Mahmoud Khalil was a prominent student leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestine protests last year. On Saturday, he was taken into detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. According to The Associated Press, his attorney says she spoke to one of the agents over the phone, who told her that Khalil’s student visa was being revoked. The AP also reported that when the attorney told the agents that Khalil had a green card, they said this, too, was being revoked.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Democrats and Republicans have gone along with the idea that saying the magic word ‘terrorism’ amounts to a permission slip to undermine core freedoms.
This is a disturbing escalation in the Trump administration’s war against basic free speech norms. Trump has previously called for cable news channels he finds unfair to have their licenses revoked, unconstitutionally retaliated against the AP for refusing to redesignate the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” in its reporting, and even floated the idea of a constitutional amendment to enable protesters to be imprisoned for flag-burning. But Khalil’s arrest crosses a frightening new threshold of authoritarianism.
Let’s be very clear, though, that this didn’t come out of nowhere. In the decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both Democrats and Republicans have gone along with the idea that saying the magic word “terrorism” amounts to a permission slip to undermine core freedoms. This is always where that road led.
If there was any doubt that Khalil was being punished for protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, it was removed the next day. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that “the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters” will be revoked “so they can be deported.” Trump himself went further on Monday, declaring:
“This is the first arrest of many to come. 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. … If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children … you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”
The idea that protests against the war in Gaza are innately pro-Hamas is an insult to the intelligence of the American public. Trump himself has often claimed to have opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the evidence shows that this likely wasn’t his position at the time, if it had been, would that have made him “pro-Saddam Hussein”? Similarly, many in the MAGA movement oppose U.S. backing for Ukraine. If that doesn’t make them “anti-American,” why are students who oppose U.S. backing for Israel’s carnage in Gaza “anti-American”?
And the accusation of antisemitism is, if anything, even more offensive. Anyone who has spent time around the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States knows that many students who participate in such protests are themselves Jewish — and it’s to be expected that Jewish students would be more likely than Hindu or Catholic or Episcopalian students to have spent time wrestling with how they felt about Israel and Palestine and to thus be inspired to show up to protest the atrocities in Gaza. One of the most popular slogans of Jewish peace organizations says it all: “Not in Our Name.”
Nor is any of this the heart of the issue. Anyone at the protests who actually did support Hamas would have a position I would find loathsome. Perhaps Khalil did have this position (although, if so, I haven’t yet seen any evidence to back up that accusation). But free speech protections have to mean that people can take loathsome positions. No authoritarian regime has ever censored people who say things the regime likes. The test of our commitment to free speech is always whether we defend people’s rights to say things we find vile.
Trump’s announcement suggests that free speech, at least for green card holders, stops at support for “the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children.” But tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women and children have been slaughtered by the Israeli army since Oct. 7, 2023, and millions have been displaced.
Should green card holders who support the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu face deportation for their views?
The whole point of the First Amendment (which applies to government censorship) and broader free speech norms (which can apply to nonstate actors) is that all sides get to have their say, so that the public can hear it all and freely make up their minds. It would be difficult to overstate how central this is to the whole premise of popular democracy.
Trump doesn’t think he can get away with arresting American citizens who agree with Khalil, but his statement leaves little room for doubt that he’d love to do so. Right now, Trump doesn’t think he can get away with arresting American citizens who agree with Mahmoud Khalil, but his statement leaves little room for doubt that he’d love to do so. He says he “won’t tolerate” protests he deems “anti-American.” His announcement feels like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel about the rise of an authoritarian regime. But let’s be very clear on how we got here, because the rot that led to this started spreading long before Trump was first elected in 2016. George W. Bush responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks with unprecedented assaults on civil liberties. The “PATRIOT Act” he pushed through Congress allowed for records to be searched without normal judicial warrants in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment. He set up “black sites” around the world to detain suspected terrorists without charging them with any crime and openly used “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture). He even started a drone program whereby terrorism suspects in countries with which the United States wasn’t at war were extrajudicially executed as they sat at restaurants or cafes surrounded by innocents. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he declined to prosecute anyone involved the illegal torture program, declaring that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” (I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone arrested for trying to rob a liquor store used that line.) Worse yet, Obama not only didn’t reverse the rest of Bush’s civil liberties-shredding policies but, in some cases, made them his own and expanded them. He greatly expanded the use of drones, even killing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen. Obama claimed that al-Awlaki was involved in plotting terrorist attacks, but this claim was never tested in any sort of judicial process. And neither President Joe Biden nor, of course, Trump himself ever gave up the powers asserted by Bush and Obama. Trump’s open and unabashed declaration that he won’t “tolerate” protests he dislikes and that he’ll use arrests and deportations to intimidate protesters into silence crosses a new frontier in authoritarianism. But we didn’t go from 0 to 60 when he was elected. I hope the courts block Trump’s latest actions. There’s some hope that this will happen. There’s already been action from a district judge to temporarily block Khalil’s removal from the United States pending further review of the case. But his belief that he can get away with it by accusing protesters of supporting terrorism makes all too much sense after decades of both Democrats and Republicans acting as if there’s a “terrorism exception” to our core rights and freedoms. If we’re ever going to come back from this brink, we need to take a hard look at how we got here.
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast. 
