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      There’s nothing elitist about college or university. We should reject that idea | Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

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      It’s no secret that the Trump administration is not a friend of the country’s higher education system. During a speech he gave at the National Conservatism conference in October 2021, vice-president JD Vance pinpointed American universities as “the enemy” while repeating a litany of increasingly familiar charges about their purported cultural elitism, radical-left ideological agenda, and incapacity to prepare students for the real needs of the labor market.More recently, Donald Trump has also endorsed plans to tax university endowments and abolish the Department of Education, which oversees both the federal Pell Grant system and most federally subsidized student loan programs, jointly accounting for about 40% of the country’s higher education revenues.Amongst the stated grounds for this hostility, one of the most frequent – but also perplexing – claims is that colleges and universities are “elite playgrounds”. This is of course one of the several ways in which the current Republican party has sought to rebrand itself as a champion of the interests and values of the working class, against the country’s purportedly progressive establishment.Yet the appeal to anti-elitist sentiment in the attack against higher education remains perplexing, for a few reasons. To begin with, both Trump and Vance are themselves Ivy-League graduates otherwise deeply invested in preserving, rather than upending, the country’s established social hierarchies. The “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs specifically intended to broaden access to higher education institutions have, if anything, been the target of their most virulent attacks.It’s also confusing – and somewhat circular – that most of these attacks have focused on Ivy League colleges and universities, which do primarily serve elites but are also responsible for a tiny fraction of the post-secondary education in the country at large. Their total undergraduate enrollment is currently at around 60,000, which is less than 0.5% of the overall undergraduate population in the United States.But there is a deeper reason why anti-elitism and hostility towards higher education are strange bedfellows. Higher education institutions have historically been among the most effective powerful engines of social mobility in the country. They are therefore natural antidotes against the consolidation of what the founding fathers referred to as “artificial aristocracies founded on wealth and birth”.In advocating for the creation of a publicly funded university in the state of Virginia, for instance, Thomas Jefferson argued that “those talents which nature hath sown liberally among the poor as the rich” would thereby be “rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens … without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental conditions or circumstances”.The limits of Jefferson’s actual disregard for factors of “birth” in the target population he had in mind when advancing his vision for a publicly-funded higher education institution are evident in the fact the University of Virginia he contributed in creating initially only accepted white males, notwithstanding the fact the removal of the “wealth” barrier was in itself a significant achievement.Yet the same fundamental faith in the capacity of higher education to break down social barriers also underpinned the subsequent expansion of the United States’s higher education system to include various categories of individuals who had previously been excluded from it.Women’s colleges began in the first half of the 19th century and played a decisive role in challenging the marginal position that women had historically occupied in American society, eventually leading to their inclusion in previously male-only colleges in the aftermath of the second world war. The same is true of historically Black colleges and universities for African Americans, and of the land-grant universities created between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries for multiple generations of immigrants of Catholic, Jewish and Asian descent.Contemporary empirical evidence confirms that US higher education institutions continue to function as powerful engines of social mobility: a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts showed that adult children born to parents in the bottom quintile of the income distribution are about four times as likely to reach the top quintile by attending college.To be sure, there is also evidence that complicates the long-established narrative. Low-income students still attend highly selective colleges at much lower rates than their peers from richer families, and their enrollment at the mid-ranking institutions that are most effective at propelling them into higher income brackets has actually been declining over the past two decades.But, if that is the case, the answer should be more, not less, investment in expanding access to higher education. The fact that the incoming administration is intent on gutting not only “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs but also the federally funded Pell Grant and student loan programs shows that it doesn’t really intend to contrast the persistent elements of “elitism” in the country’s higher education system.On the contrary, to the extent that college education has become one of the most powerful predictors of electoral support for the Democratic party, the goal is more likely to be a further entrenchment of the deep socioeconomic divisions that colleges and universities have historically served to undermine but the current Republican party thrives on.Seeing past this ruse requires separating legitimate concerns about elite power in the contemporary United States from the attack against the very institutions that are most likely to do something about it.

      Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is executive director of the Moynihan Center and full professor of political science at the City College of New York. More

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      The ADL and the Heritage Foundation are helping to silence dissent in America | Ahmed Moor

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      The repression that began under the Biden administration has accelerated under Trump. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by federal agents – reportedly Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – despite his legal, permanent resident status will probably have its intended effect. People will speak up less; their fear of the irreversible harm meted out by a vengeful state is justified. Now we are all left to contend with the wreckage of the first amendment to the US constitution, which used to guarantee the right to speech in this country.Responsibility for the erosion of our rights is attributable – in part – to the bipartisan embrace of the non-governmental, non-profit sector. That’s because from the 1940s onward, the federal government has ceded much state authority to philanthropies and non-profits. Those groups, in turn, have acted to craft policy – everything from how to develop equitable housing or the benefits of inoculating children to ensuring that speech targeting Israel is punishable by law.The tax code ensures that we subsidize special interest groups, such as the Israel lobby, even as it skirts the ordinary mechanisms of democratic policymaking and accountability. Today, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a rightwing Israel advocacy group, has taken the lead in seeking to undermine bedrock American freedoms in support of Israel. The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther roadmap explicitly describes its goal of having “foreign [‘Hamas Support Network’] leaders and members deported from the US”.It should be said here that “Hamas Support Network” is a made-up, strangely emotional and overwrought phrase used by the Heritage Foundation to describe college students who oppose Israel’s genocide in Palestine.In her essay How Philanthropy Made and Unmade American Liberalism, Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, argues that the rise of the philanthropic apparatus in America, defined broadly as tax-exempt, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), presented special interests with the means to exercise power in an unregulated, nontransparent way.Starting in the early 20th century, when the federal income tax was codified into law, special effort was made to exempt “public-benefit associations” from taxation. The argument was that they acted in the public good while simultaneously representing the best of capitalist success, a core tenet of American liberalism.There was a practical component to the argument, too. Philanthropies could act as policy labs – in the 1930s, the Carnegie Foundation could support educational programs away from the public. If policies were successful, they could be implemented across a broader swathe of society. For their utility, NGOs and philanthropies received tax-exempt status. Yet, as Corwin Berman said, “any time there’s a tax exemption, it’s a tax expenditure, but it’s an expenditure which avoids public scrutiny”. When Nixon restructured USAid through the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, it was in part to obscure government efforts “that doubled as global capitalist and neocolonial ventures” – all without democratic oversight or public participation.Early opposition to private policymaking for the “public good” came from anti-elite quarters and from the right. In the 1960s, Wright Patman, a populist Democratic representative from Texas, kicked off a series of investigations designed to curtail the power of what’s sometimes called the “submerged state”.But in the 80s and 90s, the right began to co-opt non-governmental frameworks. The Heritage Foundation and others learned how to leverage “philanthropy as a tool and a cudgel”, as Berman said to me. Today, non-profits work across a broad range of policy issues both domestically and abroad. Many of the groups that have engineered the bipartisan consensus on the suppression of speech that is critical of Israel are non-profits. They obtain tax-exempt status and simultaneously craft policy, and they do so on behalf of Democrats and Republicans, away from public scrutiny.The ADL, which controls total net assets of 200m tax-free dollars, in particular lobbied for policy responses to student activism in both the Biden and Trump administrations. In 2022, the ADL – which regularly conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel – commended the Biden administration for developing a “national strategy to combat antisemitism”.The statement went on to take credit for the policy: “This is one of the steps that we have long advocated for as part of a holistic approach to address the antisemitism that has been increasingly normalized in society.”After Khalil’s detention, the ADL, whose leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, was paid more than $1.2m in 2022, issued a statement on X that reads in part: “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.”There is an irony in all this. The right is now on a mission to defund universities, a process which started with angry pro-Israel billionaires on X. It seems reasonable to expect the IRS to be weaponized to revoke the tax-exempt status of philanthropies and other elite institutions deemed to be sympathetic to the Democratic party’s agenda.Khalil’s detention – a shocking assault by the Israel lobby on American freedom – is not the first time that constitutional rights in this country have been assailed by a president. Abraham Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus during the civil war, this country’s first major constitutional crisis. But this may be the first time that a dramatic erosion in Americans’ constitutional liberties has been engineered by policymaking organizations that are subsidized by the public but are accountable to no one at all.

      Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges the US state department with circumventing the law to fund Israeli military units accused of human rights abuses More

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      Trump is using Mahmoud Khalil to test his mass deportation plan | Heba Gowayed

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      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

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      Columbia University ‘refusing to help’ identify people for arrest – White House

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      The Trump administration said on Tuesday that Columbia University was “refusing to help” the Department of Homeland Security identify people for arrest on campus, after immigration authorities detained a prominent Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate over the weekend.The Trump White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday the administration had given the university names of multiple individuals it accused of “pro-Hamas activity”, reiterating the administration’s intention to deport activists associated with pro-Palestinian protests.“Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus,” Leavitt said in a press briefing. “And as the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that.”Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at the university last year, was detained on Saturday night in an unprecedented move that prompted widespread outrage and alarm from free speech advocates.Trump described the arrest this week as the “first arrest of many to come”.The federal immigration authorities who arrested Khalil reportedly said they were acting on a state department order to revoke the green card granting him permanent residency.As of Tuesday, Khalil had not been charged with any crime. However, two people with knowledge of the matter told the New York Times that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him broad power to expel foreigners if they give him “reasonable ground to believe” their presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”. Zeteo also reported that Rubio himself “personally signed off on the arrest”.As of Monday morning, Khalil was being held at an immigration detention facility near Jena, Louisiana.On Monday evening, a federal judge in Manhattan barred his deportation pending a hearing in his case set for Wednesday.The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have joined Khalil’s legal team, led by his attorney, Amy Greer. Greer stated on Monday that she had spoken with Khalil and that he was “healthy and his spirits are undaunted by his predicament”.On Tuesday, 13 members of Congress – led by the Palestinian-American US representative Rashida Tlaib – issued a letter demanding his immediate release.The arrest came just days after Donald Trump’s second presidential administration canceled $400m in funding to Columbia University over what it described as the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment on campus.On Monday, the US education department’s civil rights office followed the cuts to Columbia with new warnings to 60 other colleges and universities indicating that they may face “enforcement actions” for allegations of antisemitic harassment as well as discrimination on their campuses.In Monday’s letters to the 60 higher education institutions, the federal education department’s office of civil rights (OCR) said that the schools are all being investigated in response to complaints of alleged “violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination”.A department statement said it sent the admonitions under the agency’s authority to enforce Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin”.“National origin includes shared (Jewish) ancestry,” the statement said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe letters stem from an executive order signed by Trump shortly after retaking office in January that purported to “combat antisemitism”. A fact sheet corresponding to Trump’s order suggested deporting international students involved in pro-Palestinian protests.In a statement on Monday, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said her department was “deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year”.“University leaders must do better,” the former executive for the WWE professional wrestling promotion said. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers.“That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws.”Trump had recently threatened to halt all federal funding for any college or school that allows “illegal protests” and vowed to imprison “agitators”. The president accused Columbia University of repeatedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The institution has been a focal point for campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Demonstrations erupted last spring both across the US and internationally, with students calling for an end to the US’s support to the Israeli military as well as demanding that their universities divest from companies with ties to Israel.At Columbia, such protests led to mass arrests, suspensions and the resignation of the university’s president at the time. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment should not happen in a democracy | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Forced disappearance, kidnapping, political imprisonment – take your pick. These terms all describe what has happened with the Trump administration’s first arrest for thought crimes, something that should never happen in a democracy.But it has, to Mahmoud Khalil, a recently graduated master’s student from Columbia University’s school of international and public affairs. And for each minute that Khalil is held in detention, every one of us should feel like our own individual rights in this country are being shredded. