As ICE Jails Palestinian Protester, Universities Must Commit to Academic Freedom

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

This past week has been punctuated by a series of horrifying events. Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia who was a mediator during last year’s encampments, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday and has now been transported to an “immigration holding facility” (ICE jail) in Jena, Louisiana.

In an unprecedented act, ICE claimed to “revoke” his green card, and for at least a day his lawyers and his wife, who is eight months pregnant, did not know his location.

Khalil is being targeted for participating in peaceful protests for the boycott, divestment, and sanction of the State of Israel for its genocide in Palestine. These protests were suppressed in the name of “combating antisemitism” and making campuses “safe” by administrators who invited police on campus to brutalize.

While Khalil’s detention is a horrifying, authoritarian escalation by the Trump administration, the path to it was greenlit by college administrators and politicians, many of whom describe themselves as liberals. This escalation was only possible because these liberals colluded to crush pro-Palestinian voices long before Trump took office, corroding the integrity of academic institutions and through it, the future of our nation as a whole.

On March 4, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social:

All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This statement follows the announcement that a new “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” will be targeting 10 U.S. college campuses that had large encampments or Gaza solidarity protests last spring.

But prior to Trump taking office, colleges and universities were already surveilling our students. They were already arresting them: Last year, we protested outside of City College of New York as students were loaded into police vans. Tens of students across the country have been expelled. Faculty — including contingent, tenure track and tenured faculty — have been pushed out from their positions.

Immigrant students have been targeted long before Trump. Last year, Cornell University threatened one of its own graduate students, who was on an F-1 visa, with expulsion due to his participation in peaceful pro-Palestine protests. This would have resulted in the student being deported, for loss of student status.

With each act of oppression, the bar for respect of human liberties and the freedom of academic spaces wanes.

Last week, in the lead-up to Mahmoud’s detention, nine students at Barnard College were arrested at a pro-Palestine sit-in on their campus, protesting the prior expulsion of three of their peers. The Trump administration also pulled $400 million in federal grants from Columbia for its alleged “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

And, the week before, in an incredible overstep in executive authority, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that our employer, City University of New York (CUNY) Hunter College, remove job postings for “Palestine Studies,” deeming their mention of “settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, and apartheid” as “hateful” and “antisemitic.” The CUNY chancellor and Board of Trustees concurred with her office’s position.

The pushback against these egregious violations of the rights of pro-Palestinian students was weak and muted. Meanwhile these infringements on academic freedom by campus administrators and politicians have created the conditions that an administration intent on enacting a segregationist vision for the U.S. can now exploit. This not only includes the continued suppression of pro-Palestine voices, but also the attack on critical race theory and all forms of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on our campuses, including (and particularly) on race and sexuality.

Amid this repression, immigrant students, among the most vulnerable on our campuses, have been singled out for attack.

Mahmoud’s arrest followed a targeted campaign on social media by pro-Israeli groups and one of Columbia University’s own faculty members, Shai Davidai, who tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio on March 6, asking him to deport Khalil. It came after groups like Columbia Alumni for Israel, and right-wing hate groups like Mothers Against College Antisemitism (MACA), identified him and other students on social media for targeting.

Mahmoud Khalil has now been transported to an “immigration holding facility” (ICE jail) in Jena, Louisiana.

These groups were empowered by university administrators’ acquiescence to their demands, whether that be canceling the showing of the film Israelism at our own Hunter College in November of 2023, or the Office of the President of New York University reporting to MACA on the sanctioning of student protestors.

They celebrate the arrest of Mahmoud, because now, under an administration that has taken a deep authoritarian turn, these right-wing groups feel they have a say, literally, on who can be part of our nation.

In a January 29 executive order, as part of a broader policy on mass deportation, the Trump administration directed leaders of agencies including the Departments of Education and Homeland Security to familiarize institutions of higher education with immigration policy “so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and “if warranted, [take] actions to remove such aliens.”

The Trump administration will reportedly deploy AI technologies through a program of “catch and revoke” to catch students who are “pro-Hamas” and revoke their visas.

An adjoining fact sheet spelled it out further: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Another executive order laid the groundwork for deporting immigrants exhibiting “hostile attitudes” toward the United States in the name of combating terrorism.

The danger to our immigrant students is heightened not only by the Trump administration’s new policies, but also by the Laken Riley Act, passed with the support of many Democrats in the House and the Senate, that threatens to deport any immigrant on the accusation, and not conviction, of a variety of petty crimes or of assault on an officer — putting the stability of immigrants at the mercy of anyone who wants to report them to authorities.

The specter of deportation has long haunted student activists of all stripes, who have reason to be distrustful of law enforcement which has a history of targeting people of color, including those who are Muslim and Black.

The precedent set by the villainization of our students for their political views and identities aims to both desensitize us and lay the groundwork for the complete erosion of the independence and safety of academic institutions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the attack on federal funding, which predates this latest statement.

Already in the first month of Trump’s presidency, federal agencies froze payments on grants, shuttered entire research centers and circulated lists of words to be flagged for review. In issuing these orders, Trump and his administration have repeatedly cited “DEI” and “woke gender ideology” as justifications for ending federal funding. As these orders began circulating, many higher education institutions rushed to comply in advance, wiping the existence of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from their websites.

While academic institutions are deeply flawed, they are also, in their ideal form, bastions for thought and pedagogy. They are where students can make mistakes and learn from one another. They are also crucial spaces of learning for the citizenry. This is why they are the longtime targets of rightwing attack.

We, faculty, have watched in horror for months (really decades), as our colleges and universities, our administrators and colleagues, take steps toward quashing student activism often unprompted by political coercion or interference. “Agitators” have been punished and permanently expelled — even as they are agitating against genocide. By these actions, by their willingness to scapegoat and vilify the pro-Palestine student movement, these institutions have invited their enemies in, becoming testing grounds for the authoritarianism that threatens our nation.

We call on everyone on and off campus to dissent, to organize on behalf of those who are today’s targets, regardless of whether they are targeted by their own university’s administrations or by the federal government. We call on our colleagues to refuse to conduct their jobs as though it’s business as usual. To refuse to obey in advance, to recognize that the lives of our students, the future of our nation, is very much at stake. We must all insist, vocally and without fear, that colleges and universities recommit themselves to the principles of academic freedom and free expression before it is truly too late.