphasized the need to “stand together”. “Our university is defined by the principles of academic freedom, open inquiry, and respect for all,” she wrote. One email linked to a public safety webpage outlining protocols for potential Ice campus visits. But some students interpreted this to mean they were responsible for dealing with immigration officials alone. Columbia did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.While studying for her two-year degree in social work, Miru, 35, learned about advocating for those who need help. She said the university needs to “go the extra mile” by mediating with those in power to protect its students’ rights.“I’ve heard a lot of people at Columbia say that this is our community, so what are you going to do if your community is experiencing something like this?” said Miru. “I am expecting something more than just sending us super-long emails. Prove to us that we are part of your community.”On 14 March, Khalil’s lawyers released a video of him being taken away from his wife, Noor Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, by plainclothes immigration officers. “As a woman I feel it’s so hard for her to think about raising your child without support from your partner,” said Miru, a mother of two girls. “If they deport her husband, family separation is not a good idea, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this little family. I’m speechless.”Miru made the difficult decision to leave her daughters with her parents in Indonesia to get her degree, after her father gave her books about the US and talked for years about the high quality of education while she was growing up. “I also got accepted to some universities in Australia, but since Columbia also accepted me, I thought let’s aim for the highest, let’s aim for the stars,” said Miru. Her hope was to bring her daughters to the US so they could also study there. Now, she’s questioning whether she should give up on her aspirations and move back home.

      Some names have been withheld for sources’ safety.
      Jazzmin Jiwa is an international journalist and documentary maker currently based in New York City. Reporting contributed by Duaa Shah, a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. More

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      ‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefs

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      In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent” warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.“My 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, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said.“At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.”He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket.In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”.“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel.“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.“I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.”Khalil’s arrest ignited protests and caused alarm among free expression advocates, who view the deportation attempt as a violation of his free speech rights. Khalil has not been accused of a crime. His lawyers argue that the Trump administration is unlawfully retaliating against him for his activism and constitutionally protected speech. In an amended petition filed last week, they contended that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.His attorneys are currently fighting in a New York court to have him transferred back to New York and to secure his release. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation while the legal challenge is pending.Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and since assuming office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, frequently framing such demonstrations as expressions of support for Hamas.Khalil, who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between the pro-Palestine protesters and university administrators.The Trump administration has accused the former student of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” and was attempting to deport him using a rarely invoked legal provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to remove someone from the US if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.Federal prosecutors are asking the New York court to order his challenge to his detention moved to Louisiana, where it would likely face more conservative judges.Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and member of Khalil’s legal team, said that what happens to Khalil will reverberate beyond his case. “The Trump administration has clearly signaled that this is their test case, their opening shot, the first of many more to come,” she said.“And for that test case, they chose an intrepid and deeply principled organizer who is beloved and trusted in his community,” Shamas said.After Khalil’s arrest, Trump said that it was just “the first of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport other foreign students he accused of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.Khalil said in his statement that he has always believed that his duty “is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear”.“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention” he said. “For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”He added: “That is precisely why I am being targeted.”Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”The university has increasingly taken disciplinary actions against students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on the school under the guise of fighting antisemitism, which it claims run rampant at the university. The administration is using the same argument to threaten dozens of others American universities with potentially crippling funding cuts.Students, Khalil said, have an important role to play in fighting back. “Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,” he said.“In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”He concluded: “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”

      Read Khalil’s full statement here. More

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      There can be no ‘Israel exception’ for free speech | Kenneth Roth