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is a barefaced attempt by the Trump administration to destroy free thinking while murdering due process and free speech along the way. This is an ominous development.On the evening of Saturday 8 March, Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US (a green card holder), and his US-citizen wife, who is eight months pregnant, were returning home to their Columbia University apartment in upper Manhattan. According to reports, the couple had just unlocked the door to the building when plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security pushed their way in like thugs and demanded Khalil surrender himself for arrest.The lead agent told Khalil’s lawyer, whom Khalil had immediately called, that his student visa was being revoked. But Khalil doesn’t have a student visa for the very simple reason that he is a lawful permanent resident! Apparently confused, the agent next responded that Khalil’s green card was being revoked – which, by US law, cannot be done without a lot of due process. When pressed by Khalil’s lawyer to show a warrant for arrest, the agent simply hung up on the lawyer, shoved Khalil into handcuffs, and carted him away. As of this writing, Khalil is in a detention facility in Louisiana.Let’s be clear. If you grew up in Egypt or Nicaragua or Russia, you would recognize this behavior. If you have read the work of Milan Kundera or Ariel Dorfman or Breyten Breytenbach, you will recognize this behavior. This is how the authoritarian regimes always operate, seeking to demonize their critics and neutralize their opposition by lies, exaggerations and the blunt force of state power. This despicable and dangerous conduct has now come to the land of the free and the home of the brave as official policy.The Trump administration doesn’t even bother to disguise the ideological assault that characterizes Khalil’s arrest. Khalil was an active member of Columbia University’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, a war that has been characterized as a genocide by Israel by experts and multiple human rights organizations around the world. Khalil also served as a negotiator between the university administration and student activists who had set up an encampment on campus.It was in that role that Khalil’s profile grew, particularly among extreme rightwing organizations supporting Israel that began sending lists of students to the Trump administration who, they said, should be deported from the US because of their views. This blatant attempt to shut down free speech picked up after Donald Trump issued two executive orders in late January that called for deporting “perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment”. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the Trump administration is actively canceling every form of protection for other minority populations, while appearing deeply concerned about antisemitism, as it also tacitly supports antisemitic behavior.)Khalil had already suffered so much harassment by these pro-Israel groups that the day before his arrest, he wrote to the interim president of Columbia University, telling her that he was afraid that government officials or private actors would target him or his family, urging her to provide him legal support and protection. After his arrest, the official White House account on X issued a post that said: “Shalom, Mahmoud,” using a Hebrew word that can mean goodbye. Haha. Whoever wrote the post must think this very clever. But in a court of law, the post will only buttress the argument that Trump is on a rampage to shut down any types of speech he doesn’t like.Exactly which crime has Mahmoud Khalil committed? Which activities has he engaged in to warrant arrest and deportation? The best the Department of Homeland Security can come up with are the same flimsy innuendo that we hear over and over again. Any show of concern for Palestinians is, presto, turned into “activities aligned to Hamas”.That “aligned to Hamas” is not a legal standard is hardly surprising. It comes after all from the Trump administration, which operates almost definitionally as the opposite of a legal standard. Expecting something reasonable from this administration is like eating a razor-blade sandwich and thinking you won’t come out all bloodied, which is of course why the Trump administration is repeatedly offering you such aromatic and enticing fresh bread.I expect as much from Trump, but I demand more from Columbia University, my own alma mater. After Trump withdrew some $400m of federal funding over an unproven and completely ideologically driven allegation that Columbia was a hotbed of antisemitism, the interim president didn’t bother to defend her institution. Instead, she immediately sent us Columbia affiliates an email to “assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns”. I’m educated enough to know that the word “appeasement” has a specific history. I also know that cowards run away from Palestine, even if they too will be the ones who suffer in the end.I also demand more from my local officials. This federal assault on protected speech from a New Yorker should raise huge alarms from the mayor of New York, but all we’ve heard from Eric Adams thus far is … well, what sound would crickets make if they were flying business class on Turkish Airlines? If it’s any sound at all, I imagine the jet engine hums louder than the lack of objection he’s made. His silence is matched only by Andrew Cuomo, Adams’s new competition for the next New York mayoral race. Together, they might have enough courage to lose a game of chicken to the lion in the Wizard of Oz.But mostly, I demand a whole lot more from the Democratic party. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? They seem to believe the best way to defend free speech in this country is not to speak at all. Irrelevance has never been so recognizable.Democracy has always been a fragile, improvised, teetering wall of bricks that extends high in the air. It takes a lot of people to support it, but it gives quickly when faced with pressure from the other side. The thing is, even if you’re not supporting it, you’ll still get crushed when the wall falls. Too many people seem ready to be crushed. That’s only the tiniest reason to support Mahmoud Khalil. We all need to rush to the wall and do what we can to free him from his unjust imprisonment. For him and also for us. Because, you know what? He won’t be the last.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump | Owen Jones

