READ | ‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’ by Nadia Abu El-Haj

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’
by Nadia Abu El-Haj

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

Mahmoud Khalil has been a public face of the pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia University and Barnard College since last spring. I have known him for over a year. During the encampment on campus he served as the lead negotiator with the Columbia administration: a mature, gentle human being and a sophisticated political thinker, he worked to deescalate the situation and bring about a peaceful resolution. 

Last week Mahmoud joined a student sit-in at the college’s Milstein Center. Most of the participants wore masks to hide their identities out of caution, fearful of the Barnard administration and hoping to avoid the vicious campaigns perpetrated online by some of their fellow students and amplified by outside groups—among them the longstanding blacklisting enterprise Canary Mission and a more recently formed organization called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus. Mahmoud was not masked. Images of his presence were circulated on social media both by a Columbia undergraduate and by the business school professor and enfant terrible Shai Davidai, who tagged Marco Rubio and urged him to expel Mahmoud from the country: “Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?” Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus echoed Davidai, explicitly calling on Rubio to revoke his visa. And now here we are. 

A Palestinian refugee, Mahmoud was raised in a camp near Damascus. He fled to Beirut when it became too dangerous in Syria, and eventually he made his way to the US to enroll in an MA program at Columbia’s School of International and Foreign Affairs. Now, a week after ICE agents arrived at his university-owned apartment in Morningside Heights and took him away, he is incarcerated at an immigration detention center in Louisiana, his green card has been revoked, and he is at serious risk of deportation. He may well be displaced yet again. 

Let us be clear: Mahmoud has been abducted and detained for his political speech. It is political speech that some of our colleagues and students—together with Zionist organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Canary Mission—do not like. This is political speech that makes them not just uncomfortable but enraged. Over and over again, they have harnessed that rage to paint pro-Palestinian politics as antisemitic, even as providing material support for terrorism, with no evidence to back up the claim. 

We now know quite a bit about the campaign against Mahmoud and his peers. On January 29—the day Trump signed an executive order that laid the groundwork for deporting students with foreign citizenship for their pro-Palestine speech—the far-right Zionist youth group Betar posted that it had sent Mahmoud’s information to the government. “He’s on our deport list,” it boasted. Last month The Intercept reported that pro-Israel Columbia alumni and parents have maintained a WhatsApp group in which they discussed, among other things, reporting student protesters to law enforcement, including the NYPD, the FBI, and ICE. (It remains unclear whether Mahmoud was among their targets.) The Zionist activist Ross Glick told The Forward that on the day of the Milstein sit-in he “discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to ‘escalate’ the issue.” (Neither senator returned The Forward’s request for comment.) Glick also alleged, without elaborating, “that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.” The day after Mahmoud’s arrest, another recently formed group called the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association praised his detention on social media: “Reportedly, Khalil’s green card is being revoked. Good. A green card is a privilege that millions wait years for. So is studying at Columbia. Khalil threw them away…. No one should feel sorry for him.”  

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This behavior—naming specific individuals, tagging them for arrest and deportation—amounts to a witch hunt the likes of which we have not seen in this country since the Red Scare and McCarthyism. How did we get here? How did we get to the point that a mild-mannered, thoughtful Palestinian political activist—a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime—can be picked up by ICE agents and shipped o# to a detention center a thousand miles away?

The peril Mahmoud and others face today did not materialize out of thin air two months ago, when President Trump returned to the White House and the Republican Party secured all three branches of the federal government. The range of Democratic politicians and liberal citizens who, over the last year and a half, have vilified Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists merit their own share of the blame. From the minute protesters converged on college campuses and on the streets of American cities to oppose the slaughter in Gaza, they were portrayed as a danger to the wellbeing of Jewish Americans and as enemies of the country’s interests. Long before encampments were set up or a building occupied, Columbia’s administration and a number of its supporters were already cracking down on dissent and implementing draconian disciplinary measures: banning Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace barely a month into the genocide; establishing unreasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations. When a peaceful encampment emerged, rather than make any serious attempt at negotiating, the administration sent in the riot police on the second day—all in the name of student safety, particularly the safety of Jewish students.