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      The Trump administration’s threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil seems to reflect a dangerous disregard for freedom of expression – a blatant example of official censorship to curb criticism of Israel.Khalil was a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He holds a green card, giving him permanent residence status, and is married to a US citizen. They are expecting their first child soon. Immigration agents arrested him last week in his university housing and sent him for detention from New York City to Louisiana. He had been a leader of protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.Beyond that, the facts are contested. His friends called him “kind, expressive and gentle”. A Columbia professor described him as “someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue. This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things.”But Donald Trump, hailing his arrest, suggested Khalil was among students “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. The administration has presented no facts to back up these assertions, but even were it to do so, the suggestion that permissible speech can be a basis for deportation is deeply troubling. Trump vowed more such deportation efforts.Ordinarily, the first amendment protects even offensive speech. Although the government retains greater latitude to deport non-citizens, Trump’s rhetoric suggests an intention to step way over the line of propriety. What does it mean to be “anti-American”? As we saw during the McCarthy era, people can face that accusation for a wide range of legitimate political views. Such campaigns are the antithesis of the free debate that is essential for US democracy.As for the charge of “antisemitism”, Trump seems to be fueling a disturbing tendency to use claims of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli government. Antisemitism is a serious problem that threatens Jews around the world. But if people see accusations of antisemitism as mere efforts to censor critics of Israel, it would cheapen the concept at a time when the defense against real antisemitism is urgently needed.Even Trump’s unsupported suggestion that Khalil is “pro-terrorist” needs unpacking. To begin with, opposing Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Palestinian civilians, as well as its starvation of them, does not make anyone pro-terrorist. Israel is required to carry out its military response to Hamas’s appalling murders and abductions of 7 October 2023 in accordance with international humanitarian law. War crimes by one side never support war crimes by the other. Pointing that out, if that’s what Khalil did, does not make him “pro-terrorist”; it makes him pro-civilian.The Trump administration’s retaliation against Khalil is part of its larger attack on campus protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Just days earlier, the administration announced the withdrawal of $400m in federal funding from Columbia for supposedly failing to protect Jewish students and faculty during anti-Israel protests, the vast majority of which were entirely peaceful. Other universities have now been threatened with a similar suspension of their funding.Coincidentally, I spoke on the Columbia campus days before Khalil’s detention. As a Jew, I did not feel the least bit threatened. Indeed, many of the protesters against Israeli atrocities have been Jewish. Again, Trump’s pretext for censoring critics of Israel is transparently thin.If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow. Trump likes to half-jokingly refer to himself as a “king”. Are we heading toward a Thailand-style lèse majesté under which criticism of the king is criminalized?But censoring criticism of Israel is a poor strategy even for protecting Israel. Trump’s plan to “solve” Israel’s Palestinian problem by forcibly deporting millions of Palestinians would be a huge war crime; it has been rightly rejected by the Arab states that Trump envisioned receiving the refugees or later paying to rebuild Gaza.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFailing that plan, the Israeli government would prefer the status quo – endless occupation – but the world increasingly rejects that option as apartheid, as did the international court of justice in July. Another option would be to recognize the “one-state reality” created by Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refuses to provide equal rights to all residents. Roughly the same number of Jews and Arabs like between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, so Israel would lose its Jewish majority.The most realistic, legal and enduring option remains a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side in peace. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has devoted his political career to avoiding a Palestinian state, but it is the best prospect for lasting peace.In pressing Netanyahu to agree to the current temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Trump showed his capacity to exert pressure on the Israeli government to take steps toward peace that it resists. He could do the same for a two-state solution.But to build a political support for this important step, we need free debate in the United States. Trump’s efforts to censor criticism of Israeli misconduct is a recipe for endless war and atrocities. Free speech is required if we hope to do better. Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Khalil.

      Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs was just published by Knopf More

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      Deporting speakers over supposed ‘propaganda’ is a stock authoritarian move | Sarah McLaughlin

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      The dust is starting to settle on the conflicting reports emerging after immigration officers’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader and green card holder, last weekend – and Americans should be alarmed by the similarities to authoritarian regimes’ speech policing.The White House has confirmed the arrest took place under a law granting the secretary of state unilateral power to act when given “reasonable ground to believe” an immigrant’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country.The Trump administration has not been shy in asserting that Khalil’s political expression is at the root of efforts to deport him. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed Khalil distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda”. A White House officially reportedly added that the “allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. Their actions are not about conduct, but speech.Trump himself claimed Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come” against students engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”.Americans must ask ourselves whether we are comfortable with our government wielding its power to deport speakers for what it claims is pro-terrorist propaganda. If your answer is “yes”, you should know this method is often employed by authoritarian governments with significantly weaker national commitments to free expression than our own.In recent years, India has increasingly canceled or failed to renew the work visas of journalists in the country whose writing has challenged the government, including one whose reporting “crossed the line” and another, married to an Indian citizen, who created a “biased negative perception about India” through her journalism. Officials are also targeting the overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status, available to certain individuals of Indian origin or married to Indian citizens, while it takes aim at those it accuses of “tarnishing the image” of India.These denials serve multiple purposes: they not only diminish government critics’ ability to speak but they also limit the viewpoints that citizens of those countries can access – and warn everyone else to shut up.Similar efforts are under way elsewhere.Russia’s targeting of the press, especially after its invasion of Ukraine, has included the expulsion of foreign journalists including Politico’s Eva Hartog and El Mundo’s Xavier Colas. Hong Kong authorities refused to renew the visa of Rowena He, a scholar and Tiananmen massacre researcher, resulting in her removal from the city and her job at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kuwait revoked citizenship from the blogger and critic Salman al-Khalidi and has since in absentia convicted him for social media posts and extradited him from Iraq. The list goes on.Governments retain significant authority over who can enter and reside within their borders. But that authority should not be used as a weapon to reflect the government’s preferred political opinions or sift out their critics. Unfortunately, in many places, it is, often on the basis of spurious national security-related claims.The question at hand today is not whether Khalil’s views are popular or beloved among American citizens or politicians. That should never be the question we ask in our most challenging questions about our speech rights. What we must ask instead is: should we approve of the use of government power to expel speakers whose political views the government loathes?Because, through its many comments about Khalil’s case, that is the question the Trump administration has undoubtedly posed to us. If constitutionally protected speech “adversarial” to the political positions of the US and allies can make Khalil eligible for deportation, this administration is ultimately threatening the authority to revoke the status of any lawful immigrants whose views it dislikes. You don’t need to hold any sympathy for Khalil’s views to see why this is an immense threat to free expression.Here in the United States, I advocate for the rights of international students originating from authoritarian regimes who study on our nation’s campuses and carry fear that research or political activity challenging their governments will create consequences at home. Now, immigrants legally in the United States on either a green card or a student visa may be forced to make some of the same calculations as those who live or work in authoritarian states abroad – but about our own government.Is it safe for me to speak my mind? Is it worth the risk? Is the government going to target me for my views?America’s immigration holding cells should not become detention centers for speech the government intends to target.

      Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech More

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      Almost 100 arrested during protest occupying Trump Tower over Mahmoud Khalil

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      Protesters organized by a progressive Jewish group occupied the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City on Thursday to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University student held by US immigration authorities. About 100 were arrested.Chanted slogans included: “Free Mahmoud, free them all” and: “Fight Nazis, not students.”Other chants in footage posted to social media included: “We will not comply, Mahmoud, we are on your side” and: “Bring Mahmoud home now.”At a news briefing on Thursday afternoon, a police official said those arrested faced charges including trespassing, obstruction and resisting arrest.Many of the protesters in a group organizers said was more than 250-strong wore red T-shirts bearing the message “Jews say stop arming Israel”. By early afternoon, footage was posted showing officers from the New York police department beginning to arrest protesters.The protest in the gold-coloured lobby of Donald Trump’s signature Fifth Avenue building, the US president’s New York home, was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world” and has staged protests at New York landmarks including Grand Central Station.In a statement, the group said: “The detention of Mahmoud is further proof that we are on the brink of a full takeover by a repressive, authoritarian regime.“As Jews of conscience, we know our history and we know where this leads. It’s on all of us to stand up now. Many of us are the descendants of people who resisted European fascism and far too many of our ancestors lost their lives in that struggle. We call on the strength of our ancestors and we call on our tradition, which teaches us we must never stand idly by.”The actor Debra Winger participated in the protest.Accusing the Trump administration of having “no interest in Jewish safety” and “co-opting antisemitism”, Winger told the Associated Press: “I’m just standing up for my rights, and I’m standing up for Mahmoud Khalil, who has been abducted illegally and taken to an undisclosed location. Does that sound like America to you?”Khalil, 30, was a lead organizer of protests at Columbia University over Israel’s war in Gaza, which began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.Having completed a master’s degree, Khalil is due to graduate from Columbia in May. Though he is a legal permanent US resident and married to an American citizen, he was arrested in New York last Saturday.He is now in custody in Louisiana, without charge but held under a rarely used immigration law provision that allows the secretary of state to approve the detention of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.His lawyer, Baher Azmy, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has called the arrest “absolutely unprecedented” and “essentially a form of retaliation and punishment for the exercise of free speech”.Amid Trump administration attacks on universities over pro-Palestinian protests, observers say Khalil is being used as a test case for mass arrests. Trump has said Khalil’s arrest is “the first of many to come”, and promised to deport students seen to be guilty of “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”. Khalil has not been accused of breaking any laws.On Thursday, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, spoke to Reuters. She said Khalil asked her a week ago if she knew what to do if officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) came to the door of their home.“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive,” she said.She added: “I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen.”Khalil “is Palestinian and he’s always been interested in Palestinian politics”, she said. “He’s standing up for his people, he’s fighting for his people.”On Wednesday, in a statement read by a lawyer, Abdalla, 28, said: “My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it is shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people. I demand his immediate release and return to our family.“So many who know and love Mahmoud have come together, refusing to stay silent. Their support is a testament to his character and to the deep injustice of what is being done to him.”Sonya E Meyerson-Knox, director of communications for Jewish Voice for Peace, posted footage of the Trump Tower protest on Thursday and said: “We will not comply – Mahmoud we are in your side[,] 300 Jews and friends in Trump Towers [sic] [because] we know what happens when an autocratic regime starts taking away our rights and scapegoating and we will not be silent[.] COME FOR ONE – FACE US ALL[.]”Jewish Voice for Peace said descendants of Holocaust survivors were among the protesters.Meyerson-Knox told NBC News: “My grandmother lost her cousins in the Holocaust. I grew up on these stories. We know what happens when authoritarian regimes begin targeting people, begin abducting them at night, separating their families and scapegoating. And we know that it’s one step from here to losing all right to protest and then further horrors happening, as we have seen too well in our history.“We’re calling on everyone to speak up today because otherwise we won’t be able to tomorrow.” More

