Mahmoud Khalil’s Arrest Was Just The Beginning

Written By Leeja Miller

EDIT: Since filming, it was revealed that Mahmoud Khalil is being held at a detention center in Louisiana and a judge has blocked his deportation for now.

Sources:

Transcript:

On Saturday evening, ICE officers entered the Columbia University residence of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil. They produced no arrest warrant. They seemed uncertain of his legal status but were certain that, whatever it is, it was revoked. They took him into custody and when his wife, who is eight months pregnant, attempted to visit him at the detention center where DHS claimed he was being held, he was not there. As of last night, Khalil’s wife and legal team do not know where he is. Despite Columbia’s policy that law enforcement must produce a warrant before being permitted on school property, a spokesperson for the school refused to confirm to AP reporters whether they had received a warrant before Khalil’s arrest. So just so we’re clear: official government agents took a man who is a member of a minority immigrant population from his home in the night and no one knows where he is now. This is a dramatic escalation of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies but it is exactly what immigrants rights activists were sounding alarm bells on even before the election: Trump is using “terrorist” designations and emergency proclamations as pretext to detain and remove immigrants and people he doesn’t agree with and, in doing so, flagrantly breaking their constitutional protections for due process under the law. Today, we’re going to talk about how we got here, including Trump’s executive orders and his moves to use Guantanamo as an immigrant detention center, and what this escalation means going forward. Let’s get into it.

The arrest of the Columbian University activist has been making headlines around the world, with a predictable disparity in how it’s being reported depending on the bias of each news source.

This article from NPR today caught my eye with the headline “ICE arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University protests” which is just obviously a concerning headline to read, so I wanted to know more.

Using the Ground News browser extension, it’s helpful to see that this news source has a left leaning bias. I really love this extension because it provides context, and I can see how other sources are framing the story by clicking full coverage.

On the Ground News website you can see that there are over 300 sources covering this topic

Among them, the left leaning publication Common Dreams uses the headline:  “ICE Arrests Palestinian Green Card Holder Who Helped Lead Columbia's Gaza Solidarity Camp"   while the far right The Daily Wire frames it as: "Anti-Israel Activist Detained By ICE ‘Led Activities Aligned To Hamas,’ Trump’s DHS Says." Very different takes, and it's a clear example of how consuming news from only one perspective can limit your understanding of a situation.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture. For example, I can see each publication's factuality rating, as well as the overall factuality ratings of publications discussing this story, so I know which is more trustworthy. And I can see who owns which publication, and that the overall ownership skews more towards media conglomerates than independent news outlets.

By using the Ground News Vantage Subscription, I can also see the blindspot feed where I can see stories disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum.I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective.

I’m always really impressed with Ground News and genuinely think they’re a great resource. If you want to stay informed on US Politics and more scan my QR code, or click the link in the description or go to ground dot news slash leeja to get 40% off the same Vantage plan I use which comes to about $5/month. Ground News is subscriber-funded, so they don't rely on ads that could introduce bias! Subscribing supports my channel and an independent team working to keep the media transparent. Thanks Ground News!

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian immigrant who just graduated with a masters in international affairs from Columbia. He is married to a US citizen who is, again, EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT, and he is a green card holder. This is not a person here on a temporary visa, this is not a person here illegally, this is a green card holding ivy league graduate. Khalil participated in the pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus last spring in which students were pushing for the University to divest from Israel. He served as a liaison between student protestors and university officials to negotiate an end to the tent encampment that was erected on campus. Because of this, he took on a very public position in the protests and, in recent weeks, according to NPR pro-Israel activists have called on the Trump administration to deport him. He was also a target of investigation by a new internal Columbia office created specifically to bring disciplinary charges against students for pro-Palestinian activism. He has been accused by that internal Columbia office of organizing an “unauthorized marching event,” glorifying Hamas’ Oct. 7th attack, and circulating social media posts “criticizing Zionism.” And op! If someone is being silenced for “criticizing Zionism” that should perk your ears up because, friends, Zionism does not represent all Jews. Criticizing the existence of Israel is not anti-semitic. Many MANY Jews also criticize the existence of Israel. Being sanctioned for criticizing a nation state is, to use the legal terminology, really icky. We don’t like that. It raises major red flags for First Amendment protections, especially for someone like Mahmoud Khalil, a literal scholar of international affairs. Not being able to criticize a nation state in a university setting really puts a damper on your ability to freely do your academic work. Not that Columbia seems to give two shits about that. It has been actively attempting to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and fall in line with the Trump administration, just last week issuing a revised protocol according to Reuters which allows for ICE agents to enter school property and arrest students without a warrant if there are “exigent circumstances” meaning some sort of emergency. And op!! Any time a state actor claims it can violate your rights or change policies because of “exigent circumstances” that should make your ears perk up!!! Sometimes exigent circumstances do legitimately require bypassing safeguards, but a lot of times “exigent circumstances” is a convenient way to get around constitutional protections. So the fact that Columbia JUST updated that policy indicates to me that it is ready and willing to let Trump’s ICE run rampant on campus, zero probable cause required. But despite Columbia’s best efforts to kiss the ring, on Friday, the day before Khalil’s arrest, Trump announced he had canceled Columbia’s government contracts and grants worth around $400 million.


