Trump's Disappearing Of Mahmoud Khalil Should Be A Warning For Us All

If Trump has his way, Kahlil will be just the first of many

People gather outside of a New York court to protest the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil at Foley Square on March 12, 2025 in New York City. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s supporters love to claim he’s a champion of “free speech” and “free expression.” It’s such an absurd notion that you almost have to ask, “Have you even listened to the guy?”

We all know that Trump is a weak, thin-skinned man-child who can’t handle criticism. He has done all he can to chill free speech that he doesn’t like through various punitive and retaliatory measures.

For example, when the Des Moines Register’s final pre-election poll showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points in Iowa, Trump sued them.

When the AP refused to use Trump’s fake “Gulf of America” label for The Gulf of Mexico, he kicked them out of the White House press pool.

He even sued CBS for airing a 60 Minutes piece he claimed was edited to make Kamala Harris look better, crying “election interference!”

Yes, like any good autocrat, any speech that Trump perceives as critical of him or favorable toward his political enemies must be quashed. Quite a free speech champion you got there, MAGA.

Unfortunately for Trump, the United States still does have our pesky Constitution, with all its pesky amendments.

The first one—perhaps the peskiest of all where Trump is concerned—makes clear:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So, even as Trump has normalized the chilling of free expression for those who say things he doesn’t approve of, he has recently taken his contempt for the First Amendment a disturbing step further, not just to chill speech but to literally criminalize it.

That occurred with the recent detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.

This episode is the latest in what the left warned would be Trump’s anti-democratic crusade were he to be re-elected. What New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg calls the “Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”

In today’s piece, I’ll take a look at the current state of Khalil’s case, the basis on which the Trump administration claims it detained him, and how it’s playing out politically as Democrats, civil rights groups, and Jewish advocacy organizations unite to condemn and fight back against this latest Trump authoritarian maneuver.

On What Grounds?

Mahmoud Khalil, who until December was a graduate student at Columbia University where he led pro-Palestinian protests, is a lawful permanent resident of the United States, holding both a student visa and a green card. Last Saturday night, as he returned to the apartment he shares with his wife, federal Department of Homeland Security agents apprehended Khalil without charging him with a crime.

According to NBC News’ reporting, the circumstances of his apprehension are chilling, as recalled by Khalil’s wife:

ICE agents told her and his attorney, who was on the phone, that they had a warrant to revoke Khalil’s student visa, according to court documents. When the attorney told the agents that he has a green card, they replied that they were there to revoke his green card, his attorneys said.

“We were not shown any warrant and the ICE officers hung up the phone on our lawyer,” said Khalil’s wife, who was not named in court documents.

“Within minutes, they had handcuffed Mahmoud, took him out into the street and forced him into an unmarked car,” she said in the statement. “Watching this play out in front of me was traumatizing: It felt like a scene from a movie I never signed up to watch.”

Since then, Khalil has been held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, awaiting an immigration court hearing on March 27.

During a hearing in New York on Wednesday, at which Khalil was not permitted to appear, federal Judge Jesse Furman blocked the government’s attempt to deport Khalil until he could hear a challenge to Kahlil’s arrest and detention. He ordered Khalil to be allowed calls with his lawyers, something until yesterday the government had prohibited.

As for what authority the administration claimed to detain Khalil in the first place, Trump himself admitted that Kahlil’s detention is based on his anti-Israel protest activity, which by any measure should be constitutionally protected.

Brian Hauss, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, calls this “a direct attempt to punish speech because of the viewpoint it espouses.” Or, as Joyce Vance puts it in her Civil Discourse newsletter:

It’s a steep, slippery slope from here to “speak out against Trump and go to jail.” Being different, unpopular, or “other” will get you removed from your home in this new world.

A follow-up post on X by the Department of Homeland Security, perhaps in an attempt to put some teeth behind the arrest, portrayed Khalil’s detention as simply enforcing “President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

Trump’s EO dated January 30th was, in fact, quite clear about what he intended to do:

• Deport Hamas Sympathizers and Revoke Student Visas: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

But as Vance makes clear:

That’s a very thin veneer. Executive orders do not alter constitutional rights.

Goldberg notes that DHS’s accusation that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas” is “an impossibly vague, legally meaningless charge.” And surely if there was an actual crime the government could charge Khalil with they would have done so by now.

As a White House official admitted to The Free Press, “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law” but that Khalil was “mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the US.” But how?

Per The New Republic, the arrest was conducted “under the authority of the Immigration and Nationality Act” or INA:

Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of INA says that any “alien” is “deportable” if the secretary of state “has a reasonable ground” to believe their presence could result in “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States.

As Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put it on Tuesday:

"Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or a visa for individuals who serve, or are adversarial to the foreign policy and the national security interests of the United States of America," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. "Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation's finest universities and colleges and he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege, by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists."

But the government has not provided any evidence to support this claim that Khalil had been “siding with the terrorists.” In fact, as Goldberg notes:

A dossier on [Khalil] compiled by Canary Mission, a right-wing group that tracks anti-Zionist campus activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just demands for divestment from Israel. Last year Khalil was suspended from his graduate program for his role in the campus demonstrations, but the suspension was reversed soon after, apparently for lack of evidence, and he completed his degree.

Further, this use of the INA to deport aliens whose mere presence could result in “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consquences” appears to be a wholly new application of the statute:

The INA was originally used to oust those suspected of being Soviet spies. But it has never been used to punish speech, and it’s unclear what evidence Rubio would need to provide to justify superseding Khalil’s First Amendment rights.

And so far, Rubio has offered no specific justifications, simply asserting that “this is not about free speech.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it plainly in a recent video: “Khalil is in jail because of his political speech.”

