In early March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian Columbia University graduate student, campus organizer, and legal permanent resident—and detained him for more than three months, as the Trump administration worked to strip him of his status and deport him. (Khalil has since graduated.) For many, Khalil’s arrest marked a terrifying inflection point. Here was a legal permanent resident thrown in detention for what Secretary of State Marco Rubio plainly acknowledged were political reasons. Khalil was transparently and definitionally a political prisoner. His detention was an early marker that even the legal and political conventions that had held throughout Donald Trump’s first term were on the chopping block for an administration run by people like Stephen Miller, whose main takeaway from that first turn at the helm was they were too deferential to laws and norms.
Khalil had known that he incurred some risk from his campus advocacy, particularly given the so-called Palestine exception to liberal support for political speech, but he figured that he might, at most, suffer university harassment or discipline. Neither he nor, frankly, longtime political and immigration policy observers like myself expected that his actions would attract not just the attention of but direct intervention from the federal government. “My understanding of the U.S. was that they have a robust Constitution, robust rule of law,” Khalil told me from his apartment, right near the behemoth institution that recently itself bent the knee to Trump in the form of a settlement that gives the administration a hand in admissions and curriculum. “I never hid my face; I didn’t care if I would be doxed … but at no point I felt that the government would go that low in targeting free speech.”
In June, a federal judge ordered that Khalil be released, and he was finally able to return to his wife and infant son, who had been born while he was detained. Most people, in a situation where the government had already imprisoned them for their speech and was angling desperately to do so again, might opt to keep a low profile. That’s not been the case for Khalil. “In a time like this, remaining silent is complicity,” he said. “Remaining silent is not just neutral, because it has a cost, and the cost of it is that the atrocities would continue, the complicity—whether it’s from the U.S. government or Columbia University—would also continue.”
Rather than hanging back, Khalil went on a whirlwind trip in July to the U.S. Capitol, where he turned heads and met almost 20 lawmakers, largely to urge the passage of the Block the Bombs Act, which would curtail military shipments to Israel, and additional action to address the Gaza humanitarian crisis, which had by then extended to the threat of imminent mass starvation. Days earlier, he had filed a federal lawsuit seeking $20 million in damages against the administration that was still angling to detain him.
Khalil is aware of the contrast between his pushback and the capitulation of far more powerful people and institutions, including not just his university but Congress and the courts: “It’s like a stain on their history, on their morals, on just everything, what they stand for.” The Trump administration, he said, bullies people so they won’t fight back; these institutions are doing the same.
All of this has left Khalil in a somewhat bizarre situation: He is at once advocate and cause. People have come out to protest on his direct behalf, and he’s a recognizable figure worldwide, a fame that seems to leave him a bit bewildered and a bit uncomfortable. Yet the fact that he didn’t choose his role doesn’t change his conviction that he must rise to the challenge. “It’s a huge responsibility,” he told me, “to see yourself as a ‘symbol’ of the movement, of this attack on freedom of speech.”
Khalil’s case has also had the effect of more concretely connecting Israel’s actions in Gaza to creeping authoritarianism at home, a nexus he says is real and useful to establish. “It’s all the same. It all stems from … ignoring the public, ignoring human rights,” he said. “So to have this cross-movement work, solidarity, absolutely helps.” According to Khalil, some of the people who wrote him letters of support during his detention in Louisiana said they’d been aware of the conflict, but that his arrest had brought it home for them. The federal immigration enforcement apparatus, now given a practical blank check by Trump’s MAGA budget, is Trump’s attempt to create, in Khalil’s words, “his own militia that would act extrajudicially, because the immigration system is so loose, and it’s under the full control of the executive branch.”
One question Khalil can’t answer is what exactly is next, because there will be an after—after the removal proceedings and the lawsuit and the courtrooms. Before his arrest and detainment, he had an advocacy job lined up, putting his fresh graduate degree to work, but now everything is up in the air. “I’m taking it day by day,” he told me. “The killing is still happening. It’s not that I can take a break from that because the genocide does not take a break.” Whatever comes in the long term, Khalil at least has the certainty that it will have something to do with advocating for his people, to use his unexpected platform to help ensure that there is a long term for them, too.”
The post The Palestinian
Organizer
Who Wouldn’t
Be Silenced appeared first on New Republic.
