of course it's a scare tactic
on mahmoud khalil's detainment
If you're in the States, you've probably heard about Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and Columbia grad student until last December who over the weekend was taken from his university home into custody by ICE for, per DHS's spokesperson, conducting "activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." What these activities might be have not, of course, been explained or directly alleged. Khalil was active in Columbia's peaceful protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza over the last year and a half. We are, I suppose, meant to believe that such an activity—coordinating and participating in peaceful protests against what countless experts agreed was/is a genocide in action—is illegal.
He has not, to be clear, been actually charged with any criminal activity.
It’s impossible not to read the news about Khalil without remembering last year's protests on college campuses, protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling for divestment from companies and states facilitating the aggression, calling for recognition of the dead and the dying. Many of the students who chose to partake in these protests, the vast majority of which were peaceful, were subjected to (among other things) bullying, suspension, doxxing, expulsion, tear gas, state violence, and arrest.
(Briefly: I feel a bit conflicted insisting upon the peacefulness of the protests, not because they were not peaceful (they were), but because it implies that a protest is only legitimate if it turns the other cheek to the state's own violence and aggression. If it rises above. If it goes high when they go low. I don't know if I agree with that, and I feel like we are conceding a large point when we insist on "peace" as a necessary condition of legitimate protest, thus invalidating any kind of resistance that does not adhere to the strict parameters we've allowed the state or the respective authority—usually the same authority whose actions or inactions are being protested—to set.
I'm resistant to the notion of placing the onus of non-violence on the people instead of the state, when it is the state's acts of violence that have historically caused the most harm (and given rise to the need for protest).
Rebecca Pierce for The New Republic wrote about this in 2020, when protests broke out all over the country following the murder of George Floyd. She wrote:
Such totalizing narratives about the “right way to protest” also flatten nonviolent resistance into a form of respectability politics that robs those enacting or rejecting it of their agency and precludes the complex forms of solidarity that can exist within and beyond it. These dynamics are not without precedent, both in our history and globally. They put emphasis on optics, when the focus of these protests is changing the material conditions of Black lives in a country built on violent white supremacy and colonialism. And by seeking refuge in such stories, we may prematurely foreclose the future these protests are trying to build just as they’re beginning to cohere—unpredictably and often tenuously—at a mass scale.
Regardless of my feelings on the matter, though, it is true that the campus protests of 2024 were overwhelmingly peaceful, at least on the side of the students. The state's propensity to itself resort to violence in response to nonviolent resistance is a different story.)1
It is worth remembering that as these protests were ongoing in the spring of 2024, President Biden and most of the Democratic Party leadership was very comfortable repeatedly calling for "law and order" on college campuses, Biden going so far as to categorically say that the demonstrations were "antisemitic" in April and updating his remarks in May to argue that while "dissent is essential to democracy ... [it] must never lead to disorder." The latter a somewhat inane statement considering the purpose of dissent is to upset the current order.
Meanwhile, police in riot gear were entering schools in droves and attacking students and faculty.
The lack of support for young protesters from the Democratic Party was so palpable that in April 2024 College Democrats of America, an organization that is rarely in public disagreement with the national party apparatus, released a statement of solidarity with student protesters and called on party leadership to do better.
These calls, as we now know, went largely unheeded. But it is easy to see how the Democrats' capitulation around last year's campus demonstrations set the stage for what we're now observing from the Trump administration. Through the Democrats’ inaction, protesters like Khalil were allowed to be nationally dehumanized and their concerns delegitimized, planting the seeds for the current Republican administration to act accordingly. Why not, when the opposition party has already demonstrated its apathy on this issue? If it does nothing else, apathy empowers totalitarianism.
Which is why I was glad to see the Senate Judiciary Committee Dems tweet "Free Mahmoud Khalil" on Monday, even if the appeal feels, quite frankly, a little too late.
If the Trump administration wants to test out increased suppression of political speech, a young Palestinian activist is a good starting point. And that is indeed what they seem to be doing:
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio (whose appointment, as a reminder, was confirmed by a 99-0 Senate vote, because Dems will cling to the trappings of civility if it's the last thing they do) tweeted that the Trump administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” And on Monday, President Trump posted on TruthSocial that “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.” On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson called the 2024 protests an "angry mob" and Khalil an "aspiring young terrorist," adding that "this is just getting started."
So yes. Of course it's a scare tactic.
