Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and permanent legal resident, should horrify anyone who cares about the First Amendment in the United States of America. Khalil has not been accused of breaking any laws: He simply led raucous protests at Columbia against Israel’s war in Gaza. A federal judge has ordered the government not to remove Khalil from the United States while his case is pending. We will see what happens next.
The Trump administration has not been subtle about its intentions. A White House official, speaking anonymously to the Free Press, told the right-leaning media organization that Khalil’s arrest would be a “blueprint” for other actions. Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” said the official. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.”
“He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S.”
Democrats have largely denounced the arrest, which is gratifying. Republicans have either cheered for Khalil’s deportation or gone silent. A select number of pro-Israel hawks, like former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is now running for mayor, have said little. A smaller segment of Democrats, fiercely supportive of Israel, have been satisfied to see the government take drastic action against an individual they believe is an antisemite and a menace to other students.
But even if being pro-Palestine or anti-Israel could be fully equated with antisemitism — the Jewish people are more than one nation-state in the Middle East — it would be absurd and dangerous to arrest and try to deport someone over political beliefs they espouse. There’s no evidence Khalil is partnering with Hamas to try to overthrow the United States. If somehow Khalil had a literal link to Hamas, it wouldn’t be much different than the Irish Americans who supported the ferociously violent IRA for decades. Or, more shockingly to most people today, the millions who backed Nelson Mandela, who remained on a U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008.
As disturbing and authoritarian as Donald Trump’s crackdown on nonviolent college protesters remains, it tragically belongs to a rich American tradition. For more than a century, presidents and federal law enforcement have abused their power to menace activists, typically on the left. Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids inaugurated the first Red Scare in the late 1910s, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI harassed, spied on, and infiltrated leftist and civil-rights organizations for many decades. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS, less well-known than the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO, extensively surveilled antiwar, civil-rights, and women’s-liberation organizations, holding files on thousands of American citizens.
Deportation as a political weapon is not new, either. In the early years of the Great Depression, during the presidency of Herbert Hoover, more than a million people of Mexican descent were forcibly sent to Mexico. As many as 60 percent were American citizens, and they were targeted under the nativist assumption that they were responsible for stealing jobs that the stock-market crash had bled away.
After 9/11, George W. Bush continued to expel immigrants under the auspices of the War on Terror. A 16-year-old girl who had emigrated from Bangladesh at the age of 5 was deported when the FBI found she was visiting an internet chat room containing sermons from a London imam encouraging suicide bombing. Federal authorities also wielded the threat of deportation to force immigrants to become informants. One 24-year-old Moroccan permanent resident who had immigrated legally was blocked from returning to the U.S. and had his green card suspended; he was threatened with detention if he did not inform against alleged terrorists.
None of this is to excuse what the Trump administration is seeking to do to Khalil and many other activists who are merely exercising their speech rights. It’s merely to underscore that the American government has walked this dark and potentially bloody road before. On the issue of Israel, what’s become clear is that the traditional — and more benign — approach of lusty support and soft propaganda through trips like Birthright (I briefly considered, and then turned down, such a free foray to Israel in college) have given way to furious suppression of any and all dissent. In the long run, much of this will backfire on American Jews who hope to inculcate an affection for the Jewish State in young people.
Rather than perceive any hope or glory in Zionism, these young people will associate it with the federal government’s harassment of nonviolent activists. Any students targeted for deportation will be turned into martyrs for their cause. The generation gap around Israel will only swell. While a majority of Americans remain strongly supportive of Israel and Zionism broadly, younger voters are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than prior generations. Their views are unlikely to shift with age, especially as the religious right continues to exert great sway over Israeli politics and the bipartisan consensus around unconditionally backing Israel breaks down.
In the short term, pro-Israel hawks will be successful in the United States because they have Trump on their side and colleges are terrified of losing federal funding. They see Trump freezing grants to Columbia and wealthy donors demanding fresh investigations into antisemitism on college campuses that conflate the genuine article with advocacy for dying Gazans. Activists have every reason to worry as college administrators seek to clamp down on political organizing. But what they should also take heart in is the fact that the median American teenager with a social conscience is going to look on at the Khalil arrest with great horror.
For pro-Israel hawks who dream of converting the young American masses to their cause, who hope to make Palestinian activism anathema to all that is right and true, all of this does the opposite. To any sane American, arresting and deporting Khalil is indefensible. Whatever overreach pro-Palestinian activists can be accused of — virtually all of it boils down to language and little more — none of it compares to the boot heel of the federal government crashing down on the people who legally live here. This is what Trumpism looks like.
