The Attack on Mahmoud Khalil Is Straight Out of the “War on Terror” Playbook

Mahmoud Khalil did everything by the book. The 30-year-old Palestinian came to the United States to study, completed his master’s degree at an Ivy League school, married a U.S. citizen and obtained legal permanent residency. Last year, as students across the country called on their universities to divest from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Khalil led negotiations on behalf of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition. Fellow students said he was patient and strategic in conversations with administrators, and he spoke tactfully in interviews with the media. While elected officials decried student protesters for shielding their identities, Khalil often appeared unmasked, becoming a public face for CUAD’s demands.

These are the things that the Gaza solidarity movement’s critics have demanded from student protesters in order to win their respect. Khalil did them all. He exercised his constitutional right to free speech and has not been charged with any crime. And yet, on March 8, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at Khalil’s home and arrested him anyway. The agents told Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, that the State Department had revoked his student visa; when she informed them that he in fact holds a green card, the ICE officers said the State Department was canceling that instead.

Donald Trump made it clear that this moment was coming. He has repeatedly pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestine protests, falsely casting the protesters as “pro-jihadist.” On Monday, Trump declared that Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.” While a federal judge has stayed Khalil’s deportation, the Columbia graduate’s illegal arrest is a chilling milestone in the Trump administration’s draconian crackdown on dissent.

I emphasize Khalil’s mainstream respectability here, not because I believe there’s one single “right” way to protest, but because it underscores what human rights advocates have been warning about for decades: The systematic erosion of constitutional protections in the wake of 9/11 has always been a threat to everyone’s civil liberties, not just those engaged in acts of mass violence.

When former President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” in 2001, his administration — largely with the support of Congress — ushered in a new era of expanded executive power and a blatant disregard for constitutional rights. Bush launched the President’s Surveillance Program in secret, which directed the National Security Agency to conduct illegal electronic spying on U.S. citizens, including warrantless phone-tapping and the mining of internet data. Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, with little to no debate, drastically expanding the government’s surveillance powers. Meanwhile, a parallel criminal legal system took shape, as Bush ordered the creation of secretive military tribunals with limited oversight to try detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Torture techniques were greenlit — by officials at some of the highest levels of government — in violation of international law. Throughout this, the Bush administration used the unitary executive theory to defend a broad interpretation of “executive privilege” and exempt its actions and deliberations from public view.

Legal scholars have repeatedly pointed to the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror as a turning point in the expansion of presidential authority. Vice President Dick Cheney himself stated that the Bush administration’s actions would restore the presidency to “the proper scope” of its powers.

But creating a terrorism exception to the Constitution was always going to come back around to haunt dissenters. As Trump has made abundantly clear, accusations of terrorism can be levied baselessly to suppress dissent and consolidate political power. Thus far, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — which was itself created during Bush’s tenure — has accused Khalil only of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terrorist organization, but has not clarified what those activities were or even what “aligned to” means in practice. Providing material support for terrorism is illegal, but this has a specific definition under U.S. law — supplying money, weapons, training, housing, and other resources to designated terrorist organizations. Even passing out flyers with Hamas logos — something the White House recently claimed, without evidence, that Khalil did — would not meet the “material support” bar.

Of course, the Bush legacy is also one of baseless terrorism accusations, particularly against Muslim and Arab men. The post-9/11 National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) required noncitizen men from more than two dozen, primarily Muslim-majority countries to register with the DHS before entering the U.S. and have their whereabouts tracked while in the country. The purported anti-terrorism effort surveilled more than 80,000 people yet never secured a single terrorism conviction in its 10 years of operation; about 13,000 people were, however, put through deportation proceedings.

NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and dismantled completely by 2016, but plenty of other federal government surveillance programs have cropped up to take its place. As The Verge reported, ICE can access the address data of most Americans through their utility records and sweep up personal information through a sprawling network of state, local and federal government databases. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law found that, since its founding in 2003, ICE has dramatically expanded its spying powers and now operates as a “domestic surveillance agency.”

“ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report’s authors note. “In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S.” ICE probably only needed to know Khalil’s name to locate him at his Columbia University-owned apartment.

When Barack Obama became president in 2008, he notably declined to walk back Bush-era surveillance powers or prosecute those involved in torturing detainees at ‎Guantánamo, claiming he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Biden’s administration further entrenched and expanded the federal government’s power to conduct electronic surveillance.

Trump’s attempt to deport Khalil draws from and builds upon this legacy. This is the norm of presidential power in 2025 — drastic government overreach, mass warrantless surveillance, the weaponization of terrorism accusations to suppress First Amendment activity. With a fascist in office, attacks on civil liberties will be escalated, and Muslim and Arab communities will bear the brunt of the administration’s repression.

On March 11, Khalil’s wife issued a statement. It paints a picture of a scene that Trump has promised will soon play out again and again across the country. “U.S. immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle,” wrote Khalil’s wife. “Instead of putting together our nursery and washing baby clothes in anticipation of our first child, I am left sitting in our apartment, wondering when Mahmoud will get a chance to call me from a detention center.”