The disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil is a trial run

On Saturday night, government agents broke into a university apartment building in New York City and took away a recent graduate. The agents were wearing plain clothes and refused to identify themselves to either the former grad student or his wife, who is eight months pregnant. The agents claimed that the former student’s visa had been revoked. When his wife showed them his green card—proof of legal permanent residence—they were ordered by a superior to arrest him anyway and threatened to arrest her too. (The wife is a U.S. citizen.) They didn’t tell her where he was being taken, or even who she could call to get more information.

The government has not announced any charges, nor even confirmed where he is currently being held. The wife went to one possible holding site, in New Jersey, only to be told he was not there. After a day and a half, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee locator finally showed him being held at an ICE “processing center” in central Louisiana. That appears to be where he is. But other recent ICE detainees have been listed as being in one place when they were actually in another — in several cases, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. As an immigration advocate put it in February: "They are being effectively disappeared."

This story should horrify anyone with even a minimal belief in civil liberties. That horror should be heightened when you learn that the only publicly alleged offense committed by the detained man is that he participated in protests against the government and university, including (reportedly) a library sit-in last week. What the Trump administration is counting on is that millions of Americans will lose those deeply rooted instincts when they see that the detained man in question has an Arabic name, that he is of Palestinian descent, and that the protests he participated in were against the government and his university’s support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.

They are counting on that because their goal—overtly stated today by the president—is that the detention of Mahmoud Khalil will be “the first arrest of many to come.” Those, including some purported liberals, who are cheering right now would do well to pay attention to the president’s specific warning: that they are targeting students who engaged in “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” a threat that will loom large as other kinds of protests bubble up among an increasingly restive public.

Early returns are not encouraging.

Khalil is Palestinian-American, with a typically diasporic pedigree. Born in a refugee camp in Syria in 1995, he was later granted Algerian citizenship¹ and became a U.S. permanent resident last year. He graduated from the master’s program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December; according to his LinkedIn profile he previously had internships at the British Embassy in Lebanon and the United Nations in New York. Khalil was also, indeed, a prominent participant in the Columbia campus protests in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the subsequent (and perhaps now-resuming) genocidal war against his people.

Two things to note before we go further: One, even ICE has acknowledged in internal memos that non-citizens — not to mention green-card holders — ”generally … stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens to assert First Amendment liberties” while they are in the United States. This is true, the memo noted, even if they are found to have “endorse[d] or espouse[d] terrorist activity,” so long as it does not constitute direct incitement to “imminent lawless action.”² (It is also worth noting there is no evidence Khalil has done either.) And two, the idea inherent in justifications for Khalil’s disappearance — namely that is necessary to protect Jewish people — is contradicted by the fact that Jewish students and groups were involved in organizing the protest in which he took part.

The build-up to Khalil’s arrest began last month, when Barnard College—a women’s liberal arts college that operates under the banner of and on Columbia’s campus—expelled three students for pro-Palestine activism. The Nation reports those were the first protest-related expulsions at Columbia since 1968, when students took a dean hostage in protest against the Vietnam War, and include the first for nonviolent political protest since 1936, when a student named Robert Burke was expelled for leading a demonstration against the Columbia administration’s support for Nazi Germany.

Those expulsions were only the latest actions taken against pro-Palestine and antiwar activists by Columbia administrators, who have done everything possible to cave to McCarthyite trolling on the right, only to be rewarded at every turn with further punishment. Just ask Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president at the height of the protests, who sicced the NYPD on her students, then went to Washington to grovel before Republicans in Congress, only be forced to resign anyway.

That pattern repeated last week, when the Trump administration responded to the expulsions, and renewed protests, by canceling $400 million in federal grants to the university. Instead of realizing that they were playing a losing game, the university rolled over again, with interim president Katrina Armstrong declaring that they are “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns” and that their “number one priority” was not fighting for free speech or against the potentially illegal impoundment of appropriated research funds, but rather “continu[ing] to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.”

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