The ICE Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Step in Dismantling Free Speech in America

The Trump administration is sending a clear signal on how it plans to deal with protests on campuses — and in the streets.

Drazen Photo/Envato

Mahmoud Khalil was snatched up by the feds. And we should all be concerned about this because we are next.

A Palestinian man who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year, Khalil was illegally abducted by ICE agents and sent to an immigration facility in Louisiana. A recent graduate of Columbia University with a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs, Khalil is a permanent U.S. resident whose pregnant wife is a U.S. citizen. Despite this, he was kidnapped from campus housing without charges, without due process and without any justification.

Mahmoud Khalil’s only offense is being a Palestinian who advocates for the rights of his people and protests the occupation and the genocide Israel wages against them. His abduction is proof that free speech on college campuses is dead and never was a reality for many. In the land of the free, the Trump administration will disappear you for saying things it doesn’t like.

And this stripping away of the First Amendment is a bipartisan project. Trump’s Republican Party is here for it, as are Democrats who were silent when Biden funded the Israeli genocide of Gaza, and Democratic officials — including Black officials — sicced the cops on pro-Palestinian college student protesters at Columbia, NYU, City College and elsewhere.

At the height of the Palestine encampment movement on college campuses last year, then-President Biden said “I condemn the antisemitic protests.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams — with billionaires offering him the bag to have the NYPD roll up on campus — called the Columbia student protesters “professional agitators.” And Kaz Daughtry — a Black NYPD deputy commissioner — called the students “outside agitators” who “are radicalizing our students,” and even went full IDF and claimed police found a “terrorism manual” — a textbook — on the Columbia campus.

In Georgia, prosecutors used the state’s domestic terrorism law to charge 42 activists who protested against the construction of a nearly $110 million police training center in Atlanta known as “Cop City.” Officials called the activists “violent agitators” who are part of an “extremist organization.”

Given this history of criminalizing and punishing social justice activists with full Democratic participation, it is no surprise that Trump 2.0 would take it to the next level and round up and deport people for exercising free speech. We are all fair game — even U.S. citizens.

“What is happening with Mahmoud is incredibly disheartening. America has a long history of squashing human rights activism. This is an indication of what Trump wants to do and how he wants to do it,” said Jude Taha, a Palestinian journalist and friend of Mahmoud Khalil, who reported on the Columbia encampment while she was a student there. “If anyone is advocating for freedom of liberty against the U.S. narrative, they will be met with violence.”

It is no accident that student organizers and universities are prime targets of the MAGA movement. As Jason Stanley of Yale University noted, autocrats target education and history, and authoritarian regimes have no liberal arts colleges because “wars are won by teachers.”

As the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall said: “The University is a critical institution or it is nothing.” Students should be exposed to new information, concepts, philosophies and perspectives that may make them feel uncomfortable. This discomfort leads to intellectual growth and personal development. Awareness of the history of injustice and oppression in America will cause young minds to want to change the societal status quo, and the white supremacists in power are not having it.

College students were always at the forefront of revolutions and movement organizing. The Black Power, Black and ethnic studies, and antiwar movements grew on college campuses. In 1970, police gunned down antiwar students at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi for protesting the Vietnam War. And campus organizing in the 1980s helped end the white South African apartheid regime.

Present-day assaults on critical race theory, on African-American studies and ethnic studies, women’s and queer studies and pro-Palestinian rights advocacy are part of this neo-Jim Crow project to rewrite history and erase critical thinking, dissent and organizing for social change.

Institutions such as Columbia, who capitulated to fascists and threw their students under the bus for their political speech, have abdicated their mission as centers of learning and critical thinking, yet still face punishment in the form of funding cuts from Trump despite their compliance.

“What’s happening at Columbia is not acceptable, but in order to learn you have to listen,” said Taha, who believes academic institutions are not acting in good faith, especially with the Palestinian movement. ”Academia is not about writing papers, but actually putting into action. People are going to act based on what they are being taught. When people learn that Israel was formed on the corpses of people, people will react. Academia is not a theory. We are not training people with real life issues as we should.”

It sets a bad precedent when the state abducts students from college dorms, and universities capitulate on protected speech, Taha said. “Language really matters in how we describe things. When we say ‘antisemitism’ or ‘pro-Hamas,’ it’s important we understand these things. It’s supposed to be protected rights, they find these loopholes, and Palestine is always an exception.”

We are all connected, and we must understand how our global struggles for liberation and justice and against oppression are intertwined. “People ask, ‘Why are we sending so much aid to Israel and people can’t afford health care?’ This is why you live like this,” Taha said.

Mahmoud Khalil reminds me of another student named Shaden Quos, an Afro-Palestinian artist, activist, a U.S. citizen and a law student at Birzeit University. In January, Shaden’s East Jerusalem home was raided, and she was locked in military detention for over a month for posting criticisms of Israel on social media. Released on bail and facing trial for incitement, she was prevented from attending the funeral of her father, writer and leader Mousa Quos.

Given the Trump administration’s move towards autocracy, it isn’t hard to imagine how this government will respond when activists protest the next police murder of a Black person. As Angela Davis said, "If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night."