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      For those who fear Donald Trump is a despot in the making, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he triumphantly declared in his State of the Union address. “It’s back!” JD Vance scolded Europe in his speech at the Munich security conference last month, declaring that “free speech is in retreat” across the continent.Like all authoritarian creeds, Trumpism turns reality on its head and empties words of their meaning in an effort to sow confusion and disarray among its critics. On the same day Trump announced the revival of free speech in Congress, he posted on Truth Social that federal funding for educational institutions that allow “illegal protests” will be ceased. Notably, illegality was not defined, but the issue Trump is referring to, of course, is Palestine. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he declared. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”Trump’s first target: Columbia University, which has had $400m of federal funding slashed because of what the government says is “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and the University of California – could be next. All were the sites of overwhelmingly peaceful encampments protesting over Israel’s genocidal attack against the Palestinian people. They weren’t simply opposing their government’s facilitation of this atrocity, through weapons, aid and diplomatic support, but demanding their colleges divest from companies linked to Israel.Just as Trumpism is no guarantor of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, the opposite. The very real menace of antisemitism has been systematically conflated with any critique of crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what is meant by “anti-Israel hate”, as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as new ambassador to the UN puts it, who became a rightwing icon after facing down university presidents over Israel. The president’s most powerful ally is Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet claiming Jewish communities were pushing “hatred against whites”, and recently performed Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.Trump himself declared that Jewish Americans who support the Democrats – that is, the vast majority – “hate their religion”, “hate everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and menacingly said they would have a “lot” of blame if he lost the presidential election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a large Jewish presence, and hundreds of Jewish students signed a letter rejecting “the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic”.Indeed, Columbia in particular victimised its own students. The university banned Jewish Voice for Peace before the encampment began, ordered police raids which led to more than 100 students being arrested, disciplined and expelled, and targeted sympathetic academics.One was Katherine Franke, a professor who was publicly denounced by Stefanik and forced into retirement. Far from protecting Jewish students, Franke claims, this is about “radical advocates for Israel” lying about the campus protests. “This university has bent a knee and coddled bullies,” she says of Columbia’s repression of students’ free speech – and still it had its funding slashed.It gets more sinister. The Department of Homeland Security arrested one of the lead negotiators of Columbia’s encampment: Mahmoud Khalil, a US green card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unknown to his wife, he was sent more than 1,000 miles away to a notorious detention centre in Louisiana. The department’s claim: that “he led activities aligned to Hamas”, a blatant attempt to conflate Palestinian solidarity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on 7 October.Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech simply does not exist. Surely there is one man who will be particularly incensed by this outrage. After all, just last week he grandly proclaimed: “We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.” That was the vice-president, JD Vance.But the truth is, the US right never actually cared about free speech. It was simply a ruse, intended to stigmatise any attempt to rebut its bigotry against largely voiceless minorities. The Trump administration has escalated the biggest onslaught against free speech since McCarthyism: even before its assumption of power, those opposed to Israel’s genocide have faced being deplatformed, victimised and indeed targeted by institutions like Columbia.Yet it was not just the hardcore right who defamed these protests. Many self-described “liberals” and “centrists” joined in, smearing those opposed to some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hateful, dangerous extremists – Jewish Americans among them. In doing so, they helped legitimise the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that is now under way. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of Jewish American campaign group IfNotNow, told me we are now seeing “the terrifying logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling for Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white nationalist administration carrying out its war on civil rights and free speech under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. We are all endangered by this blatant assault on our democracy.”It would be deeply naive to believe this repression will end with the attacks on people expressing solidarity with Palestine. A precedent that is established can swiftly be expanded. As it is, the US media are increasingly menaced by – among other things – Trump’s libel actions, the threat of vexatious investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos bending the knee to the would-be king. Free speech is being pummelled by those who claim to be its greatest advocates.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      US judge blocks deportation of Palestinian activist detained by Ice

