What The Hell America!

Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump told Congress, “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” Not even a week later, his administration has arrested a permanent resident, summarily revoked his green card, and is getting ready to deport him — all because they don’t like his constitutionally protected speech.

The detention and possible deportation of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, is the most serious attack on the First Amendment by any president in years. The twenty-first century has seen US administrations routinely trample over free speech, whether George W. Bush’s spying on Muslim American leaders, the surveillance and torture of whistleblowers and journalists like Julian Assange, or the US government’s involvement in tech censorship. This move is arguably more extreme than all of them.

According to multiple reports and statements, Khalil, a permanent resident who was one of the leaders of the student antiwar protests at Columbia over the past year and a half, was arrested by ICE agents after they entered in-campus housing. The ICE agents reportedly also threatened to arrest his wife, a US citizen eight months pregnant with their baby, and claimed his student visa had been revoked. When informed that Khalil was not on a student visa but rather had a green card — one step away from full citizenship, in other words — the agents were at first confused, then, after a phone call, claimed that had been revoked, too. When asked by his attorney to provide her with a search/arrest warrant, they simply hung up the phone.

Neither Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer, nor his wife know where he is currently. Despite first being told he was being held at an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his wife was informed he was not actually there when she tried to visit him yesterday morning. He is now confirmed to have been sent 1,300 miles away to Louisiana. It all has unmistakable, disturbing echoes of the lawless practice of forced disappearances common in Latin American dictatorships during the Cold War.

Meanwhile, as outrage has built over the past twenty-four hours, the Trump administration has doubled down. Just today, the White House proudly touted Khalil’s arrest, charging he had “led activities aligned to Hamas” and warning his was “the first arrest of many to come.”

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted about the incident.

“Law Enforcement enforcing the rule of law,” commented Katie Miller, a Trump advisor and wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

But this is the opposite of the rule of law. Green cards can’t summarily be revoked by the president or his secretary of state — it can only be done by an immigration judge. And they certainly can’t be canceled because the holder has opinions or took part in protests that the president and his political party don’t like.

Green cards can be revoked if the permanent resident commits certain crimes, including joining or materially supporting a terrorist organization — this is presumably what Khalil is supposed to have done to get himself targeted by ICE. But neither the government nor his detractors have given any actual evidence that he’s materially supported Hamas, or even that he’s so much as said anything supportive of the organization. Instead, they are recklessly stretching that definition to charge that his antiwar activism is tantamount to giving money to or working on behalf of Hamas.

A month ago, I warned that Trump’s mass deportation program threatened the rights of US citizens and permanent residents, who have been repeatedly swept up in raids, detained, and even deported by ICE in the past, including just the past month. What we’re seeing with Khalil’s case is that the Trump administration — which came into office on the promise of “mass deportations” of undocumented immigrants, specifically training its ire on violent criminals — is now radically extending the tools and authorities it uses for that group to not just target legal immigrants with no criminal or violent histories, but to weaken the rights of all Americans.

A permanent resident has been effectively disappeared by the government, had his legal status revoked, and is set to be thrown out of the country, without trial or any sort of due process at the whim of those in power. It is only a step away from saying you can do something like this to a permanent resident to saying you can do it to a citizen, as long as those citizens meet certain requirements of one person’s definition of non-Americanness, of course — having the wrong opinions, or the wrong heritage, or being naturalized, for example. In fact, this case is already wreaking havoc on one citizen’s life: Khalil’s pregnant wife, who, if he is deported, will effectively be forced out of her own country to be with her husband.

This has crossed over with another thread in the not-yet-two-month-old Trump presidency: its hostility to Americans’ free speech and other basic constitutional rights on behalf of Israel.

What has happened to Khalil was advocated by the Heritage Foundation in its “Project Esther,” a plan for crushing the pro-Palestinian movement that it released a month before last year’s election. Two of its chief goals were to force “leaders and members” of pro-Palestinian organizations, which it deceptively defines as “Hamas Supporting Organizations” to “voluntarily depart” or be “deported from the U.S.”

As with all attacks on free speech, Trump’s move here makes everyone’s rights less secure, including those of his own supporters. The Trump administration is currently going over Israel’s head and angering its officials by taking the unprecedented step of negotiating directly with Hamas for a decade-long cease-fire without Israel being at the table. It’s hard to see how, under the warped definition the administration is using in Khalil’s case, this couldn’t cynically be construed as materially supporting Hamas, too.

If Trump voters who are permanent residents voice support for these negotiations, are they liable to be arrested and deported, too, by a future administration? What if they support a cease-fire in Ukraine? Legislation to officially designate Russia a state sponsor of terror was being pushed as recently as last year.

It doesn’t even have to involve foreign policy. The Trump administration here is opening the door for a future Democratic administration to politically retaliate against conservative students and other immigrants for holding conservative views: on abortion for instance (where anti-choice organizations have carried out terrorist attacks in the past), or gender issues more broadly, a movement whose high-profile right-wing figures like Andrew Tate have carried out shocking crimes like human trafficking and rape of a minor.

It’s yet another unfortunate example of the rights of Americans being undermined for the sake of a foreign country, in this case Israel. Under Joe Biden, Israel was allowed to kill multiple Americans without even a slap on the wrist. Under Trump, a permanent resident is being arrested and deported because he dared criticize the country.

This attack on free speech is happening thanks to silence or even complicity from liberal institutions. Democratic officials have been slow to react with the kind of outrage they mobilized against Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. (We have asked for comment from Senator Chuck Schumer and other members of Congress from New York, where Khalil lives, and will update the story if they come.)

The reason Khalil came in the government’s crosshairs in the first place is because he was one of dozens of Columbia students being investigated by the university over their pro-Palestinian activism, after the school was threatened by Trump with withdrawing government money — which Trump has now taken away anyway, despite the university choosing to disgracefully go after its own students, canceling $400 million in grants and contracts, or about 6 percent of its total funding.

New Yorkers are planning to take over Federal Plaza in New York to protest Khalil’s treatment, while a petition demanding his release has drawn more than a million signatures in less than a day. These are appropriate responses to such a brazen and blatantly unconstitutional assault on the First Amendment. But many more Americans around the country should be up in arms.