If a student can be jailed for speaking out, so can anyone who criticizes U.S. government actions. That’s the point.
Scene from a protest in Washington, DC, March 10, 2025 -- screenshot via X
By Farrah Hassen
Less than a week after President Trump boasted that he’d “brought back free speech,” government agents abducted a student protestor and are trying to deport him.
On March 8, without a warrant or charges, plainclothes Department of Homeland Security agents forced their way into Columbia University’s student housing and detained Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil. They then shipped him to an immigration jail in Louisiana, impeding his access to attorneys and visits from family.
Khalil is a lawful U.S. permanent resident who hasn’t been charged with any crime. His wife, Noor Abdalla, is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant. “It feels like my husband was kidnapped from home, and at a time when we were supposed to be planning to welcome our first child into this world,” she said.
While a federal judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, Khalil’s fate — and the larger battle over the First Amendment — concerns all of us.
Over the past year and a half, Khalil has participated in Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia alongside students across racial, ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds who’ve demanded an end to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and U.S. complicity. He’s also served as a mediator between Columbia’s administration and its students.
Khalil has called these nationwide campus protests “a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.” They follow a long tradition of student-led demonstrations, like the 1960s Free Speech Movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.
But repression of student activism has surged since October 2023. Khalil has faced doxxing, harassment, and smears from bigots who vilify any peaceful protests for Palestinian rights as “antisemitic” and “terrorism” — baseless slanders echoed by the Trump administration.
Many Jewish students at Columbia have joined in the protests and deny this false characterization of the movement and of Khalil, rejecting Trump’s weaponization of “antisemitism” as a justification for silencing speech critical of Israel.
Regardless of whether you agree with Khalil’s views or find them offensive, his speech is protected by the First Amendment. Political speech is at the very heart of the First Amendment, which applies to citizens and noncitizens alike.
Before assuming office, Trump made his disdain for pro-Palestinian student protestors well-known and promised his donors that he’d deport them. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump said on March 10. Another White House official called Khalil’s arrest a “blueprint for investigations against other students.”
To justify deporting Khalil, Secretary of State Marco Rubio cites a rarely used and vague provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which gives the secretary of state the power to deport someone whose presence is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
However, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. That INA provision doesn’t override constitutional safeguards like freedom of speech and the right to due process, which still apply to Khalil. Moreover, as Khalil’s attorneys have argued, the INA prohibits the secretary of state from deporting a noncitizen based on their “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations.”
“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” Khalil warned in a letter from prison. “Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs… At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”
Khalil’s warnings could prove prescient for all of us, given Trump’s retaliation against news organizations for their coverage and threats to withdraw federal funding from universities that allow “illegal” protests, as he calls them.
Left unchecked, anyone who opposes Trump — whether on Israel or on cuts to Medicaid and Social Security — could become a target. Khalil must be freed immediately if our cherished freedoms of speech and assembly are to have any meaning.
We must all strongly oppose this profound attack on our First Amendment rights. Otherwise, that next knock on the door could be for any of us.
Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org
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