But Columbia University is a private institution and while it does receive public funding it does have some leeway where the First Amendment is concerned. The literal federal government does not. So when ICE agents showed up at Khalil’s doorstep on Saturday and arrested him, this became a very very different story. The ICE agents spoke to Khalil’s attorney on the phone that night and when she asked what the charges were, they told her his visa had been revoked. When she informed them that he was not in the US on a visa but was a legal permanent resident and a green card holder, they said well then his green card has been revoked. According to Khalil’s attorney, when she asked them if they had a warrant, the ICE agents hung up on her. 

On Sunday, a DHS spokesperson confirmed Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” saying Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted about the arrest, saying “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” A clear indication that Khalil is being used to set an example that will ripple out to anyone, especially students here on visas or even permanent residents, that they had better watch their back and fall in line.

And as I’ve said with every episode tracking developments in the Trump administration, we got here because of an executive action that Trump took. His cronies behind the scenes at the Heritage Foundation or wherever arrived at the White House on inauguration day with piles of executive actions written and waiting, so all Trump had to do was sign. Those orders lay out the official policies of the Trump administration and tell various government agencies to take actions to further those policies. And then all the little Trump rats scuttle away to do his bidding through official agency actions and regulations. 

He has issued a true onslaught of horrific orders but the ones we’re concerned with today include his orders specifically targeting immigrant populations. Those include his order from January 29th titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, which orders the government to investigate especially schools and colleges for anti-semitic or pro-hamas behavior. Most sinister is the requirement that various agencies push colleges and universities to monitor and report on “activities by alien students and staff” and to ensure that those reports lead to “investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” The order specifically cites to 8 USC 1182(a)(3), which is the law that lists who is ineligible to enter the US and, specifically, the section within that law related to aliens who engage in terrorist activities. So it’s not saying universities should know generally which aliens aren’t admissible, but specifically they should know about those aliens who are inadmissible because of terrorist activities. And to be clear, a potential immigrant is inadmissible if they have engaged in terrorist activity, is a member or representative of a terrorist organization, or has endorsed or espoused terrorist activity or support of a terrorist organization. And it’s that last part that particularly puts student protesters at risk. Because if Hamas is deemed a terrorist organization, which it is, and any support in favor of Gaza is considered “pro Hamas” which it often is even when protestors denounce Hamas’s terrorist activities, anything “pro-Palestinian” has been blanket dubbed “pro Hamas” because we again really struggle with avoiding black and white thinking in this country because that would require two brain cells to rub together, then that means that any student who protests in favor of ending the genocide in Gaza, the systematic ethnic cleansing of millions of people who have been oppressed by the Israeli apartheid state for decades, then they can be immediately found to be endorsing a terrorist organization and can be deported if they cannot quickly prove they were born on US soil to US parents. Because, remember, per Trump’s rewriting of the constitution, birthright citizenship isn’t a thing either and it never has been.

That January 29th executive order goes hand in hand with his January 20th executive order titled Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats in which he calls for a review and potential ban of all entrants from countries quote “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries” laying the groundwork for a future travel ban akin to his Muslim ban in his first term. But the order goes further, calling on the relevant agencies to quote “Recommend any actions necessary to protect the American people from the actions of foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including, but not limited to, our Citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.” This is a broad and sweeping call to deport anyone who engages in protests whether it be pro-Palestinian or anything that threatens “the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands” which doesn’t have a clear definition and that’s by design. It creates a nebulous call to arms for federal agencies to point to and claim whatever immigrant they’re targeting is promoting sectarian violence or the overthrow of our “national culture.”

