They Came for Mahmoud Khalil in the Night, and They Will Come for Us, Too

Yesterday, 98 protesters were arrested in New York City after overtaking the Trump Tower lobby in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and U.S. permanent resident facing deportation for his involvement in Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University. The demonstration was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which stated on social media, “We know that this is the time to speak out. We are here at Trump Tower to register our mass refusal to Trump’s authoritarian agenda intent on villainizing Palestinians, immigrants, trans people, and all those who dare to speak up.”

On Wednesday, hundreds rallied outside a Manhattan courthouse during a hearing on Khalil’s case. On Monday, thousands marched in New York City, demanding Khalil’s release. In addition to the ongoing protests in New York, marches and university walk-outs have been organized around the country.

It has been nearly one week since Khalil was seized by government agents in the lobby of his New York apartment building.

Two days before his arrest, Khalil asked his wife, Noor Abdalla, if she knew how to respond if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers came to their door. Abdalla, a U.S. citizen, reassured her husband that as a legal permanent resident, he was unlikely to be targeted by ICE.

“I didn’t take him seriously,” she told Reuters. “Clearly I was naive.”

Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, married Khalil in 2023 after a seven-year long-distance relationship. The couple was returning from an Iftar dinner on Saturday night when an ICE agent followed them into the lobby of their university apartment building. Upon identifying Khalil, the officer detained him, and ordered Abdalla to go to the couple’s apartment. When she refused to leave her husband’s side, Abdalla was threatened with arrest. Ultimately, ICE agents formed a human barricade between the couple before arresting Khalil.

“US immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle,” Abdalla said in a statement shared by journalist Prem Thakker on social media. “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.”

Abdalla called for her husband’s immediate release, saying, “I demand the US government release him, reinstate his Green Card, and bring him home.”

On March 7, one day before his arrest, Khalil appealed to Columbia University for support. In leaked emails published in Zeteo, Khalil, who was a Green Card holder, stressed the precarity of his situation to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. “Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation,” he wrote. “Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. I have outlined the wider context below, yet Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat,” he explained.

“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”

Shai Davidai is an assistant professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School, who was suspended from campus last year over allegations he had harassed university students and staff. Davidai has denied playing any role in Khalil’s arrest and potential deportation, but Davidai publicly called for Khalil’s arrest on X on March 5, and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a post on March 6, specifically calling for Khalil’s deportation on political grounds.

Notably, the extremist group Betar US has claimed credit for Khalil’s detention, telling The Guardian that the organization has provided the Trump administration with a “deportation list” that includes “thousands of names” of students and faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who the organization says should be deported. The group claims to be in communication with Rubio, White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other members of the administration. The group recently issued a warning on X that the public should expect “naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month.” (The administration does not have the legal authority to deport U.S. citizens, but Trump has expressed that his administration is “looking at” whether or not there’s a way to do it.)

The weekend of Khalil’s arrest, Columbia issued guidance for faculty and staff regarding possible “potential visits to campus” by ICE. Faculty and staff were advised that they “should not interfere” in “exigent circumstances” where ICE might seek access to buildings or individuals on campus without a warrant.

On Friday, one day before Khalil’s arrest, the administration announced that Columbia would lose $400 million in federal funding. The administration stated that the university was being sanctioned for its failure to confront alleged antisemitism on campus. Among Republicans, and other supporters of Israel’s violence against Palestinians, any criticism of Israel or outcry about the genocide Israel is perpetrating in Palestine is typically characterized as antisemitism. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, responded to the administration’s strong-arm tactics with capitulation, declaring that Columbia is “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns.”

Days after Khalil’s arrest, administrators at Columbia University warned an assembled group of students and faculty from the university’s journalism school that students who are not U.S. residents should avoid publishing pieces on Gaza, Ukraine, and protests related to Khalil’s arrest. Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor told those present, “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East.”

When a Palestinian student objected to this directive, Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s school of journalism, told students, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.”

President Trump boasted about Khalil’s arrest on Truth Social on Monday, writing: “Following my previously signed executive orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has responded to the case with a weak statement, calling the administration’s actions “wrong-headed.” In the same post, Schumer stated, “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.”

It’s unclear what “opinions and policies” Schumer was referring to or what the senator actually knows about Khalil’s politics. For his part, Khalil has made his opposition to antisemitism clear. “There is, of course, no place for antisemitism,” Khalil told CNN in April. “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.”

