Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
When ICE agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and pro-Palestine activist, on March 8, Democratic leaders could not seem to agree on whether to stand up for him. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the arrest and threat of deportation of a green-card holder for no crime other than exercising his free-speech rights as “tyrannical.” The X account for the Senate Judiciary Democrats posted, “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” But other Democrats, from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, stressed their opposition to Khalil’s political views before grudgingly conceding that people should not be spirited away to a Louisiana detention center for those views.
In some ways, Khalil’s case bears many of the hallmarks of a liberal cause célèbre. Here we have a sympathetic protagonist whose edges are softened by his status as a father-to-be, pitted against despicable villains in Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. A federal judge has halted Khalil’s deportation for now, and protests have erupted across the country as legal analysts and even Ann Coulter have voiced their dismay at what by all appearances is a full-scale trampling of the First Amendment. Yet because the issue involves Israel, which in the past year and a half has divided the liberal-left like no other issue, the support for Khalil is less than ironclad. Unfortunately, there is no pro-Palestine activist who could help the party avoid conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s verdict that it has “a gift for picking problematic martyrs,” because the Democratic Party tends to treat everyone who stands up for Palestine like a problem.
And that is the real crisis that Khalil embodies for Democrats. His cause is clearly just, but he is a member of one of the most marginalized and pilloried communities on earth — which is likely why the Trump administration feels comfortable targeting him. As a result, the party is buckling in the most prominent test yet of its commitment to opposing encroaching fascism.
For their part, conservatives from X to Capitol Hill have presented a unified front, smearing the 30-year-old Syrian national as a threat to national security and in some cases claiming he was a different Mahmoud Khalil who allegedly chanted, “Explode the heads of Zionists!” at a protest in Quebec. Trump has called Khalil’s arrest “the first of many to come,” and his plan to weaponize state resources against people who support Palestine is already entering its next phase. Department of Homeland Security agents were seen scouring two more Columbia dorms with search warrants on Thursday night. The Atlantic reported on Friday that Rubio has singled out a second unnamed green-card holder for deportation, hours before DHS announced that it had arrested a second former student who had participated in the Columbia protests, Leqaa Kordia, and that a third, Ranjani Srinivasan, had left the country voluntarily
Democrats including Schumer have seemed eager to go along with Trump’s demagogic characterization of Khalil and his fellow activists — with the minority leader asserting, “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports” — but it remains unclear if the supposedly abhorrent views he is accused of expressing are actually his. Social-media users have alleged that pamphlets from the Hamas Media Office were distributed at a protest at Barnard College earlier this month, but offered no proof that Khalil distributed them. Others have pointed to an Instagram post from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a campus group that Khalil has protested with, calling for “the total eradication of Western Civilization.” But Drop Site News reported that Khalil has nothing to do with CUAD’s Instagram decisions. So far, anyway, it appears Khalil’s principal views — that Palestinians should be free, that Columbia should divest from Israel — are within the mainstream.
Khalil had open misgivings about protesting at Columbia because he feared the exact consequences he is now facing — “that I will be arrested and ultimately deported” — so his primary role was as an intermediary between student protesters and the administration. This put him on the school’s radar and, owing in part to the activity of extremist pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and Betar US that dox pro-Palestine activists, eventually on Trump’s. “He’s an easier target than a lot of other students,” said the Verge’s Gaby Del Valle on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast. This may account for the speed with which both Columbia and key Democrats have yielded to Trump’s bellicosity. It’s no coincidence that Khalil was arrested the day after the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia over its alleged failure to police antisemitism.
However, the Democrats’ alignment with the president on this issue is less about Trump than it is about them. John Fetterman, the Senate’s most ostentatious Israel supporter, was in a meeting with pro-Israel activist Ross Glick while Khalil was participating in the Barnard protest. According to The Forward, Fetterman promised Glick, who has provided lists of campus protesters to federal immigration authorities in the past, that he would “escalate” pressure on the administration to deport pro-Palestine activists who were not citizens. Both parties are in lockstep providing material support and political justification for whatever Israel chooses to do to its Palestinian subjects, including a military assault on Gaza that has killed over 46,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women, children, or the elderly.
Even if Democrats were not proactive collaborators in Trump’s assault on the First Amendment, their own past actions would be apt precursors: In 2023, 20 of them voted to censure Palestinian American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for daring to criticize Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, the most severe punishment for a member of Congress short of expulsion.
Thus, instead of riding the groundswell of outrage over Khalil’s persecution and siding with him unequivocally, Democrats are drawing more attention to their own complicity and to their own conditional support for democratic institutions. Not only are they ceding critical ground to Trump’s authoritarian takeover in the process, they are reminding people that the reason Khalil is in this situation to begin with, Israel’s oppression of Palestine, is one they support and have shown no interest in wavering on. Even if they were not immobilized by their current lack of institutional power, entrusting them with Khalil’s political defense would be a dicey proposition. Why trust a party whose moral convictions are as weak as their opposition to Trump has been?