@tommyjusaHe has not been charged with any crime nor is there any evidence he committed one.

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And as Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times points out:

If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.

That we are.

The Politics Of Khalil’s Detention

Despite Rubio’s insistence that “this is not about free speech,” MAGA seems to be mangling the message. Once stalwart in their so-called “free speech absolutism,” now you have Tommy Tuberville saying “free speech is great but…”

And you have Trump’s border czar Tom Homan insisting that Khalil’s detention is one of those “limitations” on free speech that never seemed to exist for conservatives before.

Others in MAGA claim this is just the “rule of law” in action, which, as AOC makes clear, is quite the contrary.

The administration’s entire argument assumes constitutional rights are conditional for someone in the U.S. on a visa or even a permanent resident with a green card. In short, the theory is that they don’t have full constitutional rights because they are not citizens. And that’s just not the case.

As Goldberg reminds us, Trump need only look back to his first administration:

During Trump’s first term, a legal analysis from Immigration and Customs Enforcement concluded the same thing. “Generally, aliens who reside within the territory of the United States stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens to assert First Amendment liberties,” it said. Khalil’s arrest, said Schlanger, “seems like an incredible overreach in light of the First Amendment concerns that even the government in the last Trump administration documented.”

And that overreach appears even to be bothering some MAGA stalwarts.

Take Candace Owens:

And Ann Coulter:

It’s rare to have an issue where there is little daylight between Ann Coulter and AOC. Even Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a staunch supporter of Israel and critic of the anti-Israel protests on college campuses like the ones Khalil led at Columbia, released a statement condemning Kahlil’s detention.

Many Democrats are now calling for the release of Khalil, ranging from the Senate Judiciary Committee:

To 14 House Democrats including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, James McGovern, and Mark Pocan:

And 30 New York City, State, and Federal office holders, including AOC:

Notably, the Jewish community is making their voice heard in opposition to the anti-constitutional detention of Khalil, including Jewish Columbia students who staged a demonstration on campus yesterday:

Jewish Voice For Peace protesters have occupied Trump Tower in Manhattan:

And a coalition of 12 American Jewish organizations has signed an open letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem opposing the Trump administration’s co-opting of the fight against anti-semitism to justify anti-democratic tactics.

We urge the Administration to ensure that Mr. Khalil has access to due process and cease efforts to detain or deport other legal permanent residents or student visa holders without due process. We especially ask you to stop using the necessary fight against antisemitism as a pretext for anti-democratic actions. At a moment when antisemitic threats are affecting every Jewish community in America, the last thing we need is for the administration to co-opt the fight against antisemitism in a way that makes our community and other minority communities less safe.

This Could Be Just The Beginning

As with all of his authoritarian moves we’ve seen over the past 50+ days, Trump has shown no signs of backing off.

The White House is doubling down on its threat that Khalil is just the first of many arrests of student protesters to come.

A message that has been echoed by Secretary of State Rubio.

The Khalil detention is proving galvanizing as Americans of good conscience unite against Trump’s overreach. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer eloquently explains:

Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. …

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

In a sign that the tide may be turning against the administration on this issue, DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar went on NPR to defend Khalil’s detention and it was an absolute disaster.

It’s worth it just to hear NPR’s Michel Martin pick Edgar’s dubious argument apart.

Here’s just an excerpt of the devastating interview.

Martin: How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?

Edgar: Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we've invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he's put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.

Martin: He's a permanent resident. He's not a visa holder. He's a legal permanent resident. He has the green card, at least he did, until it's alleged that it was revoked.

If the allegation is that Mr. Khalil organized protests and made speeches after which other people engaged in prohibited activity, or, say, violent activity. Well, Mr. Trump gave a political speech on January 6, 2021, after which some individuals engaged in violent and illegal acts. How is this any different?

Edgar: President Trump's a citizen and the president of the United States. This is a person that came in under a visa. And again, the secretary of state at any point can take a look and evaluate that visa and decide if they want to revoke it.

Martin: He's a legal permanent resident. I have to keep insisting on that. He is a legal permanent resident.

So what is the standard? Is any criticism of the Israeli government a deportable offense?

Edgar: Like I said, I think that at this point when he entered into the country on a student visa, at any point we can go through and evaluate what his status is.

Martin: Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?

Edgar: Like I said, if you go through the process and you're a student and you're here on a visa and you go through it, at any point …

Martin: Is any criticism of the government a deportable offense?

While it’s clear that the administration is taking punitive action based upon Khalil’s speech, it may not be enough to spare Khalil from deportation. As Georgetown law professor Steve Vladek has noted, the Trump administration may have legal grounds for detaining and deporting Khalil because of how the statute is written.

The key point is that it’s at least possible that the government has a non-frivolous case for seeking Khalil’s removal…especially if Secretary Rubio invoked § 1227(a)(4)(C). And insofar as the government is relying upon those provisions to pursue Khalil’s removal, that might bring with it a sufficient statutory basis for his arrest and detention pending his removal proceeding. We’ll see what the government actually says when it files a defense of its behavior before Judge Furman; for present purposes, it seems worth stressing that there may well be a legal basis for its deeply troubling conduct.

We will know more after Khalil’s immigration hearing on March 27, but whether he prevails or not doesn’t change the fact that, as Vladek puts it:

If anything is anti-American, it’s threatening non-citizens who are in this country legally and have committed no crimes with the specter of being arrested, detained, and removed for doing nothing more than speaking up on behalf of unpopular causes.

Through the Khalil case and likely many more like it to come, Trump hopes to reshape what free speech protects and means in America. It will be up to the courts—and to the people exercising that right of free speech—to defend the First Amendment against his full-out assault.