And these orders are having their intended effect: reports are surfacing of international students fearful of attending events, choosing not to engage in activism, and curbing their speech in order to avoid deportation. According to NPR, quote “Abed Ayoub, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the threat is getting real. He says the ADC has heard from at least a dozen students who left the U.S. for winter break and were unable to return because their visas were canceled — with no explanation given.

"Two of them have no involvement at all with student activism on campus. They just happened to be from Gaza," Ayoub says.”

NPR goes on to report “Meanwhile, pro-Israel groups say they're receiving a growing number of tips accusing campus activists of supporting U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.”

And let me be clear: I don’t think it’s bad immigration policy to bar terrorists and supporters of terrorists from being in this country. But there is a needle to thread when it comes to protest activity because that is speech protected by the First Amendment. And these orders are clearly meant to and are having the actual effect of chilling the free speech of protesters around the country, while promoting an overbroad understanding of what constitutes “endorsing” terrorism. And this latest move, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil will continue to stoke that fear. I don’t have all the evidence laid in front of me and this case is very much developing, but reports are that his activities were in student activism promoting an end to the war in Gaza and divestment from Israel. He has denied promoting Hamas or being a member of Hamas. The government will have a steep uphill climb to prove he has violated immigration law and was not just exercising his free speech rights, and his legal team, which he appears to have had the foresight to line up in anticipation of this arrest, has vowed to fight this out in court. But many immigrants who are targeted under these executive orders will not have the support of a legal team.

Immigration court is not a criminal court. Let me repeat that: people in immigration detention are not being held as defendants in criminal cases. They are being held pending the administrative proceedings related to their immigration status. As such, they are not guaranteed the right to an attorney the way criminal defendants are. Right now there are children winding their way through our immigration courts with zero legal representation. Some of the people in immigration detention are being accused of violating the law, but they are not being tried for crimes, they are being processed through our administrative immigration system. 

While they do not have the protections provided for criminal defendants in the constitution, people in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, whether citizens or not, whether here legally or not, ARE protected under our constitution. You don’t need a law degree to understand this, it is in the plain language of the constitution. The First Amendment prohibits the state from passing laws that abridge freedom of speech, and it protects the PEOPLE’s right to peaceably assemble. The people. The fifth amendment says NO PERSON shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. No person. The fourteenth amendment says no state shall “deprive any PERSON of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It does not say citizen in any of those protected rights. In fact within that same section of the 14th amendment, it does say citizens, it differentiates between the two. States cannot pass laws that abridge the privileges or immunities of CITIZENS of the United States, AND ALSO they shall not deprive any PERSON of life, liberty, or property, without due process, nor deny any PERSON equal protection under the laws. This was deliberate as the 14th Amendment was written after the civil war and discussions of who counts as a “citizen” were at the forefront of everyone’s mind leading up to and after the Civil War. They were not throwing the terms around willy nilly. As such, anyone, any person subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, which is pretty much anyone who is physically present here, whether legally or not, enjoys these protections.

This is why it is INCREDIBLY concerning when ICE officials show up without an arrest warrant and disappear an immigrant in the night allegedly for exercising his free speech rights. Requiring an arrest warrant, which shows probable cause, is a basic foundation for due process protections. Your right to due process includes being given a reason for why you are being detained, why your right to liberty is being taken away, it includes protections against arbitrary imprisonment. These are like basic fundamentals to a society that protects freedom and liberty. And under Trump’s executive orders, he is using the pretext of “national emergencies” and “terrorist organizations” to deny those basic fundamental rights to immigrants no matter what their status is. Because, again, to be clear, these are fundamental rights for all people not only citizens, and they are fundamental rights guaranteed to people accused of even the most heinous crimes. Serial killers have due process rights. Ted Bundy was guaranteed his day in court. But when terrorism enters the chat, especially since 9/11, constitutional rights have a sneaky way of flying right out the window.

Which brings us to Guantanamo. Now as I said no one knows where Mahmoud Khalil is so I’m not insinuating he’s in Guantanamo, I have no clue where he might be, but we cannot talk about the due process rights of immigrants, or lack thereof, without talking about Guantanamo. Trump has promised the greatest mass deportation in history. The problem is that there simply isn’t the infrastructure available to round up his promised 20 million immigrants, especially given the reported backlog of over 3.5 MILLION immigration cases already trying to move through the system. Denying due process rights is a great way to get around that backlog of cases but you have the pesky inconvenience of where to put the people you’re rounding up. What to do with all the bodies was also a pesky problem for Hitler, as an unrelated side note. Immigration detention centers are reportedly operating at 109% capacity. Trump’s genius plans of just sending immigrants to be held in other countries are too showy and not really kosher with you know international humanitarian laws and stuff. No no, this level of scrutiny will not do!! So what do you do when you’re running out of space to put the people whomst you’re rounding up and violating their due process rights? Someplace remote. Hard to get to. Secretive. Rural Poland comes to mind or, I know! An island.