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      Seth Meyers on Trump’s Tesla photo-op: ‘This is how oligarchy works’

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      Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump marketing Elon Musk’s Tesla cars with taxpayer money and how Trump’s tariffs are sinking the US economy.Seth MeyersThe one silver lining of the economic downturn since Trump took office, according to Seth Meyers, is that Tesla shares are plummeting too. Musk’s car company is now worth half of what it was at its mid-December peak.On Tuesday, Trump intervened to pump up Tesla’s stock price by doing a promo for the company with taxpayer money. He transformed the south lawn of the White House into a Tesla car lot, looking to “buy” a new car with Musk himself. Asked by reporters if he would pay with a credit card, Trump said he was “old-fashioned” and preferred checks.“So fun to see the crypto president just fully admit he’s still a check guy,” the Late Night host laughed.Trump also climbed into a Tesla with Musk and exclaimed: “That’s beautiful! This is a different pedal … everything is computer!”“You know, I give the man a hard time, but then he says something that really puts something into perspective,” Meyers joked. “Because when you really think about it, everything’s computers.”Musk then had to explain to Trump that driving a car is like “driving a golf cart … it’s like a golf cart that goes really fast.”“A car is a golf cart that goes really fast. I mean, is that how they have to explain things to Trump in the Situation Room?” Meyers wondered.What is Trump getting out of the photo-op? Musk already spent nearly $300m on the 2024 election and has reportedly promised to funnel another $100m directly into political entities controlled by Trump. “And it says everything about Trump that his reaction to that is: ‘Thank you for that, in exchange, I’ll buy one Tesla,’” said Meyers.“This is how oligarchy works,” he added. “If you’re favored by the regime, you get an infomercial paid for by taxpayers.“But you say something the regime doesn’t like, you get disappeared in the middle of the night without any due process or even an accusation of a crime,” he added, pointing to the story of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and leader of pro-Palestinian protests who was arrested by immigration agents, claiming his student visa was revoked, even though he is a legal permanent resident.Stephen ColbertOn the Late Show, Stephen Colbert lamented the economy’s “toboggan ride to skid row” because of Trump’s tariffs. “But today, Trump implemented a plan to quell fear of tariffs with more tariffs. Remember, you’ve got to fight fire with setting our money on fire,” he joked.Trump’s sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum went into effect on Wednesday, “Of course, these tariffs, like any tariffs, are a tax that we pay on the stuff that we buy,” Colbert explained, noting that the price of a new car could increase as much as $12,000. “So from now on, teenagers are going to have to try to get to third base in the backseat of a bike.”To quell outrage – even the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal called the tariffs “the dumbest in history” – Trump sent his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to make the rounds on the news. Asked by a CBS journalist if he thought the tariffs would still be worth it if they led to a recession, Lutnick answered: “These policies are the most important thing America has ever had.”“Yes, these tariffs are THE most important thing America has ever had,” Colbert deadpanned. “More important than the Declaration of Independence, more important than landing on the moon, more important than making the taco shell out of the Dorito.”He added: “You know someone is lying when they use that big of a superlative about anything.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also checked in on a dire state of affairs. “The prices Trump said he would lower on day one are still high, our eggs have the flu and half the Department of Education is about to get laid off,” he said.Those Department of Education employees are now at the whims of Linda McMahon, education secretary and wife of the WWE founder, Vince McMahon. “Could you imagine getting fired by the wife of the disgraced wrestling meathead? Don’t let the folding chair hit you on the way out,” Kimmel said.“Here’s a math problem: if the Department of Education has 4,000 employees, and the president cuts 50% of the workforce, how many edibles do I need to get through the next four years?”As for Trump, “he’s Thanos-ed the Department of Education,” Kimmel concluded. “Goodbye half the Department of Education. Goodbye half the National Park Service. Goodbye half of our allies, goodbye half of your 401(k). They all disappeared, and they’re not coming back.” More