(A tactic that, by the way, Columbia seems happy to accommodate, despite halls of higher learning historically being one of the first places totalitarian (and paranoid) governments look to suppress speech.)2
It becomes much simpler for the state to successfully intimidate critical political speech when precedent shows little resistance to the punishment—via deportation or other means—of an activist like Khalil. People are cautious. They often have to be. If it happened to him, it could happen to me, they think, and that is the point. That is how suppression grows.
Fortunately, on Monday afternoon a federal judge blocked Khalil's deportation pending his legal team's habeas petition. And as of this writing on Tuesday, 15 Congressional Democrats (out of 214) have signed a petition to demand Khalil's immediate release. Again, that is 15 out of 214.
It was just last week that I wrote about I'm Still Here (2024) and the value in pursuing public accountability from the state regarding its criminal activity.
Meanwhile, trans rights are crumbling before our eyes, companies are rushing to voluntarily comply with xenophobic executive orders, our president’s favorite unelected and unappointed billionaire South African adviser is showing up at German far-right rallies, and immigrants are being sent to Guantanamo Bay, a detention camp famously unencumbered by the Geneva Convention. Is this not state-sanctioned violence, too? Or can we only call it that in history books, once enough years have passed?
I'm asking Democrats, the supposed opposition party, along with anyone with a sliver of conscience, to not just live in the present, but to visualize the present as it will be seen in the future. Consider, if the present is not enough to sway you, how history will treat you and your apathy.
We've all seen images of Palestine, a land and a people ravaged over the last year and a half. Is it any wonder that someone—anyone, really, but in this case a Palestinian—might protest the states responsible for this destruction? And when this protest—this speech that is supposed to be free and protected—is punished and restricted, what does that say about the stability of our democracy, the frailty of our systems, the cowardice of the elected officials whose duty it is to protect people and their rights?
It shouldn't be only 15 Democrats asking for Khalil's release. By now, we should've heard more than mere platitudes (Schumer) or silence (Gillibrand) from New York's two Senators. It’s the lack of support for people the party considered unworthy of its voice that got us into this mess, and if allowed to continue, it will only worsen.
Some folks, by the way, keep bringing up Khalil's legal status, as if the state's detainment of a green card holder over political speech is worse than the state's unlawful detainment of an immigrant without permanent residence status. And I understand the impulse to frame it thus, to allow people to see themselves as potential victims, to emphasize the state's commitment to oppressing political activism, even from someone presumably on his way to citizenship, but again, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that: this is not a goalpost we have to move, and conceding it makes us weaker.
Even if Khalil was only here on a student visa, even if he was here with no status at all—it still would not have been reason enough to rip him from his home in New York, detain him for allegations that appear to have no legal basis, and ship him to Louisiana where, reportedly, DHS was judge shopping.3
Immigrants with no legal status are being sent to Guantánamo, where god knows what's happening, and acting as though a more privileged immigration status is and should be the only factor keeping someone from gross mistreatment by the state is not a point we should want to concede. Ideally, our sense of morality is stronger than that.
What do you call it when a state pursues violence and oppression to invoke the population’s fear, silence, and obedience? There's a word for it, I think.
Further reading:
Immigration agents arrest Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University protests (AP)
This is the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare (New York Times) (archive link)
14 House members demand release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil after arrest at Columbia (ABC News)
Mahmoud Khalil: What we know (Forbes) (N.B. this is an obnoxious headline but the article actually is quite comprehensive)
Why isn’t the entire country terrified by the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil? (Slate)
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I did write about the protests last year: linking it here.
Per
for , Khalil emailed Columbia a day before his detainment to request legal protection from the school, citing death threats and calls for his deportation.One of those how is this even legal quirks of the American justice system, in which “litigants exploit quirks in the structure of the federal judiciary to evade random assignment and instead hand-pick judges who are sympathetic to their ideological goals.” (Brennan Center) Also: perpetual reminder that none of this is or should be interpreted as legal advice. Etc.
Clara, this is your best (of many) to date. You lay it out so plainly, plaintively and persuasively. Just incredibly well done. I, like you, lean into our feckless Dems (what choice do we have) knowing full well that my strategy of hope is the worst of all strategies. We are well down a very slippery slope.
Mil gracias por escribir sobre este asunto. Muy bien escrito, como siempre. Déjanos que pongamos nombre a esto. Y sobre todo recuérdanos a cada momento que cuando el miedo impera, la parálisis es una opción, pero no la única. No dejes que nos acomodemos a una situación que no es la única posible. Y en este caso, no olvidemos que es el de un comienzo predicho de abuso de poder con acciones "no violentas sino aparentemente calmantes" en un ambiente deshumanizador. Gracias. (Escribo en español, por cierto, con todo el propósito de darle también valor)