Back in January, Trump made the alarming announcement that they’d be expanding Guantanamo to house up to 30,000 immigrants who would be rounded up in deportation raids, reportedly surprising even the members of his own administration with the declaration, as he is wont to do. A brief history lesson: Guantanamo Bay is located in Southeastern Cuba and has been valued for over a century because of its strategic position as the passage between Haiti and Cuba that links the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea and the Panama Canal. So, obviously, after the Spanish-American War, the US established by treaty a 45 square mile naval base there in 1903 in exchange for Cuba’s independence. Because, you know, colonialism. The provisions of the treaty include a perpetual lease of the land where the Naval base is located, for which the US pays around $4500 per YEAR in rent. Since the 1959 revolution on the Island, the Cuban government has rejected the US’s right to occupy the territory, won’t accept the yearly payment, and has threatened to seize the base. That naval base has been used to train forces for Caribbean missions, and of course to famously hold accused terrorists, but it also houses a small separate facility for holding migrants, typically those attempting to enter the US from Cuba or Haiti. This was especially true in the early 1990s, after a coup in Haiti caused tens of thousands of Haitians to flee, usually packed in boats. A recent article from the New Yorker paints a picture of what the detention center was like in the 90s, and a potential preview of what’s to come:

“There were no trees nearby, just rows and rows of tan and olive-green tents erected on cement and surrounded by airport hangars, porta-potties, barbed wire, and guard towers. Most of the tents had minimal airflow, and people were packed into them like sardines. Some of the detainees were being held with their children. Others had been separated from them. There was little privacy except what people achieved by hanging sheets between field cots. The camp was infested with mice, the air filled with flies, and the detainees would get soaked, even inside the tents, when it rained. Iguanas roamed inside the perimeter along with rodents known as banana rats that were the size of cats.” The Haitian detainees were seen as “economic migrants” and were therefore not processed quickly, if at all, and many were left to wait on that base for months. Detainees told reporters and human rights activists at the time that they were being treated like prisoners of war, sometimes sitting shackled together under the hot sun or thrown into underground prisons, there were reports of sexual assault and rape. And there was zero accountability for any of it. Ira Kurzban was one of the first lawyers to ever represent detainees on Guantanamo and called the base a kind of gulag, with the US government saying “We do not want to keep people physically in our country, so let’s find a place where we can keep them out of sight,” He added, “There was a great deal of human tragedy that was hidden from the American people.”

There is nowhere near the capacity in that migrant facility to hold the promised 30,000 migrants. Which then logically draws the conclusion that he plans to use the rest of the naval base to house these migrants. 

Military bases have been used by the US for decades as temporary shelters for waves of new immigrants, but of course the use of Guantanamo comes with particularly sinister undertones given its very recent history. Since September 11th, Guantanamo has been famously used to house inmates accused of orchestrating the attack or those detained overseas during the “war on terror.” During the Bush administration, Guantanamo was roundly criticized the world over for human rights abuses, including holding inmates indefinitely without trial, and use of torture in violation of the Geneva convention. Most insidiously for our discussion today, Bush maintained that these inmates were being held outside of the United States and therefore the protections of the constitution did not apply to them. International law of course does still apply but the pesky thing about international law is that aside from a couple criminal tribunals for exceptionally heinous cases, there’s not much by way of enforcement mechanisms. It’s mainly name and shame, strongly condemn. Not really reassuring with a guy like Donnie at the helm now. 

So while Trump’s administration is also looking to other military bases and expanding detention centers on US soil, the push to open Guantanamo for large numbers of immigrants creates a very strong potential for human rights abuses that will remain obscured and largely go unchecked. Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights put it well in a statement: The move to send immigrants to Guantanamo “sends a clear message: migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports.” All of Trump’s executive orders, from declaring an emergency at the border, to pushing for the curbing of free speech and broad definitions of what constitutes “espousing terrorism” to expanding the list of terrorist organizations, all of it makes it incredibly clear that he is using this country’s historical legal permissiveness, since 9/11, when it comes to the treatment and rights of those deemed “terrorists”, to his advantage by casting all immigrants, whether here legally or not, especially those whose beliefs are contrary to the beliefs of the administration, as terrorists, dangerous criminals, undeserving of legal protections, dehumanized to the point that we will all turn a blind eye when they start disappearing in the night, no warrant provided, location unknown.

