For months now, US president Donald Trump has been threatening to deport foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Behind the scenes, his administration got to work.
Investigators from a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, administration officials said.
The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the state department, which used an obscure legal statute to authorise the arrest over the weekend of a 30-year-old lawful permanent resident: Mahmoud Khalil.
Trump said this week that Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come”.
Civil rights groups say the arrest of Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident and is married to an American citizen, is a clear violation of the first amendment. But it also illustrates how Trump is using the tools of the federal government to launch a crackdown not only on those who break the law but also on dissent more broadly.
“Freedom of speech has limitations,” Thomas Homan, who is overseeing Trump’s deportation operation, said on Wednesday during a meeting of New York lawmakers in Albany. “We consider him a national security threat.”
Khalil has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the government is using a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act to argue that his actions during protests at Columbia University harmed US foreign policy interests by fomenting anti-Semitism.
The statute says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable”.
Khalil was a negotiator and a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, from which he graduated in December with a master’s degree. His lawyers said on Wednesday that they had not been able to hold a private conversation with him since his arrest.
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A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the government not to remove Khalil from the United States while his case is pending. But it is not yet clear whether that judge has jurisdiction over him because he has been moved to the Ice processing centre in Louisiana.
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said there was only one other case he was aware of where similar powers were cited in deportation proceedings.
The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, a former deputy attorney general of Mexico, who entered the United States in 1995 on a visa. That year, the US government tried to send him back to Mexico, where he was wanted on money-laundering and other charges.
The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, said deportation was necessary for foreign policy reasons. Allowing Ruiz Massieu to stay would undermine the US push for judicial reforms in Mexico, Christopher argued. That argument was upheld on appeal.
The cases differ in important ways, Vladeck said. Ruiz Massieu was a foreign government official accused of corruption who was in the country on a temporary visa. Khalil has a green card – which allows a person a path to stay in the US permanently – and was engaged in what appears to be constitutionally protected speech.
“The government certainly appears to be retaliating for constitutionally protected, even if offensive, speech,” Vladeck said.
The Trump administration has argued that Khalil’s role in protests at Columbia showed he was “aligned with Hamas”, but officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.
Trump has talked openly over the years about using the power of the presidency for retribution and reprisals. He has fired, or launched investigations of, government officials deemed to be disloyal, and revoked security details for people with whom he has fallen out. He has put federal employees embracing diversity programmes that he disagrees with on leave.
But critics of the president say Khalil’s case seems designed to intimidate.
“We cannot allow this nation to slide into a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at their homes, arrested and detained simply for expressing disfavoured political viewpoints,” said Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a ranking member of the judicial committee.
Raskin said the detention of Khalil “sets an extremely dangerous and chilling precedent from an administration that is hell-bent on wielding fear and intimidation as weapons to crush political dissent”.
Legal experts say Trump’s attempts to stifle dissent can have a chilling effect.
“Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favour of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end,” Vladeck said.
Trump has used his powers in the past to muzzle forms of protest.
In 2020, as demonstrations against police brutality and racism swept the nation, Trump deployed various federal agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and Customs and Border Protection officials, to crack down on protests in Washington. His administration even deployed military helicopters to fly low in the nation’s capital to try to disperse protesters.
The Trump administration also considered making use of the Hobbs Act, which was put in place in the 1940s to punish racketeering in labour groups, to charge the protesters.
At the same time, Trump has shown leniency when it comes to protests he agrees with.
One of his first acts when he came into office in January was granting clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people who committed violent and nonviolent crimes on January 6th, 2021, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. The rioters ransacked the Capitol in Trump’s name after Joe Biden won the election.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times