The university’s Task Force on Antisemitism, appointed in November 2023, has meanwhile issued a lengthy report depicting the university as a decidedly dangerous place for Jews—all Jews, any Jews—and e#effectively equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, thereby also dismissing the voices of anti-Zionist Jewish students. Last September dozens of Jewish faculty members sent the administration a ten-page letter enumerating a number of deep flaws in the document. It failed, they noted, to “recognize (save for a single fly-by phrase) Israel’s decimation of Gaza,” effectively effacing the fact that “protesters were reacting to a moral and material catastrophe” rather than denigrating Jewish identity as such; it neither corroborated many of the stories it was told by Jewish students who claimed to feel or to be unsafe, nor clarified when the alleged incidents occurred off campus; and it made “no effort to distinguish” between “incidents of genuine bias, discrimination, lack of safety or exclusion” and “discussions or chants that made some Jewish students feel uncomfortable or that they disagreed with.”

As I have argued in these pages, such appeals to “safety” regularly conflate actual, physical safety with students’ feelings of discomfort and rely on overbroad definitions of antisemitism that encompass almost all anti-Zionist and, for that matter, almost all Palestinian political speech. The Task Force’s report is no exception: the “working definition” of antisemitism it proposes “for pedagogy and training purposes only” includes “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among them “calls for divestment solely from Israel”—a definition that would encompass virtually the entire pro-Palestine student movement. In his newsletter this week for the Chronicle of American Higher Education, Len Gutkin wrote that, under the “current circumstances” of the right’s campaign against elite universities, the Task Force’s reports “read a bit like the accused slipping a confession to the prosecutor.”

All of my colleagues who promoted this rhetoric—each and every member of the Task Force, each and every colleague and student who tweeted unsubstantiated accusations against individual students and student groups: they, too, made Mahmoud’s arrest possible. Their speech has produced dire material consequences. Mahmoud is not safe. This is not a matter of how he feels. He is in real danger, and everyone who helped fashion a moral panic around students fighting to stop the outright annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza—and increasingly also in the West Bank—bears moral responsibility for that fact. They have helped produce and empower a narrative that has, in effect, made it a crime simply to be Palestinian in this country, and Mahmoud Khalil is paying an unconscionable price.

Nadia Abu El-Haj

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Olin Whitney Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and codirector of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology; and most recently Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post–9/11 America.

Originally published in the New York Review of Books on March 15, 2025.

READ | 'The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil' by Wadie E. Said

The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil
by Wadie E. Said

If the secretary of state can simply declare a legal permanent resident deportable based on their constitutionally protected activities, the First Amendment no longer applies to noncitizens.

Though the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil has been widely covered, it still does not cease to shock. A legal permanent resident of the United States, Khalil was returning to his Columbia University apartment building with his pregnant wife (a U.S. citizen) when he was approached by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking to take him into custody in connection with his role as a prominent student protester on campus. The whole affair had a slapdash quality to it: the ICE agents claimed to be revoking his student visa, only to be told he had a green card, which prompted confusion. The lead agent, who had been honored by Donald Trump during his first presidency, then spoke to Khalil’s lawyer on the phone, but promptly hung up when the lawyer requested a copy of the warrant the agent claimed to have in his possession.

After Khalil was arrested and whisked away, his lawyer filed a habeas petition to have him released. This makes perfect sense; in a deportation action, qualified noncitizens are usually not detained unless there is a fear that they will abscond or otherwise pose a danger to the community. In this instance, there is neither, as Khalil’s wife is here, and he has not been charged with any crimes. In what looks like retaliation for filing the habeas action, the immigration authorities moved Khalil to a detention facility in Louisiana. This move also functions as an attempt to render him subject to the judges of the Western District of Louisiana, a far more conservative region of the equally conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The villainous nature of this move—taking Khalil over 1,000 miles away from his pregnant wife—could not be more obvious. The official White House X account post announcing Trump’s order to put Khalil into deportation proceedings began with a taunting “Shalom, Mahmoud!” And as the documents supporting his habeas petition cited, a recent case from the Second Circuit found it unconstitutional to impose punitive immigration-related consequences in retaliation for a noncitizen exercising their rights to protected speech and advocacy.