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      A judge has blocked the deportation of the prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s protests against Israel over the war in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University until this past December who holds permanent US residency, is being detained by US immigration authorities at a facility in Louisiana after his arrest, according to information from officials.A spokesperson for the US’s homeland security department – as well as the country’s top diplomat – confirmed the arrest. In a statement to the Associated Press, a homeland security department spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said Khalil’s arrest was made to support Donald Trump’s presidential orders “prohibiting antisemitism”.The department alleged that Khalil’s activism constituted “activities aligned to Hamas”.Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also confirmed the arrest, adding on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”Jesse M Furman, an Obama-appointed judge in New York’s southern district, announced the block in an order on Monday amid protests over Khalil’s arrest.Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called on the department of homeland security on Monday evening to “produce facts and evidence of criminal activity”.“Absent evidence of a crime, such as providing material support for a terrorist organization, the actions undertaken by the Trump administration are wildly inconsistent with the United States constitution,” Jeffries’ statement read.Khalil served as lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last spring. On Monday, an online tracker administered by the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) indicated he was at the LaSalle detention center near the central Louisiana community of Jena. The facility is operated by the private contractor GEO Group.According to Zeteo, which first reported on the arrest, Khalil’s attorneys did not immediately know where he was being detained. The same tracker showing Khalil in custody in Louisiana on Monday indicated on Sunday that he was at an immigration detention center in New Jersey.But when Khalil’s wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, attempted to visit him at the New Jersey center, she was reportedly told he was not there.Khalil was detained by Ice agents despite having a green card and therefore being a permanent US resident. Khalil’s attorney said Ice agents hung up the phone during the detention when she asked if they had a warrant.“The Trump administration’s outrageous detention of Mahmoud is designed to instill terror in students speaking out for Palestinian freedom and immigrant communities,” said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on the arrest. “This is the fascist playbook. We all must fiercely reject it, and universities must start protecting its students.”Trump has vowed to target foreign students for deportations as well as “agitators” involved in protests on US college and university campuses. The second Trump administration has made a specific focus of Columbia University, recently announcing the cancellation of $400m in grants over claims the school isn’t doing enough to combat antisemitism.A Zionist activist group, Betar USA, claimed credit for releasing Khalil’s name to the Trump administration, praising his detention. The Anti-Defamation League has listed the group as a hate group – the only Jewish group on the list.“This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America,” Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive of New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.“Furthermore, Khalil and all people living in the United States are afforded due process.“A green card can only be revoked by an immigration judge, showing once again that the Trump administration is willing to ignore the law in order to instill fear and further its racist agenda. DHS must immediately release Khalil.”Abené Clayton contributed to this report More