The Trump administration has arrested and jailed (“detained”) Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University who is in the United States as a lawful permanent resident. Khalil has not been charged with or convicted of any crime. The administration is very open about its reasons for trying to deport Khalil: he participated in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia. Trump has long vowed to deport students from foreign countries who take part in pro-Palestine protests (“pro-Hamas radicals”), and this is the administration’s first effort to make good on that promise. Trump has vowed that there will be much more of this 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,” Trump said. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”  Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement on X, said, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Khalil was immediately sent 1,300 miles away to a facility in Louisiana that is infamous for abuses. (A judge has temporarily blocked the administration from actually deporting Khalil.) 

Arresting Khalil is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, as even viciously anti-immigrant pundit Ann Coulter recognizes. Many online appear to hold the mistaken view that the First Amendment only protects the free speech of American citizens. In fact, the First Amendment does not say anything about citizenship. It places limits on the government’s ability to regulate speech, period. The First Amendment defines the scope of what’s permissible for the government to do and makes clear that abridging the right to speak freely is not constitutional. Whether an action violates the First Amendment depends on what the government is trying to restrict and by what means, not who the speaker is. Deporting someone for their speech is exactly the kind of action that the First Amendment prohibits. There have been efforts to curtail the First Amendment rights of noncitizens. For example, the Obama administration argued in 2014 that it could legally punish detained immigrants for protesting their conditions, because they were not Americans. But that argument did not prevail, precisely because the Constitution does not care who you are, it cares what the government is doing to you. 

The Trump administration has not made any argument for why it is consistent with basic civil liberties to deport someone who has not committed any crime simply because they were part of a protest. In fact, Trump’s actions were not only unconstitutional but in violation of other U.S. laws, because permanent resident status can only be revoked by an immigration judge. ICE wouldn’t even show Khalil’s attorney that they had a valid warrant for his arrest. Instead, the Trump administration has adopted the favorite tactic of dictatorships everywhere: simply declare that your enemies are “terrorists” and “criminals,” and hope that people will be persuaded that anything can be done to those who are terrorists and criminals  in the name of protecting the country. (As Trump himself wrote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”)

Their reasoning is straightforward: people who protest on behalf of Palestine must support Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Therefore people who protest on behalf of Palestine are terrorism supporters. There must be zero tolerance for supporting terrorism. Therefore protesters must be deported. But, first, the notion that participating in protests against the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians makes you “pro-Hamas” is ludicrous, and this was the same “with us or against us” logic that led to opponents of the Iraq War being branded “pro-Saddam.” I would have hoped we had become smarter in the two decades since the antiwar protesters of the Bush years were unfairly smeared (before being vindicated by history).

As Branko Marcetic notes in Jacobin, “neither the government nor [Khalil’s] detractors have given any actual evidence that he’s materially supported Hamas, or even that he’s so much as said anything supportive of the organization. Second, even if someone “supports” Hamas, if they keep to opinions and speech, they have violated no law. You are allowed to support what Hamas is doing. I have personally found many of Hamas’s tactics repugnant. I do not support Hamas. But it is legal to hold a “pro-Hamas” position. It is also legal to, as many of Israel’s defenders (including elected officials) do, speak in favor of the obliteration of Gaza, including bombing and starving the civilian population. I see outright genocidal rhetoric all the time from Israel’s supporters, many of whom think all Gazans should be held collectively responsible for the crimes of Hamas and who endorse actions that result in vastly more suffering and death than the ghastly Oct. 7 attacks themselves. I dream of living in a world in which people do not believe in and advocate such things. However, it would not be legitimate or lawful for a U.S. president to decide that any Israeli student who supports their country’s actions should be rounded up and deported. Even if it is quite accurate to call much of Israel’s action “terrorism” (and I think it is), we must be cautious about branding people “terror supporters,” because authoritarians (like Erdogan in Turkey, Xi in China, and Putin in Russia) constantly use the “terrorist” label to justify extralegal punishments against those opposed to their rule. We must resist any and all efforts to brand protesters “terrorists,” and remind the public of what those like Khalil have actually been protesting: Israel and the U.S.’s brutalization of the Palestinian people, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, countless more with debilitating injuries, a generation of children with trauma, and the destruction of the basic infrastructure of an entire community. The number of war crimes in Gaza have been staggering, and those students on U.S. campuses who have spoken up have been praiseworthy and moral. They should be commended, not deported.

But they’ll be a lot more afraid to speak up now, which is the point. Foreign students will be on notice that if they protest for Palestine, they might be taken away from their family all of a sudden (Khalil has a pregnant wife) and disappeared into a far-off detention cell. I have no doubt that if the Trump administration feels it can get away with it, it will punish U.S. citizens for pro-Palestine activism as well. After all, a Green Card holder is already close to a citizen; even the National Review (which supports deporting Khalil) admitted they have “the most robust protection that our law provides for non-Americans. […] [They are a] non-American who has lawfully relocated to the United States and is on track to become a naturalized citizen.” If they get away with deporting Khalil, the Trump administration will push the envelope further and further. Already it has withheld federal funds in an effort to compel Columbia University to further clamp down on dissent. They have already been doing that, such as by investigating students for what they write in the student newspaper or punishing them for hosting an art exhibition, and a special group of Columbia alumni works to identify student protesters so it can “squash them like roaches.” Before he was arrested, Khalil pleaded with Columbia to help him, since there was a campaign (pushed in part by a Columbia professor) to have him deported. Columbia did nothing. 

 If the personal costs of protesting are raised, fewer people will engage in it. Or so the theory goes at least. In practice, heavy-handed authoritarianism can spark backlash, and during the U.S. civil rights movement, we saw that protesters were willing to risk their lives when they were fighting a monstrous tyranny.

The Trump administration’s outrageous attempt to punish a protester for protesting should be met with universal condemnation by everyone who wishes to live in a free society. If you don’t want them to be able to do it to you, you shouldn’t let them get away with doing it to Mahmoud Khalil. Some politicians have spoken out against the administration’s actions. Others like New York City Mayor Eric Adams (and would-be mayor Andrew Cuomo) have been deafeningly silent. The Anti-Defamation League, which should be highly sensitive to creeping abuses of state power, actually endorsed the deportation effort, saying that they “appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism — and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.” But there is no evidence that Khalil has engaged in any antisemitism, nor is it clear what he’s the “alleged perpetrator” of. Fortunately, many other, more genuine civil rights and civil liberties organizations have immediately condemned the action. 

The arrest of Khalil is an important moral test: any official who is silent about it should be presumed to endorse it. It must be vigorously opposed and protested. I cannot emphasize enough that if they get away with this, it will only be the beginning. Martin Niemöller’s famous piece “First They Came” remains as important a warning as ever. First they came for Mahmoud Khalil. Did you speak out?