Fourteen house members — including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett and Al Green — have signed a letter demanding Khalil’s immediate release.

“Wholly Unguided and Unreviewable Discretion”

One unusual aspect of Khalil’s case is the involvement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a Green Card holder and permanent resident, Khalil is not a typical candidate for deportation. However, the case against him has proceeded at the behest of the Secretary of State, who is invoking a rarely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The provision reads: “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

The INA, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, became law in 1952. As The Forward has reported, “The act’s quotas and ideological litmus test were widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.”

On March 9, Rubio shared an article about Khalil’s detention on X and stated, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Lindsay Nash, an associate professor at Cardozo School of Law and the co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, discussed the legality of this legal maneuver in a recent interview in The New Yorker. “The one decision I’ve seen addressing this provision actually found it unconstitutionally vague,” Nash told Isaac Chotiner. “That decision was, interestingly, issued by President Trump’s sister when she was a federal district-court judge, in 1996.” Nash noted that the judge found the law unconstitutional “because it denied a non-citizen due process by not giving him a meaningful opportunity to contest the charges, and that it was unconstitutionally vague because it gave non-citizens no way to know what it prohibited, and that it gave the Secretary of State unbounded discretion that permitted no check on potential abuse.” The judge also found that the provision involved an unconstitutional delegation of power to the Secretary “because it left deportability determinations to the ‘wholly unguided and unreviewable discretion of the Secretary of State.’”

“Democrats and College Administrators Didn’t Listen”

When evaluating this case and its ramifications, it’s important to consider the political and historical contexts of these events.

First, we must remember that attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement by universities, law enforcement and public officials in both parties set the stage for the kind of vilification that has facilitated Khalil’s incarceration and potential deportation. As Palestinian activist and University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi recently told me, “The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil represents a major escalation in the wars against political freedom, higher education and Palestine activism that this administration is waging.” Abdelhadi noted that these wars are intertwined. “Palestine solidarity activists have faced repression and criminalization for decades, and these escalated to unprecedented levels with the assault on Gaza that began in October 2023.” Abdelhadi noted that participants in the Palestine solidarity movement have long warned that the repression being waged against them was setting the stage for greater escalations. “We warned, over and over, that the repression we were facing was setting a dangerous precedent,” she said. “Democrats and college administrators didn’t listen.”

Abdelhadi says that by treating Palestinians and their allies as “fair game for repression,” Democratic officials and college administrators “opened the door for the far right to strip away constitutional protections from everyone.”

“Trump is waltzing through the door that liberals opened for him, and we are all suffering for it,” Abdelhadi said. “It is clear this administration is testing what we are willing to tolerate, what we are willing to sit through. If Mahmoud Khalil has no rights, none of us do.”

The decades of repression that Abdelhadi referenced also warrant examination. In 1987, the U.S. government attempted to deport the L.A. Eight — Khader Hamide, Julie Mangai, Michel Shehadeh, Ayman Obeid, Amjad Obeid, Beshar Amer, Naim Sharif, and Iyad Barakat, using the same McCarthy-era law being used to target Khalil: the McCarran-Walter Act. Seven of the L.A. Eight were Palestinian. Julie Mangai, the wife of Khader Hamide, was Kenyan. The L.A. Eight were accused of being members of or supporting an organization that supported “world communism.” While Khalil is accused of supporting Hamas, the L.A. Eight were accused of having ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The government’s approach to their case shape-shifted over the course of two decades in the face of various legal defeats. After a federal judge rejected the government’s effort to use the McCarran-Walter Act against the eight, the government attempted to leverage the 1990 Immigration Act, the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, the PATRIOT Act, and the Real ID Act against them. Eventually, in 2007, after a legal battle that spanned 21 years and four administrations, the government’s case against the L.A. Eight collapsed for the last time.

Khalil’s case also brings to mind the history of the Palmer Raids. In 1919 and 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover (then a young lawyer in the Justice Department), organized a series of raids across the country targeting suspected socialists, anarchists and communists. The raids focused on Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in 36 cities. Hoover’s investigative team, which included the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor), prepared 6,396 deportation cases against people seized during the raids. However, Palmer successfully deported fewer than 600 people, due to the intervention of acting Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post. Post was ideologically opposed to the effort and invalidated nearly 3,000 arrests due to missing warrants, due process violations and sloppy investigations. While Palmer’s vision of deporting thousands of immigrants swept up in the raids was not realized, hundreds of people were forced out of the country during the effort.

