Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student arrested by the Trump administration last weekend without being accused of any crime, is not in federal custody because of things he has said, the secretary of state maintains.
“This is not about free speech,” Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
While that may be true, the secretary proceeded to contradict himself when asked why Khalil was being held, saying that Khalil had participated in antisemitic activities at his New York City Campus, including protests that expressed support for Hamas.
Expressing support for Hamas is not a crime. While such support is a position with which we vehemently disagree, there are lots of people who hold positions with which we vehemently disagree, and we do not consequently wish to see them arrested by federal agents.
Secretary Rubio is quite clearly wrong. This is about free speech, plain and simple. While it is true that Khalil is not an American citizen, rights of free speech enjoyed by Americans have traditionally been extended to all residents of our nation. Khalil finished his course work for a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. A Palestinian who was born in Syria, he was certainly prominent in protests at Columbia last year. But so were a lot of people. Unlike in China, unlike in Russia — unlike in a lot of countries — protests are not something for which American presidential administrations round up the usual suspects. In fact, it is un-American to do so.
But Khalil was arrested by ICE agents at his New York home last week alongside his eight-months-pregnant wife, who is an American citizen. Agents cited an obscure statute that allows the secretary of state to deport anyone whose presence is harmful to American foreign policy and national security interests. Following his arrest, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” It said that it would deport him by taking away his student visa, but Khalil is not here on a student visa — he has a green card, making him a lawful permanent U.S. resident. So then the State Department said it would take away his green card.
Khalil was whisked away to a detention center in Louisiana, where he awaits deportation.
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” President Trump wrote on social media on Monday.
Reasonable people will agree that there is a difference between supporting the Palestinian side in the Gaza war and being an actual terrorist — or even being “pro-terrorist.” Otherwise, you could call the many Trump voters of Arab descent in Michigan who said they voted for the president because they thought the Biden administration was too pro-Israeli in the conflict of being “pro-terrorist.”
But the Trump administration is not targeting those voters, not arresting them and planning to deport them for exercising their free speech. When the president writes “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply” with crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters, it seems to have more to do with his disdain for ivory-tower liberalism than with actual concerns about internal threats to United States security.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week that DHS was “using intelligence” in order to find other students who were involved in campus protests over Gaza.
Green card holders have already been subjected to extensive background checks before being granted permanent residence. British diplomats say Khalil previously worked for UK agencies in the Mideast for four years, and was subject to standard vetting in order to do so. There’s no reason to believe he’s a terrorist. There’s every reason to believe he’s being punished for his speech.