Even conservatives have been left bewildered and opposed to the blatantly speech-related nature of the detention of green card holder and former Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil, who had been involved in organizing anti-Israel campus protests last year. In its efforts to deport this permanent resident, the Trump administration up to and including the president has been vocal about going after Khalil specifically for his organizing and advocacy. And that’s not allowed under the First Amendment, about not “abridging the freedom of speech.”
Khalil has not been charged with any crime and thought crime isn’t on the books. The matter will be addressed today before Manhattan Federal Judge Jesse Furman, who has ordered that the government cannot remove Khalil from the country while Furman considers the activist’s well-supported claim that his First Amendment rights were violated.
What Khalil said or didn’t say about Israel and the war in Gaza following the Hamas Oct. 7 attack isn’t material as far as the government is involved. We didn’t like much of the protests, which too often leached into antisemitism, but that’s irrelevant to the feds trying to boot someone from the country for it.
We would ring the same alarms over the summary detention and attempted deportation of anyone targeted exclusively for their political perspectives no matter how contemptible we found them, and let’s be clear that the issue here is indeed First Amendment-protected speech.
Over several days of pointed questions, no one in the federal government has produced or pointed to any evidence that Khalil did anything but speak and organize. The sleight of hand of stating that he “led activities aligned with Hamas,” as the Department of Homeland Security did post-detention, is absurd theater.
Setting aside the fact that pro-Palestinian protest is not inherently pro-Hamas, what does it mean legally or practically for someone to engage in a subjective “activities aligned with” a terror group? That they have some goals or views in common? In that case, a huge portion of the Trump administration is aligned with the violent groups that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6
Either an individual provided material support or otherwise explicitly coordinated with a sanctioned group — and if the government has any evidence Khalil did so it should present it immediately — or they did not, and if they did not, then all they’ve done is express themselves in the ways that the Constitution explicitly guarantees
Reportedly, if not the terrorism angle, then the administration is planning to lean on an obscure provision of immigration law that allows the secretary of state to find someone is deportable if their “presence or activities… would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
This is something that the government would have to pursue in immigration court, and we’re having a hard time imagining how they could possibly substantiate that a campus organizer engaged in what was part of a nationwide university protest movement could individually have serious bearing on the foreign policy of the United States
Again, this is a pretext, and a transparent one. We’d even suspect that the administration’s explicit and open targeting of Khalil is a test of the waters to see how far they can get away with a clear official action against protected speech. There should be some clarity coming from Furman’s courtroom today.