The Mahmoud Khalil detention is a new iteration of an old practice: using a Palestinian to shatter constitutional protections and increase government power. In this instance, the target is the free speech rights of all noncitizens. But we should be forewarned that if the government gets its way here, the speech rights of citizens will be next up in its crosshairs.

For decades, Palestinians have been subject to government overreach at the expense of constitutional rights more broadly. The examples from recent history are legion. In the wake of the Black September group’s attack on the Israeli Olympic team compound during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, the Nixon administration established the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism (CCCT), which charged the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the precursor to ICE), and the State Department with monitoring and surveilling Arab noncitizens and American citizens of Arab origin alike. The CCCT’s most invasive and high-profile program, Operation Boulder, involved heightened visa reviews for all Arab noncitizens. Despite the program processing some 150,000 people, which resulted in a few hundred exclusions and deportations, it was discontinued in 1975 because in the government’s view it did not produce results. That is another way of stating that the Arab population in this country, including Palestinians, was not the terrorist threat that the government believed them to be. One unintended effect of the increased surveillance was to make the country’s hitherto politically withdrawn Arab community much more mobilized to meet the threat of government repression.

In the 1980s the Reagan administration once again targeted Palestinian immigrants for deportation. In an action overseen by then Assistant Attorney General John Bolton, the government tried to remove Fouad Rafeedie, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian origin from Ohio, on the grounds of his alleged membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated a terrorist group by the government, after he attended a conference in Syria. He had received authorization to travel in and out of the United States and completed his trip within two weeks. When he returned, he and his companions were stopped and questioned at the airport about their trip. Based on confidential information, the government tried to put Rafeedie in summary exclusion proceedings. Exclusion differs from deportation in that the government may turn a noncitizen away at the border without a hearing or any right of appeal. All the federal courts that reviewed his case held that Rafeedie had a right to due process; as a legal permanent resident, he could not be summarily excluded. The government eventually dropped its attempts to remove Rafeedie, but the point was clear: the government was not afraid to use Palestinians to attempt to expand its powers, even in the face of obvious constitutional limits.

In 1987, INS agents arrested seven Palestinian immigrants and one Kenyan citizen (the L.A. 8) on charges they were members of the PFLP. The government suspected them based on their activities in Southern California, which entailed distributing literature and holding events around the Palestinian cause. Although they were targeted for their political views, some were charged with minor infractions, like overstaying a student visa or working without authorization. As the PFLP was a Marxist-Leninist group, they were accused of being removable on the basis of membership in a communist organization under the McCarran-Walter Act, which was ultimately declared unconstitutional and later repealed by Congress. The L.A. 8 prosecution was a twenty-year saga of deportation charges dismissed and new charges being filed as immigration law changed. Their case was finally dismissed in 2007, after the government failed to turn over the actual evidence demonstrating that they were in fact members of the PFLP.

In an article I wrote with Anthony O’Rourke at the end of 2023 in Dissent, we criticized the call by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to have the FBI investigate students protesting the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign for purportedly providing material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). There never appeared to be a link between the protestors, who represented all walks of American life, and any FTO, let alone Hamas. The FBI, with its massive investigatory powers, surely knew that. The crime of providing material support to an FTO in the form of speech requires working in coordination with, or at the direction of, the FTO itself—something the protestors were plainly not doing. Independent advocacy for an FTO remains protected speech, even for a noncitizen. But facts and logic never win out when the issue is standing up for Palestinian rights in the United States.

The passage of the material support law itself in 1996 relied on what I believed to be a false premise—that foreign terrorist groups were raising money for violent activities under the guise of charitable organizations. There has never been any evidence produced that this was true. But that did not stop Congress from passing the law, for which the ADL and several other pro-Israeli groups lobbied.

In the post-9/11 world, the paranoid belief that terrorists lurked among us, bamboozling well-meaning Americans and spiriting away their money to fund violence, produced the conviction of five Palestinian Americans in 2008 on charges of materially supporting Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, then the country’s largest Muslim charity. The government never disputed that the money the Holy Land Five raised went to people in need and that they had no links to any violent activity—only that the aid enhanced Hamas’s legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was a far cry from raising money for violence through charity, but it did not derail the prosecution from producing sentences of up to sixty-five years in federal prison for the defendants’ nonviolent humanitarian activities. The outcome severely chilled charitable donations to Palestinians in need, as potential donors in the United States feared being on the wrong side of a terrorism investigation.

