My client, Mahmoud Khalil, is a 30-year-old Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University. Today, he should be at home with his wife in New York City, awaiting the birth of their first child next month. Instead, he’s locked up in a cell in Louisiana, 1,400 miles away.
On Saturday, March 8, armed federal agents arrested Mr. Khalil in the lobby of his apartment building. A publicly released video captures the moment when they cuffed him in front of his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant. They told Mr. Khalil’s lawyer over the phone that they were acting on an order to revoke his student visa. When his lawyer told them that he was, in fact, a legal permanent resident with a green card, the agents said the government had revoked that as well.
After sleeping on the floor in a facility in lower Manhattan, Mr. Khalil was transferred to an immigration jail in New Jersey. Then, after his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court challenging the legality of his detention, the Department of Homeland Security abruptly flew him to an immigration jail in rural Louisiana.
The Trump administration is seeking to deport Mr. Khalil simply because he is a dedicated Palestinian human-rights defender who has spoken out against Israel’s assault on Gaza, and against the U.S. and Columbia University’s complicity.
In the aftermath of the arrest, Mr. Khalil has received an extraordinary amount of support from people across the political spectrum because they see the Trump administration’s actions for what they are: a wholesale assault on the First Amendment and the cherished right to freedom of speech.
In an effort to punish Mr. Khalil for his beliefs, the Trump administration is exploiting a vague provision in a 1952 immigration law (the Immigration and Nationality Act) that gives the secretary of state the authority to deport people if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe they could harm U.S. foreign policy. But this measure, a product of the Cold War, targeted Soviet spies. Its purpose was not to punish people for constitutionally protected speech—indeed, the law explicitly prohibits retaliation against noncitizens for their politics.
And it is about politics. The administration has no evidence at all that Mr. Khalil is a threat to U.S. foreign policy. In its own telling, he was arrested because of his involvement in advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University.
Mr. Khalil emerged as a well-respected leader in the student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Representing students in negotiations with the Columbia administration, he made a mark with his thoughtfulness and his commitment to the rights of all. In an interview last year with CNN, he said, “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.”
To be sure, Mr. Khalil has expressed views that members of the Trump administration and other Americans do not agree with. But under the First Amendment, the government cannot punish people, including noncitizens, for expressing dissenting opinions. If it is permitted to—if people can be detained and deported for their speech—then the country will have taken a hard turn toward becoming an authoritarian state.
Mr. Khalil was one of the first non-citizens the Trump administration targeted for their advocacy for Palestinian rights, but he is not the only one. This abuse of immigration law should alarm us all, citizens and noncitizens alike. If the government is able to deem certain ideas illegal, then our rights to free speech and free thought become conditional. The fight to free Mahmoud Khalil is a fight for all of us.
Last week, Mr. Khalil released a letter that he wrote in detention, in which he discusses his childhood as a refugee in Syria, the need to stay united in the face of repression, and the gravity of this political moment. “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances,” he wrote, “I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”
Samah Sisay is a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s Attorney: ICE Arrest of My Client Illegal, Unconstitutional appeared first on Newsweek.
