By ERWIN FREED
On the evening of March 8, ICE agents arrested Palestinian activist and academic Mahmoud Khalil, who received his Masters Degree from Columbia University in December. This represents the latest, qualitative, escalation in a general crackdown on civil liberties that accelerated during the Biden administration and is now being pushed to extremes by the MAGA movement. President Trump has declared that Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come.”
According to court filings, Khalil and his wife were confronted by plainclothes ICE agents as the couple returned to their university-owned housing. During the process of arrest, Khalil’s lawyer asked the police over the phone to email a copy of their warrant to her; at that point, special agent Elvin Hernandez hung up.
Khalil was kidnapped by immigration authorities despite being a recognized permanent resident green card holder and not being charged with any crime. The legal basis for Khalil’s detention appears to be the 1952 McWarran-Walter Act, which gives the State Department the ability to revoke visas from “subversives.” How this is applicable to Khalil is not clear. According to the Forward, the Act was “widely understood at the time [of its signing] to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.”
Initially after his arrest, Khalil was effectively disappeared. No one, including his wife or attorneys, were able to get an answer from the government about where he was physically located for almost two days. At the moment, he appears to be held in Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La. The detention center is privately operated by the notorious GEO Group, and there are ongoing complaints of sexual abuse and torture in the facilities. Khalil’s attorneys have filed a petition to bring him back to New York City.
On Monday afternoon, March 10, Jesse Furman, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York issued a statement blocking Khalil’s deportation and setting a hearing for Wednesday, March 12.
A campaign of harassment
Mahmoud Khalil was caught in the crosshairs of a Zionist campaign weaponizing “antisemitism” to attack the Palestine solidarity movement. In the days leading up to his detention, Khalil was maliciously doxxed, and Zionist provocateurs even met with Senators Ted Cruz and John Fetterman to demand his deportation.
Only one day before being detained by ICE, Khalil sent an email to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong requesting support from the university in the face of an intense harassment campaign and fears of potential illegal immigration action against him.
“Since yesterday,” he wrote, “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. … Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. … Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat. … 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.”
That same day, Trump announced that his administration was canceling $400 million in funding to Columbia on the completely baseless claim that the university had failed “to protect Jewish students from harassment,” according to The New York Times. Later, on March 10, the U.S. Department of Education threatened some 60 additional colleges and universities with sanctions for allegedly not protecting Jewish students against antisemitism.
The response from the movement has been swift. As soon as news of Khalil’s detention was made public, activists put out an online petition, which quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. As of this writing, the petition has over 1.6 million supporters. Emergency demonstrations demanding Khalil’s immediate release are being organized around the country. Thousands turned out to an urgent mobilization in New York City on Monday, March 10. Student activists everywhere are responding to a call for a national day of action for Tuesday, March 11.
MAGA on the offensive against constitutional rights
The Trump administration has blown up any pretense of upholding constitutional rights. In a complete affront to due process, neither Khalil’s attorney nor anyone else has been informed of what, if any, specific charges the government is claiming against Mahmoud. Instead of even the formality of a warrant, Khalil is currently being made guilty until proven innocent by the entire federal government in statements and on social media.
According to a White House official interviewed by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was directly involved with the effort to revoke Khalil’s green card. On Sunday, March 9, Rubio tweeted from his personal account a link to an Associated Press article about Khalil’s arrest with the statement, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The official Department of Homeland Security “X” account also put out a statement on Sunday: “On March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”
The DHS statement was echoed by Trump’s message on Truth Social, where he said in part, “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. 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. Many are not students, they are paid agitators.”
Taken together, these and similar statements use time-worn buzz-words and racist fears that are constantly inculcated into the U.S. population. As we discussed in a previous article, the U.S. government at all levels works to create manufactured threats from which they can then claim to “protect” citizens.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Khalil, a leader of the Palestine solidarity movement at Columbia and a lead negotiator between the movement and administration, is either antisemitic or “pro-Hamas.” What the MAGA heads are really after is not keeping anyone safe, but rather carrying out a media blitz to confuse and disorient would-be supporters of civil liberties.
These propaganda and legal maneuvers are important to recognize. They are the tip of the spear of an ongoing bipartisan attempt to silence social movements through intimidation, mass surveillance, and, effectively, blackmail against activists. The ruling class is trying to create a situation in which anyone can be targeted directly by the president as an “enemy,” “provocateur,” or foreign agent. All of this also has the effect of pushing down the fundamental idea that one is “innocent until proven guilty.”
The state is also putting Biden’s extension of surveillance technologies against the Palestine solidarity movement into a higher gear. Rubio’s State Department recently began a program titled “Catch and Revoke” that uses AI to trawl social media and the press to target visa-holders who criticize Israel. This program is the latest stage of using mass surveillance to politically silence oppressed communities and people who raise political opposition to U.S. imperialism and Israel’s genocide.
U.S. war on Palestine: the college front
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is the latest entry in a seemingly endless list of acts of surveillance, frame-ups, and police harassment against Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and the entire world. At the same time, the specific contexts of domestic universities in general and Columbia in particular are important to recognize. From liberal Clark Kerr’s crackdown on the free speech movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 to the Biden administration’s national task force aimed at repressing today’s Palestine solidarity movement, there is a long and violent history of U.S. imperialism targeting higher education campuses to snuff out dissent.
Biden set the stage for Trump’s escalation against the Palestine solidarity movement, and by extension all social movements and independent thought. It was, after all, the Biden administration that carried out the show trials of university presidents last spring. State-level Democratic Party politicians introduced new legislation equating criticism of Israel with “antisemitism,” often under the guise of combating “hate speech.”
Now, after collaborating with law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private Zionist “security” organizations to disrupt the movement, university administrators are being threatened by Trump with funding loss if they step out of line. The irony is that Columbia University administration has been at the forefront of both administrative and direct police repression against the Palestine solidarity movement. In the lead-up to Khalil’s arrest, at least three activists were expelled, the first such expulsions in 50 years. One of the expelled students faced discipline for a protest that happened almost a year earlier.
Free speech! No deportations!
The movement’s response to Khalil’s detention is absolutely essential to both securing his freedom and all of our ability to speak out against the crimes of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. The basic rights of free speech, thought, and assembly are hard-won rights maintained through vigilant struggle. Support for freedom of speech is one of the positive cornerstones of U.S. society; it is a deeply held belief for the vast majority of U.S. residents. Utilizing immigration authorities to target activists must be opposed vocally and through mass demonstrations.
The immediate responses from the movement demanding Khalil’s immediate release are an important first step. A national day of action is absolutely called for. At the same time, Trump’s attack on the Palestine solidarity movement goes well beyond Columbia or even college campuses. These are the spaces and the movement where they are testing what sort of state actions and roll-backs of democratic rights might be possible today.
We cannot give one inch to the ruling class’s anti-democratic forces. Workers in all sectors have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil. These efforts are beginning to coalesce through Tuesday’s day of action, but in order to build the movement that can really contest state repression, what is needed is national coordination through democratic assemblies and conferences bringing all anti-repression forces together in a united front.