I know to be on my guard when discussing Palestine and its relationship to American law. Nonfactual and sensationalized claims are the order of the day. That’s why I had a nagging feeling as I listened to both Joe Biden and Trump repeatedly condemn the campus protests in 2023 and 2024. As a candidate, Trump threatened to deport those involved should he be elected. He made good on his promise with two executive orders that demand a crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors on campus, under the guise of combating antisemitism. The first order, from January 20, calls for enhanced vetting of what it deems the “foreign terrorist threat,” based on the assumption that such individuals are either already in the United States or actively trying to come here, and deporting them or excluding them as the case may be. The second order, issued nine days after, calls for action against those who are engaged in antisemitism, specifically targeting campus protesters and directly linking them to the October 7 attacks. It urges a number of measures, including “encouraging” the attorney general to pursue criminal prosecutions of those who would conspire to deny Jewish students their civil and constitutional rights.

Khalil’s case, coming on the heels of these executive orders, represents an attempted legal innovation made permissible by his Palestinian identity. Despite some fundamentally flimsy accusations of his “Hamas-aligned” activity, or possession of Hamas-supporting flyers—for which it has produced no evidence—the government finally admitted what it considers to be the deportability grounds. It was not relying on the wide and expansive concept of material support to Hamas, because it was clear that he had provided none. Instead, the government is arguing that he is deportable as an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” a statutory provision that was declared unconstitutional in the one judicial opinion to have considered the law. Although the case was later dismissed on other grounds, the court noted that it would be impossible to know how to conform their speech beforehand to the unknown and shifting nature of U.S. foreign policy. No material support, no criminal grounds—just the determination of the secretary of state that a stateless Palestinian’s presence has adverse foreign policy consequences, based solely on First Amendment protected speech and association. At this point, we might pause here to ask a question on the substantive nature of what these “adverse foreign policy consequences” might be. During the over seventeen months since October 7, has there been any daylight between the United States and Israel on the fundamental issue of denying Palestinians any say in their future? We have witnessed a truly unprecedented level of military, diplomatic, and economic aid from the United States to the Israeli government during what a vast network of individual scholars, human rights groups, UN bodies, and multiple sovereign nations label a genocide. And the aid has not only never stopped, it has increased beyond all rationality.

The federal immigration statute that covers exclusion—a process far less protective of noncitizens than deportation—states that a noncitizen “shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien’s admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The same provision also makes it clear that the secretary of state has to inform the heads of congressional committees on the judiciary and foreign affairs if they intend to designate someone under this part of the statute. The presumption is that the free speech rights of a noncitizen must be respected; given that this presumption exists in the far less protective realm of exclusion, it should function as a greater protection in the deportation hearings that Khalil is facing.

The true danger of Khalil’s proposed deportation is not in these procedural niceties. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the First Amendment applies to everyone in the United States, citizen or not, and regardless of whether the government finds it offensive. If the secretary of state can simply declare a legal permanent resident deportable as a threat to foreign policy based on their First Amendment protected activities, the First Amendment no longer applies to noncitizens in the United States. We must view this action as part and parcel of the Trump administration’s other challenges to what is settled constitutional law, such as the executive order purporting to overturn birthright citizenship.

In other words, Mahmoud Khalil’s plight constitutes a test case in amending the Constitution by executive action, free from the safeguards that make amendment such a difficult process. Here the beachhead is a stateless Palestinian, targeted in his homeland for extermination, and now persecuted in his supposed place of refuge. The American penchant for unfair treatment of Palestinians continues apace. We can only hope that the courts see this unconstitutional power grab for what it is—but the angry and unthinking self-righteousness of the executive makes for a terrifying foe.

Wadie E. Said

Wadie E. Said is a Professor of Law and Dean’s Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado Law School and the author of Crimes of Terror.

Originally published in Dissent on March 14, 2025.