The BDN Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, and does not set policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Before this week, we, like most Americans, had not heard of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil, a lawful American resident who completed his international affairs graduate studies at Columbia University in December, was a leader in pro-Palestinian protests on the New York City campus.
Although he spoke out and served as a mediator for pro-Palestinian students, Khalil did not engage in violence and was not charged with any crimes related to the protests. He was called kind, thoughtful and conscientious by his friends and colleagues.
Yet on Saturday, Khalil was arrested at his New York City apartment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An ICE agent told his lawyer that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. When the lawyer said Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, the Associated Press reported.
Khalil was whisked away from his pregnant wife, who is an American citizen, and is being detained in Louisiana. A federal judge has already stayed Khalil’s deportation pending further legal review.
The Trump administration is creating a shifting rationale to punish a person with a perspective it disagrees with.
It is the famed warning of German theologian Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for criticizing Nazi control of churches, brought to life in America.
The administration likely started its crackdown on protesters with Khalil because it was easy to portray him in a bad light. But, as Trump himself warned, Khalil’s arrest was the “first of many.” Who and what groups will they go after next?
This is chilling.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
It must be remembered that criticizing the Israeli government, its leaders and their actions is not necessarily antisemitic. Plenty of Israelis and Jews in Israel are critical of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and how it has waged a brutal war against Hamas, killing nearly 50,000 residents of Gaza and displacing nearly 2 million.
Likewise, criticizing the actions and policies of the Israeli government does not negate the horrid and inhumane terrorist attacks that Hamas launched in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. More than 1,200 people, including 36 children, were killed that day and 59 people continue to be held hostage, although only 24 are thought to still be alive.
Some campus protestors expressed antisemetic views and some campus protests and activists made Jewish students feel unsafe and unwelcome. That is unacceptable and many campuses are still struggling to improve dialogue on this complex and contentious issue.
However, these situations cannot give the U.S. government the green light to ignore free speech protections in our Constitution to ban campus activism and to target, harass and, in the case of international students, deport those who join campus protests.
Even far-right commentator Ann Coulter has criticized Khalil’s detention
“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” Coulter said on the social platform X.
The Trump administration started with Khalil, who was raised in Syria by a Palestinian family, because it likely thought few people would notice or care. Like how it has harassed Maine, a small state with a Democratic governor who stood up to the president, for its policies on transgender athletes.
Although there are zero transgender athletes participating in sports at the seven University of Maine System campuses, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday said it was temporarily freezing its funding to the system. It did so after the director of civil rights from its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service sent the university system 10 questions and gave them an hour and 10 minutes to respond to them. The administration restored the funding late Wednesday, after the intervention of Sen. Susan Collins, who has worked to reverse many of the recent Trump administration policies that have hurt Maine.
Previously, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did a very cursory review (mostly reading news articles from conservative websites) before finding that the state violated Title IX by allowing transgender girls to play on girls high school sports teams. There are only two documented instances of this happening in Maine recently. And, the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which conflicts with Maine’s law, is novel and untested, according to legal experts.
If Trump can arrest and try to deport someone because of their political views, if he can punish a state because it won’t bend to his demands — even if they conflict with federal and state laws — we are on a very dangerous road. It is a road that takes us away from the founding ideals of America as a place where freedom of speech, thought and association are cherished and protected, and where the rule of law and the rights of the people are the cornerstone of our democracy.