The escalations of the present moment are not alarming because they are wholly unprecedented, but because they are accelerating. The L.A. Eight fought a 21-year battle in the courts. Now, the Supreme Court has been captured by right-wing zealots. In 1919, Palmer founded a Radical Division to track subversive activities. Now, the FBI — which has been surveilling and repressing movements for over 100 years — is controlled by Kash Patel, a maniacal Trump acolyte. While immigrant activists have never been safe from the threat of deportation, the administration is now using AI in its “Catch and Revoke” effort to target student visa holders in the Palestine solidarity movement. The repressive tendencies of U.S. history are being weaponized by right-wing fanatics in an era of automated repression, when many people’s lives and politics are well catalogued on the internet. With a president who the Supreme Court has placed above the law and a cabinet that Elon Musk has characterized as “revolutionary,” it appears that all bets are off in the pursuit of Trump’s agenda, and of those he perceives as his enemies.

For example, under the leadership of Kash Patel, the FBI is moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for accepting federal funds from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration. Citibank recently revealed in a court filing that the bank has been instructed by the FBI to freeze Habitat for Humanity’s bank accounts due to “possible criminal violations,” including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” The Appalachian Community Capital Corporation, the Coalition for Green Capital, and the DC Green Bank are also being targeted. It appears that Trump’s characterization of climate change as “a scam” is not only fueling efforts to claw back federal funds, but also propelling allegations of fraud against the recipients of federal funds.

The absurd overreach of this administration has brought the longstanding injustice of this system to a tipping point. Any association with a cause the administration disapproves of may be twisted into a violation of the law, or a threat to the safety and security of the United States. We must treat each of these efforts as an attack on all of our communities, and as an attempt to silence every voice of dissent, because those are the actual stakes.

Do Not Wait for This Pain to Visit You

Students around the country have already faced repression in the form of suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and brutality for their opposition to the genocide in Gaza. As the situation escalates under Trump, the administration’s war on academia has merged with its war on the Palestine solidarity movement, but as I have previously mentioned, what happens on campus will not stay on campus. The Heritage Foundation and the Capital Research Center have outlined plans to attack progressive nonprofit infrastructure more broadly with the same language being deployed against students—alleged alignment with Hamas. As Maya Schenwar and Negin Owliaei have reported:

“The [Capital Research Center’s] 150-page document, titled ‘Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement’ lays out a multistep plan for targeting a wide variety of progressive and left groups — including everything from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America, legal defense organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, and many others including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.”

Schenwar and Owliaei explain that while the playbook proposes a supposedly narrow focus on pro-Palestine organizing, “it effectively lays out a method by which the right could attempt to use statements made on Palestine by a broad swath of groups to forcibly halt progressive organizing and resistance in the U.S.”

As the repression of this moment builds, the stakes are ever-expanding. If we were simply discussing the fate of a young Palestinian man, persecuted for raising his voice against a genocide, that would be reason enough to fight. If we were exclusively addressing Trump’s efforts to control universities, end honest discussions of history, quash dissent, and gut the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of his fascistic agenda, this too, would be enough cause to protest. However, we are faced with a much larger, sprawling threat, which threatens to consume and destroy much more than university programs, the right to protest on campus, or one man’s life. We are faced with an all-out assault on our very ability to speak out, protest, and otherwise pursue justice in the United States.

And this is only the beginning.

They came for Mahmoud Khalil in the night, and they will come for us, too. They will come with immigration raids. They will come for us with AI searches, scraping our data, and compiling massive lists of political targets. They will come with RICO charges, as they have for Cop City protesters in Atlanta. They will come with bizarre allegations of “fraud.” They will accuse us of supporting and abetting terrorism. They will terrorize us, criminalize us, and attempt to silence us. Now is the time to speak out and to “flood the zone,” as Scot Nakagawa writes.

As protests and support efforts for Khalil continue, we should all uplift demands for his freedom.

Do what you can, where you can. Do not wait until this violence comes to your doorstep, or until the anguish that is being visited upon Noor Abdalla fills your heart and your home. “My parents came here from Syria, carrying their stories of the oppressive regime there that made life unlivable,” Abdalla told Reuters. “They believed living in the US would bring a sense of safety and stability. But here I am, 40 years after my parents immigrated here, and just weeks before I’m due to give birth to our first child, and I feel more unsafe and unstable than I have in my entire life.”