Which is why, with all this history in mind, it was so alarming on February 4th to see images of ten Venezuelan men, hands and feet shackled, escorted onto a military plane bound for Guantanamo. According to the New Yorker, 164 more detainees were sent to Guantanamo over the following weeks. The Trump administration accused them of being gang members in gangs that had been newly dubbed as terrorist organizations. Family members of the detainees who recognized them from photographs on social media reported that many of them were not members of gangs at all. 51 of the detainees had no criminal records. They were all reportedly flown from Guantanamo to Venezuela, but additional migrants were later sent to the migrant camp in Guantanamo. Those recent detainees reported being beaten by guards, strip searched, put into solitary confinement, and some detainees attempted suicide or staged hunger strikes to protest their conditions. The transport of more migrants to Guantanamo has slowed, with the administration citing tents that fail to meet “detention standards.” Defense officials further confirmed that the tents lacked air conditioning and running water and therefore don’t even meet ICE detention standards, for which the bar is on the fucking floor. The administration faces several ongoing lawsuits trying to stop the transfer of migrants to Guantanamo brought by the ACLU and other immigrants rights advocates. On top of that, the cost of transporting thousands of migrants to an offshore island and holding them there is proving to be unwieldy, especially because the Trump administration is forgoing the usual ICE charter planes in favor of military aircraft, for the optics, as confirmed by Trump administration officials. Those “optics” cost a whopping $250,000 per round trip flight, not to mention the cost on the ground of attempting to expand operations to make the place habitable for 30,000 people. Despite Donald still wanting his little concentration camp plan to move forward, officials within the administration have said that a “scaled down” version of his Guantanamo plan seems the likeliest outcome, according to reporting from NBC News. What that means remains to be seen. But whether migrants are detained in Guantanamo or a base in Texas or a detention center in New Jersey, it seems clear that the Trump administration is ramping up efforts to dehumanize immigrants, paint them all as terrorists, and use these optics and his various executive orders as pretext for mass denial of basic civil rights protections across the board. 

If you or a family member or friend is concerned about potential legal issues regarding immigration status, there is a lot of helpful educational material, especially what are known as red cards or know your rights cards. The Immigrant Legal Resource center has a lot of information, including printable red cards in numerous different languages. I’ll link them in the description. Print those out for yourself or to give to your community as they are helpful to consult and have on hand especially when interacting with law enforcement. It may also be in your best interest to seek out and connect with an immigration lawyer in your area for support, even if you don’t currently need legal representation. For Mahmoud Khalil, it was a really important move that he had his attorney on the phone as ICE was arresting him. She was able to advocate for him in the moment and also sound the alarm to the media. The Immigration Advocates Network has a directory of low cost or free immigration attorneys. Go to immigration advocates dot org and click on Find Help to search for lawyers in your area, it’s also linked below. It is completely reasonable to send an email or call them and just say I am concerned for myself or my family, who should I call if I am imminently in need of a lawyer? As I’ve been saying, lawyers and judges continue to be the main barrier preventing complete break down of our democracy (though of course many lawyers are also hiding behind Trump and scripting its demise), and many people go to law school with the intent to help people in these exact circumstances. Do not be afraid to lean on those services. And if you are not in need of help, consider going to immigration advocates dot org, click find help, and search for legal non profits providing immigration help in your area and consider donating to them to help support their ongoing work. Lord knows it will be incredibly necessary in the years to come.

Education is also power. If you’d like to support my work, I just launched the Why, America? Co-Learning Lab, a learning community having discussions and making connections, along with a monthly syllabus curated by me. All year we’ll be covering topics under the umbrella theme of “Eat the Rich: Building Solidarity in the New Gilded Age.” March’s topic is how billionaires bought the government. This is all hosted over on Patreon, which is linked down below. If you’re interested, please join us. Patreon dot com slash leeja miller.

Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Thomas Orf, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, R_H, L’etranger (Lukus), Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you! 

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last Wednesday about tariffs and the impending trade wars. Lol I hate it here!


Leeja Miller
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